Muhammad (6 page)

Hearing her cry, Muhammad drew back. He had been taught that this was a sign of danger. The camp is under attack when women sound the alarm. And he didn't know her, of course. To him, I was his mother. I bent down and slapped him hard across the face.

“Go to her. Forget me,” I said. “I hate you like a stranger.” We always use the same harsh words when giving a baby back. Muhammad didn't move or even cry. He had to be hit a second time before he ran toward Aminah, who was crouching in the street now, arms open wide. But their reunion was a tease. Mecca had been infected with a plague, and when the first neighbor died on Aminah's street, she covered her face with a veil into which bitter herbs were knotted. She veiled her baby's face too, but this was a futile precaution. She knew fate wasn't done with her. In tears she returned Muhammad to me. Contagion blows from house to house faster than dust, so there was little time to consider.

“When should I bring him back?” I asked. I was rushing back to the same camp where the Banu Sa'd always stay, only now it was dangerously close to town. Aminah ran beside me, holding Muhammad in her arms. He couldn't run fast enough to keep up, and she couldn't bear parting from him so soon, after only a day.

I asked again. “Two months, three?” It was up to her.

“Three years. Keep him as long as you can,” Aminah said.

I won't lie. I was shocked. “But the plague will be gone once the weak are all dead. It won't take nearly that long, perhaps by winter.”

She wasn't listening. She thrust her baby into my arms and ran away, not looking back. Which wasn't heartless, as you might think. She knew what fate was like. It was like a wasp covered in honey. You cannot taste the sweetness without a sting.

That was why the boy grew up to be five among the nomads and saw his first corpse in the sand dunes. Foreigners had other uses besides dying on us, which could be very useful if their horses were still alive and their purses full of coins. Muhammad learned about respect from the eyes of strangers. Not just the ones from outside Arabia, who were forced to show respect unless they wanted to wake up one morning in the desert to find that their guide had disappeared in the night. City Arabs move freely back and forth between the city and the wild. The young men in particular are never more than half tamed by life in town. Since childhood they have heard about falcon hunting and sneak attacks on the tents of the enemy. Young men want glory, and they sneak away into the desert as soon as they can.

Muhammad met many of them from his tribe, the Quraysh, who were the proudest of all, since they were used to power and money in Mecca. It took only a few days to strip their pride. It wasn't done through humiliation or mischief (although no one strongly objected to handing them a blanket full of sand fleas to wrap themselves in at night—a few hundred pink bites is a healthy reminder of how things are). What won their respect was something you'd never suspect: words. The young men come with mouths as filthy
as the bottoms of their feet. A few can read, but all know the magic of words, and there is no purer magic than the words of the Bedouin.

We are the living chronicle of every Arab hero and god. Our minds are soaked in poetry the way a wineskin is soaked with juice. Their first night sitting around the fire, the young men are shivering with cold—they never come dressed for the chill that descends after the sun sinks—and exchanging filthy anecdotes to keep warm. No one rebukes them. A Banu Sa'd elder will softly begin to sing one of the songs about a great raid in which our ancestors stole a hundred camels. A second man will join in once he recognizes the tune, then a third. In a few moments the whole tribe is singing, and the young men's jaws drop. It's not the melody or the exploit being praised that moves them, but the strength of every voice singing as one, and in such beautiful, pure Arabic as these corrupt young dandies have never heard in their whole lives.

You think you know what comes next. I will praise Muhammad for being the best singer or the youngest or the most precocious. I will paint a picture of the day he stood up and astonished the men by singing a song he had only heard once, not getting a syllable wrong. In fact, Muhammad almost never sang, except in a low voice no one could hear. When we were blessed by a wandering bard and laid a feast before him in order to hear his epics of massacred Christians and enemy armies drowned in sand overnight, Muhammad sat on the edge of the assembly or even sneaked away. I had to protect him from suspicion that he had blood that wasn't Arab in his veins. Without verse and song, what is an Arab?

No use worrying about that. I was anxious that fate would never let him see his mother again. But after three years they were reunited again. She was waiting by the gate, just as before. She crouched in the street with her arms spread wide. Only this time she didn't cry out, and I didn't slap Muhammad to make him run to her. He was old enough to be told what his situation was. When he set eyes on Aminah, he was prepared for this strange woman who must be called mother. He didn't kiss me, but only gave a grave little bow and walked slowly into her arms.

Aminah brought me inside. She was poorer than ever, but she had cakes and tea waiting for me, and two girls in bangles who did a dance in my honor (they had been coached to run off as soon as they were done, not staying for a share of cake and tea). She placed a small sandalwood box on the table between us. When I opened it, I saw all the jewelry she possessed in the world. One was a single pearl as large as my thumb, which I knew she had brought with her in her dowry when she arrived in the house of Abdullah.

Aminah saw that I was about to protest. She drew Muhammad close and wrapped her skirt around him. “You take it. Now I have a richer pearl,” she said. She was a woman, but she had the Arab way with words.

I spent the night in a featherbed covered with a silk spread, once beautiful, now worn almost threadbare. I couldn't sleep, because my mind kept thrashing a memory over. Aminah was eager to know everything about her son, and we had spent the evening in one-sided talk, as I recounted everything he had learned among the Banu Sa'd. But fear forced me to lie. I withheld the one thing she had to be told.

The thing happened when he was three. One day I was scrubbing out a copper pot with sand when my own child, a boy little older than Muhammad, ran into the tent.

“Two men are killing my brother!” he cried.

He was too breathless and frightened to say more. I raised a cry and ran out into the desert, following the tracks my boy had left. A few men heard my distress and joined me. That morning Muhammad had wandered off. We covered a long distance before I spotted him lying in the sand near a thornbush. My heart pounded. I rushed to his side. He was alive, but very weak.

“Run after them! They tried to kill him!” I cried, but the men didn't move. They were bewildered. There was no blood on the boy's body and no wounds. Looking around, you couldn't see tracks leading anywhere. Nobody called my son a liar. We have a good position, and they wouldn't dare. I swept Muhammad up in my arms, grateful that he hadn't gotten lost. Somehow the string that tied him to one of the girls must have broken.

I scolded my boy, and his father threatened to beat him for lying, but he never changed his story. He had followed Muhammad out into the desert when he saw the broken string. The footprints were easy to track. When he came over a rise, he saw two strangers bent over Muhammad, who was lying on his back just as we found him. The two had long knives, and while one kept the boy pinned with his knee, the other plunged his blade into Muhammad's chest. If they noticed that they were being observed, they didn't turn their heads. The one reached into Muhammad's chest and did something. My boy couldn't tell what; he was barely six himself. The sight so frightened him that he watched for only a minute before running back to camp.

The tale was not incredible to everyone.
Jinns
roam the desert thirsting for human souls. That was the strongest possibility. I had my doubts, though.
Jinns
attack at night, and they don't need knives to pluck out your soul. They have dark enchantment. Not that anyone has survived to say what that enchantment is. I feared Muhammad would be shunned for drawing two demons so close to camp in broad daylight. In fact, the opposite happened. The fact that he had survived their attack was considered to be a sign of stronger magic than that of the
jinns
. It was decided that Muhammad's name would be added to the songs about our ancestors who had driven off
jinns.
After that, his reputation was made. Besides, it was obvious he hadn't had his soul sucked out.

I couldn't tell Aminah this, and since Muhammad was so young, there was no fear that he would let it slip. I took the sandalwood box and departed the next morning after first tucking the pearl under Aminah's pillow. Everything in the box would have vanished anyway, once she fell sick and doctors had to be paid. In the few years she had left, I would have been welcome in her house, but I never went back. Muhammad had spent enough time with a mother who wasn't real. Now he needed time with a mother who would be real such a short time. Aminah was like a shadow passing through his life.

 

W
HEN HE WAS
sure that I had regained my strength, Muhammad led me from my sickroom to the edge of town. Mecca is too green to see the desert from, even atop the highest watchtower. He fussed over my bags when the small train of donkeys and camels arrived to take me home. I let him. Why not? A hundred cousins aren't the same as a milk-
mother. My few things were packed into saddlebags. The Banu Sa'd men who came for me were old ones who could be spared, and they hated the city. The circling hills shut out too much of the sky. In haste I was laid on a stretcher behind the last camel, since I was too weak to make the journey on foot. The last thing I felt wasn't love for Muhammad, but a twinge of curiosity.

“Do you remember one day in the desert, when you were very young and got lost?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I wasn't lost. I had a feeling where I should go. Two men were waiting for me when I got there.”

I was amazed. “They attacked you, and you never told me? After we got you home, you wouldn't say a word.”

“I couldn't. I knew you thought the
jinns
had captured me.”

“It had to be
jinns.
They left no footprints. They were seen ripping open your chest.”

“I wondered why everyone whispered behind my back. But it wasn't
jinns.
Other beings live in the desert. You should know that.”

If it had been anyone else putting me in my place, my nails would have been at his face. But with him I felt a mixture of meekness and wonder. “What kind of beings?” I asked in a small voice.

A strange smile crossed Muhammad's face. “I've never stopped asking that question. You came running in such a panic, you scared them off.” He put a finger lightly on his heart. “Don't worry. Whatever they wanted to do, it's done.”

T
he best hiding place is inside your own heart. I've tried all the others. Even when I dug a hole by the open latrines and covered it with thatch, they dragged me out and beat me. I was young then, and they were thugs. A hideous idol with a serpent's tail had been found smashed to bits outside the Kaaba. It was probably one of them, getting drunk and daring one another. But I was easier to blame.

I only wanted to be alone so I could think about God. How did that hurt anyone? But loneliness is the seeker's affliction. It drove me to wander in the marketplace. I was overheard muttering to myself.
Allah, endow my heart with wings, so that I may fly to the garden of eternity
. I meant it as a prayer, but they took it as sacrilege.

One time a scrap of writing fell out of my pocket. Some Qurayshi roughs picked it up, and a wandering scribe recited it aloud: “The veil between God and his servant does not exist in heaven or on earth. It exists in himself.” I couldn't dig a hole deep enough to hide that kind of blasphemy.

Eventually I saved my skin by getting rich. Money is protection against persecution. Not perfect protection. If looks
could kill, the Qurayshi youth who prowl the streets would send me to a shallow grave every day of the week and twice on feast days.

I straighten my spine and walk past them eyes ahead. Once I reach the inns by the Kaaba, my identity changes. I'm no longer “the believer” who cannot enter a house for dinner without the rooms being disinfected with musk after he leaves. I turn into a well-padded merchant whose shameful ideas are insignificant, once you hear the clink of gold in his purse.

“Waraqah ibn Nawfal, you are most welcome.”

“Waraqah, my brother, sit here next to me.”

“Waraqah, blessed by the gods, make me happy by sharing this wine.”

I never trusted any of them, and yet one time I let my guard down. My only excuse is gathering age. I took one of the Quraysh aside, a young man who stood out for being slightly more thoughtful than his peers. I unfolded a parchment before his eyes. It was wrinkled and yellow; it had been clumsily mended in several places.

“What do you think of this?” I asked.

The young man was barely literate, but he looked impressed. “Your will?” he guessed. He was an old camel trader's son, not yet twenty. He probably dreamed about his inheritance every spare moment.

I smiled. “It's more precious than my will. It's a page from the Bible. I've been translating it.”

His eyes widened. “Better be careful,” he warned. I had pushed the page toward him, but he backed away as if I were offering him a hot coal.

It was comical, really. Everyone knows that such pages
exist. A merchant whose route passes through the tiny communities of Jews and Christians may buy or sell an occasional tattered leaf from their jumbled scriptures. But we Arabs pretend that these communities have not sprung up in our midst. It would be like admitting a growth of black smut in your bags of wheat.

I reverently kissed the parchment. “It tells of Abraham and Isaac. You should let me recite the story to you sometime. There's almost a murder in it. You like knives, don't you?” I was toying with the young man, who looked relieved when I folded the scrap and thrust it back into my robe. I was lucky. He could have led a move against me.

What does “the believer” believe? No one ever asks me to my face. They only know that the idols are good business, and anyone who speaks out against them threatens everybody's income. “Listen to reason, my dear Waraqah,” they say. “We will shrivel like a barren womb. Mecca will die without the pilgrims. You see how much they spend.”

It's true. You can get money out of a pilgrim simply for letting him set eyes on a golden idol. They spend even more during the Hajj, when hundreds flood Mecca to run the circle around the Kaaba. No one knows when that started, but now it's a fixed tradition.

I am approaching Muhammad, my spiritual son, in this roundabout way, because that is how he approached me.

One day, it was a dozen years ago, I was sitting in my courtyard. I was expecting a messenger momentarily and left the gate open. A little boy wandered inside. We looked at each other. I asked where his mother was, but he didn't reply. He gazed at me shyly. From his dress I saw that he must be a nomad. They are fierce about keeping their children close by.

I went over and crouched in front of him. “Do you know me?” I asked. I had the strangest feeling.

He shook his head. “I don't know you, but I hear your voice.”

Well, of course he did. I had just spoken to him. But the boy didn't mean that. He turned and pointed past the gate. “I was playing by the well, and I heard you. What do you want?”

If he meant Zamzam, it was ten streets away. “I don't want anything from you,” I said, feeling very queer talking this way to a five-or six-year-old.

“Then I must want from you,” he said.

Before I could question him, one of those Qurayshi toughs was at my gate. He didn't dare come through it, but he started yelling. “Hey, hey, he's here. I found him.”

A second later two of his fellows ran up and behind them a Banu Sa'd woman, red-faced and puffing. “Muhammad!” she cried and rushed into the courtyard to sweep him up. Immediately she realized her discourtesy and began spewing apologies, tangled with a disjointed tale about bringing the boy back to his mother, who hadn't seen him in three years. I didn't care. I assured her that her infraction was nothing. I escorted her back to the gate, glaring at the Qurayshi roughnecks, who lingered in case I gave them a coin. If I didn't, they'd shake down the poor woman, so I slipped them the smallest piece of silver I had. Why not? God sees every good deed.

A tiny incident, but it preyed on my mind. Muhammad had wandered away from his wet nurse when her back was turned and headed straight for my gate.

Under my bed I have many pages of the Bible stashed
away. It's my habit to pull one out late at night and translate a few passages into Arabic. I also have another ritual that I keep to myself, for good reason. When I am puzzled over a mystery, large or small, I pull a sheet out at random, and whatever my eye falls upon I take to be a message. A few days after the boy appeared, I reached under the mattress and took out the first page my fingers touched. I shut my eyes and pointed to a passage at random, then took it over to the lamp to read:

These were not meaningless words. The man who sold me this particular page was a Christian beggar who followed my caravan many years ago. I threw him some bread, and as he wolfed it down he told me about his savior. He felt blessed, even though he lived in the gutter and fought with stray dogs over garbage.

The year the beggar sold me this scrap of scripture he had a terrible cough. He knew he wasn't long for this world. This page from the Bible was precious to him, and the beggar wanted the message of his Messiah carried forward.

So I knew that the virgin had conceived, and Emmanuel had come. It happened long ago, and the only reason to keep the page was to remind me of how the beggar's face glowed when he spoke about his savior. Why, then, had my finger landed on this verse?

Several years passed before a Jew came to Mecca whom I could trust. He plied gold and silver trinkets. His trade was so valuable that he bought his way out of the law that kept
Jews from entering Mecca. I gave him wine and showed him the passage. The name Emmanuel brought a crooked smile to his face.

“Don't trust your beggar,” he said. “What kind of a savior would allow someone to live like that?”

The messiah is yet to come, he said, to kill the enemies of the Jews and save them all. I was too impatient to wait that long, I told him. In Arabia, idols can save you today, if you‘re gullible enough. I pressed the Jew for an explanation that meant something real. More than a bit exasperated, he said that for my understanding “Emmanuel” meant the “king of prophets.”

Ah, well, that was a different story.

Arabs put great store in prophets. If God pointed to the word “prophet” when I asked about Muhammad, something must be afoot. In Mecca some of the ignorant call me “the Jew,” but that's just their crude way of insulting a servant of God. I have no religion. I am
hanif,
a believer without a faith, like a lone palm tree without an oasis.

I did not approach Muhammad the whole time he was growing up. That was far too risky. I watched from afar. Old Muttalib, his grandfather, was still alive then. It was a tragedy that he had survived his youngest son, Abdullah, but he found solace in Muhammad. He would take the boy to the inns and prop him on his knee while holding forth. Muttalib had gotten too old for trading. He was half blind and growing weaker by the month. It was a common sight, he and the boy, who kept his eyes on the ground. No one had ever seen a child who wanted to keep to himself so much. But Muhammad was obedient, and when Muttalib wanted to show him off, he would stand up like a man, even in front of half a dozen drunk Quraysh in a dingy, smoky wine house.

Then a peculiar thing happened. Many years later I was out walking and happened to see a figure crouched in an alley. The light was dim, but I made out Muhammad squatting on his heels. I nodded. He put his fingers to his lips and pointed at something on the ground. A mouse. The creature had been lured out into the open with a few grains of wheat.

Then Muhammad gazed up at the sky, where a black speck hovered. My eyes were failing, but I knew it was a hawk. Muhammad looked back at the mouse, then at the hawk again.

“It has no idea of the danger,” he said.

“Neither do we,” I replied.

You see the point? Like the mouse innocently eating its seeds, we go about our lives not realizing that death is watching us from afar, constantly stalking. Those were Muhammad's inner thoughts. Why had he shared them with me? Our voices made the mouse scurry back into its hole. Muhammad stood up and walked toward me.

“I'm a man now,” he said. “We can talk.”

“A man? You're seventeen,” I smiled.

He didn't smile back. “Old enough to defend myself, if anyone catches us talking like this.”

That's how it started. I never brought up the day his nurse lost him and he wandered into my courtyard, but he must have remembered. What kind of patience does it take to wait twelve years before speaking to someone again? He began coming to my house for tea and God. Only tea at first, because God remained a forbidden subject until later.

Naturally, he wanted to know about me. “What is a
hanif
?” he asked.

“One who believes in Allah, one who scorns idols and waits for the light to descend,” I said.

He nodded gravely. “Everyone says you're different, but you look ordinary to me.”

Muhammad said this frankly and without apology, considering he was insulting an elder. I answered with a quote from one of my hidden books. “A man goes in and out among the people. He eats and sleeps with them. He buys and sells in the marketplace. This everyone can see. What they cannot see is that he never forgets God for a single instant.”

“Are you that man?” asked Muhammad.

“I will be, when I become a saint. For now, I can only try.”

“Why is one god better than many?” he asked.

I answered with another question. “Why is one faithful wife better than many whores?”

“What makes you call the gods whores?”

“In both cases you pay your money and get your wish. Only a whore is more reliable and trustworthy. Most idols take your money and give nothing in return,” I replied.

Muhammad seemed pleased that I spoke so freely. As for myself, I often had to conceal a burning excitement that agitated me every time I set eyes on him. How could I explain it? It was impossible. I would lose all respect. A grown man trembling like a bride waiting in the dark for her bridegroom.

We talked about everything, endlessly. Yet I could never draw Muhammad out about his own beliefs. This was a cause for concern. In Arabia, one belief swallows up every other: the tribe. The tribe tells you where you belong on earth. The tribe runs to defend you after you knife a stranger for spitting on your sandals. Like a monster with a thousand heads, the
tribe sees everything and can eat whom it pleases. There is no room for belief in anything else, including God. God is just another thing for the monster to devour.

One day I'd had enough. I turned on Muhammad. “Talking to you is like talking to a respectful oyster. Open up. Who are you?”

He didn't look startled. “I am one who selects friends carefully.”

An angel must have seen my impatience, because at that moment he brought me the perfect response. It was from an old verse. “I have a friend, and he fills my cup with wine that has no equal.”

Muhammad blushed. “You have been such a friend to me.”

After that, our bond was sealed. We became bold enough that we'd talk in public, late at night after everyone else had stumbled home. I was always eager for his company.

Word soon shot around town that he was my protégé. Just in case anyone took that amiss, I spread my money around more generously. I even sent a messenger boy to buy a calf and sacrifice it outside the Kaaba during the spring rites. He took my money and an hour later came racing back.

“Which god is it for?” the boy asked. “They want to know.”

“The one whose only name is ‘the One,'” I said. The boy looked confused, so I said, “The choice is theirs. Just make a good show of it.” He ran away still confused. No matter. I was used to being unfathomable.

Muhammad was balm to my soul. I had someone to hold in a spiritual embrace. The affliction of loneliness was lifted. But what good was I doing for him? I could always leave him my money. Mecca would have a second rich outcast. There had to be something else.