Muhammad (14 page)

He said, “Our father Abraham smashed the idols of his people when they were gone. He mocked these petty gods as lumps of clay that were blind and deaf to the prayers of the idolaters.”

After that Muhammad began to ridicule the idols planted all over the Kaaba, inside and out. At dawn he went to greet the new pilgrims who came to Mecca during the holy months, and he challenged idol worship to their faces.

“If your idols, who have no eyes and ears, can protect you from my blasphemy, let them do their worst,” he declared. “They won't avail you. In reality they are only the servants of God themselves. Why trust in the slave when you can accept the Master? He alone answers prayers and provides protection.”

When the pilgrims saw that none of their gods could harm Muhammad, a few became convinced and were converted. Abu Lahab could not tolerate this, so whenever word came that Muhammad was making his way to the Kaaba, he sent his own men to shout, “Close your ears! A madman is about to harangue you.” Their clamor drowned out the Prophet's sermons. After that, he abandoned public preaching and held meetings at night, underground.

Nothing was lost on Abu Lahab, who now had the backing of the entire Quraysh tribe. Instead of crushing the faithful all at once, which even he did not dare, he decided to use a flyswatter. For every new convert to Islam, an old convert would be killed or driven out of Mecca by terror.
Muhammad couldn't be touched, not with Abu Talib's protection. But almost everyone else was in danger, especially the servants and slaves who dared to believe differently from their masters.

One day I knocked on the door of an old
hanif
who had come over to our side. The door swung open with a creak. Inside there was no one. I went from room to room, calling out. The old man had vanished overnight, taking his family with him. A demonic symbol had been written in animal blood on the wall.

I ran to Muhammad and cried that the campaign by his enemies was intolerable. “Let me fight back. What else can be done with men who hate you?”

“Do you want to show how much you love your Creator?” he asked quietly.

“With all my heart,” I exclaimed.

“Then love your fellow beings first,” he said.

After many months neither side could break the stalemate. One man of God with forty followers against every powerful family in the city. Muhammad had no choice but to ask God to bring him a solution.

W
hat strange creatures we are. If you beat a dog, he cringes. If you beat a horse, he runs away. But if you beat a man, he sometimes starts to dream. Such dreams may take him to places you cannot imagine. Being a Jew, I dream all the time.

In my favorite dream, I'm running after bird-catchers. I used to do that for real, long ago. Every spring I'd lie in bed before dawn in my father's house, listening. The bird-catchers never missed a spring. You could hear their captives—finches, larks, and sparrows—singing in wicker cages. Other traders hung bells on their mules, so you would know they were coming from afar. The bird-catchers had no need.

“Did they sell nightingales?” Muhammad asked me one day. It was hot, a few months after he arrived in Yathrib. I was his everyday scribe, and yet there was nothing for me to write down. Nobody was rushing to his house with a divorce for him to judge or a missing bag of wheat that a neighbor had “found” in the street.

“Maybe they sold nightingales,” I said. “But they dipped the birds in dye to make them pretty, so you couldn't really tell what they were.” A boy couldn't tell, at least.

“Desert birds are gray, but in Paradise they will be brilliant red and green,” Muhammad mused. “And their songs will have no longing in them. There is no longing when you are close to God.”

“Do birds long for God?” I asked.

“All creatures long for God,” Muhammad replied.

He's a dreamer, you see, like me. But his dream holds people's lives together. These Muslims are new to us. They trekked to this faraway city, Yathrib, across the desert two hundred miles from Mecca. Sent by God, they say, as the Jews were sent out of Egypt. The newcomers call it their
hijra,
or “migration.” I have no opinion. Maybe their God sent them. Maybe the constant opposition and hatred wore them down.

Here's a joke about being hated. A woman gives birth, and the midwife comes out to greet the father, who is nervously pacing up and down. “Good news,” she says. “It's a baby boy, and he's healthy.”

But the father still looks worried. “You're sure he's normal?” he asks.

The midwife nods. “He has ten fingers and ten toes. He has a wagging little penis. Oh yes, and he hates the Jews.”

The first Muslim I met laughed when I told him that joke. He was a servant to Abu Bakr, who fled here with Muhammad. Affairs had gone from bad to worse in Mecca. Hatred simmered for twelve years after Muhammad met the angel. Abu Bakr built a special structure for prayer outside his house, what they call a mosque. It was obvious no one wanted Muslims defiling the shrines where they kept their idols. This
mosque was just four walls open to the sky, where Abu Bakr knelt before God five times a day. That's what Muhammad told them to do. The walls were low, and anyone could look over to see what was happening; the sound of Abu Bakr's devotions filled the street. The elders of the tribe took this as a deliberate provocation.

Muhammad's enemies muttered that no amount of money was enough to keep him from being punished. Muhammad had already proven that the old idols couldn't harm him or his followers. And yet these enemies were right about money not being enough.

Abu Bakr owed his life to a sworn protector who kept the tribe at bay. This protector, Ad-Dughunnah, came one morning and pleaded with Abu Bakr to go inside his house to pray. Instead of relenting, Abu Bakr gave him a hard stare and said, “I release you from your oath. The protection of Allah is all I need.”

The hate soon boiled over. The clans of the tribe hatched a plot to get rid of Muhammad without starting warfare in the city. Each clan agreed to pick one strong young man who could wield a knife. As a group, the chosen assassins would set upon Muhammad, each striking him with his dagger. In that way, blame would be equal among all the clans in the tribe of Quraysh. Blood money would be paid to absolve the crime. The new religion would fade away like a parched rose whose water has been stolen. As everyone knew, Muhammad was the water of Islam.

A Muslim merchant was telling me the story, and I stopped him. “Weren't they his own people, the ones who wanted to kill him?”

“He has no people who stand outside God,” the man replied.

The appointed night for the assassination arrived. The band of killers stood by the gate of Muhammad's house, holding vigil until he came out for his morning walk at sunrise. They failed to conceal themselves well enough, and inside Muhammad and his devoted young cousin Ali became aware of their presence and the looming danger.

Muhammad and Ali had little time to spare. Muhammad quickly devised an inspired plan. He took a nomad's cloak of green wool that people frequently saw him in. He wrapped Ali in it and told him to lie on his bed disguised as the Prophet.

Ali was reluctant, because he would be leaving Muhammad defenseless. Eventually he was persuaded to obey. Left alone, Muhammad began to recite a verse given to him in a revelation. When he came to the words “I have enshrouded them, so they cannot see,” he understood what God wanted. Wrapping himself in a plain cloak, he departed from his house, walking past his assassins without any of them seeing him.

A few streets away he met an acquaintance, who nodded and passed. But the acquaintance was privy to the plot, and he rushed to Muhammad's house and exclaimed that he had just seen him on the street. The band of assassins swore that no one could have gotten past them during the night. To prove it, they sneaked up to the window of Muhammad's bedroom, where he lay asleep, wrapped in his favorite green cloak. The deception was revealed only at dawn when Ali emerged from the house and announced that his cousin had escaped.

Muhammad had made his way to Abu Bakr's. There would be no choice but to flee. Muhammad had received a message warning him of imminent danger. God's will was clear. To stay meant death for all.

With several packed camels, Muhammad and Abu Bakr left Mecca with a small party in haste. They spent three days in a mountain cave outside the city. Ali was left behind to settle Muhammad's business affairs. When he was absolutely convinced that God wanted him to go, Muhammad agreed to cross the desert to his new home in the north.

After I heard this tale, curiosity got the better of me. One afternoon when I saw that he was particularly relaxed and in good humor, I asked Muhammad, “Do you always trust your messages?”

“It is Allah who trusts me,” he said.

“But he sent you into the wilderness. Is that a sign of love? Why didn't he just kill your enemies?”

Muhammad gave me a look. He knows more about the Jews than you can imagine, and the look said,
You're speaking about yourself
. He waited a moment as if deciding what he could tell me.

“I had a wife who believed in me when no one else did,” he said gravely. “She heard every word from God and accepted it, to the point that where I ended she began and where she ended I began. Our faith was a second marriage. Her name was Khadijah. One day she was coming to my room with a bowl of soup in her hands. At that moment, just as I heard her footsteps, God spoke to me about her. She came into the room and I said, ‘My dear, the Lord tells me that you are blessed. A place awaits you in the Garden, where there is no weariness and only quiet.' She didn't smile, but only gazed at me. We shared the same thought:
this is Allah's way of gently foretelling her death
.”

Sorrow came into Muhammad's eyes. I was touched that he would confide in me, and I had the urge to embrace and
comfort him. But the next moment his body stiffened. He said, “Because God tells me the secrets of life and death does not mean that I am the master of life and death. These are great mysteries. By God's mercy I am closer to them than ordinary men. That is just as much a cause for grief as joy.”

He never confided in me again, yet I had the strongest feeling that he understood the Jews, because that's how God commands us to live: close to the mystery, but never solving it. Our sorrow and our joy are entwined. Later I heard that Khadijah died soon after that message. It was three years before the Muslims fled Mecca. They call that year Muhammad's year of grief, because his old uncle, Abu Talib, died around the same time. He never converted to Islam, but he blessed Muhammad. They tell me he was hounded on his deathbed by relatives who wanted Abu Talib to give orders against the new faith. He always refused.

One thing I'll grant these Muslims. They pray quietly. They purify themselves and recite the verses taught to them by Muhammad. And they're not lawyers. Before the Muslims arrived, my whole life was lawyers in the rabbis' court. I sat cross-legged in court with my writing table on my lap, scribbling down endless arguments. The judges nodded on the bench, swatting flies that buzzed around plates of sweetmeats. Plaintiffs supplied judges with sweets to keep them in good temper. The lawyers thought they were wiser than the Torah. Them and their niggling minds. One stingy bastard docked me an hour's pay, because he said I smudged a line.

“You smudge the truth, and they pay you more,” I pointed out.

He bellowed and kicked me out of court. After that, it was harder to get work with the rabbis, which is why I snatched
the job offered by the Muslims. Yathrib has its share of Jews, and too many of us can write.

“You will not take down the Prophet's holy words,” they said. “We have our own scribes for that. Your job is to follow legal proceedings, disputes, and daily affairs. When the Prophet renders a judgment, record every word. If he gives advice on any subject, record every word. This is important. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I wanted the job, didn't I? A few Muslims had been trickling into Yathrib for several years, but nobody really noticed them. They made a tiny solemn group when Muhammad entered the gates at sunset. A few Jews invited them to take refuge here. In Arabia, if you worship one God, you want allies. Now that Muhammad is among them, his people don't just feel safe; they feel that God has shown them the way. They've even proclaimed that Yathrib should have a new name: Medinat al-Nabi, “the city of the Prophet.” If they're in a hurry, they just say Medina.

“Christians also write, perhaps more than the Jews,” said Muhammad. Because it was hot, I wasn't writing, as I told you. When I was, he enjoyed watching me, with a look almost of wonder on his face. For a moment he wasn't fifty-two with a gray beard, but a child again.

“Christians had to write to survive,” I said.

“Why is that?”

“Because the Romans hated their prophet, Jesus, and they would have killed the lot,” I said. “Luckily for them, the rich Romans were lazy. Many didn't bother to learn to read and write.”

I caught myself, realizing that Muhammad might take offense. “I don't mean you, sir. You're not lazy. You work yourself half to death.” He smiled, which was rather incredible.
Any other rich man in Medina would have given me a swift kick for my insolence.

I went on. “The first Christians were commanded to read their scriptures. They didn't leave it to priests. After a while, so many could read and write that they became useful as scribes. The Romans hired them in the provinces. Time passed, and whenever a new emperor got it into his head to persecute the Christians, his governors would say, ‘You can't. Tax collecting will fall apart without our filthy little Christians.' In a few centuries the whole empire became Christian.” The irony pleased me.

Muhammad was intrigued. “First they persecute you. Then they need you. In the end, they convert to your religion.”

He repeated this to himself several times that day. Later on, I figured out why. No one in power needs the Muslims, not yet. There are not many of them, not enough to form a decent armed tribe. He's worried about how they'll survive. God commanded him to spread the good news, like Jesus, but how?

The Muslims told me that in Mecca Muhammad would sit near the town well every morning teaching his followers. If a servant came by, he could sit and listen along with everyone else. Even a slave could sit and learn.

The high-born people didn't like this, but they wouldn't draw near, because you don't talk to a respectable man with slaves hanging about. Finally one of the elders came to Muhammad, saying, “I wish to have words with you, brother. Send the slaves away.”

Muhammad nodded as if he consented, but suddenly he couldn't speak, and his face broke out in a sweat. Receiving
no answer, the elder stormed off. A little after that, a new message came to Muhammad: “Do not drive the believers away or you will be among the evildoers.” So he had no choice. He had to save every idol worshiper in Mecca, rich or poor. The task seemed impossible. When Muhammad went to the fat elders of his tribe, they ridiculed the notion that one of their own was chosen by God. When he went among the poor, they were too easy to convince. They would hope for favors and money from a wealthy merchant who suddenly paid attention to them.

“Did he find an answer?” I asked one of the Muslims.

The man shrugged. “Would we be here if he had?”

I meet Jews who are suspicious of the newcomers. I tell them that Muhammad is like Moses leading his lost children, but they mock, “And Yathrib is their promised land? Where's the milk and honey? They should keep moving.”

I went to Muhammad and asked him if this was their promised land.

“That's not my concern,” he replied. “God can find his own anywhere on earth. There's something more important.” He pointed to a pile of scrolls on the floor. “This is God's book. It has been growing for twelve years now. Nothing is more precious. You are people of the Book, so you understand.”

I drew back. If I said yes, I understand, would that make me a bad Jew? Is it a sin for me to work for a Muslim whose book isn't mine? I hear the whispering in my mind, and to the people of the Torah this is what I say. If the messiah comes tomorrow and drives the Gentiles into the sea, maybe he will turn to me and say, “Eli, dear boy, sit at my right hand. I will be busy rebuilding the Temple of David. You
take care of business while I'm away.” Then I would rule the world and nobody's God would be before mine.