Muhammad himself was aware of this when it came to his own antecedents. Later grafted on to the family tree of biblical prophets via Isma’il, the infant asylum-seeker in Mecca, Muhammad himself forbade anyone to try and trace his pedigree back that far: beyond Ma’add, the putative ancestor of the northern tribes, he knew that the record was unreliable. ‘Genealogists,’ he said bluntly, ‘tell lies.’ Then again, both those statements come in hadiths. What can you believe?
Looking at his more recent ancestry, Muhammad was not only an orphan, but also from a poorer clan of Quraysh. In the fissile tribal tradition, the two grandsons of the Quraysh founding father Qusayy had fallen out: one account has these two, Hashim and Abd Shams, born as conjoined twins and cut bloodily apart with a sword. If it is not true, it should be: lashings of gore would mire relations between their descendants, the Hashimis and the Umayyads (named after Umayyah, the son of Abd Shams, whose own name – ‘Slave of the Sun Goddess’ – would have sat strangely on the future dynasty of Islamic caliphs). The blood still flows today from the open wound separating Sunnah and Shi’ah, which is a follow-through from that first legendary severance. Over the two generations after it, the Meccan economy began to boom, and the Umayyad line did better than the Hashimis in the capitalist free-for-all. Wealth also meant power, and during the youth of Hashim’s great-grandson Muhammad, the Umayyads effectively pushed the Hashimis out of the ruling elite of Quraysh.
Muhammad the orphan, posthumous son of Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, did not have a deprived childhood. He was brought up lovingly by his paternal uncle Abu Talib, and cosseted by household slaves and an Ethiopian nurse. By some accounts, he spoke Ethiopic, presumably learned from the nurse. To the ‘rain on parched earth’ of Meccan speech and this possible bilingualism was added further richness: following Meccan tradition, Muhammad was sent out as a very small child to the badiyah, the badw-land or steppe hinterland of the town, to live with the nomad tribe of Sa’d ibn Bakr. This bedouin kindergarten served both to toughen up Meccan infants and to improve their language – elocution by immersion. Nomad mobility had been the mother of the Arabia-wide, elevated form of Arabic, and it was seen almost as an innate attribute of the mobile tribes. Cities, in contrast – even relatively eloquent Mecca – were regarded as inimical to pure speech, places where one’s glottal hamzahs would wither and drop as surely as a Cockney’s aitches or a Cajun’s final consonants. Strange though the custom of the bedouin education seems, therefore, it is no stranger than sending small boys off to boarding schools. It was also older than Muhammad’s time and more widespread than Mecca: in a late Sabaic inscription from the time when the South was being widely arabicized, the writer mentions sending his sons to be wet-nursed by nomadic a’rab. Later, after their move to the fleshpots of Syria, the Umayyad caliphs continued the practice: in an exception, Caliph Abd al-Malik admitted that he had spoiled his son al-Walid by not sending him to the badiyah. Much later – in fact as late as the 1920s – better-off Meccans were still sending their sons out to the badiyah boarding school.
The experience seems to have left Muhammad with a positive view of the neighbouring nomads, and a sense of their symbiosis with Mecca. Much later, when his wife A’ishah referred to the nomads of the Meccan hinterland as a’rab, Muhammad retorted, ‘They are not a’rab. They are the people of our badiyah, and we are the people of their qariyah’. From this, however, it is also clear that Muhammad was wary, to say the least, of the further-flung, wilder nomads. As we shall see, his relations with the latter would be fraught. He would be willing to make use of their tactics, but ever aware of their dangers.
For the moment, Muhammad’s brief and seemingly happy nomad education – it might be called arabicization, even arabization – would have an importance far greater than just personal. Looking at the wider Meccan milieu and the broader currents of Arabian history, Muhammad was from a perfect background to mediate in the long-running dialogue between hadar and badw, and eventually to try to gather their word into one. He was from an urban, commercial background, but one that was embedded in a nomad environment and had to rely on the nomads for its trafficking. It has been claimed that politically, culturally and religiously, Meccans were much like their nomad neighbours. But they were genteel – or, one might say, using terms derived from words for ‘city’, polite or urbane – versions of nomads. If the visions of paradise in the Qur’an can be used as a guide, they aspired to the sort of lifestyle enjoyed by their more distant civilized neighbours. The Qur’anic paradise is described as if it were an eternal Hellenistic, or perhaps Palmyrene, symposium, where the elect wear silk, recline on raised thrones and drink from vessels of silver and crystal plied by youthful cupbearers. Its gardens are watered by rivers that invariably flow underground, like the subterranean qanats developed by the Persians. But through their bedouin homestays Meccans were made aware from an early age of the nomad reality – sour milk from goatskins and brackish water scooped from gritty holes. At home they occupied a middle ground, the qariyah in the badiyah, the market town in the steppeland, watered by the revered – if somewhat bitter-tasting – spring of Zamzam.
The rest of Muhammad’s early life is a blank, except for that possible Syrian trip in his boyhood, accompanying his merchant uncle. Later on, as a young man, he made another trip to Syria on behalf of an older woman, a Qurashi widow named Khadijah who was a businesswoman in her own right. This was a success, and among the results of it was their marriage. Five children were born – three girls and two boys. The latter died young, as did Muhammad’s later son, Ibrahim. The boys were posthumously islamicized with the names ‘al-Qasim’ and ‘Abd Allah’, but according to his main biography he had named one of them Abd Manaf, ‘the Slave of [the Goddess] Manaf’, the given name of his uncle and guardian Abu Talib.
As this shows, Muhammad was a part of his pagan Meccan environment. He is known to have made offerings to the pagan deities on at least one occasion, when he sacrificed a white sheep to the goddess al-Uzza. But, as we shall see, Mecca was not immune to the divine environmental shift that had affected much of the region over the previous three centuries. Monotheism had spread around the entire rim of the Mediterranean, overwhelming ancient pantheons and seeping up towards the far islands of Britain (Augustine was taking Christianity to Canterbury at about the time Muhammad was taking Khadijah’s caravan to Syria). Monotheism had also taken over both Fertile Crescents: in the old Sabaean-Himyari south, for example, its various forms – Christianity, Judaism, and an indigenous and little-understood product of local evolution, Rahmanism – had jostled, sometimes battled, for supremacy. Mecca was still a pocket of theo-diversity, but al-Uzza and her like were an endangered species. We will return to this divine evolution below.
At some time in the first decade of the seventh century, Muhammad began emulating other contemplative Meccans by going into retreat; a favourite destination for this was Jabal Hira’, the mountain overlooking Mecca. That is just about all that is known about the practice. The preceding couple of centuries had seen Christian stylites and other hermits proliferating, especially in Syria and other regions to the north of the peninsula. To speculate about some inspiration from them may be justified, but it is no more than speculation. At any rate, it was during one of these retreats that the revelations began. At first Muhammad was afraid – afraid, as he told his wife Khadijah, that he was turning into a kahin, a seer; if he already had monotheistic leanings, then the idea that he might have fallen into the clutches of the daemonic spirits of ancient Arabia would indeed have been frightening. That was also the diagnosis of his eventual successor, Umar, and of other impartial observers: later, hearing him mention that he had not experienced any revelations for a while, a Qurashi woman said, ‘His shaytan [‘satan’, or inspiring daemon] is keeping him waiting!’ But by that time Muhammad had realized his revelations were different from those of the ancient Arab soothsayers. For a start, the supernatural intermediary who brought them was no shaytan, but an angel.
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Together, the revelations would form the Qur’an. It is not just the only indisputable record of Muhammad’s life, but also his chief miracle as a prophet. Its rhetorical power would fuel the greatest of all wheels of fire, a cycle of unity and fragmentation that is still in motion today. It is the masterpiece of the Arabic language and, in a sense, the centrepiece of the Arab story – the hidden thread of history made suddenly, dazzlingly visible. We must step for a while out of the obscurity of Muhammad’s earlier life and look into that miraculous book.
RECITE!
According to later Islamic legend, Isma’il had received the Black Stone from Allah via Gabriel. Now, Muhammad received from Allah not an obscurely symbolic lump of rock but a living word: iqra’!, ‘Recite!’, was the first word of the Qur’an, ‘the Recitation’, revealed by Gabriel to Muhammad. It is proof, if it were needed, of the primacy not just of the word, but of the sound of the word. ‘I am no reciter,’ Muhammad replied, confused and terrified. At this, according to Ibn Hisham’s biography, Gabriel is said to have stuffed a cloth inscribed with writing into Muhammad’s mouth, almost making him choke. After three attempts, Muhammad got the words out, in both senses. In recently monotheized Britain, Muhammad’s near contemporary the hymnist Caedmon would also recoil from a divine visitor (‘Sing! ’ ‘I cannot sing’); and the painful annunciation has been compared to Isaiah’s angel touching him with a burning coal.
‘Annunciation’ suggests a Judaeo-Christian context, which is partly appropriate: following Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, the Word of God was made flesh; with that to Muhammad, the Word was made sound. Both Mary and Muhammad were virgins – Mary literally, in that she had no experience of procreation, Muhammad in the sense that he had no experience of recitation. But the context disguises the underlying subtext: as the Qurashi woman who spoke of Muhammad’s shaytan realized, Gabriel also performed the function of a sort of super-daemon, such as those that had inspired the ancient kahins.
To Muhammad’s original audience, it was the kahin-like nature of the early revelations that was most obvious – even to Muhammad himself, worried about becoming a seer. To show why, it is enough to compare the oath of a kahin judging in a dispute between those earlier Qurashis, Hashim and Umayyah, with an oath preceding an early Qur’anic chapter. First the kahin:
By the moon that shines brightly,
By the star that shows clearly,
By the clouds that give rain,
By all the birds in the air . . .
Then the Qur’an:
By the sun and its forenoon brightness,
By the moon when it follows it,
By the day, revealing it,
By the night, veiling it . . .
Later, however, Muhammad would express his dislike of the kahins’ rhyming speech, in order to distance himself from them. He had ended and surpassed their tradition, he declared: ‘There can be no kahinhood after prophethood.’
As well as being thought of as a kahin, Muhammad was accused by his early detractors of being one of those other adepts of the high Arabic tongue, the poets. Both accusations were denied in the Qur’an:
This is indeed the word of a noble messenger.
It is not the word of a poet: how little is your belief!
And it is not the word of a kahin: how little you reflect!
Linguistically, the revelations were undeniably uttered in the same high Arabic language that the rhymed speech of the seers shared with poetry: for its hearers, a circle of Meccans that rippled outwards from Muhammad’s close family and for whom the special speech was a guarantee of the message’s supernatural origin, this was all part of the proof of its truth. But the subject-matter of the Qur’an was clearly different from that of the already classic poetry of boasting, panegyric and love. ‘Do you not see,’ the Qur’an asks of the poets’ fanfaronade,
that they wander in every wadi,
And that they say things that they would never do?
But was the subject-matter always so different? In western Arabia about the time of Muhammad a new, if rare, strain of what could be called ‘devotional’ poetry was appearing. Its best-known exponent was Umayyah ibn Abi ’l-Salt who hailed from al-Ta’if, a town 60 kilometres from Mecca. He was an ardent hanif, the term used in the Qur’an for one practising the ‘original’ but somewhat misty pre-Muhammadan monotheism that went back to Abraham and had remained free of subsequent accretions, Jewish and Christian. This Umayyah is said to have read the older scriptures, worn hair shirts, eschewed alcohol and had a penchant for destroying idols. Lines attributed to him include the sort of material that also appears in the Qur’an – on divine unity, creation, heaven and hell, the ancient prophets, the ‘extinct’ tribes of Ad and Thamud, and matters of more local interest like the Day of the Elephant. One of his verses goes,
On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will consider every din –
other than the din of the hanifs – false.
Compare with this Qur’anic verses such as,
So set your face towards religion as a hanif . . . that is the straight religion, but most people do not know.
Other than his being a contemporary of Muhammad, Umayyah’s dates are unknown. What is clear is that he was, and remained, an opponent of Muhammad: after the setting up of the state of Medina, he would compose elegies on those killed in Muhammad’s raids.
For believers, the Qur’an is the eternal word of Allah and can have no precursors. If we willingly suspend belief, however, there is the obvious question of who influenced whom. Orientalists like Clément Huart tried to show that Umayyah influenced Muhammad; Muslim free-thinkers (and you have to be a free-thinker to engage in the debate at all) like Taha Husayn tried to show the opposite. Neither is convincing, and no one can be convincing as long as we cannot answer crucial questions about the dating and authenticity of Umayyah’s poems. Regarding the latter, it is generally agreed, ‘that there might well be some authentic material’ among the verses ascribed to him. That is all. And all that can be said with certainty is that, in western Arabia in late pagan times, there was a kind of oral circulating library – of parables from ancient times, snippets of knowledge about the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and ideas about creation and the nature of the monotheistic God. All the hanifs drew from these, and to try to decide which way influences went between them is probably a pointless exercise. What is clear is that Muhammad was not alone in his beliefs. Even the verb aslama and its noun islam, as a term for ‘submission’ to the One God, was shared. Compare the beginning of the last Qur’anic verse quoted above with some lines by Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, a Meccan hanif who predated Muhammad but may have overlapped with him:
I have submitted [aslamtu] my face to Him to whom
the Earth submitted, bearing heavy rocks.
He spread it out, and when He saw it lying evenly
on the waters, He set mountains firm upon it.
Like Muhammad, Zayd would go regularly into retreat on Mount Hira’; also like the later adherents of islam, he would submit his face in prayer and prostration to the One God, Allah, literally ‘facing’ His house, the Ka’bah. ‘Islam’, ‘Submission’, only gained its capital letter as the system of the cognate ‘Muslims’, the ‘Submitters’, after the move to Medina and the shift in focus from spiritual to political. Until then, Muhammad and his followers and predecessors were all hanifs together.
If the Qur’an is not unique in content and thought, it is, however, unique in form. It went much further than any poetry, devotional or other, and than the old magic speech. The latter seems to have been uttered in snatches. The Qur’an ‘descended’ in this way too. But it builds up into something much more sustained, and something that beside even the longest pre-Islamic odes (rarely more than a hundred lines) looks truly epic: it builds into nothing less than the first ever, and for a long time to come the only, Arabic book.
THE WORD MADE BOOK
It has been said that, ‘With an alphabet, a people . . . sets ou
t upon a journey’. And with a book – and especially such an omnibus volume as the Qur’an, that takes in heaven, earth and all of time from the moment of Creation on – there is a vehicle for the journey. The Qur’an is therefore not only the scripture of Islam; it is also the founding text of Arabdom as we know it, with all the historical weight of a Pentateuch, a Magna Carta and a Declaration of Independence.
Anyone who looks into Arab history must dwell on the Qur’an. Like that other gift of Gabriel, the Black Stone, it is a turning point on which a lot of history hinges: while at first glance ‘the influences which stamp the world’s history are wars, uprisings or downfalls of dynasties,’ to quote Whitman again (he does tend to put his finger on things),
yet, it may be, a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle, even literary style, put in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war . . .
The long and bloody wars would come as well, and soon enough. But it was the book and the supposedly ‘illiterate’ literatus, Muhammad, that wrought the change.
As that first word revealed – ‘Recite! ’ – shows, qur’an really means an oral text, read aloud and listened to. Even today, printed and electronic versions reproduce a standard edition done in Egypt in the 1920s which itself relied not on manuscripts, but on oral tradition. Individual copyists have always been regarded as more fallible than the mass memory of Qur’an reciters. But as the story of Gabriel stuffing the inscribed cloth into Muhammad’s mouth recognizes, reciting and writing are intimately bound up from the beginning. Furthermore, that first revelation continues thus:
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