In Search of the Original Koran: The True History of the Revealed Text (19 page)

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Authors: Mondher Sfar

Tags: #Religion & Spirituality, #Islam, #Quran

The political importance of eclipses to the people of Medina was all the more evident because an immemorial tradition had often associated these astral phenomena with the fate of kings and the outcome of wars. For example, an Assyrian astrological prediction affirms that "if the Sun rises in the form of a crescent and wears a crown like the Moon: [then] the king will take the land of his enemies; evil will quit the land, and the king will be healthy ..."8 Muslim Tradition, for its part, associated the eclipse with the end of the world, as reported in a story attributed to the famous companion of the Prophet, Abdallah ibn Masud: "The Messenger of Allah ordered us to pray during an eclipse of the Sun and Moon: `If you witness it, take refuge in prayer, for if it is what you fear [i.e., the end of the world] you will not be taken unprepared, and if not, you will have accomplished a good deed."'9 Another interpretation advanced was that an eclipse was due to the appearance of Allah before astral bodies that "darkened" out of fear of him.10

The eclipse of January 27, 632, permits us not only to date with better approximation the death of Ibrahim, son of Muhammad, but also permits us to date the greatest conjugal drama that the Prophet experienced during the twenty years of his apostolate.

In fact, during the prayers over which the Prophet presided during the eclipse, he had apocalyptic visions, which Ibn Abbas, the most illustrious of the traditionalists among Muhammad's companions, reports in these terms: "At the end of the prayer, people said: `O Messenger of God! During your prayer we saw you take something, and then you moved backward.' The Prophet replied: `I saw Paradise, and there I gathered a bunch of fruit. And if I had truly taken it, you would have eaten some until the end of time. And then I saw the Furnace and never in my life have I seen such a horrible spectacle as that one. And I saw that most of those in it were women.' The people then asked: `Why, 0 Messenger of God?' He replied: `Because of their ingratitude [kufrl.' They asked him: `Their ingratitude toward God?' He replied: `But also toward their companion. They are ungrateful for the good he does for them. Even if you do good for one of these women for an eternity, it suffices for her to get angry just once for her to say to you: "I never saw any good in you"!'."'i

Ibn Abbas says not one word here to explain this sudden explosion of misogyny that condemns to hell all of womankind. And for a good reason! It is because Muhammad alludes here in a scarcely veiled way to his own wives, who had just created a resounding scandal when he slept (in the bed of his wife Hafsa, daughter of the future caliph Omar) with her slave Mariya the Copt. When Hafsa discovered him there, she fulminated against God's chosen one, who quickly recognized his error and promised not to sleep anymore with Mariya, on condition that she did not spread news of this scandal. But Hafsa could not keep quiet, and soon all the wives of the Prophet were in a rage. Hurt and even wounded by this high treason, Muhammad decided all of a sudden to repudiate all of them and henceforth live with only one woman ... Mariya. But after negotiations to find an outcome that might satisfy everyone, the Prophet returned to his wives (having lived effectively one month with his young Coptic slave).

The incident was so serious that the Koran devotes a surah to it; number 66 is called "Prohibition" (Al-Tahrim) and deals with a secret confided to a spouse but soon discovered. Then comes this threat: "If the Prophet divorces you, perhaps his Lord will give him in your place better wives than yourselves, submissive, praying and obedient to Allah, devotees who glorify God, married or virgins" (66:5).

Mariya the Copt was in fact offered as a present to Muhammad by al-Muqawqis, governor of Alexandria, along with her sister Slrln, a mule, an ass, honey, and the ceremonial clothing in which Muhammad was apparently later buried. According to a story told by Ibn al-Athir, twelfth-century author of the Common Era, the Prophet offered Sirin to Hassan ibn Thabit, his court poet.'2 Ibn al-Athir states that Mariya gave birth to Ibrahim in the month of Dhu al-Hijja of the eighth year of the Hijra. When the infant was seven days old, they cut and buried his hair according to Arab tradition, and gave him a name. But the wet nurses argued over the baby, states the same author, so as "to free Mariya for the Prophet, so attached he was to her."13

The scandal must have exploded when Ibrahim died, shortly before the eclipse. During the prayer of the eclipse on that Monday, January 27, 632, the mosque was still resounding with sarcastic and reproachful remarks addressed to the Prophet over his conduct, as confirmed by a different story attributed to Aisha, who has Muhammad say during the great day of the eclipse: "0 Community of Muhammad! By Allah! Nobody other than Allah cares any longer about preventing his Servant [i.e., Muhammad] or his concubine [ `amatuhu, alluding to Mariya the Copt] from carrying out fornication [yazniya]. 0 Community of Muhammad! By Allah! If you knew what I know [alluding to his vision during prayers of a hell filled with women], you would have laughed less and cried more."14

By all accounts, Tradition tries here-somewhat clumsily, it must be admitted-to exculpate the Prophet. But the choice of the prayer of the eclipse as the context for this explanation could not be due to chance, since evidently this affair was contemporaneous with the cosmic event of the eclipse. It is likely that the death of Ibrahim must have been contemporaneous with this conjugal drama, which itself was contemporaneous with surah 66 of the Koran that relates it. And all of this occurred during the days that preceded and followed the eclipse of January 27, 632.

Muhammad had probably never observed an eclipse in his life apart from the one that shortly preceded his death. That means the psychological impact and the shock that he felt at the sight of the diurnal star soaring over the Medina sky being amputated of three-quarters of its splendor must have been tremendous indeed. On this point, traditionalist literature is eloquent. A story attributed to Asma, sister of Atsha, relates that during the eclipse, Muhammad was so seized with panic (fazi`a) that he took away a woman's cloak rather than his own.'s Another story from Abu Musa, a companion of the Prophet, reports that during the eclipse, Muhammad "being seized with panic, rose, fearing the end of the world" and headed for the mosque. At the end of the prayer, he is said to have explained that the eclipse had been "provoked by Allah to cause fear in his Servants. So if you see it again, urgently invoke God, pray to Him and ask Him for pardon." 16

Did Muhammad think of his own mortality during this long eclipse of almost three agonizing hours that must have seemed an eternity? We saw above his apocalyptic evocations of paradise and of hell during his eclipse prayer. To this should be added a vision of "the torment of the tomb" that awaits those among the dead who respond wrongly to the angels when they ask about the identity of the true Prophet. Aisha is even reported to have said that, after this vision during the eclipse, the Prophet prayed to God to protect him not only from the torment of hell, but henceforth also from "the torment of the tomb.""

It seems, in the light of all these witnesses, that Muhammad was profoundly shaken by the eclipse, and that his infinitely repeated denials of any link between the eclipse and the death of men are formulas designed to exorcize his own death, after the quite recent one of his only son.

How can one otherwise explain the surprising decision that the Prophet of Islam took only a few days after the eclipse: to perform his first pilgrimage to Mecca since he settled in Medina in September 622?

It was now clear to him that the astronomical phenomenon that he observed on that fresh morning of Monday, January 27, 632, was a true "sign from Allah," whose meaning could not escape him. Muhammad arrived in Mecca on March 3 and performed the pilgrimage from March 8 to 10. Then he immediately returned to Medina. Barely three months later, God completed his astral sign: the Prophet died peacefully, close to his favorite wife, Aisha.18

The birth of Ibrahim had not been envisaged by Muhammad, since the male infants he had from his first wife, Khadija, had all died. This is what permits the famous affirmation in the Koran: "Muhammad is the father of no man among you. He is the Messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets" (33:40). It is quite evident that the birth of Ibrahim constitutes a refutation of this assertion, which Tradition did not know how to resolve. Al-Razi posed the question: "The Koran says `Muhammad is the father of no man among you', and yet he was the father of Tahar, Tayyib, Qasim and Ibrahim." He then replies that all these boys did not reach the age of "manhood."

Some have even envisaged the possibility that this last son would have succeeded Muhammad as nabi if he had lived. Baydawi affirms this in his commentary on the same verse of the Koran: "As the Prophet, may God bless him, said about Ibrahim when he died: `If he had lived, he would have become a nabi."19 This is yet another illustration of the fact that the closure of the prophecy by Muhammad is probably only a myth invented by Muslim orthodoxy and was certainly not on the agenda during his lifetime.

Finally, Muslim Tradition has often asserted that the archangel Gabriel came each Ramadan for a session of work with Muhammad to verify and shape the revelations of the preceding year, except for the year of his death, when there were two meetings. Why these two meetings instead of the usual annual one? Tradition has never raised this question. But the answer is obvious: the last Ramadan of Muhammad's lifetime did not coincide with the end of the revelations. Important events like the conjugal drama and especially the farewell pilgrimage gave rise to decisive revelations after the annual rendezvous with Gabriel. Consequently, it was necessary to have a second and final working session. In addition, Tradition has never specified in which month this second exceptional session took place. No doubt people were afraid to engage in more debates over a calendar that was hard to reconcile with the myth of a "collecting" of the Koran effectuated during these so-called celestial annual rendezvous.