The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (31 page)

But Muhammad gave no indication that he was even tempted to stay in Mecca, let alone make it the new center of his administration. He had come home, and yet not home. It was as though now that Mecca was his, he was no longer of Mecca—as though by returning, he had freed himself of the need to return. Mecca would always be the center of pilgrimage, and he underscored this when he came back from Hunayn to make the umra, the lesser pilgrimage of homage. But then, having spent a total of just fifteen nights in the city, he left. He was to set foot there only once more.

Some of his Medinan followers had been galled at seeing those huge bonuses handed out to leading Meccans and not to them, but as Muhammad now pointed out, where the Meccans got camels, the Medinans would get him. “I mean to live and die among you,” he had sworn to them eight years earlier, and as they prepared for the journey back to Medina, he reaffirmed that oath. “If you are disturbed because of the good things of this life by which I win a people over to islam, are you not satisfied that other men should take away flocks and herds while you take back with you the messenger of God?”

Though the Quranic word fatah would later come to mean “victory,” Muhammad clearly did not consider it so. To him, it truly was the opening of Mecca, and this opening was both literal and figurative. Where closed doors separate people, cutting off those inside from those outside, open ones are an invitation, a means of bringing together inside and outside. By the same token with which Muhammad had closed the door on an old era, he had opened the door to a new one. He had united Mecca and Medina in a way that went far beyond physical location. It was no longer a matter of either/or; he had returned to one home, and would now return to the other.

here’s no knowing if he sensed that the door had been opened to something much larger, and that this would be achieved not by him but by those closest to him. But then who could have foreseen such a thing at the time? After all, Muhammad’s was not the only return in that year 630. In fact in the great scheme of things Middle Eastern at the time, his conquest of Mecca can have been barely a blip on the proverbial radar.

As he returned to Medina at the end of March, what seemed a far more significant event had just taken place seven hundred miles to the north, where the Byzantine emperor Heraclius had ceremoniously returned the relics of the “True Cross” to Jerusalem. To anyone aware of both events at the time, it would have been self-evident which was the larger and more significant of the two. Muhammad’s achievements would have seemed merely a pale reflection of those of Heraclius. Yet history would move with remarkable speed to reverse that equation, making the Byzantine emperor play a poor second string to Muhammad.

Their struggles over the past decade had developed with remarkable synchronicity. In 620, when Muhammad had first faced the prospect of being forced out of Mecca, Heraclius too had been on the verge of defeat, with the Persians at the gates of Constantinople. Jerusalem was already in Persian hands, and now the Byzantine center of Christendom was under siege, ravaged by famine. Heraclius was forced to sue for peace under the most humiliating terms, then to leave his own capital city in a kind of self-imposed exile that would be nearly as long as Muhammad’s from Mecca. But like Muhammad, Heraclius found strength in exile, rebuilding his army to renew his challenge to the Persians.

Just as Mecca and Medina had battled almost continuously between 622 and 628, so had Byzantium and Persia. In 627, when Muhammad held off abu-Sufyan’s siege of Medina in the Battle of the Trench, Heraclius won a surprise victory over the Persians at Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq. Three months later his army sacked the palace of Khosroe in the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, close to the future city of Baghdad, thus provoking Khosroe’s assassination by his own son. At the same time as Muhammad and abu-Sufyan agreed to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, the younger Khosroe sued for peace with Heraclius, but to no avail. The Byzantine emperor pursued his advantage, quickly ousting the Persians from Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Anatolia, and making a triumphal reentry into Constantinople in August 629. As Muhammad performed the umra in Mecca, Heraclius played the pilgrim in Jerusalem, returning the True Cross to its rightful place.

There is no sign in the Byzantine records that Heraclius was even aware of what had happened far to the south in Arabia. But then why would he notice? For as long as anyone could remember, the Arabs had played at best a peripheral role in the big dramas of empire being played out to their north. In Byzantine eyes they were mere provincials, negligible in the great scheme of things. Nobody expected that to change, let alone with such remarkable speed.

But there is no doubt that Muhammad and his advisers were fully aware of what was happening. “The Byzantines have been defeated in a nearby land,” one Quranic revelation had commented on the temporary Persian ascendance, “but they will reverse their defeat within a few years. God will give victory to whom he will.” The news of Heraclius’ entry into Jerusalem was confirmation of this prediction, and just nine years later there would be a new interpretation of “victory to whom he will” when Omar led a united Arab army into Jerusalem in one of the most peaceable conquests in that city’s overly contested history, establishing Islam as the new power force in the Middle East.

To devout Muslims, the speed of the Arab conquests seems a manifestation of divine will. Even modern historians appear somewhat at a loss to explain it, falling back on hoary Orientalist theories like “a tribal imperative to conquest.” In fact such cultural assumptions are not only questionable but unnecessary. Political analysis explains far more, because although Heraclius had forced the Persian Empire to the verge of collapse, the long military conflict had left his own realm in not much better shape. Despite the show of piety in Jerusalem, Byzantine control of the far-flung Christian empire was more tenuous than ever, riven by fierce factionalism rationalized as theological dispute. The two great empires had essentially fought each other to exhaustion, creating a vast vacuum of power in the Middle East.

Any such power vacuum begs to be filled, and for an Arabia newly united under the banner of Islam, the timing was perfect. If Arabia was all but terra incognita to the Byzantines and Persians, the reverse was palpably not so. Even before Muhammad was born, well- connected Meccan merchants had established roots in the lands and cities they traded with. They owned estates in Egypt, mansions in Damascus, farms in Palestine, date orchards in Iraq, and thus had a vested interest in these lands. The collapse of the existing political structure was practically an open invitation for a newly established power to enter and take over.

By the year 634, Arab forces would be at the gates of Damascus. In 636, they would decisively defeat Heraclius at Yarmuk, to the southeast of the Sea of Galilee. In 638, they would deal a similar blow to the Persians at Qadisiya, in southern Iraq. One year later, Omar would lead them into Jerusalem, and by the year 640, they would control both Egypt and Anatolia. Barely a century after Muhammad’s death, the Muslim empire was to encompass nearly all of both its Persian and its Byzantine predecessors and far more, stretching from Spain in the west to the borders of India in the east, with its capital in the newly built city of Baghdad.

It may be tempting to imagine that as he stood in the Kaaba that day in January 630, Muhammad knew that this was the beginning of a moment in history just waiting to be seized, and that he foresaw how a previously ignored people would unite in his name and that of God to assert a new identity, sweeping out of the wings to become the lead players on the world stage. But as the Quranic voice had constantly reminded him, he was only human, and as his body reminded him, a tired human at that. If he sensed the magnitude of what he had put into motion, that was a matter of God’s will so far as he was concerned, not his own. As he stood alone in the darkness of the sanctuary, the moment itself has to have been more than enough. That, and the hope, perhaps, that now he might find some rest. But there was to be none.

very moment of Muhammad’s life would now be freighted with meaning for those around him. Every gesture would be closely observed, every word and movement scrutinized. Whatever he said or did, or was said to have said or rumored to have

done, had become a matter of intense public interest. Try as he might to insist on simplicity and a lack of ostentation, the equivalent of a royal court formed around him. Scribes and poets celebrated him, economic and political advisers vied for his ear, gatekeepers asserted control over the flood of petitioners. Even among his closest confidants, intrigues and resentments simmered as they jockeyed for access, eager to claim proximity to the locus of power. And to his increasing dismay, this was true even among his wives,

Not that he had ever been comfortable with his multiple late-life marriages and the demands they made on his time. Careful as he was to rotate his nights with each wife in turn, their small rooms built in a row against the wall of the mosque compound allowed next to no privacy. Even before the surrender of Mecca, petitioners had crowded these rooms, begging one wife or another to intercede with him, even shoving the wives aside in their eagerness for his attention. The “revelation of the curtain” two years earlier had not done much to help. “If you are invited into the presence of the messenger,” the Quranic voice had instructed, “enter, and when you have eaten, disperse. If you ask his wives for anything, speak to them from behind a curtain. This is more chaste for your hearts and theirs.”

The curtain in question was just that: a piece of muslin draped over a section of each room, providing at least a modicum of privacy. It applied only to Muhammad’s wives, and there is no historical indication that he ever intended it to be taken as an order for any woman to veil. The Quran would advocate modesty for both sexes, but it never specified veiling, which is in any case a misnomer. What would be called “the veil” was in fact a thin shawl, and when it was first adopted in Islam, decades after Muhammad’s death, it was to a large degree a matter of status. Much as aristocratic women in ancient Assyria and Persia had worn it as a mark of distinction, so would the women of a rapidly rising Islamic aristocracy. Like an expensive manicure or a pair of Prada shoes today, it was a public indicator, a sign that these women were above any kind of hard work. They had servants, and so could allow themselves the luxury of flamboyantly impractical dress.

There is, of course, a bitter irony at work here, since the whole system of aristocracy by birth and wealth was exactly what Muhammad had opposed all his life. But the proto-democracy he had envisaged would devolve into a succession of ruling dynasties. Class distinctions grew, and with them—as had happened before in both Judaism and Christianity—a rapidly rising all-male clerical elite. These men became the gatekeepers of faith, elaborating the principles of islam into the institution of Islam, often by projecting their own conservatism onto the Quran itself. As they built the vast body of Sharia law, they’d attempt to enforce “the veil” on all women, eventually taking the idea so literally that in its most extreme form, the burqa, it would become more like a shroud. Certainly none of Muhammad’s wives had any idea that a mere piece of muslin would develop into such a thing, least of all the outspoken Aisha. She might have accepted the shawl as a mark of distinction, but the veil as an attempt to force her into the background and to silence her? The young woman used to high visibility would never dream of being rendered invisible.

But for now, neither curtains nor shawls, let alone veils, could contain the tension among the wives. Marital time had become such a valuable commodity that it could even be traded, with one wife often agreeing to cede “her night” to another in return for a favor, and intense arguments as to who was the favorite. Within a few months of Muhammad’s return from Mecca, dissension had built to such a pitch that he simply couldn’t take it any longer. In effect, he declared a strike against his role as a multiple husband, and began sleeping alone in a small storeroom on the roof of the mosque. Word of this spread instantly, and along with it the rumor that he was about to divorce all nine of his wives.

he immediate cause of his exasperation was the wives’ resentment of a slave girl called Mariya, said to have been sent as a gift from the Coptic Christian patriarch of Alexandria. Muhammad had taken her as a concubine and installed her in a house on the outskirts of Medina, out of sight of both mosque and wives. He began to spend more and more time there, apparently seeking refuge from the public eye. But no matter how discreet he tried to be, his fondness for Mariya was a matter of intense speculation, all the more so when the wives, in an unusual show of unity, publicly protested the amount of time he was spending with her.

Some accounts have it that Mariya had given birth to a son by Muhammad, who had named him Ibrahim, or Abraham. If this was true, it can only have added to the wives’ resentment. The very idea that this slave girl had given him what none of them had done would have been intolerable. A son—a natural heir—was the one thing most painfully missing in Muhammad’s life. His existence would place their own standing in jeopardy, forcing them to play secondary roles to a mere concubine.

It seems strange, however, that while none of the late-life wives had a child by Muhammad, this girl named after the mother of Jesus reportedly did. The symbolic significance is clear. A son of Mary and Muhammad named after the man the Quran honored as the first hanif, the Bible’s founding monotheist, would appeal to Christians throughout the Middle East. But in all likelihood this infant was born not in reality but in the fond imagination of a male-centered culture. Though the Quran repeatedly asserted that daughters were as valued as sons, Ibrahim’s birth would serve as a kind of reassurance of Muhammad’s virility. If so, however, it would be an unwittingly cruel one: like Khadija’s one son so many years before, Ibrahim would apparently die in infancy, shortly after the conquest of Mecca.