by Tom Holland
Here, in this uncompromising assertion that there existed only a single divinity, lay the key to a starkly new vision of the universe: monotheism in the raw. With each successive revelation, Muhammad’s understanding of God’s oneness—and of what was owed to Him as a result—was burnished to an ever more awesome sheen. The people of Arabia—with their idols of stone, or wood, or dates mixed with rancid butter—were merely repeating what had been, since the dawn of time, humanity’s greatest delusion: that the heavens and the earth were thronged with a whole teeming mob of gods. So Muhammad, ordered by his voice to “proclaim aloud”13 God’s revelations, began to preach. Again and again, he warned, mankind had succumbed to the one sin that could not be forgiven: shirk—the belief that God can be associated with other beings. Again and again, however, because He was all merciful, the “Lord of the Worlds”14 had sent prophets to open the eyes of people to their folly, and summon them back to the primordial way of truth. Noah and Abraham, Moses and Jesus: all had preached the one identical message, a call for submission to God. Now, it appeared, with revelations being granted to Muhammad in ever increasing length and number, there had arisen, six centuries after Jesus, a new prophet. Indeed—the very “Seal of Prophets.”15 As the years passed and the divine continued to speak through him, so Muhammad and his growing band of followers came to realise that he was the recipient of the ultimate in messages: the definitive revelation of God.
Not that everyone concurred. “Prophecy,” as Ibn Hisham would sagely observe, “is a troublesome burden. Only strong, resolute messengers can bear it by God’s help and grace, because of the opposition which they meet from men in conveying God’s message.”16 Which was putting it mildly. Muhammad’s fellow townsmen regarded him first as a diversion; then as a provocation; and finally as a mortal danger. Particularly outraged by his uncompromising message were the members of his own tribe, “Quraysh” as they were known: a consortium of clans who had long enjoyed a peculiar respect among the scattered tribes of Arabia.17 The prestige they enjoyed as a “People of God” reflected the lucrative role that the Quraysh had grasped for themselves as the guardians of the Ka’ba, and its multitude of idols: a role that Muhammad, with his wild talk of there being only a single god, seemed determined to sabotage.c The unsurprising consequence was that Mecca grew increasingly hot for the Prophet and his followers. By AD 622, twelve years after the first revelation had descended from the heavens, the threat was directly to their lives. One night, Gabriel appeared to the Prophet and warned him that the Quraysh were plotting to murder him in his bed: the time had come to leave. Following in the footsteps of his followers, many of whom had already abandoned Mecca, Muhammad obediently slipped out from the city and vanished into the night. The moment had been long anticipated: what the Prophet had now embarked upon was not some aimless flight into the wilds of the desert, but rather a meticulously planned migration—a hijra.
An escape that would come to be seen, in due course, as having transformed the entire order of time. The year in which it took place still serves Muslims, to this day, as Year One. Dates in their calendar continue to be defined as AH, or “Anno Hegirae: In the Year of the Hijra.” To Ibn Hisham, the central episode of Muhammad’s life was not his first revelation, but his departure from Mecca. No longer simply a preacher, he was now embarked upon a spectacular series of exploits that would see him emerge, in due course, as the leader of an entire new political order. His destination, an oasis to the north of Mecca known as Yathrib, stood in desperate need of a guiding hand. The tribes who lived there, an uneasy mixture of Jewish and Arab settlers, had long been great enthusiasts for savage feuding; but increasingly, as the violence spiralled ever more out of control, there were many weary of the perpetual bloodshed. Pressure was building in Yathrib to find a peacemaker. Someone neutral, someone trustworthy, someone authoritative. Someone, perhaps—just perhaps—with a channel direct to God. In short, between Muhammad, a prophet in need of a refuge, and Yathrib, a city in need of a prophet, there could hardly have been a more perfect fit. A match made literally in heaven, as Ibn Hisham would choose to cast it.
It is the measure of what Muhammad ultimately achieved in Yathrib that its very name would end up erased from the map. It was the fate, and the undying glory, of the oasis that had offered him sanctuary to be commemorated as “The City of the Prophet,” or “Madinat an-Nabi”—Medina. Muhammad would spend the rest of his life there, building a society that has served as the model for Muslims ever since. Angry and clear was the reproach delivered by the Prophet to those who lived by the murderous ethics of the desert. To love gold “with a love inordinate,”18 to steal from orphans and squander their inheritance, and to dispose of unwanted daughters by burying them alive in the sands, was, so Muhammad warned, to be bound for eternal fire. “Account is demanded of those who oppress people and commit transgression on earth, unjustly. To them there is painful torment.”19 Before the awesome infinitude of God, enthroned upon His judgement seat, even the haughtiest or most rumbustious clan chief was but the merest speck of dust. The squabbling tribes of Yathrib, overwhelmed by the floodtide of Muhammad’s revelations, increasingly found their old antagonisms, and their old loyalties, dissolving amid the urgency and grandeur of his message. Yet the Prophet, even as he tamed their addiction to the more traditional pleasures of chauvinism, did not think to deny them all sense of community. On the contrary. Although Muhammad would certainly succeed in bringing peace to his oasis refuge, just as he had been invited to do, peace was hardly the limit of what he brought. Something more, very much more, was on offer to the people of Yathrib: a radically new identity, forged out of the whirling atoms of their pulverised tribal order. An identity as a single people—as the members of a single Umma.
“Seal of the Prophets” Muhammad may have been—but he did not disdain to found an earthly state. God continued to speak to him. His self-confidence did not dim. Obstacles in his path were swept aside or else trampled down. When the gap between rich and poor—which offended Muhammad to the core of his being—refused to narrow, he summarily outlawed usury and established an equitable taxation system. When the Jews of Yathrib, disconcerted by the transformation of their hometown into the “City of the Prophet,” presumed to manoeuvre against him, they were variously expelled, enslaved or massacred. When the Quraysh, informed that Muhammad was planning to raid one of their caravans, sent a military escort out into the desert, it was met by the Prophet and his tiny band of followers beside a watering hole named Badr, and put humiliatingly to rout. Angels, “white turbans flowing behind them,”20 shimmered in the sky above the battlefield, flashing their fiery swords, and sending Qurayshi heads flying.
Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!”21 Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrectio
n day.”22
This assurance, even in the bleak days following Muhammad’s death two years later, offered the faithful much comfort. It suggested to them that they had not been abandoned by God. Despite the loss of their Prophet, Arabia remained transfigured by the sacred still. Nor was it only Mecca, “the holy of holies,” that still endured upon the face of the earth. So too did the Umma—and to the greater glory of all that the Prophet had taught. Over the succeeding years, the succeeding decades, the succeeding centuries, the Muslim people would serve to make of the entire world a Ka’ba: conquered, cleansed and sanctified. By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet. Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it, “and is pleased with our faith, namely that He has given us dominion over all peoples and religions.”23
And yet, all the while, there was anxiety. Even amid the wealth and splendour of a great empire, vast on a scale beyond anything that Muhammad would have imagined possible, the Muslim people could not shake off an uncomfortable sense of their own decay. A generation after Ibn Hisham had completed his biography, and the scholar who would end up crushed to death beneath his toppled books, an astounding polymath by the name of Al-Jahiz, could view the entire triumphant course of Islam’s history as embodying nothing but a dying fall. There had been only the one truly golden age. Those who had heard the Prophet actually talk, who had ridden by his side, who had served him as his Sahabah, or “Companions”: they alone could be reckoned to have practised “the authentic monotheism.” Hence, of course, their astounding success. It was their generation, fresh from the burial of the Prophet, which had first embarked upon the conquest of the world—and achieved it, what was more. The men who had presided over this glorious victory charge, a sequence of leaders known as “Caliphs,” or “Successors” of the Prophet, had all of them been noted intimates of Muhammad. The first, a grizzled veteran by the name of Abu Bakr, had been his companion during the perilous flight to Medina, and the father of his favourite wife; the second, Umar, had been his brother-in-law; the third, Uthman, had been married to one of his daughters. The fourth, Ali ibn Abi Talib, had rejoiced in the most splendid pedigree of all: the first male ever to convert to Islam, a step he had taken at the precocious age of nine, he was also the Prophet’s cousin, before finally graduating to become, just for good measure, his son-in-law as well.d These four men had reigned for just thirty years in total, but already, by the time that Al-Jahiz was putting pen to paper, they were well on their way to being enshrined by the vast majority of Muslims as veritable paragons—ar-Rashidun, or “the Rightly Guided.” Not, of course, that their period in power could quite compare with Muhammad’s at Medina; but still, as a golden age, it came in a glorious second. “For at that time,” as Al-Jahiz put it wistfully, “there was nothing in the way of offending action or scandalous innovation, no act of disobedience, envy, rancour or rivalry.”24 Islam had been pristinely Islamic still.
But after every summer there must be a winter; and after every golden age an age of iron. In 661, the era of the Rashidun was brought to a bloody and tragic end. The Caliph Ali was murdered. Then, two decades later, his son was cut down in battle; lips that had kissed the Prophet were prodded mockingly by a conqueror’s stick. By now, a dynasty of Qurayshi despots, the Umayyads, had dug their claws deep into the Caliphate and made it their own—to the scandal of the God-fearing. The new Caliphs drank wine; they kept pet monkeys; they termed themselves, not the Prophet’s Successors, but “the deputies of God.” Monstrous behaviour such as this was bound to tempt the wrath of heaven; and sure enough, in 750, the Umayyads were toppled, forced to flee, and systematically hunted down by vengeful death squads. Nevertheless, the blots and stains of their near century in power were not so easily erased. No matter that the dynasty that succeeded them to the caliphal throne, the Abbasids, claimed descent from the uncle of Muhammad himself—the golden age of the Rashidun was not restored. Instead, no less than in the dark days that had preceded the coming of the Prophet, novelty and division seemed rife. Rival sects proliferated—and rival Caliphs too. Meanwhile, beyond the palaces in which the Successors of the Prophet dressed in silks and ate from plates of gold, the poor found themselves as oppressed as they had ever been by the arrogance of the powerful, the wealthy, the cruel. Remorselessly, the question nagged: how had it all gone wrong? And even more remorselessly: how was it best to be set right?
Two centuries on from the hijra, and the last man to have seen the Prophet alive was long since departed from the face of the world. Nevertheless, confronted as they were by the splintering of the times, most Muslims knew that there could be no true solution to any problem that lacked the sanction of their beloved prophet. “In the Messenger of God,” the Almighty Himself had informed the faithful, “you have an excellent example to follow.”25 To sketch him was therefore to sketch the ultimate in role models: a pattern of behaviour fit to serve all mankind, and all eternity. As the years went by, and ever more biographies were written in ever more extensive detail, so the Prophet came to be ever more venerated. That his birth had been marked by incontrovertible wonders, whether the appearance of strange stars in the sky or the whisperings of jinn in the ears of clairvoyants, foretelling a new age to come, had been well known to Ibn Hisham; but time would radically improve on this record of miracles. Fresh evidence—wholly unsuspected by Muhammad’s earliest biographers—would see him revered as a man able to foretell the future, to receive messages from camels, and palm trees, and joints of meat, and to pick up a soldier’s eyeball, reinsert it, and make it work better than before. The result was one yet additional miracle: the further in time from the Prophet a biographer, the more extensive his biography was likely to be.
Not that it required a whole book to spell out a lesson from the life of Muhammad. A single anecdote, a single phrase, would do. Hadiths, these snatches of biographical detail were termed—and already, a bare century after the time of Ibn Hisham, they existed in their tens, perhaps their hundreds, of thousands. Anyone with a taste for lists could consult one of a number of vast compilations, arranged neatly by subject. There was barely a topic, it seemed, on which Muhammad had not opined. Should the God-fearing wish to know whether they could marry demons, or why most of the damned in hell were women, or how an orgasm during procreation would affect the appearance of the resulting child, then a hadith would provide the answer. Scraps from Muhammad’s biography they might have been; but they were also a record, preserved for the edification of later generations, of the Prophet’s entire outlook on life. What could possibly be more precious to the Muslim people than that? Taken together, as the hadiths increasingly were, they constituted something infinitely more significant than a mere anthology of quotations. What they embodied was a quite exceptional body of law, one that touched upon every conceivable facet of human existence and left almost nothing unregulated, almost nothing to chanc
e: “Sunna,” as hadith scholars termed it. Here, then, was yet another of the glories of the Muslim people. Not for them laws dredged up from the sump of worldly custom or invention—their laws, they proudly boasted, derived directly from heaven. It was the Sunna, by instructing the faithful in their duties towards the poor, and by prescribing for them with great precision how to pray, where to go on pilgrimage, what to eat, and when to fast, that had succeeded in taming the instincts of previously savage societies, and granting them a glimpse of what a civilised community of human beings might truly become. Those who lived by its tenets viewed this as an accomplishment so miraculous that they never doubted its divine origin. As one renowned hadith-master put it, with a triumphant show of logic, “It was brought to the Prophet by Gabriel, and Gabriel was sent from God.”26
So it was, during the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, that episodes from the life of Muhammad came to be woven imperishably into the fabric of Muslim life. The age of the Prophet and his companions was not forgotten. Those who laboured, generation after generation, to preserve its memory never doubted the full, revolutionary implications of their undertaking. It was not enough to provide the vast mass of the faithful with codes and standards of behaviour; the appetites of the rich, and of the powerful, and of the well-fed, those whose flaunting of the dictates of social justice had so provoked the anger of the Prophet in the first place, had to be tamed as well. “No man is a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour goes hungry.”27 Here, and in the multitude of hadiths like it, were maxims calculated to unsettle anyone who had grown fat on the pickings of empire. Indeed, to an elite rotten with oppression and greed, Muhammad’s indignation at the inequities of human society, preserved in the record of his sayings, was bound to appear chilling in the extreme. No wonder, then, that the scholars of the Caliphate, justly suspicious of the ambitions and appetites of their rulers, should have toiled to authenticate the hadiths. The Muslim people could be left in no doubt about their veracity—no matter how challenging they might be. Here, for the jurists and the biographers, the historians and the religious scholars of Islam, was yet another prodigious task. The links that bound their own world to the time of the Prophet had to be certified as proven—and to the satisfaction of all.