Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  “So God showed the power he had, and Abraham believed him,” Sheikh Abu Sneina said. “Therefore Abraham submitted himself to God.”

  “So was Abraham a Muslim?” I asked. This was one of the key questions I had come to explore. The Muslim decision to embrace Abraham was arguably even more remarkable than the Christian decision to embrace him. Islam emerged a full six centuries after Christianity, and at least a millennium after Judaism. Muhammad lived twenty-five hundred years after Abraham would have lived. And yet Muhammad followed the same course that Paul and early Christians did, and the same course that Ezra and early Jews did: He attached his spiritual message to the earliest prophet. Then, just like those forebears, early Muslims, having basked in the glory of the past, proceeded to claim that past as theirs alone.

  “That depends on what you mean by Muslim,” Sheikh Abu Sneina said. “If you take a Muslim to be anyone who submits himself to God, then Islam began with Adam, continued through Abraham, then all the prophets of Judaism and Christianity. But if you mean a Muslim is one who follows Islam, with the prophet Muhammad and all the interpretations, then that comes much later.”

  “So which definition do you prefer?” I asked.

  “For me, Abraham submitted himself to Allah. He did everything for God. I don’t know if he’s like me, but I would like to be like him.”

  THE IDEA THAT in the seventh century after Christ another religion would arise out of the Middle East, use the same basic narrative as Judaism and Christianity, then quickly supplant them in terms of political and religious power came as a shock to almost everyone—including Arabs.

  But not to Muhammad. Nearly two centuries after the death of Augustine, when Christianity was just developing its most virulent strain of triumphalism, a new prophet arose in Mecca to deliver the Arabs to what he considered their rightful place in the history of salvation. In many ways, Muhammad seemed like an unlikely messenger: He was around forty, a well-to-do trader, married to an older woman, illiterate. He was hardly the profile of a revolutionary.

  But Muhammad had learned a lot traveling the Arabian Peninsula, an area beset by feuding tribes. Because of its adverse location in the parched core of the Fertile Crescent, Arabia had not shared in the abundance of culture and power that a regular supply of water brought Mesopotamia, Egypt, or even the Promised Land. Bedouin tribes had no agricultural surplus, no need for a complex society, no spur for civilization. Two millennia after monotheists first overturned the idols of their fathers, Arabians were still polytheists.

  But Arabia was changing. International trade routes and more complex financial transactions were bringing more money and sophistication to the peninsula, led by Muhammad’s tribe, the Qurysh. With greater contact with the outside world, tales of the monotheistic prophets were now circulating widely. Muhammad’s gift was to recognize this change—and to husband it. He didn’t push too hard at first; he didn’t try to evangelize too loudly. He just told his story, and couched it as a chauvinistic coming-of-age for Arabs, a sort of Revenge of the Infertile Crescent.

  Key to his patriotic message was Muhammad’s language. Anyone who travels to the Middle East today knows that Arabic is a mellifluous, poetic language. Particularly Arabs who spend any time in the desert speak whatever languages they’re speaking—Arabic, English, French—with a grace and loftiness that is evanescent, inspiring, and occasionally maddening. Arabic is many things: concrete is not one of them. More often it’s flowing, evolving, sculpted, like a dune.

  And Muhammad, by all accounts, spoke an Arabic even more arresting in its power and mesmerizing in its beauty than anyone had heard at the time, and few have heard since. One reason the Koran continues to exert such influence is that the poetic language reproduced in its suras has a luxuriance attributable only to God. Partly as a result, more than a century of academic dismemberment has had much less impact on the Koran than it has on the Bible. Pious Muslims continue to see the Koran as the unfiltered word of God, which is one reason for the devotion it elicits. There is no third-person narrative in the Koran. God speaks directly in all of the text’s six thousand two hundred verses.

  Another key to Muhammad’s message was that it came populated with figures already familiar to his listeners. Jesus, Moses, David, and others were becoming well known in Arabia, from the large population of Jewish and Christian traders settled in the peninsula. But for maximum effect, Muhammad needed to link his message to a prophet his audience could identify with. To do that, he needed someone similar to him, someone connected to Arabia itself, and someone also bringing a message of monotheism to a reluctant population of polytheists.

  He needed Abraham.

  Abraham is mentioned in twenty-five of the Koran’s one hundred fourteen suras, with sura 14 named after him. And the predominant message about Abraham is that he was upright, submitted to God, and rejected idol worship. As sura 60 says, “You have a good example in Abraham.” He said to his people, “We disown you and the idols which you worship besides God. We renounce you: enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in God only.”

  Once again, the starting point for Islam is remarkably similar to the starting point for Judaism and Christianity: Have faith in God. And one man best personifies that message. “Why Abraham to me is such an interesting figure,” said Bill Graham, the Harvard Islamicist, “is that while we don’t know anything about him historically, there is this Near Eastern tradition that somehow portrays him as a man of unimaginable, almost idiotic faith. A man who in the face of all rationality believes in God. And because of that he stands out in history—whether he’s mythological or real—as the figure who somehow catches the imagination of all three traditions.”

  Like Christianity, Islam began by casting itself as broadly as possible. In the early years of Muhammad’s preaching, while he lived in Mecca, along the southwest coast of Arabia, he was careful to stress that Abraham was a universal figure of faith. Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all People of the Book, Muhammad said, who believed in the same God. In fact, Muhammad fully expected Jews and Christians to follow his return to pure monotheism. “Be courteous when you argue with the People of the Book,” sura 29 says. “Say: ‘We believe in that which has been revealed to us and which was revealed to you. Our God and your God is one. To him we submit.’ ”

  This closeness between Muhammad and the other faiths only strengthened when a group of tribes living in nearby Yathrib, including Jews, invited the prophet to mediate a dispute. The prophet readily agreed. Like Jesus, he had stirred up controversy among Meccan leaders with his message of social and spiritual equality. The local oligarchs, who profited from such inequality as well as from the annual pilgrimages Arabians made to pagan shrines in the city, were beginning to strike back. Muhammad’s migration from Mecca in July 622, called the hijira, is so seminal that it marks year one in the Muslim calendar. Muslims date their history not from Muhammad’s birth or death, or even from the year he began to recite the Koran. Time begins the year the prophet left his native land, went forth to another land, and gave birth to a community of believers. The echo of Abraham’s Call is unmistakable.

  Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was founded as a Jewish settlement, and ten thousand Jews still lived in the city. Muhammad worked closely with Jewish leaders, enhanced his knowledge of the Bible, and adjusted his new religion to accommodate his allies even more. He set his weekly prayer day on Friday, so it would coincide with the time Jews were preparing for their Sabbath (and not compete with the Jewish workweek, as the Christian Sabbath did). In addition, he urged his worshipers to pray toward Jerusalem and declared that the Jewish Day of Atonement would also be a fasting day for Muslims.

  But the warm relations between Jews and Muslims did not last. While the Jews may have been prepared to align politically with Muhammad, they were not prepared to accept him as a prophet. For Jews, the days of God’s revelation had ended. The Koran suggests the prophet was frustrated by their reluctance. The tone of the suras that de
scribe revelations received during this period is sometimes harsher than that of earlier ones, particularly toward Jews and Christians.

  In sura 5, Allah says: “The Jews and the Christians say: ‘We are the children of God and his loved ones.’ Say: ‘Why then does he punish you for your sins?’ ” The sura goes on to accuse the People of the Book of hiding certain things in their Scripture and delivers a pointed message to Christians. “Unbelievers are those who declare: ‘God is the Messiah, the son of Mary.’ ” The passage ends: “Our apostle has come to you with revelations after an interval which saw no apostles, lest you say: ‘No one has come to give us good news or to warn us.’ Now someone has come to give you good news and to warn you. God has power over all things.”

  Gradually a schism began to develop between early Muslims on one side, Jews and Christians on the other. The process mirrored what happened between early Christians and Jews, when the new believers offered what they considered a univer sal message but the established believers failed to embrace it. In both cases, the new religion proceeded on its own.

  In January 624 Muhammad introduced a monumental change: He asked his worshipers to turn around, to no longer face Jerusalem during their prayers but to face Mecca instead. Mecca was the original home of monotheism, the Koran says, and the previous direction had been only a test to know Muhammad’s true adherents. From now on, Muslim worshipers would face the prophet’s birthplace.

  While this shift certainly widened the rupture among the religions, it did little to change the importance of Abraham. If anything, Abraham became even more important to Muslims as a symbol that true submission to God predated Judaism and Christianity. As sura 2 says, “They say: ‘Accept the Jewish or the Christian faith and you shall be rightly guided.’ Say: ‘By no means! We believe in the faith of Abraham, the upright one.’ ” This faith was revealed not only to Abraham but also to “Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets.” Islam, in other words, is the true universal faith.

  Peace-loving Muslims point out that the Koran never advocates violence toward the other religions and never insisted Jews and Christians become Muslim. As Sheikh Feisal Abdul Rauf, of New York’s Masjid al-Farah Mosque, told me, “The Koran is explicit. ‘There shall be no compulsion in religion.’ Faith has to be a matter of individual conscience. Even in places where Muslims were ruling over non-Muslims they never coerced them to convert.”

  But most scholars believe the split that took place in Medina is reflected in the text. As Bill Graham said, “If you take the Koran over time, there is an increasing challenging of Jews and Christians to respond now to God speaking again. And finally there’s even a condemning of them after one contretemps or another. Then you get to the point where certain actions by the People of the Book were used as pretexts for persecution.”

  The most egregious example of this violent tendency occurred over the next three years as Muhammad, now with greater political clout, slowly banished those Jewish tribes in Medina that had turned against him and begun supporting his Meccan oppressors. Ultimately, Muhammad’s followers slaughtered an estimated seven hundred Jews and sold their women and children into slavery. Any hope of a long-term alliance of faith was shattered. The new Muslims were now powerful enough to survive on their own.

  After protracted struggle, Muhammad, in 628, made an alliance with the oligarchs of Mecca who had opposed him and marched into the city unopposed. By the year of his death, 632, he controlled all of Arabia. Monotheism had a new member religion; Abraham had a new address.

  AFTER I’D SPENT about a half hour with Sheikh Abu Sneina, the mood began to lighten somewhat. He still hadn’t taken off his coat, but he had set down his briefcase. A couple of times he interrupted my questioning to point out that he had a few more things to say. One time I did the same to him, and we both laughed. Finally he seemed comfortable enough for me to ask him about the Hajj.

  When Muhammad arrived back in Mecca, he began to purify the holy city of its polytheism and transform it into the capital of the new faith. He destroyed all the sanctuaries of paganism, except for one, the Ka’ba. Mecca had been a center of pilgrimage for generations, with the Ka’ba, the large black cube roughly forty feet in every direction, being the most prominent destination.

  The Koran says the Ka’ba was actually built by Adam, then rebuilt by Abraham. During Noah’s Flood, the Ka’ba had been taken up to heaven, where angels fluttered around it, the origin of the tradition of pilgrims circumambulating the cube. Later, it was returned to earth and lost under the sands. During one of Abraham’s visits to Arabia, a two-headed wind revealed the secret location, and Abraham set about reconstructing the primordial temple where God left his footprint on earth. When Abraham tired, Ishmael helped him by bringing a large rock to stand on; it came to be known as the Maqam Ibrahim for the footprint Abraham left on it.

  Some interpreters note that Abraham and Ishmael did not entirely get along during this period. In some traditions, Ishmael could not find a cornerstone or was too late or too lazy to be of any help. His father says, “God would not entrust such a thing to you, my boy!”

  After Abraham finished building the Ka’ba, God commanded him to go to the top of a nearby hill and summon all humankind to make a pilgrimage to the site. His voice was amplified so it could be heard around the world. Muhammad echoed Abraham’s faithfulness when he once again called Muslims to make the same pilgrimage.

  The pilgrimage, or Hajj, soon became one of the five pillars of Islam and one of the enduring reasons for Abraham’s central role in the faith. All pilgrims—men and women—purify themselves, donning seamless white garments, and wearing strapless white shoes. They enter the Grand Mosque, where the Ka’ba is located, move clockwise around it seven times, then pray in the spot where Abraham stood. In subsequent events of the weeklong pilgrimage, worshipers run between the knolls of Safa and Marwa in commemoration of Hagar’s frantic search for water for Ishmael and stone the pillars that represent the devil who tried to tempt Abraham to ignore God’s command to sacrifice his son.

  Unlike Jews or Christians, for whom he is a largely literary figure, for Muslims Abraham is a tangible figure intimately connected to one of the most moving experiences of their lives. As Sheikh Abu Sneina said when I asked him what feeling he got when he viewed the Ka’ba, “You get the sense that it was done to perfection. God instructed Abraham to build it, and he built it stone by stone, and he did it perfectly.”

  Sheikh Abu Sneina has made the pilgrimage five times. In honor of his completing the journey, he earned the right to put the name Hajj before his name. During our talk, Dr. Nadsheh referred to him as Hajji Yusef.

  “When you walk around the Ka’ba you get the feeling that Allah tested Abraham,” the imam continued, “and that Abraham survived and performed well in those tests. Then you stop and make two prayers. That’s when you really feel closest to Abraham. It’s very moving.”

  “What kind of feeling do you get?” I asked.

  “It’s a feeling of connection. You feel that you have a sort of channel between you and God. A spiritual feeling that you are human, but you are not human. You’re human with a special capability because you are so close to God.”

  “And what do you want from Abraham at that moment?”

  “You don’t want anything from Abraham. You want things from God. Every time Abraham spoke to God, he never asked for something for himself. He always asked for his family. He was not selfish in that way, so we try not to be selfish either.”

  “Do you cry?”

  “Some people cry loudly, because they’re in pain. Some people cry quietly. Some people cry because they are sinful and their sins have been revealed. Some people cry out of joy.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Many times.”

  “What kind of tears?”

  “Tears of worship.”

  LIKE CHRISTIANITY, Islam spread rapidly in its first decades. Within a hundred years of the prophet’s death
in 632, under the first four caliphs, or rulers, and the first great dynasty (the Umayyads), Islam spread through Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Persia, and much of Afghanistan as far as India, as well as across the whole of North Africa from Alexandria to Tunis. Also like Christianity, Islam quickly proved itself portable, adaptable, and inspirational to populations far removed from its historic and geographic epicenter. The long-promised great nation of Ishmael had finally come to be.

  The long-repressed rivalry between Ishmael and Isaac was about to resurface.

  In yet another similarity with Christianity, once Islam began to grow in stature and power, Muslim leaders started to distance themselves more aggressively from their monotheistic forebears. Islamic midrash, known as tafsir, is considered harsher toward Jews than toward Christians, largely because of the political circumstances during the prophet’s lifetime. As one ninth-century commentator wrote, Muslims prefer Christians to Jews because the latter actively opposed the prophet in Medina: “The reason that the Christians are less hideous—though they certainly are ugly—is that the Israelite marries only another Israelite, and all of their conformity is brought back among them and confined with them . . . they have, therefore, not been distinguished either for their intelligence, their physique, or their cleverness.”

  Once again, a by-product of this process was that interpreters of the new religion expressed their feelings of superiority toward their monotheistic ancestors by attempting to tighten their claim on Abraham. For example, Muslim inter preters added a new twist to the construction of the Ka’ba. They pointed out that the spot was the one where the angel of God revealed a spring to Hagar, thereby saving Ishmael’s life.