by Reza Aslan
In pre-Islamic Arabia, the responsibility for maintaining the tribal ethic fell upon the Sayyid or Shaykh of the tribe. Unanimously elected as “the first among equals,” the Shaykh (the title means “one who bears the marks of old age”) was the most highly respected member of his community, the figurehead who represented the strength and moral attributes of the tribe. Although it was a common belief that the qualities of leadership and nobility were inherent in certain families, the Shaykh was not a hereditary position; the Arabs had great disdain for the inherited reigns of the Byzantine and Sasanian kings. The only requirement for becoming a Shaykh, besides maturity, was to embody the ideals of muruwah: the code of tribal conduct that was composed of important Arab virtues like bravery, honor, hospitality, strength in battle, concern for justice, and, above all, an assiduous dedication to the collective good of the tribe.
Because the Arabs were wary of concentrating all the functions of leadership in a single individual, the Shaykh had little real executive authority. Every important decision was made through collective consultation with other individuals in the tribe who had equally important roles: the Qa‘id, who acted as war leader; the Kahin, or cultic official; and the Hakam, who settled disputes. The Shaykh may occasionally have acted in one or more of these functions, but his primary responsibility was to maintain order within and between the tribes by assuring the protection of every member of his community, especially those who could not protect themselves: the poor and the weak, the young and the elderly, the orphan and the widow. Loyalty to the Shaykh was symbolized by an oath of allegiance called bay’ah, which was given to the man, not the office. If the Shaykh failed in his duty to adequately protect every member of his tribe, the oath would be withdrawn and another leader chosen to fill his place.
In a society with no concept of an absolute morality as dictated by a divine code of ethics—a Ten Commandments, if you will—the Shaykh had only one legal recourse for maintaining order in his tribe: the Law of Retribution. Lex talionis in Latin, the Law of Retribution is more popularly known as the somewhat crude concept of “an eye for an eye.” Yet far from being a barbaric legal system, the Law of Retribution was actually meant to limit barbarism. Accordingly, an injury to a neighbor’s eye confined retaliation to only an eye and nothing more; the theft of a neighbor’s camel required payment of exactly one camel; killing a neighbor’s son meant the execution of one’s own son. To facilitate retribution, a pecuniary amount, known as “blood money,” was established for all goods and assets, as well as for every member of society, and, in fact, for every part of an individual’s body. In Muhammad’s time, the life of a free man was worth about one hundred camels; the life of a free woman, fifty.
It was the Shaykh’s responsibility to maintain peace and stability in his community by ensuring the proper retribution for all crimes committed within the tribe. Crimes committed against those outside the tribe were not only unpunished, they were not really crimes. Stealing, killing, or injuring another person was not considered a morally reprehensible act per se, and such acts were punished only if they weakened the stability of the tribe.
Occasionally, the sense of balance inherent in the Law of Retribution was skewed because of some logistical complication. For example, if a stolen camel turned out to be pregnant, would the thief owe the victim one camel or two? Because there was no formal law enforcement and no judicial system at all in tribal societies, in cases in which negotiation was required, the two sides would bring their arguments to a Hakam: any trusted, neutral party who acted as an arbiter in the dispute. After collecting a security from both sides to ensure that all parties would abide by his arbitration—which was, technically, unenforceable—the Hakam would make an authoritative legal declaration: “A pregnant camel is worth two camels.” As the Hakam’s arbitrations accumulated over time, they became the foundation of a normative legal tradition, or Sunna, that served as the tribe’s legal code. In other words, never again was arbitration needed to decide the worth of a pregnant camel.
However, because each tribe had its own Hakams and its own Sunna, the laws and traditions of one tribe did not necessarily apply to another. It was often the case that an individual had no legal protection, no rights, and no social identity whatsoever outside his own tribe. How the pre-Islamic Arabs were able to maintain intertribal relations when there was technically nothing morally wrong with stealing from, injuring, or killing someone outside one’s own tribe is a complicated matter. The tribes maintained relationships with one another through a complex network of alliances and affiliations. But the easy answer is that if someone from one tribe harmed a member of another, the injured tribe, if strong enough, could demand retribution. Consequently, it was the Shaykh’s responsibility to ensure that neighboring tribes understood that any act of aggression against his people would be equally avenged. If he could not provide this service, he would no longer be the Shaykh.
The problem in Mecca was that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few ruling families had not only altered the social and economic landscape of the city, it had effectively destroyed the tribal ethic. The sudden tide of personal wealth in Mecca had swept away tribal ideals of social egalitarianism. No longer was there any concern for the poor and marginalized; no longer was the tribe only as strong as its weakest members. The Shaykhs of Quraysh had become far more interested in maintaining the apparatus of trade than in caring for the dispossessed. How could the Law of Retribution function properly when one party in a dispute was so wealthy and so powerful as to be virtually untouchable? How could intertribal relations be maintained when the Quraysh’s ever-expanding authority placed them essentially beyond reproach? It certainly didn’t help matters that as Keepers of the Keys, the Quraysh’s authority in Mecca was not just political or economic but also religious. Consider that the Hanifs, whom the traditions present as severely critical of the insatiable greed of their fellow Meccans, nevertheless maintained an unshakable loyalty to the Quraysh, whom they regarded as “the legitimate agents of the Abrahamic sacredness of Mecca and the Ka‘ba.”
With the demise of the tribal ethic, Meccan society became strictly stratified. At the top were the leaders of the ruling families of Quraysh. If one was fortunate enough to acquire enough capital to start a small business, one could take full advantage of the city’s religio-economic system. But for most Meccans, this was simply not possible. Especially for those with no formal protection—such as orphans and widows, neither of whom had access to any kind of inheritance—the only option was to borrow money from the rich at exorbitant interest rates, which inevitably led to debt, which in turn led to crushing poverty and, ultimately, to slavery.
AS AN ORPHAN, Muhammad must have understood all too well the difficulty of falling outside Mecca’s religio-economic system. Fortunately for him, his uncle and new guardian, Abu Talib, was also the Shaykh of the Banu Hashim—a small, not very wealthy, yet prestigious clan within the mighty tribe of Quraysh. It was Abu Talib who kept Muhammad from falling into the debt and slavery that were the fate of so many orphans in Mecca by providing him with a home and the opportunity to eke out a living working for his caravan.
There is no question that Muhammad was good at his job. The traditions go to great lengths to emphasize his success as a skillful merchant who knew how to strike a lucrative deal. Despite his lowly status in Meccan society, he was widely known throughout the city as an upright and pious man. His nickname was al-Amin, “the trustworthy one,” and he was on a few occasions chosen to serve as Hakam in small disputes.
Muhammad was also, it seems, a striking man. He is described as broad-chested, with a full beard and a hooked nose that gave him a stately appearance. Numerous accounts speak of his wide black eyes and the long thick hair he kept tied behind his ears in plaits. And yet, as honest or skilled as he may have been, by the turn of the seventh century, Muhammad was a twenty-five-year-old man, still unmarried, with no capital and no business of his own, who relied entirely on his uncle’s genero
sity for his employment and his housing. In fact, his prospects were so depressingly low that when he asked for the hand of his uncle’s daughter, Umm Hani, she rejected him outright for a more prosperous suitor.
Things changed for Muhammad when he attracted the attention of a remarkable forty-year-old widow named Khadija. Khadija was an enigma: a wealthy and respected female merchant in a society that treated women as chattel and prohibited them from inheriting the property of their husbands, Khadija had somehow managed to become one of the most respected members of Meccan society. She owned a thriving caravan business and, though advanced in age and with children of her own, was pursued by many men, most of whom would have loved to get their hands on her money.
According to Ibn Hisham, Khadija first met Muhammad when she hired him to lead one of her caravans. She had heard of his “truthfulness, reliability, and nobility of character,” and decided to entrust him with a special expedition to Syria. Muhammad did not disappoint her. He returned from the trip with almost double the profits Khadija had expected, and she rewarded him with a proposal of marriage. Muhammad gratefully accepted.
His marriage to Khadija paved the way for Muhammad’s acceptance at the highest levels of Meccan society and thoroughly initiated him into the religio-economic system of the city. By all accounts he was extremely successful in running his wife’s business, rising in status and wealth until he was, while not part of the ruling élite, a member of what may be considered anachronistically “the middle class.” He even owned his own slave.
Yet despite his success, Muhammad felt deeply conflicted by his dual status in Meccan society. On the one hand, he was renowned for his generosity and the evenhandedness with which he conducted his business. Although now a well-respected and relatively affluent merchant, he frequently went on solitary retreats of “self-justification” (the pagan practice of tahannuth mentioned in the previous chapter) in the mountains and glens surrounding the Meccan valley, and he regularly gave money and food to the poor in a religious charity ritual tied to the cult of the Ka‘ba. On the other hand, he seemed to be acutely aware of his complicity in Mecca’s religio-economic system, which exploited the city’s unprotected masses in order to maintain the wealth and power of the élite. For fifteen years he struggled with the incongruity between his lifestyle and his beliefs; by his fortieth year, he was an intensely troubled man.
Then, one night in 610 C.E., as he was meditating on Mt. Hira during one of his religious retreats, Muhammad had an encounter that would change the world.
He sat alone in a cave, deep in meditation. Suddenly an invisible presence crushed him in its embrace. He struggled to break free but could not move. He was overwhelmed by darkness. The pressure in his chest increased until he could no longer breathe. He felt he was dying. As he surrendered his final breath, light and a terrifying voice washed over him “like the break of dawn.”
“Recite!” the voice commanded.
“What shall I recite?” Muhammad gasped.
The invisible presence tightened its embrace. “Recite!”
“What shall I recite?” Muhammad asked again, his chest caving in.
Once more the presence tightened its grip and once more the voice repeated its command. Finally, at the moment when he thought he could bear no more, the pressure in his chest stopped, and in the silence that engulfed the cave, Muhammad felt these words stamped upon his heart:
Recite in the name of your Lord who created,
Created humanity from a clot of blood.
Recite, for your Lord is the Most Generous One
Who has taught by the pen;
Taught humanity that which it did not know. (96:1–5)
This was Muhammad’s burning bush: the moment in which he ceased being a Meccan businessman concerned with society’s ills, and became what in the Abrahamic tradition is called prophet. Yet, like his great prophetic predecessors—Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus—Muhammad would be something more.
Islam preaches the continual self-revelation of God from Adam down to all the prophets who have ever existed in all religions. These prophets are called nabis in Arabic, and they have been chosen to relay God’s divine message to all humanity. But sometimes a nabi is given the extra burden of handing down sacred texts: Moses, who revealed the Torah; David, who composed the Psalms; Jesus, whose words inspired the Gospels. Such an individual is more than a mere prophet; he is God’s messenger—a rasul. Thus, Muhammad, the merchant from Mecca, who over the course of the next twenty-three years will recite the entire text of the Quran (literally, “the Recitation”), would henceforth be known as Rasul Allah: “the Messenger of God.”
What that first experience of Revelation was like for Muhammad is difficult to describe. The sources are vague, sometimes conflicting. Ibn Hisham states that Muhammad was sleeping when the Revelation first came to him like a dream, while al-Tabari claims the Prophet was standing when the Revelation dropped him to his knees; his shoulders trembled and he tried to crawl away. The command (iqra) that Muhammad heard in the cave is best understood as “recite” in al-Tabari’s biography, but is clearly intended to mean “read” in Ibn Hisham’s. In fact, according to one of Ibn Hisham’s traditions, the first recitation was actually written on a magical brocade and placed in front of Muhammad to be read.
Muslim tradition has tended to focus on al-Tabari’s definition of iqra (“recite”), mostly to emphasize the notion that the Prophet was illiterate, which some say is validated by the Quran’s epithet for Muhammad: an-nabi al-ummi, traditionally understood as meaning “the unlettered Prophet.” But while Muhammad’s illiteracy may enhance the miracle of the Quran, there is no historical justification for it. As numerous scholars and Arab linguists have demonstrated, an-nabi al-ummi should more properly be understood as “the Prophet for the unlettered” (that is, the Scriptureless), a translation consistent both with the grammar of the sentence and with Muhammad’s view that the Quran is the Revelation for a people without a sacred book: “We did not give [the Arabs] any previous books to study, nor sent them any previous Warners before you” (34:44).
The fact is that it would be highly unlikely that a successful merchant like Muhammad would have been unable to read and write the receipts of his own business. Obviously he was neither a scribe nor a scholar, and he in no way had the verbal prowess of a poet. But he must have been able to read and write basic Arabic—names, dates, goods, services—and, considering that many of his customers were Jews, he may even have had rudimentary skills in Aramaic.
The traditions also disagree about how old Muhammad was when the Revelation first came to him: some chroniclers say forty, others claim he was forty-three. Although there is no way to know definitively, Lawrence Conrad notes that it was a common belief among the ancient Arabs that “a man only reaches the peak of his physical and intellectual powers when he becomes forty years old.” The Quran confirms this belief by equating manhood with the realization of the fortieth year of life (46:15). In other words, the ancient biographers may have been guessing when they attempted to calculate Muhammad’s age at Mt. Hira, just as they were probably guessing when they figured the year of his birth.
Likewise, there is a great deal of confusion over the precise date of that first revelatory experience. It is cited as having occurred either on the fourteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or twenty-fourth day of the month of Ramadan. There is even some debate within the earliest community over exactly what the first recitation was: some chroniclers claim that God’s first command to Muhammad was neither “recite” nor “read,” but rather “arise and warn!”
Perhaps the reason the traditions are so vague and conflicting is that there was no single momentous revelatory event that initiated Muhammad’s prophethood, but rather a series of smaller, indescribable supernatural experiences that climaxed in a final, violent encounter with the Divine. Aisha, who would become the Prophet’s closest and most beloved companion, claimed that the first signs of prophethood occurred long before the experi
ence at Mt. Hira. These signs came in the form of visions that assailed Muhammad in his dreams, and which were so disturbing that they made him increasingly seek solitude. “He liked nothing better than to be alone,” Aisha recalled.
Muhammad’s disturbing visions seem to have been accompanied by aural perceptions. Ibn Hisham records that when the Prophet set off to be alone in the “glens of Mecca,” the stones and trees that he passed along the way would say, “Peace unto thee, O Apostle of Allah.” When this happened, Muhammad “would turn to his right and left and look behind him and he would see naught but trees and stones.” These aural and visual hallucinations continued right up to the moment in which he was called by God at Mt. Hira.
Obviously, no one but the prophet can describe the experience of prophecy, but it is neither irrational nor heretical to consider the attainment of prophetic consciousness to be a slowly evolving process. Did Jesus require the heavens to part and a dove to descend upon his head to affirm his messianic character, or had he understood for some time that he was being singled out by God for a divine mission? Did enlightenment suddenly burst like a flash of light upon Siddhartha while he sat under the Bodhi tree, as the event has so often been described, or was his enlightenment the result of a steadily developing conviction of the illusion of reality? Perhaps the Revelation came to Muhammad “like the break of dawn,” as some traditions claim, or maybe he gradually became aware of his prophetic consciousness through a series of ineffable supernatural experiences. It is impossible to know. What seems certain, however, is that Muhammad, like all the prophets before him, wanted nothing to do with God’s calling. So despondent was he about the experience that his first thought was to kill himself.