The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (10 page)

There was no question that it had to rebuilt, and as quickly as possible, before word of its destruction spread through all of Arabia and it was taken as a bad omen, undermining the whole raison d’être of Mecca. The Quraysh council decided on a raised foundation so that the door would stand above the new peak flood level, and they took advantage of the opportunity to opt for a sturdier, more imposing design: a tall, almost cubic shape. As it happened, timbers had been salvaged from a Red Sea shipwreck caused by the same storm system that had produced the flood, and these were now hauled up to Mecca to serve as a solid infrastructure. Everyone in Mecca was involved. Since labor on the new sanctuary was clearly a privilege, not a chore, it was carefully portioned out between the various clans of the Quraysh, ensuring that no single clan could claim that it had been especially honored. And indeed all went smoothly until the time came to place the famed Black Stone back in the northeast corner.

From a distance, you might take this stone for a large chunk of black onyx, though on close inspection (it’s still set into the corner of the Kaaba today, almost overshadowed by a huge silver frame) it contains streaks of red, brown. and dark green, and appears to be meteoric in origin. Islamic tradition has it that it was placed in the wall of the original sanctuary by Abraham and Ishmael, and was then lost until it was rediscovered by Muhammad’s forefather Qusayy, the founder of the Quraysh tribe. For all its fame it is surprisingly small, barely larger than a football, so lifting it into place when the Kaaba was rebuilt in the year 605 was not the issue. One reasonably strong man could have done it easily enough, but now there was the question of who that man should be.

Everyone claimed the honor of replacing the stone, and none was willing to cede it. Within minutes the process that had been a model of cooperation between the various clans of the Quraysh broke down into such violent disagreement that it seemed actual violence was imminent. One clan even produced a bowl filled with animal blood, then thrust their hands into it and held their bloody palms high for all to see, swearing that they were willing to shed their own blood for the right of one of their own to lift the stone into its newly built niche. Fists were bunched and hands reaching for daggers when one of the elders, distressed at the prospect of bloodshed in this of all places, found a way to defuse the situation. They were all too exhausted with the effort of intensive labor to make such a weighty decision, he said. Instead, they should leave the decision to God by agreeing that the first man to enter the precinct from that point on, no matter which clan he belonged to, should decide whose hands would lift the stone. As it happened—or,depending on your point of view, as it was predestined—that man was Muhammad.

Newly returned from his retreat, he’d made for the precinct in order to circle the sanctuary the prescribed seven times, but instead of walking into the peaceful ritual of homecoming, he’d walked into conflict—and into an almost Solomonic role in resolving it. “This is the amin, the trustworthy one,” they agreed when they saw him, “and we will be satisfied with his decision.”

He was to be the arbiter: enough of an insider to know what would work yet at the same time enough of an outsider to be considered objective. It was a role Muhammad seemed made for. Precisely because he was not one of the movers and shakers of the city, he was the ideal man for the moment. And if it had been anyone else who had walked into the Kaaba precinct at that particular point? The question is moot to the early Islamic historians; as they saw it, it could only have been Muhammad.

“Bring me a cloak,” he said, and when they did so, he had them lay it on the ground and place the Black Stone in its center. “Let the elders of each clan take hold of the edge of the cloak,” he ordered, “and then lift it up together.” This they did, and when they had raised it to the right level, Muhammad eased it into position himself.

It was acclaimed as the perfect solution. Everyone had had a hand in the process, and all had been equally honored. But for Muhammad this small but poignant demonstration of the constructive power of unity can only have served as a distressing reminder of division. What would stay with him was not the praise for his judiciousness but the alacrity with which the Quraysh had resorted to threats of violence, and at the one place, the sanctuary of the Kaaba, where violence was forbidden. As he left the precinct that day, he has to have been more aware than ever of his strangely ambivalent position among the Quraysh, trusted only because he was one of them yet not one of them, only because he was not in a position to lead. Or so he thought.

erhaps it could only have happened when he was forty, given the auspiciousness of that number throughout the Middle East. For the Beduin, for instance, it is a healing number— one that saves life. A common cure-all is called al-arbain, the forty, a blend

of herbs in olive oil and clarified butter. Traditional healers say it takes forty days for a broken bone to mend (or as Western doctors will tell you, six weeks). And a man cannot be attacked within forty paces of his home or tent, or that of anyone who gives him shelter, no matter how just the cause.

Forty, that is, gives a new lease on life, and this is how the number consistently appears in the sacred books that came out of the Middle East. The duration of the great flood waited out in Noah’s ark, the years of Israelite wandering in the desert after the exodus, the nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness—all forty, the number signifying a time of struggle and displacement in preparation for a new beginning. For anyone fortunate enough to live that long, forty years marked the fullness of time: the time to step into one’s destiny.

And so in the month of Ramadan this year of 610, as he had the past few years, Muhammad sought the solitude of retreat up on Mount Hira, where everything human was stripped away and he could be part of the silence, letting the implacable vastness enter into him. As he climbed the familiar path, following tracks made by mountain goats, Mecca receded beneath him. He knew the mountain well by now, its hidden hollows and crevasses part of the landscape of retreat, and by dusk he was standing in his usual place.

He leaned forward as though into the wind, though there was barely a hint of a breeze as the last birds darted for home. As the darkness thickened, so too did the silence—the kind of absolute silence that rings in the ears, a high, perfect tone that comes from everywhere and nowhere. A vibration more than a sound, really, as though the whole landscape is sentient. The rock itself seems to be alive as it releases the accumulated warmth of daytime into the cool of night, and as the stars begin their slow revolution overhead, there comes that sense of being a human all alone and yet inexorably part of something larger, a sense of life and existence far older and deeper than the superficial ambitions and everyday cruelties of human affairs.

Was this meditation or was it vigil? Did Muhammad stand in simple gratitude for the ordinary human happiness that had been granted him against all expectation, or was there a certain watchfulness about him, as though he were waiting for something about to happen? We only know that if it was peace he was seeking, what he experienced that night would be anything but.

hat actually happened on Mount Hira? We have what appear to be Muhammad’s own words, but they come relayed through others, at several removes, with each narrator struggling to translate the ineffable into terms they could understand.

One account is credited to Aisha, the youngest and the most outspoken of the wives he would marry after Khadija’s death: “He said: ‘When the angel came to me, I had been standing, but I fell to my knees and crawled away, my shoulders trembling . . . I thought of hurling myself down from a mountain crag, but he appeared to me as I was thinking this and said, ‘Muhammad, I am Gabriel and you are the messenger of God.’ Then he said, ‘Recite!’ I said, ‘What shall I recite?’ He took me and pressed me tightly three times until I was nearly stifled and thought that I should die, and then he said, ‘Recite in the name of thy Lord who created, created man from a clot of blood, that thy Lord is the most munificent, who teaches by the word, teaches man what he knew not.’ ”

The narrative continues in words credited to one of Muhammad’s future followers, ibn-Zubayr, who again quotes him directly: “I recited it, and the angel desisted and departed. I woke up, and it was as though these words had been engraved on my heart. There was none of God’s creation more hateful to me than a poet or a madman; I could not bear to look at either of them, yet I thought, ‘I must be either a poet or a madman. But if so, Quraysh will never say this of me. I shall take myself to a mountain cliff, hurl myself down from it, and find respite in death.’ But when I came near the top of the mountain I heard a voice from heaven saying ‘Muhammad, you are the messenger of God.’ I raised my head to see who was speaking and there Gabriel was in the form of a man with feet astride the horizon. I stood looking at him and this distracted me from what I had intended, and I could go neither forward nor back. I turned my face away from him to all points of the horizon, but wherever I looked I saw him in exactly the same form.”

“This was a true vision,” Aisha would say, but the form it took in her mouth and those of others is clumsily flat. These were wellintentioned people trying to find words for a state of being they had never experienced. In the process, they simplified it, turning the metaphysical into the merely physical as in that image of the angel Gabriel straddling the mountains. It is as though the moment itself were cloaked, as though too close an account of what happened that night were beyond human comprehension, which is in fact exactly how Muhammad experienced it. Where his reported words come to life is not in the angelic apparition but in the palpable feeling of terror—that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that feeling of being utterly overwhelmed to the point of near death by a force larger than anything the mind can comprehend. In short, a terrible awe.

This may be difficult to grasp today when the word “awesome” is used to describe a new app or a viral video and “God-awful” is casually attached to a rotten movie or a bad meal. With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we are protected from real awe. Few people even know any longer what it’s like to stand alone in a thunderstorm on the open plains, or to feel the shore vibrate beneath you as a gale sends millions of tons of water pounding in across thousands of miles of ocean. We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we are in control, or at least hoping for control, and lose touch with what it is to be overwhelmed by a force much greater than ourselves.

How, then, to understand Muhammad’s awe? Something that is literally metaphysical— beyond the physical—is bydefinition beyond rational explanation. Yet while the attempt to reconstruct mystical experience may well be absurd, one can at least be a fool for trying rather than a different kind of fool for not trying.

Rudolf Otto, the great scholar of comparative religion, may have come close in his book The Idea of the Holy, albeit in the rather overly impassioned language of the Victorian era. The fear of God in the Hebrew bible, he wrote, “seizes upon man with paralyzing effect.” Job experienced “a terror fraught with an inward shuddering such as not even the most menacing and overpowering created thing can instill. It has something spectral in it.” And he really meant spectral. In ghost stories, he continued, the sense of dread makes you shudder, going so deep that “it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making a man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake.” Yet by comparison with what he called “numinous consciousness”—the awareness of divine will and power—this ghostly shudder is child’s play. At its highest level, “dread reappears in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fiber of its being.”

There is nothing remotely blissful about such an experience, Otto emphasized, throwing in a sly dig at those who cling to the idea of revelation as ecstatic by concluding that “the singularly daunting and awe-inspiring character of such a moment must be gravely disturbing to those who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy.”

But if we don’t need to be as purple-prosed as Otto, neither do we have to be as literal as Aisha or ibn-Zubayr. We don’t need to insist that Muhammad actually heard Gabriel speaking as though the angel were a human being, let alone reduce Muhammad to the status of a divinely appointed voice recorder playing back what was dictated to him. Since we are rational products of the twenty-first century, we might look instead to science for an explanation, calling on neuropsychiatry and the idea of “altered states of consciousness.”

Was Muhammad in such an altered state that night on Mount Hira? Of course he was. But neurological research has only revealed what ascetics have always known: that practices such as fasting, sleep deprivation, and intense meditation can induce such states, which are accompanied by changes in the brain’s chemical activity. The fact that an altered state of consciousness has a physical correlate should come as no surprise, since brain chemistry parallels experiential input. But to then imagine that everything is explained by chemistry is to fall into the reductive trap of what William James called “medical materialism,” which dismisses experience in favor of mechanics. While science can chart the physical effects of such altered states, it cannot enter the experience of them.

In the end, the most practical way to pursue the question may be the one that at first glance might seem the least practical of all: by making the leap into poetry.

The essence of religious experience is at heart poetic. Ritual and dogma are merely the framework of organized religion—its girders, as it were; they do not touch on religious experience itself, which is the experience of mystery, of the indescribably enigmatic.

Poetry pivots on enigma, which naturally has not prevented many poets from trying to define it nonetheless. Walt Whitman called the beauty of poems “the tuft and final applause of science,” which is a nicely phrased response to medical materialism. Coleridge talked of “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith,” while Ralph Waldo Emerson called poetry “the endeavor to express the spirit of the thing.” Note the words used: “faith,” and “spirit.” But the most apt definition of poetry may be the anonymous one: “saying something that cannot be said.” Which again is no reason not to try. If we look at the metaphors in the account of Muhammad on the mountain, it may be possible to at least begin to understand.