The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (12 page)

To reject any form of hospitality, let alone from your own nephew, was more than an act of unspeakable rudeness; it was a declaration of enmity. The gathering broke up in a confused babble of shame and alarm, but Muhammad remained nonplussed. He simply invited everyone to return for the same meal the next day when he again recited the Quranic verses, this time without interruption since abuLahab had conspicuously stayed away. Then he appealed directly to his kinsmen. “Sons of Abd el-Muttalib,” he said, “I know of no man among the Arabs who has brought his people something better than what I have brought you. I bring you the best of this world and the next, for God has commanded me to summon you to him. Which of you will aid me in this matter?”

Only one, it seemed. The story continues in the voice of abu-Talib’s adolescent son Ali, who was by now part of Muhammad and Khadija’s household: “They all held back, and although I was the youngest and the most short-sighted, pot-bellied and spindly-legged, I said ‘I will be your helper, oh messenger of God.’ ” In response, “Muhammad put his hand on the back of my neck and said, ‘This is my brother, my representative, and my successor among you, so listen to him and obey him.’ ”

This announcement broke the spell cast by the Quranic recitation. “They rose up laughing,” Ali would remember, “and said to abu-Talib: ‘Muhammad has commanded you to listen to your son and obey him!’ ” How could anyone possibly expect them to take this seriously? It was patently absurd to elevate a mere spindly-legged adolescent over his father. And to his father’s face? Such a reversal of authority was unthinkable—a foolish challenge to the whole accepted order of things.

The kinsmen must have emerged from Muhammad’s house shaking their heads in bemusement, wondering if his success as a trader’s agent had not gone to his head and if he should not, perhaps, have remained a lowly camel boy after all. They had done him the common courtesy of listening, and had been moved by the verses he’d recited— until this. However much they may have abhorred abu-Lahab’s deliberate insult of the previous day, they now wondered if perhaps he had been right. This was surely a delusion of grandeur, they told each other; Muhammad could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn. They tsked and tutted in disappointment, trying to reassure themselves that if they just gave him time, he’d return to his senses.

None would dream of saying it to abu-Talib’s face, but they must also have pitied the man who had taken in Muhammad as an orphaned lad but somehow failed to instill in him the absolute respect for fathers and forefathers so central to Arabian society. And pitied him all the more for having compounded his mistake by giving Muhammad his own son Ali, a lad who had clearly emerged from the experience lacking in the respect due a father.

But while Muhammad’s uncles and the other more established Hashims had been deaf to his appeal, a few of his younger kinsmen had not. Like Ali, they had been stirred by what they’d heard, and began to meet secretly with Muhammad in the wadis outside Mecca to perform what would soon become the established prayer ritual of Islam away from the public eye. This is what they were doing, it seems, when abu-Talib happened on them one day, stopped dead in his tracks in surprise, and asked, “Nephew, what is this?”

Muhammad invited his uncle to join them, begging him to disavow Uzza and Lat and Manat, the three totems known as the daughters of al-Lah, and to acknowledge the unitary power of the one god, “neither begotten nor begetter.” But even if the older man had wanted, he could not. “Nephew, I cannot abandon the ways of my fathers,” he replied.

The “ways of the fathers” were what held the Quraysh together, creating a tradition that was unbreakable so far as abu-Talib was concerned. The phrase invoked the faith and practice not only of his immediate fathers but of his forefathers, the venerated ancestors of the Quraysh. This was a matter of loyalty and identity, so that to abandon the tribal gods would be, in a sense, to abandon himself. Yet something in him must have responded nonetheless to Muhammad’s appeal, as well as to the sincerity of this small group of young people, because he did not denounce what he had seen. Instead, he tempered his refusal by assuring Muhammad that no matter how far he seemed to stray from the ways of the fathers, he would remain under his uncle’s protection as head of the Hashim clan. “Come what may, by God, you shall never meet with anything to distress you so long as I live,” abu-Talib declared—a statement that in hindsight would only reveal to what extent he underestimated what was to come.

This is how both ibn-Ishaq and al-Tabari tell the story, and yet one wonders how abu-Talib really felt when he saw his son following a strange new ritual. He had sent Ali to live with Muhammad in good faith, but how would any father feel on realizing that his son was going in a direction that seemed to place him far outside the norm? The ways of the fathers were too hallowed, too strongly entrenched in a society built on respect for ancestry and lineage, to be dismissed so quickly. Indeed they may have been all the stronger for abu-Talib as he struggled to rebuild his business, since a man reduced in external circumstance tends to treasure all the more the bedrock of tradition.

It has to have been immensely painful for him to realize that his son was in effect no longer his, but Muhammad’s. Did he accept this with such apparent ease because he regretted his rejection of Muhammad as a son-in-law years before? Or did he simply not want to make too big a fuss about it all, assuming that “this too will pass”? There were all sorts of preachers and new ideas floating around town, after all— including those of the hanifs—and for the most part they were considered harmless, no threat to the powers-that-be of Mecca. Or perhaps abu-Talib made his accommodation as a father. He could see that if he insisted that Ali leave Muhammad, the boy would refuse, and all he’d achieve would be a total break with his own flesh and blood. As many fathers know, there is nobody more stubborn than an adolescent boy.

Still, he was immensely disturbed by what he had witnessed. These young people were not only reciting the Quranic verses; abuTalib had come on them in the act of prayer. He had seen them bowing down low in islam, that supple word whose associated meanings in Arabic ripple out to include peace and wholeness, but which means above all submission. True, it was not a forced submission but a willed and willing acceptance. Yet the posture of prayer—forehead on the ground, arms outstretched, rump high in the air—was the classic one of captive before conqueror, still visible today on ancient Assyrian victory steles, where prisoners do precisely this at the feet of the victorious king. It was the posture of utter surrender to the mercy and grace of a far greater power, and thus a clear statement, felt in muscle and bone, of the literal meaning of islam. So abu-Talib had been shocked, as so many others would be. To a man of honor in a society that prided itself, as it were, on pride, nothing could be more un-Arabian.

ithin the year, the Quranic revelations took on a more urgent tone: “Oh you shrouded in your robes, Muhammad, arise and warn!” The time for discretion was over. Muhammad was to start speaking out loud not only to his kinsmen but in the most public way possible, in the Kaaba precinct. And the new verses he’d recite there would go far beyond mystical praise. They would constitute a stinging critique of the greed and cynicism that had turned Mecca into a kind of seventh-century equivalent of a Wall Street bull market, relegating the majority of its residents to the status of an underclass.

These new verses would build into an impassioned protest against corruption and social inequity. They took the side of the poor and the marginalized, calling for advantaging the disadvantaged. They demanded a halt to the worship of the false gods of profit and power along with those of the totem stones. They condemned the concept of sons as wealth and the consequent practice of female infanticide. And above all, they indicted the arrogance of the wealthy—“those who amass and hoard wealth,” who “love wealth with an ardent passion,” who “are violent in their love of wealth” and “think their wealth will make them immortal,” unaware that “it will not avail them when they perish.”

“Know that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime,” said one verse, “a cause for mere vanity and for rivalry in riches and sons.” Only “righteous deeds, not wealth or sons, will bring you closer to God,” said another, for “the bounty of God and his mercy are better than any wealth you amass.” And in what may well have been a deliberate echo of “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” in the Gospel of Matthew: “We desire to show favor to those oppressed on earth, to make them the leaders and the inheritors.”

If this was not quite a call for revolution, it was certainly a potent call for reform. It was not too late to reverse the disastrous course Mecca had taken, the verses said. Its people had only to think. “Remind them” of what they once knew, Muhammad was told. “Tell them to consider” what happened to past cultures that had succumbed to corruption and ended up as half-buried ruins. “Tell them to remember” the values they so treasured in principle but flouted in practice, the real “ways of the fathers” that had been so distorted.

In a sense the verses were an invitation: an appeal to the Meccans’ better selves and a warning of what would happen if they ignored this prophetic call. Because prophetic it definitely was, placing itself explicitly in the tradition of previous prophets from Moses down through the ages to Jesus. “Say: ‘We believe in God and in that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes of Israel; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets.” This was a call to return to the real tradition of the forefathers. “Before this, the book of Moses was revealed, and this Quran confirms it,” said one verse. “All this is written in earlier scriptures, the scriptures of Abraham and Moses.”

And so it had been. The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As early Judaism and early Christianity had been, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn’t matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society.

This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

But if the Quran was a confirmation of what had come before—a renewal of a timeless message—it was also one with a huge difference. This time, through Muhammad, the message was “in a clear Arabic tongue.” Not in Hebrew as it had been for the Jews, nor in Greek as for the Christians, but in the Meccans’ own language, an Arabic so musical that it made the work of even the most famed poets seem mundane by comparison. It announced itself as theirs. They need no longer feel inferior to the “People of the Book,” for they were now a people with their own book newly in the making, one sent not just to confirm but to complete the existing ones. For those who accepted it, there was the excitement of being present at something new coming into being. Now it was they who had been chosen to receive the word of God. It was their turn to be addressed directly not only in their own language, but in their own specific terms of reference.

All the great civilizations of the past had failed, the revelations said, because they had strayed from the core principles of justice laid down so long ago. Just as the Jews had derided and ignored their prophets and thus been exiled from their own land, and just as the Christians were now going against the teachings of Jesus only to see their empire divided and failing as the Persians pressed their advantage against the Byzantines, so too with the legendary ancestor tribes of Arabia. The peoples of Ad and Thamud—the great Nabatean civilization in northern Arabia and the Yemeni one in the south—had mocked and scorned their own prophets. They had been warned that their pride contained the seeds of their own destruction, just as the Quranic verses were now warning the Meccans, and the proof that they had rejected the warning was there for all to see, in the ruins of the Nabatean necropolis of Petra in today’s southern Jordan and in the remnants of the great Marib dam near Sana.

Muhammad’s message was far more than a personal awakening; it was an Arabian one. It called on the values and ethics that had once been the pride of Arabia, celebrating the past even as it looked to the future. It was a call to action—a spiritual call to address the social and economic problems of the time. In short, it was overtly political. And for those without power, empowering.

The corrupt would finally be called to account. On the Day of Judgment, “wealth shall not avail,” said the opening verses of what would become Sura 81, The Darkening. “When the sun shall be darkened, when the stars shall be thrown down, when the mountains shall be set moving, when the pregnant camels shall be neglected, when the savage beasts shall be mustered, when the seas shall be set boiling, when the souls shall be coupled, when the buried infant shall ask for what sin she was slain, when the scrolls shall be unrolled, when heaven shall be stripped off, when hell shall be set blazing, when paradise shall be brought nigh—then shall a soul know what it has produced.”