The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (11 page)

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tart, then, with the idea of inspiration: literally, the act of breathing in, or being breathed into. The Arabic word for both “breath” and “spirit” is ruh, close kin to the Hebrew ruach. The idea of having spirit breathed into you is thus built into the language, as it is in the second verse of Genesis, where “the breath of God,” ruach elohim, “lay upon the waters.” But while this may sound wonderful in principle, consider that a human being is not water. Imagine being breathed into—inspired—with such force that your body can hardly bear it. No gentle breath from heaven here, but air being impelled into your lungs with immense force, as though a giant were giving you

mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It feels like every cell of your body is overtaken by it, and you are entirely at its mercy. Even as it gives you life, it seems to be squashing the life out of you, suffocating you under its enormous weight until it’s useless to even think of fighting against it.
And then consider the real meaning of that phrase of Muhammad’s: “as though these words were engraved on my heart.” If this is by now a cliché, consider it afresh, as he used it, and you begin to grasp its impact. If you have read Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” you will think instantly of the prisoner suffering the words of his penitence being carved letter by letter into his flesh.

Imagine, then, the unimaginable: the agonizing pain of a sharp blade carving deep inside you as you lie beneath it, conscious but unable even to struggle against it. Here is the real experience of that childhood scene in which the two angels sliced into the five-year-old’s rib cage to lift out his heart and wash it, and it has none of the unearthly calm of that earlier story. Instead, it contains all the violence of open-heart surgery: the wrenching apart of the chest, the baring of the heart, the unutterable pain—all in the name of a new lease on life.

Muhammad was left cowering on the ground, depleted. Covered in sweat yet shivering, he was inhabited by those words that were his and yet not his, the words he had repeated out loud into the thin, pure air of the mountain, into the emptiness and the darkness. Maybe he sensed somewhere inside him that these words could only come to life, could only achieve reality, when spoken into the face of—breathed in by—another human being, the one person he could run to for consolation in the face of this overwhelming force, who could perhaps save him from both the fear of madness and the fear of the divine: Khadija.

Or perhaps at first there were no words at all. Perhaps it took time for experience to form into something as human and tangible as words. We know that he came stumbling down the mountain, slipping and sliding on the loose scree, his breath hot and rasping, each inhalation needing to be struggled for until it felt like his chest would burst with the effort of it. His robe was torn, his arms and legs scratched and bruised by thorns and sharp-edged rocks in the path of his headlong flight for home.

“I have been in fear for my life,” was the first thing he said. “I think I must have gone mad.” Trembling, shuddering almost convulsively, he begged Khadija to hold him and hide him under her shawl. “Cover me, cover me,” he pleaded, his head in her lap like a small child seeking shelter from the terrors of the night. And that terror alone was enough to convince her that what her husband had experienced was real.

She held him, cradled him as the night sky began to grow pale in the east with the reassuring prospect of day. Slowly, haltingly, the words he had perhaps felt more than heard began to find physical shape in his mouth. Even as he still shook in Khadija’s arms, Muhammad found his voice, and the first revelation of the Quran formed into words that another human being could hear. What had been breathed into him up on the mountain was now breathed out, to take its place in the world.

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hey had been man and wife for fifteen years, but she had never heard him speak with such beauty before. His speech was usually terse and restrained, as one might expect of a man who had learned the hard way from childhood to listen rather than talk. Yet even as the words entered her mind, she was aware of how extraordinary they were. Not just for the man she loved, but for her whole world. Whatever this was, she instantly grasped one thing: it was the end of the quiet, almost modest life they had lived until now. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Another woman would have thought it unfair, perhaps. She would have feared the upheaval that was bound to come, the scorn and derision that she could see looming. She would have tried to protect herself as much as him by denying the validity of what had happened, preferring to think that his first reaction was right and that he had indeed been possessed by a jinn. Would have tried to dissuade him, to smooth things over, to reassure him that all would be well if he just got some sleep, that there was nothing to fear, that this was just a passing trick of the mind, nothing to be concerned about, it would all be better in the morning.

Instead, Khadija reacted as though this was what she had been half expecting all along—as though she had seen in Muhammad what he had barely glimpsed in himself. When he said he feared he’d gone mad, she simply shook her head. “May God save you from madness, my dear,” she said. “God would not do such a thing to you, since he knows your truthfulness, your trustworthiness and kindness. Such a thing cannot be.” And once he told her everything that had happened, her calm conviction was reinforced. “By him in whose hand is my soul,” she said, “I hope that you may be the prophet of this people.”

She held him until sunrise, feeling his muscles relax as the shuddering fear subsided. His head became heavy in her lap and he slipped at last into the deep sleep of exhaustion. When she was sure he would not wake soon, she eased him onto the bedding, wrapped herself close in her shawl, and went out into the early morning, heading for her cousin Waraqa’s house. She walked with calm determination through the narrow alleys as the first cock-crows echoed through them, past stray dogs scratching for scraps, donkeys braying for feed, the occasional muffled curse of someone trying for just a few more moments of sleep. Waraqa, the most senior of the hanifs, would confirm what she already knew: that Muhammad’s fear of delusion was precisely what argued most powerfully for his not being deluded. He was no unworldly mystic floating above ordinary humans in a smug aura of holiness, but as the Quranic voice would soon tell him, “ just a messenger,” “ just one of the people.” Just a human being suddenly charged with what seemed an inhumanly huge task.

Her cousin’s response was no less than she had expected: “If you have spoken the truth to me, Khadija, then what appeared to Muhammad was the great spirit that appeared to Moses in olden time, and he is indeed the prophet of this people. Bid him be of good heart.”

But as she made her way back to her sleeping husband, she must have done so with a heavy heart of her own, aware of the seeming incongruity of a middle-aged man and a woman on the verge of old age who between them held the key to what could be a new age. Her childbearing years were over, yet here she was at the birth of something so radically new and at the same time so old as to be utterly daunting.

She had no illusions about how hard it would be. As though the terror of his experience that night was not enough, she knew Muhammad faced yet another level of fear: the very human fear that this was too much to ask of him, and that he’d be unequal to the task. Because if she was right, and Waraqa too, then the respect that Muhammad had worked so long and hard for was now in jeopardy. He would be the outsider again, even the outcast. Not merely ignored but actively despised and derided, his honor impugned, his dignity transgressed. The small, modest peace he had achieved over the years would be torn away from him, and there was no knowing if he would ever find it again.

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hen, for two years, nothing. Instead of the steady flow of revelation that one might expect—the familiar clichés of the floodgates opened, of the life- giving waters of inspiration pouring out of him—there were two years of silence, a frustratingly

fallow period in which Muhammad struggled to come to terms with what had happened to him.

Inevitably, as a man doubly orphaned early in life, he experienced these two years as abandonment. The effects of such a childhood can never be conquered altogether. That sense of being cut off never disappears; it may be pushed deeper inside, but it is always there. A gate had been opened wide in the most momentous night of Muhammad’s life, but had then slammed tightly shut again. What had been granted him was now being withheld, and he felt a terrible loneliness, a despair of ever being able to connect again with that voice.

This was his dark night of the soul—the phrase coined centuries later by Saint John of the Cross for the pain, loneliness, and doubt experienced by mystics yearning for union with the divine. Especially the doubt, which is in many ways essential to real faith. If this seems a startling idea at first blush, consider that religion risks becoming fanatically inhuman without it. As Graham Greene indicated in his novels of those struggling with faith, doubt is the heart of the matter; it is what keeps religion human. In a way, it is the annealing fire of faith. Without it, there is only a terrifying certainty, a blind and blinding refuge from both thought and humanity.

Certainty requires no leap of faith such as Kierkegaard talked of. To walk out on the limb of a tall tree believing that it won’t break requires only a certain foolhardy credulity; to walk out on that same limb fully aware that it might indeed break requires placing one’s faith or one’s trust in God or fate or the law of averages. Where certainty is often a refusal to think, to question, to reason—a refusal to engage in the kind of Socratic dialogue with unbelief that the Quran urges— faith requires an awareness of the possibility of being wrong, which is why it is perhaps best defined in Hebrews 11:1 as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

In the lack of doubt, then, faith is moot. The certainty that you are right devolves into righteousness and dogmatism, and worse, an overweening pride in being so very right. “If what you say is true . . .” Waraqa had said. “I think you may be the prophet,” Khadija had said. They’d spoken in the conditional, sure and yet unsure. Only more revelations could confirm that first one, but as weeks and then months passed and no more came, Muhammad alternated between hope and despair.

So too did many of the Meccan elite, though for very different reasons. To the north, the world was rapidly changing, and Muhammad’s own uncertainty seemed mirrored in a new anxiety about what the future might bring. The always uneasy balance of power between the Byzantine and the Persian empires was shifting ominously. In the year 610, the general Heraclius ousted his predecessor and proclaimed himself the new Byzantine emperor, swearing to retake lands lost to the Persians only to have his bluff called by the Sassanid king of Persia, Khosroe II, better known as Parvez “the ever victorious.” The title seemed strikingly apt as Parvez racked up victory after victory: first Iraq and the Caucasus, then Syria and eastern Anatolia (present-day Turkey and Armenia). Traders and pilgrims to Mecca began to bring word that Persian armies were planning to advance on Jerusalem and even Damascus. If that happened, the whole network of Meccan business would be thrown into upheaval until they could establish working contacts among the new powers that be. The one thing essential to successful trade is political stability, yet this was the one thing that could no longer be taken for granted.

Muhammad was certainly aware of this growing uncertainty around him. It was the talk of the Kaaba precinct, and the focus of preparations for the next northbound caravan to Damascus. But those preparations no longer involved him. To keep working as a trader’s agent after what had happened on Mount Hira was impossible; he had neither the energy nor the interest for it. Instead, he increased his vigils on the mountainside, seeking out the voice that had manifested itself in him and then gone silent. Yet the harder he searched, the farther away that presence seemed. With each dawn he again faced the disappointment, the gnawing awareness that he might have been as deluded as he had at first feared.

If he knew that this was a classic time of testing, a trial of his fortitude, he must have felt that he was failing the test. It was a test of his own fear, perhaps—the dark fear that this extraordinary vision would never be granted him again, and this one single glimpse was all there would be, an unimaginable gift proffered and then withdrawn. Or perhaps he felt he was being punished for having doubted the message in the first place, for having even considered that he was mad or possessed, just another raving poet or seer fit for nothing better than to shout out in the marketplace and receive in return the jeers and laughs of those seeking entertainment, or the coins of those who bothered to take pity on him. And even as he longed for the voice to return, he may have been terrified of the possibility. Was what he most desired also what he most feared? Could he even endure such pain again? “Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me,” he’d say toward the end of his life. Who could withstand that? “Tell him to be of strong heart,” Waraqa had said, and the phrase was apt: the force of such experience could stress a middle- aged heart to the point of cardiac arrest.

He wrestled, then, with uncertainty. Had the words come from deep inside him, or had they indeed come from beyond him as he felt they had—words that he himself would never have been capable of? A boy who had learned to survive by silencing his voice had suddenly been given one, but was it his own voice he had been given, or the voice of God? Or was the voice of God within him, part of him? Had divine words literally been planted inside him, or had his own words been an expression of the divine? Where did man end and God begin? What was this boundary so powerfully and briefly broken?

The conventional picture is the literal one: God speaks to Muhammad, or more precisely, speaks through Muhammad. But when you are the one being spoken through, you must inevitably ask if the voice you hear is your own transformed, or if that transformation is indeed the result of an agency outside you. Or is there, in the end, no difference? This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to all great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being. But if some might take this to mean that there is no boundary between human and divine, Muhammad was achingly aware of the concept of hubris, of the dangerously arrogant assumption of one’s own powerfulness.

All this and more constituted Muhammad’s personal struggle to accept what had happened. Until these questions were resolved within him, there could only be silence, because what he was now called on to be—prophet and messenger, bringing the word of the divine—went against his whole nature. The boy who had survived by blending into the background had to accept that he would now be thrust into the foreground, into the unrelenting eye of the world.

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t last it came. It would be known as the Sura of the Morning, eleven tantalizingly brief verses which read in full: “By the morning light and the dark of night, your Lord has not forsaken you Muhammad, nor does he abhor you. The end shall be better than the beginning, and you will be satisfied. Did he not find you an orphan and give you shelter? Did he not find you in error and guide you? Did he not find you poor and enrich you? Do not wrong the orphan, then, nor chide the beggar, but proclaim the goodness of your Lord.”

He had not been abandoned, nor mistaken. And as though in compensation for those two dark, silent years, the Sura of the Morning heralded a spate of revelations building the early mystical foundation of the Quran. Brimming over with richness and lyricism, they were full of wonder and awe. The earth itself was a manifestation of the divine, and humans were mere stewards of God’s creation.

The verses laid out an almost environmentalist approach to the natural world still unparalleled in any other holy book, as in this from Sura 91, The Sun: “By the sun and its morning brightness and by the moon which rises after, by the day that displays the glory of the sun and by the night that conceals it, by the heavens and he who built it and by the earth and he who laid it out, by the soul and he who molded it and inspired it with knowledge of good and evil—blessed shall be the one who keeps it pure, and ruined he who corrupts it.” Or this from the mysteriously titled Ya Sin, Sura 36: “Let the once-dead earth be a sign for them. We gave it life, and produced grain for their sustenance. We planted it with the palm and vine and watered it with gushing springs so that you may feed on their fruit.” And most famously , this from the shimmering vision of Sura 24, known as The Light: “God is the light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of his light is as a niche wherein is a lamp—the lamp in a glass, the glass

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as it were a glittering star—kindled from a blessed tree, an olive of neither the west nor the east, whose oil all night would shine even if no fire touched it.”

The mystery of creation was all around. Verse after verse celebrated the stark power of mountains and earthquakes, the bounty of rainfall and harvest, the seemingly simple sequence of night and day, sun and moon, plenty and drought. Or rather, not verse after verse, but sign after sign, since the Quranic word for a verse is aya, a sign. The verses themselves, that is, were signs of the active presence of the divine, and the Quran itself the only miracle necessary.

These early revelations were like exquisite poems, some so short and dense as to be almost haiku-like. Later, they’d become long and densely involved with the issues of the moment, and these longer revelations would form the suras, or chapters, that would be placed toward the beginning of the Quran when it was written down and compiled shortly after Muhammad’s death, arranged not chronologically but more or less by length, from longest to shortest. This may have been decided on as a matter of aesthetics, or it may have been intended to give equal weight to every verse, no matter when it had first come into being. Whatever the reason, the arrangement means that any non-Arabic speaker looking for the mystical underpinnings of the Quran might find it best to start from the end and to read from right to left as though it were in Arabic.

In these first few years, Muhammad never knew when a revelation was about to come. One might follow hard on the heels of another, or there might be weeks or even months between them. But the unpredictability of the timing was itself part of the process. If revelation had come on a regular basis, the words piling up like those of a writer determined to fulfill a daily quota, one might suspect too much neatness for credibility, as though a direct line had been established between human and divine, one that could be dialed into on demand. Instead, the verses themselves taught him how to receive them. “Be not hasty in your recitation before the revelation of it is finished,” he’d be told. Let it come in full, that is, before trying to repeat it. “Be patient,” he was told again and again. It was a kind of ongoing lesson in how to surrender to the process. He was not to fight it nor attempt to hurry it, but allow it to take shape.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form—words—to the ineffable. The revelations left him equal parts humbled and determined, exhausted and energized, dazed and clear-headed. Sometimes he’d be covered with sweat even in cold weather; at others, he’d shiver and shake. There were times when he’d sit slumped with his head between his knees “as though a great heaviness had fallen on him,” his eyes narrowed in what seemed to be intense pain or grief, and others when he’d shudder violently. Whichever way it happened, he was left helplessly weak as the words formed inside him, waiting to be recited into the world. The pain was an essential part of it, part of the birthing process, for this is what he was doing: verse by verse, he was giving birth to the Quran.

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t first, only Khadija heard Muhammad recite these early verses, as though they needed to be incubated in a safe place before they could be recited to the wider world. It would be another full year until the sign came to go public with them. According to ibn-Ishaq, the go-ahead came from the angel Gabriel, who appeared to Muhammad with precise instructions. He was to prepare a meal of wheat, mutton, and milk, invite his Hashim kinsmen to dine, and when they had eaten their fill, recite the verses he had so far received.

Some forty men came, among them all the surviving sons of Abd al-Muttalib, including abu-Talib and his half-brother abu-Lahab, whose name means “father of flame.” Some would say that he had earned this name by virtue, as it were, of his quick red-faced temper; others that it marked his eventual destination in the fires of hell. Whichever, abu-Lahab would justify the name at this meal.

They had all eaten with appetite, and had leaned back satiated against their pillows when their host calmly began to recite in the heightened rhyming prose known as saj, which was the accepted form for poetry and oracular utterance. The word literally means “cooing,” because this was the effect of what linguists call the desinential inflection: an extra vowel often added to the ends of words so that they linger on the breath and in the ear, with al-Lah, for instance, becoming allaha. The usage would be gradually abandoned over the next century or so as poetry fell victim to practicality and Arabic replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Middle East, but in seventh-century Mecca it was still highly regarded, and all the more when it came with such gentle majesty as was now heard from Muhammad’s lips. Yet even as the others sat entranced, astonished at hearing such eloquence in the mouth of this terse kinsman, abu-Lahab stood up, interrupting the recital in angry protest. “He has bewitched you all,” he declared, and walked out.