Muhammad

by Karen Armstrong

  Muruwah was an inspiring ideal, but by the end of the sixth century, its weaknesses were becoming tragically apparent. Tribal solidarity (‘asibiyyah) encouraged bravery and selflessness, but only within the context of the tribe. There was no concept of universal human rights. A Bedouin felt responsible merely for his blood relatives and confederates. He had no concern for outsiders, whom he regarded as worthless and expendable. If he had to kill them to benefit his own people, he felt no moral anguish and wasted no time in philosophical abstractions or ethical considerations. Since the tribe was the most sacred value, he backed it, right or wrong. “I am of Ghazziyya,” sang one of the poets. “If she be in error, I will be in error; and if Ghazziyya be guided right, I will go with her.”2 Or, in the words of a popular maxim: “Help your brother whether he is being wronged or wronging others.”3

  Each tribe had its own special brand of muruwah, which, the Arabs believed, had been inherited from the founding fathers of the tribe and was passed, like other physical and mental characteristics, from one generation to another. They called this tribal glory hasab (“ancestral honor”).4 As the source of their particular genius, tribes-men revered their forefathers as the supreme authority and this inevitably encouraged a deep and entrenched conservatism. The way of life (sunnah) that the ancients had bequeathed to their descendants was sacred and inviolable. “He belongs to a tribe whose fathers have laid down for them a sunnah,” another poet explained, “Every folk has its own traditional sunnah; every folk has its objects of imitation.”5 Any deviation—however trivial—from ancestral custom was a great evil. A practice was approved not because of its inherent decency or nobility, but simply because it had been sanctioned long ago by the fathers of the tribe.

  The Bedouin could not afford to experiment. It would be criminally irresponsible to ignore the shari‘ah, the path to the waterhole that had been the lifeline of your people from time immemorial. You learned to survive by following a set of rules whose value had been proven by experience. But this unquestioning acceptance of tradition could lead to rampant chauvinism: the sunnah of your people was the best and you could contemplate no other way of doing things. You could only preserve the honor of your tribe by refusing to bow to any other authority, human or divine. A karim was expected to be proud, self-regarding, self-reliant, and aggressively independent. Arrogance was not a fault but a sign of nobility, whereas humility showed that you came from defective stock and had no aristocratic blood in your veins. A base-born person was genetically destined to be a slave (‘abd); that was all he was good for. A true karim could not submit to anybody at all. “We refuse to all men submission to their leading,” sang one poet, “till we lead them ourselves, yea without reins!”6 A karim would maintain this defiant self-sufficiency even in the presence of a god, because no deity could be superior to a truly noble human being.

  In the steppes, the tribe needed men who refused to be bowed by circumstance and who had the confidence to pit themselves against overwhelming odds. But this haughty self-reliance (istighna’) could easily become reckless and excessive. The Bedouin was easily moved to extremes at the smallest provocation.7 Because of his exalted sense of honor, he tended to respond violently to any perceived threat or slight. He did not simply act in self-defense; true courage lay in the preemptive strike. It is not enough for “a warrior, fierce as a lion, to strike back and chastise the enemy who has struck him with a blow,” cried the poet Zuhayr ibn ‘Abi Salma, “he should rather attack first and become an aggressor when no one wrongs him.”8 The courage praised by the tribal poets was an irresistible impulse that could not and should not be restrained. If a wrong was done to a single member of his tribe, a karim felt the duty of vengeance as a physical pain and a tormenting thirst.9 It was a tragic worldview. The Bedouin tried to glorify their struggle, but their life was grim and there was no hope of anything better. All beings, they believed, came under the sway of dahr (“time” or “fate”), which inflicted all manner of suffering on humanity; a man’s life was determined in advance. All things passed away; even the successful warrior would die and be forgotten. There was an inherent futility in this life of ceaseless struggle. The only remedy against despair was a life of pleasure—especially the oblivion of wine.

  In the past, many of the Bedouin had tried to escape from the steppes and build a more secure, settled (hadarah) life, but these attempts were usually frustrated by the scarcity of water and arable land, and the frequency of drought.10 A tribe could not establish a viable settlement unless it had either accumulated a surplus of wealth—an almost impossible feat—or took over an oasis, as the tribe of Thaqif had done in Ta’if. The other alternative was to become an intermediary between two or more of the rich civilizations in the region. The tribe of Ghassan, for example, which wintered on the border of the Byzantine empire, had become clients of the Greeks, converted to Christianity, and formed a buffer state to defend Byzantium against Persia. But during the sixth century, a new opportunity arose as a result of a transport revolution. The Bedouin had invented a saddle that enabled camels to carry far heavier loads than before, and merchants from India, East Africa, Yemen, and Bahrain began to replace their donkey carts with camels, which could survive for days without water and were ideally suited to navigate the desert. So instead of avoiding Arabia, foreign merchants trading in luxury goods—incense, spices, ivory, cereals, pearls, wood, fabrics, and medicines—began to take their caravans by the more direct route to Byzantium and Syria through the steppes, and employed the Bedouin to guard their merchandise, drive the camels, and guide them from one well to another.

  Mecca became a station for these northbound caravans. It was conveniently located in the center of the Hijaz, and even though it was built on solid rock, which made agriculture impossible there, settlement was feasible because of an underground water source that the Arabs called Zamzam. The discovery of this seemingly miraculous spring in such an arid region had probably made the site holy to the Bedouin long before the development of a city in Mecca. It attracted pilgrims from all over Arabia, and the Kabah, a cube-shaped granite building of considerable antiquity, may originally have housed the sacred utensils of the Zamzam cult. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the spring and the sanctuary (haram) were controlled by a succession of different nomadic tribes: Jurham, Khuza‘ah, and finally in the early sixth century by the Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, who drove out their predecessors and were the first to construct permanent buildings around the Kabah.

  The founding father of the Quraysh was Qusayy ibn Kilab, who had brought together a number of previously warring clans that were loosely related by blood and marriage and formed this new tribe, just as Mecca was becoming a popular center for long-distance trade. The name “Quraysh” may have been derived from taqarrush (“accumulation” or “gaining”).11 Unlike the Jurham and Khuza‘ah, who had not been able to abandon badawah, they acquired a capital surplus that made a settled lifestyle possible. First they managed to secure a monopoly of the north-south trade, so that they alone were allowed to service the foreign caravans. They were also able to control the mercantile activity within Arabia that had been stimulated by the influx of international commerce. During the first part of the sixth century, Bedouin tribes had begun to exchange goods with one another.12 Merchants congregated in a series of regular markets that were held each year in different parts of Arabia, and were so arranged that traders circled the peninsula in a clockwise direction. The first market (suq) of the year was held in Bahrain, the most densely populated region; the next were held successively in Oman, Hadramat, and Yemen, and the cycle concluded with five consecutive suqs in and around Mecca. The last fair of the year was held in ‘Ukaz immediately before the month of the hajj, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca and the Kabah.

  During the first half of the sixth century, the Quraysh had started to send their own caravans to Syria and Yemen, and gradually they established themselves as independent traders. But despite this success, they knew that they were vulner
able. Because agriculture was impossible in Mecca, they relied entirely on the exchange of commodities, so if the economy failed, they would starve to death. Everybody, therefore, was involved in commerce, as bankers, financiers, or merchants. In the agricultural settlements, the badawah spirit remained virtually intact because it was more compatible with farming, but the Quraysh were forced to cultivate a strictly commercial ethos that took them away from many of the traditional values of muruwah. They had, for example, to become men of peace, because the kind of warfare that was endemic in the steppes would make business impossible. Mecca had to be a place where merchants from any tribe could gather freely without fear of attack. So the Quraysh steadfastly refused on principle to engage in tribal warfare and maintained a position of aloof neutrality. Before their arrival, there had often been bloody battles around Zamzam and the Kabah, as rival tribes tried to gain control of these prestigious sites. Now, with consummate skill, the Quraysh established the Haram, a zone with a twenty-mile radius, with the Kabah at its center, where all violence was forbidden.13 They made special agreements with Bedouin tribes, who promised not to attack the caravans during the season of the trade fairs; in return these Bedouin confederates were compensated for the loss of income by being permitted to act as guides and protectors of the merchants.

  Trade and religion were thus inextricably combined in Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca was the climax of the suq cycle, and the Quraysh reconstructed the cult and architecture of the sanctuary so that it became a spiritual center for all the Arab tribes. Even though the Bedouin were not much interested in the gods, each tribe had its own presiding deity, usually represented by a stone effigy. The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this. In order to attract pilgrims and business away from the Quraysh, the governor of Abyssinia and Yemen constructed a rival sanctuary in Sana‘a. Then, in 547, he led an army to Mecca to prove that the city was not, after all, immune from warfare. But, it was said, his war elephant fell upon its knees when it reached the outskirts of Mecca, and refused to attack the Haram. Impressed by this miracle, the Abyssinians returned home. The Year of the Elephant became a symbol of Mecca’s sacred inviolability.14

  But the cult was not simply an empty, cynical exploitation of piety. The rituals of the hajj also gave the Arab pilgrims a profound experience. As they converged on Mecca at the end of the suq cycle, there was a sense of achievement and excitement. The caravans were checked by the Quraysh, their camels relieved of their burdens, and, after paying a modest fee, the merchants and their servants were free to pay their respects to the Haram. As they made their way through the narrow streets of the suburbs, they uttered ritual cries, announcing their presence to the gods who were awaiting their arrival. After their long trek around the peninsula, this reunion with the sacred symbols of their tribes felt like a homecoming. When they reached the Kabah, surrounded by the 360 tribal totems, they began to perform the traditional rites in Mecca and its environs, which may originally have been devised to bring on the winter rains. They jogged seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, to the east of the Kabah; ran in a body to the hollow of Muzdalifah, the home of the thunder god; made an all-night vigil on the plain beside Mount ‘Arafat, sixteen miles outside the city; hurled pebbles at three pillars in the valley of Mina; and finally, at the end of their pilgrimage, sacrificed their most valuable female camels, symbols of their wealth and—hence—of themselves.

  The most famous ritual of the hajj was the tawaf, seven circumambulations of the Kabah in a clockwise direction, a stylized re-enactment of the circular trade route round Arabia, which gave the Arabs’ mercantile activities a spiritual dimension. The tawaf became a popular devotional exercise, and citizens and their guests would perform it all the year round. The structure of the Haram acquired an archetypal significance, which has been found in the shrines of other cities in the ancient world.15 The Kabah, with its four corners representing the four cardinal directions, symbolized the world. Embedded in its eastern wall was the Black Stone, a piece of basalt of meteoric origin, which had once fallen brilliantly from the sky, linking heaven and earth. As the pilgrims jogged around the huge granite cube, following the course of the sun around the earth, they put themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the cosmos. The circle is a common symbol of totality, and the practice of circumambulation, where you constantly come back to your starting point, induces a sense of periodicity and regularity. By circling round and round the Kabah, pilgrims learned to find their true orientation and their interior center; the steady rhythm of the jog gradually emptied their minds of peripheral thoughts and helped them to enter a more meditative state.

  The reformed rites made Mecca the center of Arabia. Where other pilgrims had to leave their homelands and journey to remote sites, the Arabs had no need to leave the peninsula, which remained a law unto itself. All this reinforced the centrality of Mecca as the focus of the Arab world.16 The city was also isolated and this gave the Arabs a rare freedom. Neither Persia nor Byzantium, the great powers of the region, had any interest in the difficult terrain of Arabia, so the Quraysh could create a modern economy without imperial control. The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture.

  Their separation from the great powers meant that the Meccan economy was not damaged by their decline in fortune; indeed, the Quraysh were able to profit from it. By 570, the year of Muhammad’s birth, Persia and Byzantium were locked in a debilitating series of wars with one another that would fatally weaken both empires. Syria and Mesopotamia became a battleground, many of the trade routes were abandoned, and Mecca took control of all the intermediary trade between north and south.17 The Quraysh had become even more powerful, yet some were beginning to feel that they were paying too high a price for their success. As the sixth century drew to a close, the city was in the grip of a spiritual and moral crisis.

  The old communal spirit had been torn apart by the market economy, which depended upon ruthless competition, greed, and individual enterprise. Families now vied with one another for wealth and prestige. The less successful clans* felt that they were being pushed to the wall. Instead of sharing their wealth generously, people were hoarding their money and building private fortunes. They not only ignored the plight of the poorer members of the tribe, but exploited the rights of orphans and widows, absorbing their inheritance into their own estates. The prosperous were naturally delighted with their new security; they believed that their wealth had saved them from the destitution and misery of badawah. But those who had fallen behind in the stampede for financial success felt lost and disoriented. The principles of muruwah seemed incompatible with market forces, and many felt thrust into a spiritual limbo. The old ideals had not been replaced by anything of equal value, and the ingrained communal ethos told them that this rampant individualism would damage the tribe, which could only survive if its members pooled all their resources.

  Muhammad was born into the clan of Hashim, one of the most distinguished family groups in Mecca. His great-grandfather had been the first merchant to engage in independent trade with Syria and Yemen and the clan had the privilege of providing the pilgrims with water during the hajj, one of the most important offices in the city. But recently, Hashim had fallen on hard times. Muhammad’s father ‘Abdullah died before Muhammad was born and his mother Aminah was in such straitened circumstances that, it was said, the on
ly Bedouin woman who was willing to be his wet nurse came from one of the poorest tribes in Arabia. He lived with her family until he was six years old, and would have experienced nomadic life at its harshest. Shortly after he was brought back to Mecca, his mother died. This double bereavement made a deep impression on Muhammad; as we shall see, he would always be concerned about the plight of orphans.

  He was kindly treated by his surviving relatives. First he lived with his grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muttalib, who had been a highly successful merchant in his prime. The old man made quite a favorite of Muhammad. He liked to have his bed carried outside, where he could lie in the shade of the Kabah, surrounded by his sons. Muhammad used to sit beside him, while his grandfather affectionately stroked his back. When he died, however, Muhammad, now eight years old, inherited nothing. His more powerful relatives controlled the estate and Muhammad went to live with his uncle Abu Talib, who was now the sayyid (“chief ”) of Hashim and greatly respected in Mecca, even though his business was failing. Abu Talib was very fond of his nephew, and his brothers also helped with Muhammad’s education. Hamzah, the youngest, a man of prodigious strength, instructed Muhammad in the martial arts, making him a skilled archer and competent swordsman. His uncle ‘Abbas, a banker, was able to get Muhammad a job managing the caravans on the northern leg of the journey to Syria.