by Reza Aslan
Abu Talib had prepared a large trading expedition to Syria when he decided, at the last moment, to take Muhammad along. As the caravan moved slowly across the scorched landscape, a Christian monk named Bahira caught sight of it passing by his monastery at Basra. Bahira was a learned man who possessed a secret book of prophecy passed down from generation to generation by the monks in his order. Crouched day and night in his cell, he had pored over the ancient manuscript and discovered within its weathered pages the coming of a new prophet. It was for this reason that he decided to stop the caravan. For he noticed that as the convoy balanced its way over the thin gray horizon, a small cloud hovered continuously over one member of the group, shielding only him from the heat of the merciless sun. When this person stopped, so did the cloud; and when he dismounted his camel to rest under a tree, the cloud followed him, overshadowing the tree’s meager shade until its slender branches bent down to shelter him.
Recognizing what these signs could mean, Bahira sent an urgent message to the caravan leaders. “I have prepared food for you,” the message read. “I should like you all to come, both great and small, bond and free.”
The members of the caravan were startled. They had passed the monastery many times on their way to Syria, but Bahira had never before taken notice of them. Nevertheless, they decided to break for the evening and join the old monk. As they ate, Bahira noticed that the one he had seen in the distance, the one who was attended by the clouds and the trees, was not among them. He asked the men if every member of the caravan was present. “Do not let any of you remain behind and not come to my feast.”
The men replied that everyone who ought to be was present; except, of course, for the young boy, Muhammad, whom they had left outside to watch over the baggage. Bahira was elated. He insisted the boy join them. When Muhammad entered the monastery the monk gave him a brief examination, and declared to everyone present that this was “the Messenger of the Lord of the Worlds.”
Muhammad was nine years old.
If the childhood stories about Muhammad seem familiar, it is because they function as a prophetic topos: a conventional literary theme that can be found in most mythologies. Like the infancy narratives in the Gospels, these stories are not intended to relate historical events, but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience. They answer the questions: What does it mean to be a prophet? Does one suddenly become a prophet, or is prophethood a state of existence established before birth, indeed before the beginning of time? If the latter, then there must have been signs foretelling the prophet’s arrival: a miraculous conception, perhaps, or some prediction of the prophet’s identity and mission.
The story of the pregnant Amina is remarkably similar to the Christian story of Mary, who, when pregnant with Jesus, heard the angel of the Lord declare, “You will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:31–32). The story of Bahira resembles the Jewish story of Samuel, who, when told by God that one of Jesse’s sons would be the next king of Israel, invited the entire family to a feast in which the youngest son, David, was left behind to tend the sheep. “Send for him,” Samuel demanded when the rest of Jesse’s sons were rejected. “We will not sit down until he arrives.” The moment David entered the room, he was anointed king (1 Samuel 16:1–13).
Again, the historicity of these topoi is irrelevant. It does not matter whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are “true.” What matters is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings: that theirs is a holy and eternal vocation, established by God from the moment of creation.
Even so, when combined with what is known about pre-Islamic Arabian society, one can glean important historical information from these traditions. For example, we can reasonably conclude that Muhammad was a Meccan and an orphan; that he worked for his uncle’s caravan from a young age; that this caravan made frequent trips throughout the region and would have encountered Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish tribes, all of whom were deeply involved in Arab society; and finally, that he must have been familiar with the religion and ideology of Hanifism, which pervaded Mecca and which very likely set the stage for Muhammad’s own movement. Indeed, as if to emphasize the connection between Hanifism and Islam, the early Muslim biographers transformed Zayd into a John the Baptist character, attributing to him the expectation of “a prophet from the descendants of Ismail, in particular from the descendants of Abd al-Muttalib.”
“I do not think that I shall live to see him,” Zayd reportedly said, “but I believe in him, proclaim the truth of his message, and testify that he is a prophet.”
Perhaps Zayd was wrong. Perhaps he did meet this prophet, though he could not have known that the young orphan boy he had instructed against sacrificing to the idols would one day stand where Zayd once stood, in the shadow of the Ka‘ba, and raise his voice over the din of the spinning pilgrims to ask, “Have you considered Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat? … These are only names that you and your fathers invented … I prefer the religion of Abraham the Hanif, who was not one of the idolaters” (53:19, 23; 2:135).
2. The Keeper of the Keys
MUHAMMAD IN MECCA
WITH THE ARRIVAL of the pilgrimage season—the last two months and the first month of each year—ancient Mecca is transformed from a bustling desert metropolis into a city bursting at its borders with pilgrims, merchants, and caravans traveling to and from the great commercial fairs in neighboring towns like Ukaz and Dhu’l-Majaz. Whether originating in Mecca or not, all caravans wishing to enter the city must first halt at the outskirts of the Meccan valley so that their goods can be tallied and a record made of their trading mission. The camels are relieved of their burdens and placed in the custody of slaves while a Meccan official assesses the value of the textiles, or oils, or dates the caravan has brought back from the fairs. From this total, the official will collect Mecca’s fee: a modest tax on all commerce that takes place in and around the sacred city. Only when this business is complete are the caravan workers free to strip off their dusty veils and make their way to the Ka‘ba.
The ancient city of Mecca radiates concentrically from the sanctuary at its heart, its narrow dirt streets like arteries transporting pilgrims back and forth from the Ka‘ba. The homes on the outer rings are made of mud and straw: impermanent structures inevitably swept away by the annual floods that inundate this valley. Closer to the city center, the homes are larger and more permanent, though still made of mud (only the Ka‘ba is stone). This is Mecca’s market quarter—the suqs—where the air is thick and pungent with smoke, and the stalls reek of blood and spices.
The caravan workers push their way wearily through the crowded market, past the sheep hearts and goat tongues roasting over open fires, past the boisterous merchants haggling with the pilgrims, past the dark women crouching in courtyards, until they finally arrive at the consecrated threshold of the sanctuary. The men cleanse themselves at the well of Zamzam, then announce their presence to “the Lord of the House” before joining the swarm of pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba.
Meanwhile, inside the sanctuary, an old man in a spotless white tunic shuffles between the wood and stone idols, lighting candles and rearranging the altars. This man is no priest; he is not even a Kahin. He is someone far more important. He is a Quraysh: a member of the powerful, fabulously wealthy tribe that had settled in Mecca centuries earlier and who are now known throughout Arabia as ahl Allah: “the Tribe of God,” the Wardens of the Sanctuary.
THE QURAYSH’S DOMINANCE of Mecca began at the end of the fourth century C.E., when an ambitious young Arab named Qusayy managed to gain control of the Ka‘ba by uniting a number of feuding clans under his rule. Clans in the Arabian Peninsula were primarily composed of large extended families that called themselves either bayt (house of) or banu (sons of) the family’s patriarch. Muhammad’s clan was known as Banu Hashim, “the Sons of Hashim.” Throug
h intermarriage and political alliances, a group of clans could merge to become an ahl or a qawm: a “people,” more commonly called a tribe.
During the early settlement period of Mecca, a number of clans, some of whom shared a loose alliance, vied for control of the city. In essence, what Qusayy had managed to do was unite those clans who were nominally bound to each other through blood and marriage into a single dominant tribe: the Quraysh.
Qusayy’s genius was his recognition that the source of Mecca’s power rested in its sanctuary. Simply put, he who controlled the Ka‘ba controlled the city. By appealing to the ethnic sentiments of his Qurayshi kinsmen, whom he called “the noblest and purest of the descendants of Ismail,” Qusayy was able to capture the Ka‘ba from his rival clans and declare himself “King of Mecca.” Although he allowed the pilgrimage rituals to remain unchanged, he alone held the keys to the temple. As a result, he had sole authority to feed and provide water to the pilgrims, to preside at assemblies around the Ka‘ba where marriage and circumcision rites were performed, and to hand out the war banners. As if to emphasize further the sanctuary’s power to bestow authority, Qusayy divided Mecca into quarters, creating an outer and an inner ring of settlements. The closer one lived to the sanctuary, the greater one’s power. Qusayy’s house, it seems, was actually attached to the Ka‘ba.
The significance of his proximity to the sanctuary was not lost on the Meccans. It would have been difficult to ignore the fact that the pilgrims who circumambulated the Ka‘ba were also circumambulating Qusayy. And because the only way to enter the Ka‘ba’s inner shrine was through a door located inside Qusayy’s house, no person could approach the gods in the sanctuary without first going through him. In this way, Qusayy bestowed upon himself both political and religious authority over the city. He was not just the King of Mecca, he was “the Keeper of the Keys.” “His authority among his tribe of Quraysh, in his life and after his death, was like a religion which people followed,” recounts Ibn Ishaq.
Qusayy’s most important innovation was the establishment of what would become the foundation of Mecca’s economy. He began by strengthening his city’s position as the dominant place of worship in the Arabian Peninsula, collecting all the idols venerated by neighboring tribes—especially those situated on the sacred hills of Safah and Marwah—and transferring them to the Ka‘ba. Henceforth, if one wanted to worship, say, the lover gods, Isaf and Na’ila, one could do so only at Mecca, and only after paying a toll to the Quraysh for the right to enter the sacred city. As Keeper of the Keys, Qusayy also maintained a monopoly over the buying and selling of goods and services to the pilgrims, which he in turn paid for by taxing the city’s inhabitants and keeping the surplus for himself. In a few short years, Qusayy’s system had made him, and those ruling clans of Quraysh who had managed to connect their fortunes with his, enormously wealthy. But there was even more profit to be made in Mecca.
Like all Semitic sanctuaries, the Ka‘ba transformed the entire surrounding area into sacred ground, making the city of Mecca a neutral zone where fighting among tribes was prohibited and weapons were not allowed. The pilgrims who traveled to Mecca during the pilgrimage season were encouraged to take advantage of the peace and prosperity of the city by bringing with them merchandise to trade. To facilitate this, the great commercial fairs coincided with the pilgrimage cycle, and the rules for one complemented those for the other. Whether it was Qusayy’s idea to begin collecting a tax on this trade is difficult to know. At this point, it is likely that the Quraysh acted only as stewards of the trade that took place in and around Mecca, collecting a small fee for assuring the safety of the caravans in what was a dangerous and unpatrolled region of the desert. What seems clear, however, is that a few generations after Qusayy, under the directive of his grandson and Muhammad’s great-grandfather, Hashim, the Quraysh had managed to create a modest but lucrative trading zone in Mecca, one which relied almost entirely on the Ka‘ba’s pilgrimage cycle for its subsistence.
How expansive the trade in Mecca was is a matter of fierce debate among scholars. For years it was axiomatic to think of Mecca as the nexus of an international trade route that imported gold, silver, and spices from the southern ports of Yemen, then exported them to the Byzantine and Sasanian empires for a hefty profit. According to this view, which is confirmed by an overwhelming number of Arabic sources, the Quraysh presided over what would have been a natural trading outpost between southern and northern Arabia, a region whose prestige would have been greatly enhanced by the presence of the Ka‘ba. Thus, Mecca was the financial center of western Arabia, according to Montgomery Watt, and trade was Mecca’s raison d’être, in the words of Muhammad Shaban.
Recently, however, a number of scholars have questioned this view, primarily because not a single non-Arabic source has been discovered to corroborate the theory of Mecca as the hub of an international trade zone. “Of Quraysh and their trading center there is no mention at all, be it in the Greek, Latin, Syrian, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed outside Arabia before the conquests,” Patricia Crone writes in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. “This silence is striking and significant.”
Crone and others have argued that unlike the case in other firmly established trading centers like Petra and Palmyra, there are no tangible signs of amassed capital in pre-Islamic Mecca. And, despite the claims of the Arabic sources, both historical evidence and basic geographical sense clearly indicate that Mecca was not situated on any known trading route in the Arabian Peninsula. “Why should caravans have made a deep descent to the barren valley of Mecca when they could have stopped at Ta’if?” asks Crone.
Crone is correct. There was no reason either to travel to Mecca or, for that matter, to settle there. No reason, that is, but the Ka‘ba.
There is no question that Mecca was out of the way. The natural trade route in the Hijaz lay east of the city; a stop in Mecca would have required a significant detour between Yemen and Syria, the primary transit for international trade in pre-Islamic Arabia. Certainly, Ta’if, which was situated near the trade route and which also had a sanctuary (dedicated to Allat), would have been a more natural stop along the way. But the city of Mecca was endowed with a special sanctity that went beyond the Ka‘ba itself, by virtue of the presence of the sanctuary and the gods housed inside.
Unlike the other sanctuaries dotting the Arabian landscape—each dedicated to a local deity—the Ka‘ba was unique in that it claimed to be a universal shrine. Every god in pre-Islamic Arabia was said to reside in this single sanctuary, which meant that regardless of their tribal beliefs, all peoples of the Arabian Peninsula felt a deep spiritual obligation not only to the Ka‘ba, but also to the city that housed it and the tribe that preserved it. Crone’s solution to the discrepancies between the Arabic and non-Arabic texts is to conclude that everything we know about the pre-Islamic Ka‘ba, indeed everything we know about the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, is a complete fabrication created by Arab storytellers in the eighth and ninth centuries—a fiction containing not one kernel of sound historical evidence.
The truth is probably somewhere between Watt’s “center of international commerce” theory and Crone’s “fictional Muhammad” solution. The non-Arabic texts clearly disprove the notion that Mecca was the hub of an international trading zone. However, the overwhelming Arabic evidence to the contrary indicates that there was at least some measure of trade taking place in Mecca long before the rise of Islam. Even if the size and scope of this trade have been overstated by the Arabic sources, whose authors may have wanted to exaggerate the commercial expertise of their ancestors, it seems clear that the Meccans were engaged in what F. E. Peters calls an “internal trade-barter system,” which was supplemented by a modest trading zone along the frontiers of the Syrian and Iraqi borders and which relied almost exclusively on the cycle of commercial fairs that, by design, coincided with the pilgrimage season in Mecca.
The point is that this trade, modest as
it may have been, was wholly dependent on the Ka‘ba; there was simply no other reason to be in Mecca. This was a desert wasteland that produced nothing. As Richard Bulliet notes in his wonderful book The Camel and the Wheel, “The only reason for Mecca to grow into a great trading center was that it was able somehow to force the trade under its control.” Indeed, that is precisely what Mecca had managed to do. By inextricably linking the religious and economic life of the city, Qusayy and his descendants had developed an innovative religio-economic system that relied on control of the Ka‘ba and its pilgrimage rites—rites in which nearly the whole of Arabia participated—to guarantee the economic, religious, and political supremacy of a single tribe, the Quraysh.
That is why the Abyssinians tried to destroy the Ka‘ba in the Year of the Elephant. Having constructed their own pilgrimage center in Sana’, near the prosperous commercial ports of Yemen, the Abyssinians set out to eliminate Mecca’s sanctuary, not because the Ka‘ba was a religious threat, but because it was an economic rival. Like the leaders of Ta’if, Mina, Ukaz, and nearly every other neighboring region, the Abyssinians would have loved to replicate Mecca’s religio-economic system in their own territories and under their own authority. After all, if this system had made a loose confederation of clans like the Quraysh rich, it could make anyone rich.
Yet not everyone in Mecca benefited from the Quraysh’s system. The strictures of Bedouin life naturally prevented the social and economic hierarchies that were so prevalent in sedentary societies like Mecca. The only way to survive in a community in which movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense of tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources. The tribal ethic was therefore founded on the principle that every member had an essential function in maintaining the stability of the tribe, which was only as strong as its weakest members. This was not an ideal of social equality: the notion that every member of the tribe was of equal worth. Rather, the tribal ethic was meant to maintain a semblance of social egalitarianism so that regardless of one’s position, every member could share in the social and economic rights and privileges that preserved the unity of the tribe.