The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (19 page)

Still unsure of the depth of Muhammad’s commitment, the Medinans pressed. “If we do this and God gives you victory, will you then return to your people and leave us?” they asked. To which he solemnly replied: “You are of me, and I am of you. I shall fight whomever you fight and make peace with whomever you make peace.” And so it was done. Muhammad was no longer bound to the Quraysh, or to Mecca. He had formally bound himself to Medina, and Medina to him. They had sworn themselves to full protection and help, nasr in Arabic. The Medinan believers would thus be known as the ansar, the “helpers,” while the Meccans who came with Muhammad would become the muhajirun, the “emigrants.”

One by one, the Medinan clan leaders clasped Muhammad’s arm and pledged their bond. “We are of you and you are of us,” they swore. “Whoever comes to us of your companions, or you yourself, we shall defend you as we defend ourselves.” But in time, this pledge would come to mean far more. As one of the Medinans would remember many years later: “We pledged ourselves to fight in complete obe dience to the messenger, in weal and in woe, in ease and in hardship, and in evil circumstances.”

hat summer of 622, the hijra—sometimes written in English as “hegira”—began. The word is usually translated as “emigration,” but its Arabic root hajar carries greater psychological weight. It means to cut oneself off from something, with all the wrenching pain that the term implies. Indeed the Quran would eventually see the emigrants as having been expelled from Mecca. The Quraysh disbelievers “have driven out the messenger and yourselves from your homes,” it would say. This would feel more like exile than emigration.

For people with such a strong sense of place, the prospect has to have been terrifying. They would almost literally cut the umbilical cord. They would sever themselves from tribe, clan, and even immediate family; from the Kaaba, the lode-star by which they oriented themselves in the world; from everything that had made them who they were. For every one of them, this took courage as well as faith. Or perhaps the kind of courage that comes only with faith.

At the word from Muhammad, they began to leave for Medina ahead of him, in small groups so as to attract the least attention. But in a city as crowded as Mecca, it was impossible to leave unobserved. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and cousins quickly realized what their relatives were planning, and moved to forestall them, sometimes by force.

“When we made up our minds to leave for Medina,” one emigrant would remember, “three of us arranged to meet in the morning at the thorn trees of Adat,” about six miles outside Mecca. “We agreed that if one of us failed to appear, that would mean that he had been kept back by force, and the other two should go on without him.” Only two of them reached Adat. The third was intercepted halfway there by one of his uncles accompanied by abu-Jahl, who told him that his mother had vowed she would neither comb her hair nor take shelter from the sun until she had seen him again. On the way back, they pushed him to the ground, tied him up, and forced him to recant islam. This was how it should be done, the uncle declared: “Oh men of Mecca, deal with your fools as we have dealt with this fool of ours.”

Women were not dealt with much more kindly. Umm Salama, who was later to become Muhammad’s fourth wife after she was widowed, told how her kinsmen were enraged when they saw her setting out by camel with her then husband and their infant son. “You can do as you like,” they told her husband, “but don’t think we will let you take our kinswoman away.”

“They snatched the camel’s rope from my husband’s hand and took me from him,” she remembered. Then to make matters worse, her in-laws turned up, and a tussle developed over who would take custody of the child she was cradling in her arms—her family or her husband’s family. “We cannot leave the boy with you now that you have torn his mother from our kinsman,” her in-laws declared, and to her horror, both sides “dragged at my little boy between them until they dislocated his shoulder.”

In the end, her husband’s family took the child, Umm Salama’s family took her, and her husband left alone for Medina. “Thus was I separated from both my husband and my son,” she would say. There was nothing she could do but “sit in the valley every day and weep” until both families finally relented. “Then I saddled my camel and took my son in my arms, and set forth for my husband in Medina. Not a soul was with me.”

This was what emigration meant: a young man beaten into submission by his own relatives, the lonely resolve of a young woman and her injured infant riding unaccompanied through the desert, the desperate attempts of family to hang on to them, and the echoing absence they would leave behind them, as though they had died. With each departure, the effect was magnified, all the more in the case of prominent believers like Omar and Uthman, who had been born into the Meccan elite and thus had higher public profiles. Throughout that summer of 622, one home after another was abandoned. People would pass by a house with “its doors blowing to and fro, empty of inhabitants,” and realize that yet another family had left in the night. By early September, hundreds of men, women, and children had made the hijra.

Some leading Meccans like abu-Jahl tried to make light of it. “Nobody will weep over their leaving,” he scoffed. But people did weep. It felt as though their close kin had been taken from them, and even as a pall of bereavement hung over the city, anger focused on Muhammad, the cause of all this pain. It might have been wiser for him to leave along with the first emigrants, but he was determined to stay in Mecca until he was sure that as many of his followers as possible had made it out safely. Concerned about the danger, two of his closest companions, his cousin Ali and the respected abu-Bakr, stayed with him. But then time ran out. As though to bring matters to a head, the elderly al-Mutim, Muhammad’s interim protector, died. Until he reached Medina, he would have no protection at all.

“ The Quraysh saw that the messenger had pledged allegiance not of their tribe and outside their territory, and that his followers
had settled in a new home and gained protectors and were safe from
attack,” ibn-Ishaq would write. “Now they feared that Muhammad
would join his followers in Medina in order to make war on Mecca. So
they assembled their council, where all their important business was
conducted, to deliberate on what they should do about the messenger,
since they were now in fear of him.” If Muhammad had inflicted so
deep a wound in the fabric of Meccan society, who knew what he
might do next?
Yet the fear of war seems exaggerated, and here again ibn-Ishaq may be writing the future back into history. The Meccans had never taken the Medinans seriously before; the Khazraj and the Aws were so divided that they posed no threat to anyone but themselves. The fact that Muhammad had pledged himself to take up arms in defense of Medina if necessary certainly did not mean that anyone considered war between Mecca and Medina likely. Though the total population of Medina was about the same as that of Mecca, some twenty- five thousand, the Medinans were farmers, not fighters. Besides, Muhammad himself had consistently met violence with non-violence, turning the other cheek whenever he could. If it was war the Meccans feared, it was a war of ideas, not of weapons.
Muhammad had subverted the whole concept of tribal loyalty and identity by appealing to a higher authority. But where his challenge had formerly been on the level of principle, he had now acted on it, and worse, induced others to act with him. It made no difference that the Quraysh had basically forced him into this. In their terms, his defense pact with Medina was an act of disloyalty to his own people, and they openly made the charge of treason.
One clan leader wanted Muhammad arrested and jailed. “Lock him up, keep him in fetters, and wait for death to overtake him,” he urged. But others worried that this would only backfire. Muhammad still had sympathizers in Mecca, they pointed out, and if they were to attack the jail and release him, the authority of the council would be jeopardized.
Another advocated driving Muhammad not only out of Mecca but out of the whole of the Hijaz region. “Let us expel him from among us and banish him from our land. We don’t care where he goes or where he settles; the harm he’s been doing will disappear and we will restore our social harmony.” But this was shot down as well: Muhammad was capable of winning over the nomadic tribes with his haunting verses, and Mecca could then come under Beduin attack. “He could lead them against us, crush us with them, seize power from our hands, and do with us as he wants.”
It fell to abu-Jahl to come up with a plan of action they could all agree on, one that would achieve their aim while still preserving the public peace. “Take a young, strong, well-born man from each clan,” he said, with the sole exception of the Hashims, “and have them strike him with their swords as one man, and kill him. If they do this as one, then the responsibility for his bloodshed will be divided among all the clans, and the Hashims will not be able to act in retaliation against the whole of the Quraysh.”
With aptly Orientalist irony, this might be called the Murder on the Orient Express plot, the key to Agatha Christie’s famous novel in which all turn out to have committed the murder and thus, legally, none. If they all participated in Muhammad’s death, then no single one of them could be held responsible, and the principle of blood vengeance would be rendered moot. Not that the Hashims’ new leader abu-Lahab, “father of flame,” would be likely to invoke it anyway. In fact he’d understand that the other clans were doing him a favor. He had already expelled Muhammad from the clan, and would be only too glad to accept monetary compensation for his death. All the other clans could then contribute to the blood-money purse. They would be rid of Muhammad, and there would be no consequences. But the plot had a built-in flaw, and a major one: it depended on secrecy, and with so many people involved, somebody was bound to talk. Muhammad was warned that night—if not by a human, then as tradition has it by the angel Gabriel–-and he sent word to the trusted abu-Bakr to meet up with him while his young cousin Ali volunteered to stay behind as a decoy. While the would-be assassins grouped together outside Muhammad’s home, waiting for him to emerge as usual at dawn, their target slipped quietly out the back under cover of dark and made for his rendezvous with abu-Bakr.
At first light, Ali came out wrapped in Muhammad’s cloak, only to pull back the hood as the attackers pounced. “Where is your companion?” they shouted.
“Do you expect me to keep watch over him?” Ali retorted. “You wanted him to leave, and he has left.” However tempted they were to kill Ali instead, if only out of sheer frustration, they held off, knowing that this would definitely incur blood vengeance. Ali was roughed up but survived the face-off to stay on in Mecca a few more days, tying up Muhammad’s business affairs before he set out to make his way to Medina alone, on foot.
The Quraysh council quickly organized a posse to go in pursuit of Muhammad, offering a bounty of a hundred she-camels for whoever caught him, dead or alive. But Muhammad and abu-Bakr had foreseen this. Knowing that the posse would look first on the route north out of Mecca, toward Medina, they headed some five miles in the opposite direction and hid out in a cave high on the side of Mount Thaur, overlooking the southbound caravan route to Yemen.

hat happened in that cave would become a treasured part of Muslim lore. Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality). But legends involving caves are so widespread that they seem to be universal. If you are Freudianly inclined, you could see the cave as a symbolic womb. In more metaphysical terms, it becomes a safe place in which one sleeps, dreams, and grows before emerging back into the world. Either way, it’s a place not merely of shelter, but of incubation.

For abu-Bakr, the cave on Mount Thaur would be a place of renewed faith as he worried that they would be discovered and Muhammad reassured him that God would protect them. For Muhammad, it would be a place of spiritual strengthening and further revelation. “They two were in the cave,” the Quran would say, “and the messenger said to his companion, ‘Sorrow not, for God is with us.’ Then God sent down his spirit upon the messenger, and strengthened him with forces you cannot see.” And with natural forces too.

Ibn-Ishaq relates how on the third day, when the bounty hunters had widened their search and reached Mount Thaur, thousands of spiders appeared from nowhere and spun a thick maze of webs across the cave entrance. Seeing the dense network of filaments, the searchers concluded that nobody had entered that particular cave in years, and passed on by, leaving us with the image of Muhammad and abuBakr hidden by gossamer threads, nature itself conspiring to protect them.

Once the immediate danger was past, abu-Bakr sent word to a trusted freedman to bring camels and a guide, and the three men set off for Medina in an arcing roundabout route to evade capture: first, farther south, then west toward the Red Sea coast, then northward until finally heading up into the mountains. Even with fast riding camels, the journey took ten days, and it wasn’t until September 24 that they reached the outskirts of Medina.

“The heat of the forenoon had grown intense and the sun had almost reached its midpoint in the sky,” ibn-Ishaq writes. The emigrants who had been keeping watch, waiting for Muhammad, had given up for the day and gone back to the oasis to find shade, so the first Medinan to see Muhammad arrive was not one of his followers but a member of one of the Jewish tribes, who ran excitedly to spread the word. “Aws and Khazraj, your good fortune has arrived!” he shouted. They were words he might soon come to regret.

ews of Muhammad’s arrival spread fast. People ran out to greet him as he rode in, begging him to stop and accept their hospitality, but he turned everyone down. He would stop where his she-camel stopped, he said, and gave her free rein. She