Muhammad

by Karen Armstrong

  Muhammad would have understood the German historian Rudolf Otto, who described the sacred as a mystery that was both tremendum and fascinans. It was overpowering, urgent, and terrible, but it also filled human beings with “delight, joy, and a sense of swelling harmony and intimate intercourse.”46 Revelation cannot be described in a simple manner, and the complexity of his experience made Muhammad very cautious of telling anybody about it. After the experience on Mount Hira’, there were more visions—we do not know exactly how many—and then, to Muhammad’s dismay, the divine voice fell silent and there were no further revelations.

  It was a time of great desolation. Had Muhammad been deluded after all? Was the presence simply a mischievous jinni? Or had God found him wanting and abandoned him? For two long years, the heavens remained obdurately closed and then, suddenly, the darkness was dispersed in a burst of luminous assurance:

  By the morning hours

  By the night when it is still

  Your lord has not abandoned you

  and does not hate you

  What is after will be better

  than what came before

  To you the lord will be giving

  You will be content

  Did he not find you orphaned

  and give you shelter

  Find you lost

  and guide you

  Find you in hunger

  and provide for you

  As for the orphan—

  do not oppress him

  And one who asks for help—

  do not turn him away

  And the grace of your lord—

  proclaim47

  Here, Allah offered his assurance that he did not abandon his creatures, and reminded men and women to imitate his continuous kindness and generosity. Human beings, who had experienced the care of God, had a duty to help the orphan and the deprived. Anybody who had known dereliction, hunger, and oppression must refuse under any circumstances to inflict this pain on others. The revelation concluded by telling Muhammad that it was time to “proclaim” this message to the Quraysh. But how would they respond?

  Chapter Two

  Jahiliyyah

  HE BEGAN QUIETLY, speaking about his revelations to a small band of friends and family members, who became enthusiastic and sympathetic disciples, convinced that he was the long-awaited Arab prophet. But Muhammad realized that most of the Quraysh would find it well-nigh impossible to accept this. The messengers of Allah had all been towering figures, founding fathers of society. Some had even worked miracles. How could Muhammad measure up to Moses or Jesus? The Quraysh had watched him growing up; they saw him going about his business in the market, eating and drinking like everybody else. They had jettisoned many muruwah values, but had retained its elitist, aristocratic outlook and would expect God to choose a well-born karim from one of the more distinguished clans, rather than a minor member of Hashim. How would they react when Muhammad told them to abandon their lofty independence in a way that violated the sunnah of their forefathers?

  Even at this early stage, Muhammad had encountered opposition. Khadijah, their daughters, ‘Ali, and Zayd accepted his new status unconditionally, but though his uncle Abu Talib would continue to love and support him, he was deeply pained that Muhammad had the temerity to depart from the absolute authority of their ancestors. He was splitting up the family. Muhammad’s cousins—Ja‘far ibn Abi Talib, ‘Abdullah and ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh, and their sister Zaynab—all accepted the revelations, but his uncles ‘Abbas and Hamzah did not, though their wives did. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Abu l-‘As, who had married his daughter Zaynab, refused even to consider the new religion. Naturally, this was distressing to Muhammad. Family solidarity was a sacred value, and like any Arab, he respected the elders of his tribe and clan. He expected leadership to come from the top, but it was the younger generation who responded to his message. The revelations had already started to push Muhammad away from the norm. He could not help noticing that many of his followers came from the lower classes. A significant number were women, others freedmen, servants, and slaves. Foremost among the latter was Bilal, an Abyssinian with an extraordinarily loud voice. When the Muslims gathered to pray together in the Haram, Muhammad found himself surrounded by “the young men and weak people of the city.”1 Muhammad welcomed them warmly into his little company, but he must have wondered how a movement of such peripheral people could succeed. Indeed, some of the Qurayshan elders, who as yet knew nothing of the revelations, had begun to ask him why he was consorting with such riff-raff.

  The “weak” people were not all down-and-outs; this technical tribal term denoted inferior tribal status rather than poverty. Muhammad’s most zealous follower at this point was his friend ‘Attiq Ibn ‘Uthman, who was usually known by his kunya, Abu Bakr.* He was a successful, wealthy merchant, but like Muhammad he came from a “weak” clan that had fallen on hard times. Abu Bakr was “well-liked and of easy manners,” Ibn Ishaq tells us, a kindly, approachable man, especially skilled in the interpretation of dreams.2 Many of the younger generation, who were disturbed by the aggressive capitalism of Mecca, came to him for advice. Some of the young felt an urgent sense of personal peril, a torpor of depression from which they longed to wake, and a frightening alienation from their parents. The son of an important financier in one of the more powerful clans dreamed that his father was trying to push him into a pit that was filled with fire; then he had felt two strong hands pulling him to safety and realized, at the moment of waking, that his savior was Muhammad.3 Another youth, this one from the prestigious clan of ‘Abd Shams, came to Abu Bakr after dreaming that he had heard a voice crying aloud in the desert “Sleepers, awake!” and proclaiming that a prophet had appeared in Mecca.4 Both these young men became Muslims, but the first kept his new faith a secret from his father for as long as he could, and the latter’s conversion greatly displeased the elders of his clan, who were among the most influential men in Mecca.

  The revelations had brought to light a fault line in the city. Over the years, a worrying divide had opened between young and old, rich and poor, men and women. This was dangerous. The scripture that was being revealed to Muhammad, verse by verse, surah by surah, condemned this kind of inequality; one faction would inevitably suffer at the hands of another.5 Any society that was divided against itself would be destroyed, because it was going against the very nature of things. This was a frightening period. The incessant wars between Persia and Byzantium seemed to herald the end of the old world order, and even within Arabia, tribal warfare had reached chronic proportions. During the last twenty years, the ghazu, which had traditionally been short and sharp, had escalated into long, drawn out military campaigns as a result of unprecedented drought and famine. There was an apocalyptic sense of impending catastrophe. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world.

  Under the inspiration of Allah, Muhammad was feeling his way towards an entirely new solution, convinced that he was not speaking in his own name, but was simply repeating the revealed words of God. It was a painful, difficult process. He once said: “Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.”6 Sometimes the message was clear. He could almost see and hear Gabriel distinctly. The words seemed to “come down” to him, like a shower of life-giving rain. But often the divine voice was muffled and obscure: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.”7 He had to listen to the undercurrent of events, trying to discover what was really going on. He would grow pale with the effort and cover himself with his cloak, as if to shield himself from the divine impact. He would perspire heavily, even on a cold day, as he turned inwards, searching his soul for a solution to a problem, in rather the same way as a poet has to open himself to the words that he must haul from the depths of himself to the conscious leve
l of his mind. In the Qur’an, God instructed Muhammad to listen intently to each revelation as it emerged; he must be careful not to impose a meaning on a verse prematurely, before its full significance had become entirely clear.8

  In the Qur’an, therefore, God spoke directly to the people of Mecca, using Muhammad as his mouthpiece, just as he spoke through the Hebrew prophets in the Jewish scriptures. Hence the language of the Qur’an is sacred, because—Muslims believe—it records the words spoken in some way by God himself. When Muhammad’s converts listened to the divine voice, chanted first by the Prophet and later by the skilled Qur’an reciters, they felt that they had an immediate encounter with Allah. Biblical Hebrew is experienced as a holy tongue in rather the same way. Christians do not have this concept of a sacred language, because there is nothing holy about New Testament Greek; their scriptures presented Jesus as the Word spoken by God to humanity. Like any scripture, the Qur’an thus provided an encounter with transcendence, bridging the immense gulf between our frail, mortal world and the divine.

  Muhammad’s converts eagerly awaited each new revelation; after he had recited it, they would learn it by heart, and those who were literate wrote it down. They felt moved and stirred by the exquisite language of their scripture, which, they were convinced, could only have come from God. It is difficult for a non-Arabic speaker to appreciate the beauty of the Qur’an, because this is rarely conveyed in translation. The text seems wearyingly repetitive; it has no apparent structure, no sustained argument or organizing narrative. But the Qur’an was not designed to be read sequentially. In its final form, the chapters or surahs of the Qur’an have been arranged arbitrarily, beginning with the longest and ending with the shortest, so the order is not important. Each surah contains essential teachings and it is possible to dip into the text at any point and imbibe crucial lessons.

  In common with the majority of Arabs at this time, Muhammad could neither read nor write. The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.9 Bards chanted their odes at the annual trade fairs to excited audiences from all over the peninsula. Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of ‘Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhammad’s followers would, therefore, have been able to pick up verbal signals in the text that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again—like the variations in a piece of music, which subtly amplify the original melody, and add layer upon layer of complexity. The Qur’an was deliberately repetitive; its ideas, images, and stories were bound together by these internal echoes, which reinforced its central teaching with instructive shifts of emphasis. They linked passages that initially seemed separate, and integrated the different strands of the text, as one verse delicately qualified and supplemented others. The Qur’an was not imparting factual information that could be conveyed instantaneously. Like Muhammad, listeners had to absorb its teachings slowly; their understanding would grow more profound and mature over time, and the rich, allusive language and rhythms of the Qur’an helped them to slow down their mental processes and enter a different mode of consciousness.

  The American scholar Michael Sells describes what happens when the driver of a hot, crowded bus in Egypt plays a cassette of Qur’anic recitations: “A meditative calm begins to set in. People relax. The jockeying for space ends. The voices of those who are talking grow quieter and less strained. Others are silent, lost in thought. A sense of shared community overtakes the discomfort.”10 Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions. Yogins have found that it brings a feeling of expansiveness, comparable to the effect of music, especially when played by oneself.11 Qur’anic reciters chant long phrases on a slow exhalation and, when they inhale, leave silent pauses for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.

  God was not booming clear instructions from on high. The divine voice constantly changed the way it referred to itself—as “we,” “he,” “your lord,” “Allah” or “I”—shifting its relationship to both the Prophet and his audience. Nor was God distinctively male. Each recitation began with the invocation: “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and the Merciful (al-Rahim).” Allah was a masculine noun, but the divine names al-Rahman and al-Rahim are not only grammatically feminine but related etymologically to the word for womb. A partially personified female figure was central to nearly all the early revelations. We find veiled allusions to a woman conceiving a child or giving birth; the image of a woman who has lost her only child, and the poignant evocation of a baby girl, murdered by her disappointed parents.12 This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur’an.

  In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question—“Have you not heard?” “Do you consider?” “Have you not seen?” Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer.13 This new religion was not about achieving metaphysical certainty: the Qur’an wanted people to develop a different kind of awareness.

  The Christian notion of the Last Judgment was central to the early message of the Qur’an. Muhammad believed that Mecca was in crisis because the Quraysh no longer felt accountable for their actions. In the steppes, the karim may have been arrogant and egotistic, but he had felt responsible for all the members of his tribe. The Quraysh, however, were busily amassing private fortunes, without giving a thought to the plight of the “weak.” They did not seem to realize that their deeds would have long-lasting consequence. To counter this heedlessness, the Qur’an taught that individuals would have to explain their behavior to God. There would be a “day of reckoning” (yawm ad-din): the Arabic term also implies a “moment of truth.”14 At the end of their lives, human beings would have to face up to uncomfortable realities they had tried to avoid. They would experience a terrifying ontological reversal, in which everything that had seemed solid, important, and permanent would prove to be ephemeral. In staccato, lapidary verses, the early surahs tore this veil of delusion away.

  When the sun is overturned

  When the stars fall away

  When the mountains are moved

  When the ten-month pregnant camels are abandoned

  When the beasts of the wild are herded together

  When the seas are boiled over . . .

  Then a soul will know what it has prepared.15

  Sun, moon, and stars would disappear. Even a pregnant camel, the desert Arab’s most precious possession, had no lasting value. All that really mattered was a person’s conduct:

  At that time people will straggle forth

  to be shown what they have done

  Whoever does a mote’s weight good will see it

  Whoever does a mote’s weight wrong will see it.16

  Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life: “To free a slave, to feed the destitute on a day of hunger, a kinsman, orphan, or a stranger out of luck, in need.”17

  Anybody who had performed these “works of justice” (salihat) would be rewarded eternally in Paradise (‘illiyyin) but those
who had concentrated on the selfish acquisition of material possessions would be punished in the jahim—a strange word, usually translated “raging fire.” But the Qur’an was not preaching a crudely apocalyptic vision of hell. The passages describing the jahim are sad rather than angry. Later Muslim tradition would elaborate on the themes of Heaven, Hell, and Judgment, but the Qur’an remains reticent, its language characteristically elusive and mysterious. More crucially, it compels the listener to face up to the judgment in the immediate present. The day of reckoning was not merely a distant event; it was also a “moment of truth” here and now. The probing, intimate questioning and the use of the present tense obliged listeners to face up to the implications of their behavior on a daily basis. What would it be like to know that you had wasted your time on earth when it was too late to do anything about it? The Qur’an asks insistently: “Where are you going with your life?”18 Human beings were not inherently evil, but they were forgetful, all too eager to push these uncomfortable ideas to the back of their minds. So they needed a constant reminder (dhikr).19 “Remind them,” God urged Muhammad, “All you can do is be a reminder.”20

  People must, therefore, become self-aware, conscious of what they are doing. They must cultivate the virtue of taqwa’, a word that is sometimes translated “fear” but is better rendered “mindfulness.” They must be continually on their guard against selfishness, greed, and arrogance. Instead of frightening themselves with the fear of hell, they should meditate on the signs (ayat) of God’s generosity in the natural world and imitate his benevolence: