The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (20 page)

went on into the center of the oasis, where she wandered into a stony yard that had once been a burial ground and was now used only for drying dates. There she knelt, first her front legs buckling in that seemingly impossible way, then her hind legs, until finally she settled to the ground with a kind of sighing grunt as though to say “This far and no further.”

Like the spiders that had spun dense webs across the entrance to the cave on Mount Thaur, this camel would be seen as a sainted creature, divinely led. When she knelt and Muhammad dismounted, the hijra was complete. Mecca had been the birthplace of Islam, but its cradle, the place where it would grow and thrive, would be Medina, and it was from Muhammad’s arrival in Medina that the Muslim era—After the Hijra, or AH—would eventually be dated. It would be seven years before he set foot in Mecca again.

The date-drying yard belonged to two young orphans from the same Khazraj clan to which Muhammad’s great-grandmother had belonged, and the two boys were under the guardianship of an uncle. The similarities between their backgrounds and Muhammad’s made the choice of locale seem inspired. Moreover since theirs was a small clan, a purchase of land from them was unlikely to make other more powerful clans feel that they had been snubbed. In the event, the boys’ guardian insisted that the land be a gift, promising that he’d pay his wards the purchase price himself (a promise Muhammad ensured was fulfilled), and so it was done. This unlikely patch would become the new center of the believers’ world.

What they built here in the next few months was strikingly simple: an open compound inside a mud-brick wall, with a palm-thatched covered area in the center for shade and lean-tos built against the south and east walls as sleeping quarters. There was none of the ornate sacred space of the mosques that would be built after Islam had claimed an empire. As the earliest synagogues and churches had been, this was a gathering place as much as a prayer space (in fact the word “synagogue” is from the Greek for “coming together”). The secular and the sacred would take place side by side, blending easily into each other as they did in most of the world at the time. The single feature a modern Muslim would recognize was a niche in one wall to indicate the qibla, the direction to be faced in prayer. But this was not toward Mecca, not yet. It was toward the city of the Night Journey, Jerusalem—the same direction in which both Jews and Christians turned to pray.

That first year in Medina, the emigrants worked harder than most of them ever had before. They were city people, their muscles new to the demands of physical labor. They knew little about construction or agriculture, and had to learn the hard way. And while they tried to make light of it— one story has Ali covered in brick dust and Muhammad laughingly dubbing him abu-Turab, “father of dust”—many of them struggled with sickness, their resistance worn down by sheer physical exhaustion. It is one thing to bravely break old ties and commit oneself to a new way of being, but quite another to actually live that new life on a day-to-day basis, dealing with it in literally down- to-earth terms.

What buoyed them was a heady sense of idealism. They were not merely building the new compound, or even a new home. What they were building was a whole new society with a radically different concept of how people would relate to each other. However ironic it may sound in the context of modern politics, the closest parallel to these city people flexing muscles never used before is possibly the experience of the early Zionist pioneers in Palestine, who were also largely urban emigrants, in their case from Europe. That sense of close community, of physical hardship and shared purpose informed by communal and egalitarian ideals, produced an exciting esprit de corps, heightened further by a sense of historical self-awareness. Imbued with a vision of man and God in unison, these early Muslims threw themselves into what Kabbalists would later call tikkun olam, repairing the world. From the broken shards of life, they aimed to create a renewed whole.

The new community would become their new family. Muhammad insisted that each Meccan emigrant be “adopted” by a Medinan believer and regarded not as a guest but as a brother or sister, regardless of age or kinship or place of birth. What was being formed here was not another tribe but the kernel of a kind of supra-tribe. They did not yet call it Islam with a capital I, or themselves Muslims with a capital M. That usage would come later, after Muhammad’s death, as Islam spread out into the whole of the Middle East and became institutionalized. They still called themselves simply mu’uminin, believers, and this is what held them together so powerfully: the fervent shining faith in being the advance guard of a new society.

et no exile ever really breaks the ties of home. Even someone who leaves by choice tends to focus on the place left behind. Emigrants turn first each day to the news from their country of origin. They search out places to buy familiar foods, and befriend fellow emigrants they would never have talked to “back home.” This is more than simple nostalgia. It’s as though by such actions they might lessen the degree of physical separation, even assuage a certain guilt at having left. If they are lucky, this will ease as they adapt. But when emigration is not chosen but forced, the place left behind assumes ever greater proportions in the mind.

“Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home,” wrote Edward Said, referring to the modern Palestinian exile. The feeling of having suffered a great wrong does not fade with time, but increases and then crystallizes. Even as the exile establishes a new life, the place left behind remains the homeland, the focus of all hope for a perfect future. Only an exile could conceive of ancient Palestine as the land of milk and honey as did the writers of the Hebrew bible, turning rocky land fit mainly for thorns into a kind of paradise that should have existed even if it never had. In exile, they affirmed their belonging all the stronger. The lemon tree in the courtyard, the olive trees in the grove, the life that once was and no longer is—all these become idealized in memory, which is why the Jerusalem temple lovingly reconstructed in the minds of the second- and third-century rabbis who wrote the Mishna was far closer to perfection than the one that had been burned to rubble by the Romans.

In those early years in Medina, the sense of exile was kept alive in the distinction between the muhajirun, the “emigrants” who had left Mecca, and the Medinan “helpers” who had welcomed them—ansar in Arabic, the same word used in the Quran for the twelve apostles of Jesus. The nomenclature kept faith, as it were, with the idea of Mecca, and with the consciousness of exile.

“Exiles always feel their difference as a kind of orphanhood,” wrote Said, and the metaphor is especially poignant when applied to Muhammad. While all the emigrants had in essence orphaned themselves, breaking ties with mothers and fathers, clan and tribe, the effect was magnified for a man born without a father. He had had to struggle for a sense of home in Mecca and having gained it, had seen it wrenched away from him. Yet this loss may have been essential. To think creatively outside the habitual order of things, it helps to be placed outside it. Painful as it was, being hounded out of Mecca may have been the best thing that could have happened.

n Meccan terms, Muhammad was now the ultimate outsider. But if that city’s elite thought that he had gone quietly into the dark night of exile, they would be proved very wrong. What seemed to be his weakness would prove to be his strength, and what appeared to be defeat would eventually turn into victory.

He was fifty-three now, his beard and braided hair flecked with gray. But if he felt his age, he gave no sign of it. He hardly seemed to need sleep, spending his days working side by side with the other emigrants, and his nights in meditation. The Quranic revelations kept pace, but many were more specific than before. They had to be. The cohesiveness and spirit of the community of believers attracted an increasing number of helpers, who would soon outnumber the emigrants. Their requests for guidance rose commensurately, and the revelations began to direct Muhammad on everything from times of prayer to tithing to resolution of marital disputes. As former New York governor Mario Cuomo once famously put it: “You campaign in poetry, and govern in prose.”

Instead of simply receiving the Quranic voice, Muhammad learned to work with it, meditating on an issue or a dilemma and waiting for the voice to guide him. Most trenchantly, the revelations now addressed the relationships between believers and others, and many of their principles would be included in what was to be essentially Muhammad’s first major piece of legislation. The clan leaders had invited him to Medina to make peace between them, and the document he drew up within a year of his arrival would do exactly that. But instead of simply resolving their disputes, he aimed higher. In his hands, monotheism would become the means of conflict resolution.

The term “monotheism” to describe the belief in one god didn’t exist until the seventeenth century, when it was coined by the English philosopher Henry More, but a far more comprehensive and flexible monotheistic idea had existed for well over two thousand years. As historian James Carroll points out, the Jewish scribes who actually wrote most of the Hebrew bible during the sixth-century BC Babylonian exile conceived of “one god” less as a specific identity than as an affirmation of unity. The personified Yahweh, the territorial god of Israel, gave way to the ineffable Elohim, the universal god—the same god known in Mecca as al-Lah. In this older and wider concept of monotheism, says Carroll, “the God of this people is the God of all people, associated not with a clan or a tribe or a network of tribes, but with all that exists.” God thus becomes “the reconciliation of all oppositions.”

Muhammad now translated this concept into political terms. Blending idealism and pragmatism—a master politician’s skill if ever there was one—he drew up an arbitration agreement that used the tribal principle to reach beyond tribe. Some historians would rather grandiosely call this agreement “the constitution of Medina,” but by whatever name it was still a remarkable document for its time. On the one hand, it resolved the internecine disputes of Medina by taking the form of a mutual defense pact. On the other, it codified a new, inclusive identity as the principle that would bind all the clans and tribes together. The whole of the oasis would be united in the idea that would eventually underlie all of Islam: the umma, a term that can be understood as community or people or nation, and would come to mean all these and more.

“This is a document from Muhammad the messenger governing the relations between the believers, both the emigrants and the helpers, and those who are in federation with them,” it began. “They are a single community”—umma—“distinct from all others.”

“Those who are in federation with them” specifically included not only all the clans of the Aws and the Khazraj, whether or not they had formally acceptedislam at that point, but also the Jewish tribes, named clan by clan. As monotheists, “the Jews are one community with the believers,” the document declared, again using the word umma. “Each must help the other against anyone who attacks the people of this document. They must seek mutual advice and consultation.”

Bloodshed between parties to the arbitration document was henceforth forbidden. “If any dispute or controversy should arise from which disaster is to be feared, it must be referred to God and to Muhammad the messenger of God.” This meant that “if the contracting parties are called to make peace and maintain it, they must do so”—called, that is, by Muhammad, who would be the guarantor of the agreement. And in a further clause that was to have far-reaching effects: “The contracting parties are bound to help one another against any attack on Medina.” Not that any attack on Medina seemed likely. The danger was not from without, but from Medinan tribes fighting each other, so this clause was understood as a formulaic detail, part of the standard language of inter-tribal alliances.

If some clan leaders had misgivings, they suppressed them for the time being, according equal status to what they saw as the de facto tribe of believers for the sake of the larger goal of establishing peace between all factions in Medina. As they signed on to the concept of the umma by fixing their seals to the document, it’s unlikely that they realized its potential power to supersede all existing political units. But if they were not aware of it, Muhammad certainly was. In effect, he had persuaded a place in search of an identity to connect with an identity in search of a place.

t’s not hard to imagine a collective sigh of relief among the Meccan elite once Muhammad had escaped. Not only had they rid themselves of the threat he posed, but they had done it without any actual bloodshed. If that wasn’t quite the way they had planned it, they wasted no time persuading themselves that this was just as good, if not better. They had seen the last of him, they thought, and how perfect that he had fled to a mere date orchard like Medina. He could preach all he liked there and it would make no difference. He had been effectively sidelined. It was, they told themselves, the perfect outcome. Those kinsmen of theirs who had joined him out there in the boondocks would soon come to their senses and return to Mecca. What else were they going to do? Pick dates?

The answer came quickly. The years of harassment and insults, the boycott, the suffering of his followers, that final assassination attempt—all had stretched the limits of non-violence to the breaking point. Muhammad had sought to persuade and even accommodate the Quraysh leadership, but to what now seemed less than no avail. In the insult of exile, turning the other cheek began to seem at best ineffective, at worst self-defeating. So if the Meccan elite anticipated a peaceful life without him, they would not do so for long. Where they had once harassed him, he would now harass them.

The form of harassment he chose was the razzia—the raid— which was almost a tradition among Beduin herdsmen, especially during drought years when their flocks were decimated by lack of grazing. Small raiding parties would swoop down on horseback or on fast riding camels to attack trade caravans, often in narrow defiles where the rear of the caravan was especially vulnerable. It was part of the Beduin way of life: you lived off what the desert offered, and when it did not offer grazing, it still offered the tempting targets of those heavily loaded pack camels. For the most part, the mere threat of raiding was enough. Negotiated payments to Beduin chieftains generally assured protection as the camel train passed through their traditional territory, but when territory was disputed or when rogue bands formed to become the highwaymen of the time, the caravans became targets nonetheless. Even then, however, a kind of unofficial Geneva Convention held sway. Goods and livestock were fair game, as it were, but human life was not. Kill someone in a raid and the law of blood vengeance swung into action, acting as such an effective deterrent that a razzia rarely resulted in loss of life.