Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (18 page)

For if Muhammad was invented, or invested with a legendary biography, this would have been done in order to provide a nascent culture with a hero. Why would anyone invent a hero and then invest him with weaknesses? Why would anyone fashion a portrait of a founding father, the fashioner and unifier of the community, the exemplar in all things, and make him anything less than admirable in every way?

A singular figure appears to come alive on the pages of the Hadith: a resourceful, inventive, supremely intelligent man who seems to have known just what to do or say to inspire in his followers the maximum of awe and respect. How one evaluates the details of the portrait of Muhammad that emerges from the Islamic sources depends on what one thinks of the man and his claims. But could such a figure be wholly legendary?

Islamic tradition recounts that a rabbi of Medina, whose name comes down to us as Abdullah bin Salam, was impressed by what he was hearing about Muhammad and decided to give him a test to
see whether he was really a prophet. Abdullah asked Muhammad three questions that, said Abdullah, “nobody knows unless he be a Prophet.” They were these: “What is the first portent of the Hour? What is the first meal of the people of Paradise? And what makes a baby look like its father or mother?”

It was an odd scenario: How could Abdullah have known whether Muhammad's answers were correct unless Abdullah were himself a prophet? Muhammad took Abdullah's questions in stride, informing him coolly that “just now” the angel Gabriel had given him the answers to precisely those questions. He duly passed the responses on to Abdullah, who was so impressed that he immediately converted to Islam.
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The reader, confronted with such a story, has three options:

1. Accept that Muhammad's answers were correct, and that this was a sign of his special prophetic knowledge.

2. See Muhammad's willingness to supply answers to Abdullah that Abdullah had no way of verifying as evidence that he was a false prophet engaged in manipulating credulous people like Abdullah.

3. Regard the entire account as a later embellishment designed to show that Muhammad was a prophet.

The problem with the third option is the logical difficulty embedded within the story: Anyone who reflects on this account for any time at all will realize that Abdullah had no way of knowing whether Muhammad's answers were correct. Nor does the reader, which makes the first option problematic. These considerations make the second option more likely: Muhammad knew Abdullah had presented him with a game that he could not lose, and he exploited the opportunity.

But if Muhammad was an invented character, why fabricate a story that enemies could use to portray him—and the nascent Islamic community—in a less than flattering light?

Of course, the most likely explanation here is that this story was constructed by people who took for granted that Muhammad was
a prophet and did not consider that some readers might take the account as evidence he was a con artist. Supporting this explanation is the fact that establishing Muhammad's prophetic status is not the primary point of the story; the account of Abdullah bin Salam and Muhammad ultimately focuses on demonizing the Jews, whom Abdullah helps Muhammad catch in a lie after he converts to Islam.

But other aspects of the canonical Islamic account of Muhammad clearly did embarrass those who regarded him as a prophet. Some of the earliest Islamic material on Muhammad contains attempts to explain away certain actions of the prophet. One of the most notable examples is the episode in which Muhammad married his former daughter-in-law.

The Comely Zaynab and the Historicity of Muhammad

On several occasions Allah seemed anxious to grant his prophet his heart's desires—as in the notorious story of one of Muhammad's wives, Zaynab bint Jahsh. Noted for her striking beauty, Zaynab was originally married to Muhammad's adopted son, Zayd bin Muhammad (formerly known as Zayd bin Haritha), who was so close to the prophet that he was known as the Beloved of the Messenger of Allah. Zayd has the distinction of being the only contemporary of Muhammad, or purported contemporary, to be mentioned by name in the Qur'an.

One day Muhammad chanced to visit Zayd's home while his adopted son was away, and Zaynab answered the door in a state of semi-undress. “He looked at her,” says the
Tafsir al-Jalalayn
, a respected commentary on the Qur'an, “and felt love for her whereas Zayd disliked her.”
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Zayd offered to divorce her so that Muhammad could marry her; Muhammad's response is recorded in an elliptical passage in the Qur'an: “Keep thy wife to thyself, and fear God” (33:37).

One would think that being overcome with desire for one's daughter-in-law would bring a blush to the cheeks of the most ardent proponent of free love, but the part of the story that embarrassed
Muhammad, at least according to Islamic tradition, was not that at all. Rather, it was the fact that he told Zayd to keep his wife. Of this, one of his other wives, Aisha, later remarked: “If Allah's Apostle were to conceal anything (of the Qur'an) he would have concealed this verse.”
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Why would Muhammad be embarrassed by this point? Because Allah wanted Muhammad to marry Zaynab, and therefore the prophet was rejecting Allah's will. Indeed, Allah rebuked Muhammad for not wanting to receive what the deity wanted to give him, saying that the prophet feared public opinion (as the people might justifiably be upset at Muhammad's new union with his comely former daughter-in-law) more than he feared Allah: “And thou wast concealing within thyself what God should reveal, fearing other men; and God has better right for thee to fear him” (33:37).

So Muhammad resolved to do Allah's will. He went into the trancelike state that often attended his reception of divine revelations, and when he came to, he asked happily: “Who will go to Zaynab to tell her the good news, saying that God has married her to me?”

Allah explained that he had staged the whole event in order to impress upon Muslims that adopted sons should not be treated as natural sons and that adoption itself was illegitimate: “God has not assigned to any man two hearts within his breast; nor has He made your wives, when you divorce, saying, ‘Be as my mother's back,’ truly your mothers, neither has He made your adopted sons your sons in fact. That is your own saying, the words of your mouths; but God speaks the truth, and guides on the way” (33:4). And specifically in Muhammad's case: “So when Zayd had accomplished what he would of her, then We gave her in marriage to thee: so that there should not be any fault in the believers, touching the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished what they would of them” (33:37). Zayd bin Muhammad went back to being known as Zayd bin Haritha, and to this day adoption is not considered legitimate in Islamic law.

This new divine decree had the added benefit of absolving Muhammad of any guilt for violating the laws of consanguinity by marrying Zaynab. When, according to a hadith in Bukhari's collection,
Muhammad announced that Allah had married him to Zaynab, Aisha remarked—with what degree of irony is up to the reader—“I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”
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Could this story possibly have been fabricated as a pious legend? It is hard to imagine why any pious Muslim would have invented it: The Zaynab incident depicts Muhammad as a rogue prophet, enslaved to his lust, and stooping to construct a flimsy excuse (the prohibition of adoption) in order to exonerate himself.

But embarrassment is relative. We may see this incident as casting Muhammad in a bad light, but what constitutes a negative depiction is not necessarily constant from age to age and culture to culture. Consider the story of Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, the daughter of his close companion and first successor, Abu Bakr. Whereas the Qur'anic text that refers elliptically to Muhammad's marriage to Zaynab provides an elaborate explanation for the whole incident, the earliest records about Muhammad's dalliance with Aisha state events without apology. A hadith collected by Bukhari notes: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).”
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Aisha herself betrayed nervousness, but no one else seemed particularly concerned:

The Prophet engaged me when I was a girl of six (years). We went to Medina and stayed at the home of Bani al-Harith bin Khazraj. Then I got ill and my hair fell down. Later on my hair grew (again) and my mother, Umm Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became all right, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari women who said, “Best wishes and Allah's blessing and
good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah's Apostle came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age.
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The earliest Islamic sources offer no hint that anyone around Muhammad had a problem with this marriage. Bukhari reports matter-of-factly, and more than once, that she was nine when the marriage was consummated. Nothing in the accounts of this marriage can compare with the evident embarrassment attending Muhammad's marriage to Zaynab. In fact, the Qur'an takes child marriage for granted in its directives about divorce. When speaking about the waiting period required to determine if a woman is pregnant, it says: “As for your women who have despaired of further menstruating, if you are in doubt, their period shall be three months, and those who have not menstruated as yet” (65:4). The last part, “and those who have not menstruated as yet,” has been understood in Islamic tradition not as a non sequitur or incomplete thought but as a specification that the waiting period for divorce should be three months for prepubescent girls as well. This passage suggests that in the time and place the stories about Muhammad and Aisha began to be told, few people, if any, had any particular problem with a fifty-four-year-old man consummating a marriage with a nine-year-old girl; it was a cultural norm, and that was that.

Other elements of Muhammad's career that jar modern sensibilities seem to have caused no embarrassment for the authors of the earliest Islamic texts. Far from recoiling from their warrior prophet, one hadith has him boast, “I have been made victorious with terror.”
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Another hadith tells of how Muhammad, enraged by a tribe that murdered a shepherd and drove away his camels, had the culprits captured and ordered their eyes put out with heated pieces of iron and their hands and feet amputated. (The latter punishment accords with the Qur'an's directive that the hands and feet of those who make war against Allah and his messenger be amputated on opposite sides
[5:33].) Then he left the tribesmen in the desert without water. All this was justified, according to a companion of Muhammad who is quoted in the hadith, because “those people committed theft and murder, became infidels after embracing Islam and fought against Allah and His Apostle.”
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As brutal as this episode appears to modern eyes, to those who invented it, it demonstrated Muhammad's strength and fearlessness in the face of injustice. It also supported punishments that are still part of Islamic law, including amputation for theft (cf. Qur'an 5:38) and the death penalty for apostasy (cf. 4:89).

Similarly, hadiths portray Muhammad's polygamy as a sign not of libertinism but of his unmatched virility. The prophet is reported as saying: “Gabriel brought a kettle from which I ate and I was given the power of sexual intercourse equal to forty men.”
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Other hadiths have Aisha saying, “I used to wash the traces of Janaba (semen) from the clothes of the Prophet and he used to go for prayers while traces of water were still on it (water spots were still visible).”
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This is odd—how and why did the semen get on his clothes in the first place?—but apparently it is meant to indicate his divinely assisted virility.

Other hadiths appear merely curious to modern readers. That is largely because the controversies that gave rise to these traditions have long since faded, and also because a great deal of folk material and superstition appears to have made its way into the Hadith. For example, in one hadith Muhammad is made to say that Muslims should blow their noses three times upon waking, for Satan sleeps in the bridge of one's nose at night.
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He also said that if someone is troubled by a nightmare, “he should spit on his left side and should seek refuge with Allah from its evil, for then it will not harm him.”
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He claimed that “yawning is from Satan and if anyone of you yawns, he should check his yawning as much as possible, for if anyone of you (during the act of yawning) should say: ‘Ha,’ Satan will laugh at him.”
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He advised the Muslims that “when you hear the crowing of a cock, ask for Allah's Blessings for (its crowing indicates that) it has seen an angel. And when you hear the braying of a donkey, seek refuge with Allah from Satan for (its braying indicates) that it has seen
a Satan.'”
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He counseled: “If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease.'”
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Muhammad even announced a startling biological discovery: “A non-Muslim eats in seven intestines whereas a Muslim eats in one intestine.”
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