The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (25 page)

The cry went up that he had been killed. Whether it came first from the Meccans or from his own men is unclear, though it’s understandable why people might have thought it. While his helmet had held fast, the force of the blow had smashed its metal faceguard deep into his cheek. It had split his upper lip, broken his nose, and gashed his forehead—a gash that bled copiously, as head wounds do. But none of that concerned Muhammad as aides helped him up and he saw to his fury that his men were in flight. What did it matter if they thought he was dead? Did they have so little faith in islam? Did they really think that this was merely about him? “Muhammad is but a messenger,” the Quranic voice would say after the battle, reflecting his anger. “Other messengers have come and gone before him, so how can it be that when he dies or is slain, you turn back on your heels?”

He tried to gather his routed followers to him with the cry “To me, servants of God, to me!” But only thirty or so heard him and rallied to his side, and on this too the Quranic voice would comment bitterly: “With God’s permission, you were routing the unbelievers, but once he had brought you within sight of your goal, you faltered, disputed the order, and disobeyed. You fled without looking back while the messenger was calling to you from behind, and God rewarded you with sorrow for sorrow.” Defeat, in short, was God’s punishment for having disobeyed Muhammad.

The Meccans eased up their counter-attack as the rumor spread that Muhammad was dead. Since abu-Sufyan had made it plain that their beef was only with Muhammad, their job was done. But not Hind’s. While the other Quraysh women set out into the barley fields in search of plunder, gathering up swords, daggers, chainmail, bridles, saddles—anything of value—abu-Sufyan’s wife ignored them all. Instead, she strode from corpse to corpse in search of the one she wanted, and when she found it, she uttered a cry of victory that years later still froze the blood of those who had heard her. She stood astride Hamza, gripped her knife with both hands, and plunged it deep into his body, gouging him open to rip out not his heart but a larger and far more visceral organ: his liver. Ululating in triumph, she held it high above her head and then, in full view of all, crammed it into her mouth and chewed, blood streaming down her chin and over her chest and her arms. Some would say that she swallowed Hamza’s liver, others that she spat out the pieces, stomped on them, and ground them into the dirt. Either way, she cut an indelible image of terrifying vengeance.

The sight of this ghastly mutilation merely increased the believers’ panic, but it also mesmerized the Meccans and thus gave the small group around Muhammad the chance to retreat farther up the lower slopes of Mount Uhud, stoning the few enemy soldiers who still tried to pursue them. It was close to nightfall when abu-Sufyan himself rode up beneath them and called out loud, “In God’s name, is Muhammad really dead?”

“No, by God,” came the answer from Omar, “he is listening to what you are saying right now.”
“Then hear this,” abu-Sufyan shouted back. And instead of threatening to finish the job or gloating in victory as might have been expected, he made it clear that his wife’s mutilation of Hamza’s corpse had not been at his orders: “Some of your dead have been mutilated. I neither commanded this nor forbade it, and it neither gave me pleasure nor saddened me.”
Under the circumstances, it was very close to an apology. He had pledged revenge for Badr and gained it, but so far as he was concerned, the score was settled, at least for now. “Wars go by turns,” he now declared. “This has been our day for your day.” And having established himself, unlike abu-Jahl, as an enemy to respect, he gave the order for his army to break camp and set off back to Mecca.

ven after his nose and cheek had healed, Muhammad would suffer migraine-like headaches for the rest of his life. Many of his followers were not in much better shape, and as they straggled back into Medina, nursing both their pride and their wounds, it seemed that ibn-Ubayy’s position in the settlement had been strengthened. It had turned out as he’d predicted. Muhammad had placed them all at risk. It had been foolish to engage the Meccan army on open ground, and they should be thankful that abu-Sufyan had decided not to press his advantage and fight on into the oasis itself. Now they could see that Muhammad’s increasing power in Medina only worked to their disadvantage. While he was undoubtedly the messenger, and thus the spiritual leader, Medina would surely be wiser to place political leadership in the capable, prudent hands of ibn-Ubayy himself. But in this ibn-Ubayy underestimated one of Muhammad’s most

striking characteristics: the ability to turn reversal to his favor. Any leader can use a victory to his advantage, but one who can turn defeat to his advantage is much rarer. Muhammad had done it before, after being hounded out of Mecca, and now he would do it again, with ibnUbayy unwittingly making his task all the easier.

The following Friday, when the believers had gathered at the mosque, ibn-Ubayy stood up to speak. He began by extolling Muhammad, duly emphasizing his relief and gratitude that the messenger’s life had been spared. But then he could not resist touting his own wisdom in having advised against open battle with the Meccan army. “Had our brothers heeded me, they would not have been killed,” he declared—a statement not exactly calculated to win the hearts and minds of those who were mourning their casualties and literally smarting from their wounds. In that moment, the crowd turned against him, and he found himself accused of cowardice and worse. “Enemy of God,” people shouted, “you are not worthy to speak here after behaving as you have done,” and they forced him to cede the floor.

A new word soon appeared in the Quranic revelations: munafiqun. Often translated as “hypocrites,” it would become the title of Sura 63 of the Quran, which begins: “When the hypocrites come to you, prophet, they say, ‘We bear witness that you are the messenger of God.’ God knows that this is so and he bears witness that the hypocrites are liars. They professed faith and then rejected it. They use their oaths as a cover and so bar others from God’s way. . . . When you see them, their outward appearance pleases you. When they speak, you listen to what they say. But they are like propped-up timbers. They think every cry they hear is against them. They are the enemy, so beware of them. How devious they are!”

But was ibn-Ubayy really an enemy? Or even a hypocrite? The line between rhetoric and demagoguery is sometimes a very thin one. To translate munafiqun as “hypocrites” is to overload the word, which is better if more clumsily rendered as “those who had reservations or held back.” Literally, it means “those who crept into their holes,” the way desert voles turn tail in fright and dig deep into the earth. In fact ibn-Ubayy neither lied nor rejected islam. Instead he reserved the right to question Muhammad’s political decisions. Far from hiding his true opinion as the word “hypocrite” implies, he spoke out openly in favor of what in modern terms would be called separation of church and state.

The new coinage was a challenge to all those who had accepted islam but did not necessarily accord every statement of Muhammad’s the power of divine authority. They distinguished, that is, between the messenger and the politician, and it was this distinction that the Quranic voice now seemed to blur. The messenger was fast becoming the prophet, no longer simply “one of you,” but to be thought of as divinely directed in every aspect of his life.

The charge of hypocrisy stuck. Anyone questioning Muhammad’s decisions became ipso facto a false believer, no matter the circumstances. For instance, when the grieving father of one of those killed at Uhud was told “Rejoice, your son is in the gardens of paradise,” his despair would allow no such consolation. “By God it is not a garden of paradise,” he retorted, “but a garden of rue. You have deluded my poor son into losing his life, and stricken me with sorrow at his death.” He too was now called a hypocrite, henceforth to be shunned and distrusted. Fervent believers in the mosque began to forcibly eject anyone whose faith they considered less absolute than theirs, dusting off their hands afterward like nightclub bouncers and shouting, “Don’t come near here again!”

The phenomenon is familiar: the tightening of ranks in defeat, the refusal to acknowledge a mistake, the search for someone else to blame—for the enemy within. In Islam, it would eventually lead to accusations of heresy and apostasy as the political majority enforced the line. As Edward Said was to write in Reflections on Exile: “It is in the drawing of lines around you and your compatriots that the least attractive aspects of being in exile emerge: an exaggerated sense of group solidarity and a passionate hostility to outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you . . . Everyone not a blood brother or sister is an enemy, every sympathizer is an agent of some unfriendly power, and the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty.”

Branding ibn-Ubayy a hypocrite was a political move more than a religious one, and one Machiavelli might have approved when he advised his patron nine centuries later that “some nobles may deliberately and for reasons of ambition remain independent of you. Against nobles such as these, a ruler must safeguard himself, fearing them as if they were his declared enemies, because in times of adversity they will always help to ruin him.”

The label forced the issue. After the insult of being forcibly silenced in the mosque, ibn-Ubayy kept his distance. Among his kinsmen, however, he gave voice to his resentment of the emigrants. “They’ve tried to outrank us and outnumber us in our own land,” he said. “By God, when they say ‘Fatten your dog and he will devour you,’ that fits us and them to a tee.” In the event, Muhammad would need only one more step in order to neutralize him completely.

uhammad now focused on expanding his sphere of influence, vying with Mecca for the support of the Beduin tribes on the arid central Arabian steppeland known as the Najd. The Beduin chiefs negotiated this situation cannily, playing one side off against the other as they held out for the best terms of alliance. But this could be a dangerous game, especially when the Meccan–Medinan rivalry served as an excuse to act out power plays within their own tribes, as

Their chief had finally pledged his tribe to Muhammad, who sent forty men to instruct them in the new faith. But the chief ’s nephew wanted alliance with Mecca, not Medina, and saw the chance to discredit his uncle and take over tribal leadership for himself. Carefully maintaining plausible deniability, he arranged to undermine his uncle by having a neighboring tribe ambush Muhammad’s delegation as they camped by a well en route to the Amir. The plan might have worked if one believer had not survived. He’d been grazing the camels, and only realized what had happened when he saw flocks of vultures wheeling in the air above the well. He set off back to Medina with the news, and on the way came across two Amir tribesmen fast asleep. Believing that it was their kinsmen who had massacred his colleagues, he killed them in revenge.

The Amir chieftain now held Muhammad formally liable for this one believer’s crime. The believers argued that “a mistake is not a deliberate act,” but it made no difference. Even though thirty-nine of his own men had been slaughtered, Muhammad was left no honorable recourse but to agree to pay blood money for the killing of the two Amir. Under the terms of Medina’s arbitration agreement, he called on all its signatories to contribute, but since the Nadir tribe had their own separate long-standing alliance with the Amir, he demanded that they provide most of the payment.

The Nadir, one of the two Jewish tribes remaining in Medina after the expulsion of the Qaynuqa, did not quite see things this way. They considered themselves no more responsible than anyone else for one believer’s mistake. So ibn-Ishaq reports that while they politely welcomed Muhammad when he went to negotiate the matter with them at their Sabbath council meeting, along with his senior aides abu-Bakr and Omar, the Nadir had something else in mind. As he tells it, they asked the visitors to wait outside while they finished their deliberations, and decided to kill Muhammad instead of paying him.

Even as such stories go, this one is strange. The plan was apparently to drop a large boulder from the top of the wall against which Muhammad was sitting and then call it an accident. It was foiled at the last moment when Muhammad suddenly left “as though to answer a call of nature” and never came back, explaining later that an angel had quietly warned him of the conspiracy. But angel or no, every detail makes it an unlikely scenario. The council meeting on the Sabbath; Muhammad’s departure without abu-Bakr and Omar, presumably leaving them in danger; the little logistical matter of exactly how a heavy boulder could be brought to the top of a wall, let alone dropped from it with fatal precision—none of these seem likely. That is, they are the hallmarks of a story fabricated to justify what happened next, in the awareness that it might otherwise not be considered justifiable.

Within the hour, Muhammad sent the Nadir a message: “Leave my city and live with me no longer after the treason you have plotted against me.” The language itself was telling: not Medina, nor even the pre-Islamic name Yathrib, but “my city.” And treason charged not against Medina but “against me.” It was a statement of absolute authority: L’état c’est moi.

The ultimatum was delivered by a believer who had been a confederate of the Nadir. Astonished that any confederate could relay such a message, the Nadir asked why he had agreed to do so. The reply was a chilling announcement not only of their isolation but of a whole new political order: “Hearts have changed, and islam has wiped out the old alliances.”

As the Nadir council debated what they could do to avoid expulsion, ibn-Ubayy sent a message urging them to resist. “I have two thousand men from the Beduin and those of my own people united around me,” he said. “Stay, and they will enter battle alongside you, as will the Qureyz.” In fact the Qureyz, the other remaining Jewish tribe, had made no such commitment, but the Nadir did not know this. Relying on ibn-Ubayy’s word, they retreated into the stronghold in the center of their village, despite the warning of one of their elders that if resistance failed, they might be risking far worse than expulsion, namely “the seizure of our wealth, the enslavement of our children, and the killing of our fighting men.”