The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (18 page)

It would turn into the sixth-century Arabian equivalent of a custody battle. Al-Muttalib had legal precedent on his side, since the paternal bloodline took priority over the maternal one, but this may not have been his primary motivation. What really drove him was more likely the prospect of this newly discovered nephew taking the place of the sons he himself had never had, since as with Muhammad three generations later, all his surviving children were daughters. At all events, he lost no time in riding to Medina, intent on persuading the boy’s mother to hand him over.

In one version of what happened, the mother reluctantly agreed, worn down by al-Muttalib’s persistence in arguing how much better life would be for the boy among the nobility of Mecca, where he belonged. But in another version she did not agree, and al-Muttalib lost patience and simply kidnapped his newfound nephew. That is, he placed the boy in front of him on his camel and rode off with him, leaving the mother to wail and sob helplessly when she realized her son was gone.

This second version is supported by the fact that al-Muttalib took pains to disguise the boy’s identity on the journey back to Mecca. Wary of a possible rescue attempt by the mother’s relatives, he identified him as his slave instead of his nephew. The seven-year-old was thus dubbed Abd al-Muttalib, the slave of al-Muttalib, and the name stuck. Five decades later, this was the man who would cast arrows in front of the oracle of Hubal to spare the life of his youngest son Abdullah, who would then father Muhammad, only to die in Medina before his son was born.

Could the grandson establish a new home in his grandfather’s birthplace? Put like that, it seems to have the power of narrative inevitability. But Muhammad’s blood connection to Medina was not as strong as may seem at first. Nobody in sixth-century Arabia had openly challenged the idea that the seven-year-old Abd al-Muttalib belonged by right first to his father’s family and only secondarily to his mother’s. Muhammad’s great-grandmother had been left to mourn her son’s loss alone; there had been no repercussions, and nobody had tried to rescue him. The whole matter would have been almost a nonevent in the collective memory of Medina if it had not involved a Meccan.

The idea of a Quraysh aristocrat swooping in to claim and kidnap a native boy was of a piece with Medina’s awareness that it was relegated to second-string status compared with Mecca. Where Mecca was a flourishing center of both pilgrimage and commerce, Medina was a place to pass through, not a destination. It was an agricultural settlement, its date palms providing not only the fruits themselves but syrup and wine, oil from the sap, charcoal and animal feed from the ground pits, vegetables from the leaves, and everything from rope to roofing materials from the branches. There was a good living to be made in this fertile valley, at least for those who owned land.

While Mecca was controlled by a single tribe, the Quraysh, making for relative stability, Medina had become enmeshed in inter-tribal rivalry over issues of land ownership, which was why each of its hamlets was clustered around a small fortified stronghold serving as a defensible retreat in times of conflict. Indeed Medina’s two largest tribes, the Khazraj and the Aws, had come to blows several times in recent years. Neither had managed to dominate the other, however, leaving the valley an uneasy tinderbox that could be reignited at any time. Perhaps the one thing that really united them was a simmering resentment of the Quraysh, who so clearly considered themselves far more sophisticated than those date farmers up north who couldn’t even keep the peace among themselves.

he move to Medina began quietly, almost imperceptibly. At first it was no more than an idea mooted during the hajj pilgrimage. As he had in previous years, Muhammad had been reciting the Quranic revelations among the pilgrims who set up their tents outside Mecca. Though none had been converted, most were willing enough to listen. They were tired after traveling hundreds of miles, and the preachers and poets, seers and diviners and soothsayers who wandered through their camping grounds were if nothing else a form of entertainment. Besides, there was never any harm in listening, especially not to the man they had heard so much about, thanks to the efforts of the Quraysh elite to undermine his message. Then as now, the adage that any publicity is good publicity held true.

This year, however, Muhammad had found a handful of more serious listeners. Six pilgrims from Medina paid especially close attention. In fact they seem to have sought him out. They were all from the Khazraj tribe, though it’s unclear if they were even aware at this stage that Muhammad’s great-grandmother had been one of theirs. They had heard about his preaching, and were especially intrigued by the way the Quraysh so adamantly vilified a man they had once unanimously respected as amin, trustworthy. The story of how Muhammad had resolved the dispute over who would lift the Black Stone into place in the rebuilt Kaaba had spread far and wide, and was cited and admired as an example of the wisdom of compromise. For Medinans enmeshed in bitter contention, such a well-crafted solution held out hope. Maybe Muhammad could resolve their disputes too. “No people is as divided by enmity and malice as we are in Medina,” ibnIshaq quotes one of them as saying. “Perhaps God will reunite us through you.”

This statement was most likely written back into history, not least because Medina—“the city,” short for “the city of the prophet”—was still known by its pre-Islamic name, Yathrib. If there was any idea of Muhammad actually moving there at this point, it can have been little more than wishful thinking. Still, the six pilgrims were deeply moved by what they had heard from him. They accepted islam, arranged to meet him again during the following year’s pilgrimage, and returned home to begin discreetly spreading the word.

The next pilgrimage fell in the early summer of 621. Since to meet in Mecca itself would have been foolhardy given the level of Quraysh harassment, the Medinans sat down with Muhammad three miles outside the city, in the wide valley of Mina. This time there were twelve of them, including three from the Aws tribe, which was a promising sign. If even a few Aws and Khazraj could come together in islam, perhaps many more could. But still more promising, each of the twelve represented a major clan of his tribe. This was a deputation.

Their idea was that Muhammad would come to Medina as an arbitrator, invited by both the Aws and the Khazraj to settle their disputes. But as the discussions deepened, he insisted that if Medina was to welcome him and accept his judgment, then it had to accept his followers too. By now some two hundred Meccan men and women had openly recited the shahada and declared themselves believers. But many of them were devoid of even such elementary protection as alMutim had given Muhammad, while others were under intense pressure from their own families to recant and return to the traditional fold. Many more were sympathizers, but afraid to openly declare themselves. After everything the believers had been through, Muhammad felt as intensely loyal to them as they did to him. There was no way he could leave Mecca and build a new life elsewhere unless they came with him, and no way he could ask them to do that unless he had solid assurance that this new life would be a better one. To be emigrants was bad enough; to become refugees was untenable. If they were to leave Mecca, it could not be as dependents or as “guests” of others. They needed strong protection, with guaranteed acceptance and security. It had to be a real home.

The problem was that there was no existing mechanism for such an arrangement. What Muhammad and the Medinan delegation were negotiating—equal status in Medina, independent of tribal affiliation—was something altogether new. The issue was still not fully resolved by the time the hajj was over, but it was clear that if Muhammad were indeed to move to Medina, it would be as more than simply an arbitrator. That was an outsider role, and the last thing he needed was to be the outsider all over again. If his judgment was to be respected, it would have to be because his authority as the messenger of God was widely recognized.
They parted with only a preliminary agreement, resolving to pursue the issue further during the following year’s pilgrimage. For the time being, each of the twelve Medinans clasped Muhammad’s hand close, forearm against forearm, and pledged himself as a believer to respect Muhammad’s judgment. “We gave allegiance to the messenger that we would associate no others with God, nor steal, nor commit fornication, nor kill our offspring, nor disobey Muhammad in what was right,” one of them recalled. “If we fulfilled this, paradise would be ours; if we committed any of these sins, it was for God to punish or forgive us as he pleased.”

The phrasing marks a pivotal shift. They had sworn allegiance and obedience to Muhammad himself, as well as to God. For the first time since the initial revelation on Mount Hira eleven years earlier, Muhammad was acting as more than just a messenger. Now he was also acting as a leader, assuming the political role that his Meccan opponents had feared all along. In his early fifties, he was growing into the politics of his mission.

The Medinan deputation returned home with an extra companion, Musab, hand-picked by Muhammad to teach and explain the Quranic verses. Musab did his job well. Drawn by the sense of unity in the Quranic message, which was all the more appealing in a settlement at odds with itself, several more of the Aws and Khazraj accepted islam.

In a sense, Medina was ready, more so than Mecca. Like the Meccans, most Medinans were already halfway to monotheism. They recognized al-Lah as the high god even as many of them followed the cult of Manat, one of the three “daughters of God,” but since their economy was not built on traditional faith and pilgrimage as was that of Mecca, it would be easier for them to make the leap away from the totem gods. And with no single “tradition of the fathers” as there was in Quraysh-controlled Mecca, the appeal of the more ancient tradition on which the Quran was based was greater. All the more since it was already familiar in Medina, where three of the smaller tribes were Jewish.

odern Jews may be surprised by the fact that there were Jewish tribes in seventh-century Arabia. From today’s perspective, both political and religious, it seems impossible. But then modern Christians in the West are often just as surprised at the fact that Christianity was very much a Middle Eastern faith. The vast reach of the Byzantine Empire meant that with the exception of most of the Arabian peninsula, where distance and terrain deterred imperial influence, the majority of Middle Easterners of the time were Christian. At least nominally. Faith allegiance followed politics. It was always wise to declare the faith of whoever was in power, and the Byzantines under Heraclius had begun to push back against the Persians once more. Still, Judaism had persevered. Despite its lack of political power, it had flourished by dispersing far and wide.

Just as the Quraysh had originally migrated to Mecca after the collapse of Yemen’s Marib dam and the consequent implosion of the economy, so the Aws and the Khazraj had come north in the same migration to take over Medina. But where Mecca had been all but abandoned before then, Medina had not. It was already home to descendants of Palestinian Jews who had spread throughout the Middle East in several waves,most notably after the dramatic but ill-fated rebellion against Roman rule led by Bar Kokhba in the second century. Some had settled in the chain of valley oases reaching down from what is now Jordan into northwest Arabia: Tabuk, Tayma, Khaybar, and the southernmost, Medina. Over the years they had integrated into the Arabian tribal system, to the extent that some historians describe them as “fully Arab.” Like everyone else, they referred to God in everyday speech as al-Lah. Many had names such as Abdullah, a contraction of abd al-Lah, servant of God. They spoke the regional Hijazi Arabic, and while they could be distinguished by small differences in appearance such as the biblically mandated sidelocks still worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews, these differences were no greater than those that marked any other tribe. What made the Jews distinctive was less their concept of God than their claim that God had spoken specifically to them. After all, they had a book to prove it.

At a time when few people could read, a book was an iconic object. Words on parchment achieved an extra dimension of existence by virtue of their visibility. They were literally scripture, a word that comes from the Latin for writing. Each Jewish tribe had its own scroll of the Hebrew bible, which was treated with the utmost reverence as is still done in synagogues today. Jews, and by extension Christians, were thus known as “the People of the Book”—the book in which God had spoken to them. But now God was speaking to everyone else in Arabia too. And this time he was doing it, as the Quran declared, “in your own tongue . . . in pure Arabic.” Even better, the new book encompassed both the Jewish one and its younger Christian sibling. Eventually a full third of the Quran would reprise many of the biblical narratives and then go beyond them, declaring that it had come not only to renew but to perfect the previous revelations.

It made no difference that the ever- growing body of the Quran was not yet inscribed on parchment; with each recitation, it was inscribed in the memories of those who heard it. Writing had not yet replaced memory as it would after the invention of printing. Words lived in the mind, not on the page, and the assonance and alliteration of the Quranic voice, its lilting rhymes and doubling images, made it all the more memorable. “Iqra!”—Recite!—the voice had commanded Muhammad. The Quran, literally “the recitation,” was made to be spoken out loud. Each time it was recited and heard and recited again, it achieved greater solidity. And in Medina, thanks to Musab’s diligence, more and more people responded to its music and its message, recognizing its potential for unity.

By the time of the next hajj, in early June 622, the Medinan deputation to Muhammad had swelled to seventy-two clan leaders. The number alone testified to how serious they were. But both sides needed assurances. If the Medinans were to pledge full alliance and protection, they would have to be willing to back up their pledge with force if necessary. And as the leader of the Meccan believers, Muhammad would have to do the same. The pledge given the previous year had been a half measure. It would be known as “the pledge of women”— not because any women were involved, but because it fell short of the requirement to take up arms in mutual defense, an obligation assumed to fall only on men. The only way this could work was if both sides now committed themselves to the full “pledge of men.”