by Kamran Pasha
Childhood should be a time of play, of running through the streets with joy in one’s heart, of flying kites and letting the soul soar with them beyond the dome of the sky into a world of dreams and possibilities. In my old age, I look back and remember the countless crimes our enemies subjected us to in the early days of Islam. I have forgiven most of these transgressions, as the Messenger enjoined us. But the pain of those childhood years, spent hovering under the shadow of starvation, pestilence, and death, has been so deeply imprinted in my heart that I cannot let it go. Whenever I think back on those dark days, I feel anew the rage and despair that come with being small and powerless in a world that rewards only cruelty and strength.
It was the memory of that deprivation and fear that would drive me in years to come to seek power when I should have sought wisdom. And my grief is that many men would die because of a child’s terror of the scorpions that crawled past her as she lay on hard desert ground in the night.
Eventually the end came, as it always does. If I have learned one thing in the years of my existence, one nugget of wisdom from having lived in the midst of disputations over faith and the nature of the world, it is that everything ends. This is both the blessing and the punishment of God upon the foolish tribe that calls itself man. We can embrace the end or we can weep, but the ghost of time closes all doors with a finality that can never be gainsaid.
So it was that one night, I emerged from a torn green tent and looked out at the dozens of believers, dressed in dirty rags, sitting by makeshift campfires along the tiny riverbed. The sparks crackled and flew into heaven, like desperate prayers. I felt a terrible weight in my heart, for I carried news that would extinguish many hopes tonight.
I saw my father at the edge of the camp, gathering acacia leaves from a scattered copse of trees. We had been reduced to rationing these prickly green sprouts that even our animals were dubious of as our supply of dried meat dwindled. Some of the refugees would eat them raw, while others, especially the children, could stomach them only if they were cooked into a thin broth.
Abu Bakr saw the look on my face as I ran over, and he stopped in his tracks, dropping the basket of leaves.
“How is Khadija?” he said, a hint of dread in his voice, as if he already knew the answer.
I had spent the last two days at the side of the Mother of the Believers. She had been struck by the potentially deadly camp fever and had been fading in and out of consciousness for the past hour.
“She is still feverish,” I said, panting to catch my breath. I paused, fearful to say what my father already suspected. “Mother worries for her life.”
I saw the color drain from his tired face.
“I seek refuge in Allah! Without Khadija, I do not know how he will go on.”
Abu Bakr looked across the camp and I saw that he was gazing at the Messenger, who stood alone at the top of the hill, his head bowed in prayer or sadness. Or both.
And then I felt the ground shudder as Umar stormed over. His dark face was contorted in rage as usual. He stared at the emaciated faces of the refugees kneeling by the wadi and then turned to my father with a now-familiar rant.
“It’s been two years! When will this end? Where is God’s help?”
My father was the only one besides the Messenger who seemed to have a soothing effect on Umar’s volatile emotions. Abu Bakr was as much of a doctor as a friend to this volcano of a man, whose fire easily consumed lesser souls.
“Calm yourself, Umar,” my father said patiently. “The people need you to be strong.” He did not add what I knew he was thinking—especially if the Mother of the Believers died. The Muslims would need men who were made of granite rather than flesh to guide them through the madness and despair that would follow.
But Umar as usual failed to read that which was underneath the words. He was never a subtle man.
“How can you be so calm?” he said with increasing fury, like a child demanding an answer to an inexplicable mystery. “You’ve lost everything. You were once one of the wealthiest men of Mecca, and now there is no difference between you and the slaves whose freedom you bought!”
Abu Bakr sighed. Even my father’s impatience with this moody giant had its limits.
“Whatever I had was on loan to me from God,” he said. “Were I given tenfold what I have lost, I would gladly spend it all for God and His Messenger.”
Apparently, he had found the words that Umar needed at that moment, and the son of al-Khattab stopped shaking. A gentle calm descended on him. My father looked again to the Prophet, who now sat down upon a mottled gray rock and buried his head in his hands as if weeping. I saw deep pity on Abu Bakr’s face. Few knew as well as he the anguish of the Messenger, who had been preaching One God for almost ten years and had achieved nothing but exile and starvation for his followers.
“Go to him,” my father said softly. He knew that the Messenger saw me as one of the few bright lights in this vast blanket of night that covered his life. Even though I rarely laughed on my own anymore, I was still a performer at heart, and I had been the only one who could bring a smile to his face with my games and antics.
I walked over to the Prophet and saw that his face was wet with tears. For a moment, I stopped breathing. If the Messenger of God had been reduced to despair, what hope would there ever be that I could find joy in my dead heart again?
I put a hand on his shoulder and tried to keep it from shaking.
“Don’t be sad,” I said, and it was more of a desperate plea than a compassionate request. “God is with us,” I added, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The Prophet raised his head and looked at me for a long moment. He took my hand and squeezed it gently, and I pretended to cry out in exaggerated discomfort and then danced a silly jig at his feet. He laughed, then scooped me into his arms, smiled into my golden eyes. It was as if my presence gave him renewed strength and purpose. Looking at me, he saw the future that he and his followers were struggling to create.
And gazing into his unfathomably dark eyes, I sensed that I had reminded him of the past as well. In later years, the Messenger told me that my childish defiance of the world, my embrace of life when those with allegedly greater wisdom had resigned themselves to death, had taught him again the lesson of his own youth. For I was the same age as he when his mother had died and he lost what little standing and hope he had in the strict social hierarchy of Mecca. It was a harsh lesson that the orphan had learned that night and relearned again and again, every night for two decades, until God had brought him to Khadija and ended one chapter of his life to begin another. It was the cruel but necessary truth that pain is an unavoidable part of any struggle, as are the inevitable defeats and humiliations of the journey. Loss is the fire that tempers steel and forges it into a sword of victory. Failure is the currency by which success is eventually purchased in bulk.
And then I saw the Messenger’s face change. The smile that lingered on his lips froze. I watched in shock as his dark eyes flew back up into his head until all I could see was the ivory white orbs that encased them. His hands began to tremble and he let go of me as tremors tore through his body like terrifying bolts of lightning.
I fell to the ground, my throat constricted in fear. I felt rather than saw my father come running up behind me. Abu Bakr scooped me into his arms and held me tight, but his eyes never left the Messenger, whose face was bathed in sweat and who fell to his side, convulsing like a fish that had suddenly been pulled out of the sea.
The Trance of the Revelation.
We had both seen this happen before, but it never ceased to fill us with awe and terror. For we knew that the Messenger’s body shook with the unimaginable power of two worlds colliding. Of the entire might and vastness of heaven itself curling into a ball and descending into the tiny and weak form of a mortal man.
It was at the moment of the Revelation that we had a sense of the power of an Infinite Mind that had created the cosmos with a single word. And now that very sam
e power, the overwhelming energy of the Divine Word, was tearing into the sinews and muscles of this one man who had been chosen to be its herald to mankind.
I saw Ali approach with a blanket. He wrapped the Messenger around the shoulders and sat by him, brushing his dark curls lovingly as he shivered and shuddered under the weight of the Revelation.
And then, so fast that I gave a little scream of surprise, the Messenger’s eyes flew open and he bolted upright. The tremors immediately ceased, but I could still feel the air around him vibrating, as if the world itself shook with the force that coursed through his soul.
And then Muhammad, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him, spoke. But the voice was not his own. It was deeper, unearthly, like an echo rising up from a chasm between life and death. And it said:
“Do you suppose that you will enter the Garden
Without first having suffered like those before you?
They were afflicted by misfortune and hardship
And they were so shaken that even their Messenger
And the Believers with him cried,
‘When will God’s help arrive?’
Truly God’s help is near.”
I saw a crowd of believers gathering around us, their eyes wide with wonder as the Words of God descended into their midst. The Lord of the Worlds was speaking right now, through the tortured tongue of the man whom they had followed willingly to what appeared to be their deaths.
People were crying, not from grief or fear but from joy. God had just reminded them that this terrible period they had endured was nothing more than a test that would end at its appointed time.
And strangely enough, they found deep comfort in the admission of despair on the part of the Prophet. God had lifted the stoic veil over their leader’s heart, revealing that the doubts they had all secretly harbored were in fact shared by the Messenger himself. Their fears were his.
There is no greater revelation in life than to learn that those whom we admire share our faults and our weaknesses. In that moment, stone idols fall from their pedestals and the gulf between the lover and the beloved vanishes in the joyful embrace of the beautiful imperfection of humanity.
The Messenger blinked and I saw that the angel had departed and his soul had returned to him.
He took me by the hand and ran his sturdy fingers through my crimson hair.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” I could not imagine that the most important person in my life, the man whom my father and mother called master, would have any reason to thank me.
He smiled and spoke loud enough for the eager crowd of believers to hear.
“For reminding me that God’s help is always near.”
And then he stood and raised his hands in gratitude to God. And even though we were all still cold and hungry, standing there on the dead hill that was our wretched home, I felt as if a curtain had lifted. The air smelled different. The stench of disease and decay was gone.
And in its place was the unmistakable, and inexplicable, scent of roses.
16
I walked proudly beside my father as we broke the law and stepped onto the ground of the Sanctuary for the first time in two years. We were followed by several dozen of the believers, as well as a crowd of sympathizers from the city who had grown ashamed of watching their kinsmen struggle like rats in the shadows.
We should have been afraid of retaliation. Of an arrow shot by one of Abu Sufyan’s men positioned on the rooftops. Or a turbaned warrior emerging from an alley at a warhorse’s pace and letting his sword sing the harsh ballad of Meccan justice.
But we were not. The Messenger, when he had recovered from his trance, had told us that an army of angels would surround us and protect us from the wrath of the idolaters.
I did not see any winged beings of light. But as I looked around at the men and women of the city pouring out when they saw us, many clapping with joy, their eyes wide with wonder at our defiance of the elders, I wondered if he had been talking about them. They were the masses of the poor, the wretched, who had benefited in the old days from the largesse of our charity. The last two years had been hard on them as well. Through us, they had experienced the possibility of another Mecca, one in which the powerful aided the weak rather than exploited them, and then it had been torn away from them. But having seen a few rays of light illuminating their lives, they had been changed forever and would not go easily back into the darkness.
I realized at that moment why we were so dangerous to the lords of Mecca. Once a fire is ignited in the brush, it cannot easily be put out. Perhaps it was for that reason that we were allowed to move through the city unmolested. Whatever guards or assassins had been positioned to stop us saw the enthusiastic crowd that cheered us and realized that swordplay would likely spark a riot and then a revolution. As I was to learn to my grief in later years, once the passion of rebellion has been unleashed, it cannot be easily countered or controlled
As we approached the holy Kaaba, I saw our greatest enemy, Abu Jahl, standing before it, arms crossed, a look of contempt on his face but a hint of fear in his eyes. He was surrounded by seven of the largest men I had ever seen, black as night, their muscles rippling like the flesh of a running lion as they raised their swords to the ready. Abyssinian slaves, but not gentle and small like my friend Bilal. These were warriors who had been purchased specifically for their might and cruelty.
My father stopped and stared at Abu Jahl, who smiled in challenge. Clearly he was willing to risk violence in the streets to maintain the ban. My father let go of my hand and stepped forward alone.
As Abu Bakr strolled toward the House of God, Abu Jahl nodded to his men, who stepped forward in perfect unison. They crouched like panthers preparing to strike, their ugly swords glinting red in the morning light.
And then I saw a flash of indigo robes out of the corner of my eye and saw Abu Sufyan enter the circle of the Haram. I watched him assess the situation. The agitated crowd, the drawn swords facing an unarmed old man. His politician’s instincts overcame his outrage at our defiance and I saw his angry face become calm and neutral as he calculated the best way to resolve this standoff to his advantage.
And then Abu Sufyan moved forward, placing himself strategically between my father and Abu Jahl’s soldiers.
“What is the meaning of this, Abu Bakr? You are banned from the Sanctuary!”
My father walked confidently until his face was only inches away from his adversary.
“The ban is over, Abu Sufyan,” he said, to loud cries of support from our army of beggars.
Abu Jahl went to place his hands on a nearby idol, that of Abgal, a god from the northern sands of Palmyra, a ferocious-looking boar with giant tusks carved out of ivory.
“Blasphemer! The ban was placed in the name of Allah, and only Allah himself can lift it.”
My father looked at him with an amused smile that appeared to infuriate Abu Jahl more than his proud defiance.
“You speak the truth for once,” he said, pointing his finger at the golden doors of the Kaaba. “Go inside and see for yourself.”
Abu Jahl looked at my father as if he were insane, but Abu Sufyan saw something in his eyes that troubled him. And then without any ceremony, he turned and walked up the seven stone steps and pushed open the gate of the Holy of Holies.
Abu Sufyan walked quickly past the three marble pillars that held up the roof from within, toward the crimson idol of Hubal, its gold hand sparkling from the rays of sunlight that poured inside.
He walked over to the back wall, where he had hung the proclamation two years before, and gasped.
The wall was infested with an army of red ants. They marched across the granite interior in majestic unity, coursing right and left as if guided by an invisible hand. The feared desert insects with razor pincers that could tear a man’s flesh to shreds in seconds had unleashed their hungry wrath on the sheepskin hide that memorialized the ban. The document was gone as if it had never exis
ted.
Abu Sufyan leaned forward in shock to see that one small section of the parchment remained untouched. Indeed, the ants seemed to be moving around it in a circle, much as the worshipers did around the Kaaba itself.
It was a sliver of sheepskin that simply said: In your name, O Allah…
17
Despite the objections of Abu Jahl and a few diehards in the Hall of Assembly, the ban was formally lifted that night. Abu Sufyan knew that the passions of the crowd had been excited by word of the “miracle of the ants” and that the superstitious citizens of Mecca believed that God had spoken. In truth, he understood that the shame of expelling a whole clan, including women and children, had burdened the hearts of the citizens. Mecca prided itself on being a city of hospitality, and yet every time a trading caravan or a train of pilgrims approached its borders, they had to cross a pathetic tent city of hungry people who had been driven from their homes. The ban had proven bad for business, and many of the chieftains had been looking for any excuse to end this embarrassing chapter in their history.
The next day, I helped my mother and sister pack what few belongings we still had left—a copper pot, six rusty ladles, a knife whose blade had long since dulled to the point of uselessness, as well as the rags that had once been pretty clothes that Asma and I would proudly wear when we went to visit our friends’ homes in the city.
I had never felt such excitement as Asma and I raced down the black hills toward the haze of chimney smoke that covered Mecca. The world felt reborn. The sky was bluer than I had ever noticed, and everywhere I looked, I saw hints of emerald beneath the rocks, as if a new spring had come to the deserts. Even the stones sparkled, their veins of quartz and calcite glittering under the blazing sun.