Muhammad

by Karen Armstrong

The young Muhammad was well-liked in Mecca. He was handsome, with a compact, solid body of average height. His hair and beard were thick and curly, and he had a strikingly luminous expression and a smile of enormous charm, which is mentioned in all the sources. He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent on the task at hand that he never looked over his shoulder, even if his cloak got caught in a thorny bush. When he did turn to speak to somebody, he used to swing his entire body around and address him full face. When he shook hands, he was never the first to withdraw his own. He inspired such confidence that he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable One. But his orphaned status constantly held him back. He had wanted to marry his cousin Fakhitah, but Abu Talib had to refuse his request for her hand, gently pointing out that Muhammad could not afford to support a wife, and made a more advantageous match for her.

  But when Muhammad was about twenty-five years old, his luck suddenly changed. Khadijah bint al-Khuwaylid, a distant relative, asked him to take a caravan into Syria for her. She came from the clan of Asad, which was now far more influential than Hashim, and since her husband had died, she had become a successful merchant. Urban life often gives elite women the opportunity to flourish in business, though women of the lower classes had no status at all in Mecca. Muhammad conducted the expedition so competently that Khadijah was impressed and proposed marriage to him. She needed a new husband and her talented kinsman was a suitable choice: “I like you because of our relationship,” she told him, “and your high reputation among your people, your trustworthiness, good character, and truthfulness.”18 Some of Muhammad’s critics have sneered at this timely match with the wealthy widow, but this was no marriage of convenience. Muhammad loved Khadijah dearly, and even though polygamy was the norm in Arabia, he never took another, younger wife while she was alive. Khadijah was a remarkable woman, “deter-mined, noble, and intelligent,” says Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s first biographer.19 She was the first to recognize her husband’s genius, and—perhaps because he had lost his mother at such a young age—he depended upon her emotionally and relied on her advice and support. After her death, he used to infuriate some of his later wives by endlessly singing her praises.

  Khadijah was probably in her late thirties when she married Muhammad, and bore him at least six children. Their two sons—Al-Qasim and ‘Abdullah—died in infancy, but Muhammad adored his daughters Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah. It was a happy household, even though Muhammad insisted on giving a high proportion of their income to the poor. He also brought two needy boys into the family. On their wedding day, Khadijah had presented him with a young slave called Zayd ibn al-Harith from one of the northern tribes. He became so attached to his new master that when his family came to Mecca with the money to ransom him, Zayd begged to be allowed to remain with Muhammad, who adopted him and gave him his freedom. A few years later, Abu Talib was in such financial trouble that Muhammad took his five-year-old son ‘Ali into his household to ease his burden. He was devoted to both boys and treated them as his own sons.

  We know very little about these early years. But from his later career it is clear that he had accurately diagnosed the malaise that was particularly rife among the younger generation, who felt ill at ease in this aggressive market economy. The Quraysh had introduced class distinctions that were quite alien to the muruwah ideal. Almost as soon as they had seized control of Mecca, the wealthier Quraysh had lived beside the Kabah, while the less prosperous inhabited the suburbs and the mountainous region outside the city. They had abandoned the badawah virtue of generosity and become niggardly, except that they called this shrewd business sense. Some no longer succumbed to the old fatalism, because they knew that they had succeeded in turning their fortunes around. They even believed that their wealth could give them some kind of immortality.20 Others took refuge in a life of hedonism, making a religion out of pleasure.21 Increasingly, it seemed to Muhammad that the Quraysh had jettisoned the best and retained only the worst aspects of muruwah: the recklessness, arrogance, and egotism that were morally destructive and could bring the city to ruin. He was convinced that social reform must be based on a new spiritual solution, or it would remain superficial. He probably realized, at some deep level, that he had exceptional talent, but what could he do? Nobody would take him seriously, because, despite his marriage to Khadijah, he had no real status in the city.

  *

  There was widespread spiritual restlessness. The settled Arabs, who lived in the towns and agricultural communities of the Hijaz, had developed a different kind of religious vision. They were more interested in gods than the Bedouin, but their rudimentary theism had no strong roots in Arabia. Very few mythical stories were told about the various deities. Allah was the most important god, and was revered as the lord of the Kabah, but he was a remote figure and had very little influence on the people’s daily lives. Like the other “high gods” or “sky gods” who were a common feature of ancient religion, he had no developed cult and was never depicted in effigy.22 Everybody knew that Allah had created the world; that he quickened each human embryo in the womb; and that he was the giver of rain. But these remained abstract beliefs. Arabs would sometimes pray to Allah in an emergency, but once the danger had passed they forgot all about him.23 Indeed, Allah seemed like an irresponsible, absentee father; after he had brought men and women into being, he took no interest in them and abandoned them to their fate.24

  The Quraysh also worshipped other gods. There was Hubal, a deity represented by a large, reddish stone which stood inside the Kabah.25 There were three goddesses—Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat—who were often called the “daughters of Allah” (banat Allah) and were very popular in the settled communities. Represented by large standing stones, their shrines in Ta’if, Nakhlah, and Qudhayd were roughly similar to the Meccan Haram. Although they were of lesser rank than Allah, they were often called his “companions” or “partners” and compared to the beautiful cranes (gharaniq) which flew higher than any other bird. Even though they had no shrine in Mecca, the Quraysh loved these goddesses and begged them to mediate on their behalf with the inaccessible Allah. As they jogged around the Kabah, they would often chant this invocation: “Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other. Indeed these are the exalted gharaniq; let us hope for their intercession.”26

  This idol worship was a relatively new religious enthusiasm, which had been imported from Syria by one of the Meccan elders who believed that they could bring rain, but we have no idea why, for example, the goddesses were said to be Allah’s daughters—especially since Arabs regarded the birth of a daughter as a misfortune and often killed female infants at birth. The gods of Arabia gave their worshippers no moral guidance; even though they found the rituals spiritually satisfying, some of the Quraysh were beginning to find these stone effigies inadequate symbols of divinity.27

  But what was the alternative? Arabs knew about the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity. Jews had probably lived in Arabia for over a millennium, migrating there after the Babylonian and Roman invasions of Palestine. Jews had been the first to settle in the agricultural colonies of Yathrib and Khaybar in the north; there were Jewish merchants in the towns and Jewish nomads in the steppes. They had retained their religion, formed their own tribes but had intermarried with the local people, and were now practically indistinguishable from Arabs. They spoke Arabic, had Arab names, and organized their society in the same way as their Arab neighbors. Some of the Arabs had become Christians: there were important Christian communities in Yemen and along the frontier with Byzantium. The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab (“the People of the Book”). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language.

  But at this time, Arabs did not see Judaism and Christianity as exclusive traditions that were fundamentally di
fferent from their own. Indeed, the term “Jew” or “Christian” usually referred to tribal affiliation rather than to religious orientation.28 These faiths were an accepted part of the spiritual landscape of the peninsula and considered quite compatible with Arab spirituality. Because no imperial power was seeking to impose any form of religious orthodoxy, Arabs felt free to adapt what they understood about these traditions to their own needs. Allah, they believed, was the God worshipped by Jews and Christians, so Christian Arabs made the hajj to the Kabah, the house of Allah, alongside the pagans. It was said that Adam had built the Kabah after his expulsion from Eden and that Noah had rebuilt it after the devastation of the Flood. The Quraysh knew that in the Bible the Arabs were said to be the sons of Ishmael, Abraham’s oldest son, and that God had commanded Abraham to abandon him with his mother Hagar in the wilderness, promising that he would make their descendants a great people.29 Later Abraham had visited Hagar and Ishmael in the desert and had rediscovered the shrine. He and Ishmael had rebuilt it yet again and designed the rites of the hajj.

  Everybody knew that Arabs and Jews were kin. As the Jewish historian Josephus (37–c.100 CE) explained, Arabs circumcised their sons at the age of thirteen “because Ishmael, the founder of their nation, who was born to Abraham of the concubine [Hagar], was circumcised at that age.”30 Arabs did not feel it necessary to convert to Judaism or Christianity, because they believed that they were already members of the Abrahamic family; in fact, the idea of conversion from one faith to another was alien to the Quraysh, whose vision of religion was essentially pluralistic.31 Each tribe came to Mecca to worship its own god, which stood in the Haram alongside the house of Allah. Arabs did not understand the idea of a closed system of beliefs, nor would they have seen monotheism as incompatible with polytheism. They regarded Allah, who was surrounded by the ring of idols in the Kabah, as lord of a host of deities, in much the same way as some of the biblical writers saw Yahweh as “surpassing all other gods.”32

  But some of the settled Arabs were becoming dissatisfied with this pagan pluralism, and were attempting to create an indigenous, Arabian monotheism.33 Shortly before Muhammad received his first revelation, they had seceded from the religious life of the Haram. It was pointless, they told their tribesmen, to run round and round the Black Stone, which could “neither see, nor hear, nor hurt, nor help.” Arabs, they believed, had “corrupted the religion of their father Abraham,” so they were going to seek the hanifiyyah, his “pure religion.”34 This was not an organized sect. These hanifs all despised the worship of the stone effigies and believed that Allah was the only God, but not all interpreted this conviction identically. Some expected that an Arab prophet would come with a divine mission to revive the pristine religion of Abraham; others thought that this was unnecessary: people could return to the hanifiyyah on their own initiative; some preached the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment; others converted to Christianity or Judaism as an interim measure, until the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) was properly established.

  The hanifs had little impact on their contemporaries, because they were chiefly concerned with their own personal salvation. They had no desire to reform the social or moral life of Arabia, and their theology was essentially negative. Instead of creating something new, they simply withdrew from the mainstream. Indeed the word hanif may derive from the root HNF: “to turn away from.” They had a clearer idea of what they did not want than a positive conception of where they were going. But the movement was a symptom of the spiritual restiveness in Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century, and we know that Muhammad had close links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians. The nephew of Zayd ibn ‘Amr, who attacked the pagan religion of Mecca so vehemently that he was driven out of the city, became one of Muhammad’s most trusted disciples. It seems, therefore, that Muhammad moved in hanafi circles, and may have shared Zayd’s yearning for divine guidance. One day, before he had been expelled from Mecca, Zayd had stood beside the Kabah inveighing against the corrupt religion of the Haram. But suddenly, he broke off. “Oh Allah!” he cried, “If I knew how you wished to be worshipped, I would so worship you, but I do not know.”35

  Muhammad was also seeking a new solution. For some years, accompanied by Khadijah, he had made an annual retreat on Mount Hira’ during the month of Ramadan, distributing alms to the poor who visited him in his mountain cave and performing devotions.36 We know very little about these practices, which were believed by some of the sources to have been inaugurated by Muhammad’s grandfather. They seem to have combined social concern with rituals that may have included deep prostrations before Allah,37 and intensive circumambulation of the Kabah. At this time, Muhammad had also started to have numinous dreams, radiant with hope and promise, that burst upon him “like the dawn of the morning,” a phrase that in Arabic expresses the sudden transformation of the world when the sun breaks through the darkness in these eastern lands where there is no twilight.38

  It was while he was making his annual retreat on Mount Hira’ in about the year 610 that he experienced the astonishing and dramatic attack. The words that were squeezed, as if from the depths of his being, went to the root of the problem in Mecca.

  Recite in the name of your lord who created—

  From an embryo created the human.

  Recite your lord is all-giving

  Who taught by the pen

  Taught the human what he did not know before

  The human being is a tyrant

  He thinks his possessions make him secure

  To your lord is the return of everything

  This verse was an extension of the Quraysh’s belief that Allah had created each one of them. It identified the proud self-sufficiency of muruwah as a delusion, because humans are entirely dependent upon God. Finally, Allah insisted that he was not a distant, absent deity but wanted to instruct and guide his creatures, so they must “come near” to him. But instead of approaching God in a spirit of prideful istighna’, they must bow before him like a lowly slave: “Touch your head to the earth!” God commanded39—a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh. From the very beginning, Muhammad’s religion was diametrically opposed to some of the essential principles of muruwah.

  When Muhammad came to himself, he was so horrified to think, after all his spiritual striving, that he had simply been visited by a jinni that he no longer wanted to live. In despair, he fled from the cave and started to climb to the summit of the mountain to fling himself to his death. But there he had another vision. He saw a mighty being that filled the horizon and stood “gazing at him, moving neither forward nor backward.”40 He tried to turn away, but, he said afterwards, “Towards whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before.”41 It was the spirit (ruh) of revelation, which Muhammad would later call Gabriel. But this was no pretty, naturalistic angel, but a transcendent presence that defied ordinary human and spatial categories.

  Terrified and still unable to comprehend what had happened, Muhammad stumbled down the mountainside to Khadijah. By the time he reached her, he was crawling on his hands and knees, shaking convulsively. “Cover me!” he cried, as he flung himself into her lap. Khadijah wrapped him in a cloak and held him in her arms until his fear abated. She had no doubts at all about the revelation. This was no jinni, she insisted. God would never play such a cruel trick on a man who had honestly tried to serve him. “You are kind and considerate to your kin,” she reminded him. “You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens. You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear.”42 Muhammad and Khadijah had probably discussed their dawning understanding of the true nature of a religion that went beyond ritual performance and required practical compassion and sustained moral effort.

  To reassure Muhammad, Khadijah
consulted her cousin Waraqah, the hanif, who had studied the scriptures of the People of the Book and could give them expert advice. Waraqah was jubilant: “Holy! Holy!” he cried, when he heard what had happened. “If you have spoken the truth to me, O Khadijah, there has come to him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of his people.”43 The next time Waraqah met Muhammad in the Haram, he kissed him on the forehead and warned him that his task would not be easy. Waraqah was an old man and not likely to live much longer, but he wished he could be alive to help Muhammad when the Quraysh expelled him from the city. Muhammad was dismayed. He could not conceive of a life outside Mecca. Would they really cast him out? he asked in dismay. Waraqah sadly told him that a prophet was always without honor in his own country.

  It was a difficult beginning, fraught with fear, anxiety, and the threat of persecution. Yet the Qur’an has preserved another account of the experience on Mount Hira’, in which the descent of the spirit is described as an event of wonder, gentleness, and peace, similar to the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.44

  We sent him down on the night of destiny

  And what can tell you of the night of destiny?

  The night of destiny is better than a thousand months

  The angels come down—the spirit upon her—

  by permission of their lord from every order

  Peace she is until the rise of dawn.45

  In this surah (chapter) of the Qur’an, there is a suggestive blurring of masculine and feminine, especially in pronouns, which is often lost in translation. In the Qur’an, the question “What can tell you?” regularly introduces an idea that would have been strange to Muhammad’s first audience, indicating that they were about to enter the realm of the ineffable. Here Muhammad has self-effacingly disappeared from the drama of Mount Hira’, and the night (layla) is center stage, like a woman waiting for her lover. The Night of Destiny had inaugurated a new era of communion between heaven and earth. The original terror of the divine encounter has been replaced by the peace that filled the darkness as the world waited for daybreak.