The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (14 page)

The delegation confronting him was led by the head of the Makhzum clan, who would turn out to be the most vociferous and most violent of Muhammad’s opponents—so much so that his name, abuHakam, meaning “father of wisdom,” would be jettisoned in the Islamic historical record in favor of abu-Jahl, “father of ignorance.” He certainly wasted no time earning the distinction, serving abu-Talib with an ultimatum. “By God,” he declared, “we can no longer endure this vilification of our forefathers, this derision of our traditional values, this abuse of our gods. Either you stop Muhammad yourself, abuTalib, or you must let us stop him. Since you yourself take the same position we do, in opposition to what he’s saying, we will rid you of him.” Either abu-Talib persuaded his nephew into silence, that is, or Muhammad would be forced into permanent silence.

To a man like abu-Talib, the idea was abhorrent; he would not and could not do it. The principle involved went to the basis of social and political existence: kinship. If he were to expel Muhammad from the clan, he’d essentially be signing his death warrant, and thus betraying his duty as head of the clan to extend his protection to every member of it. No man of honor could do such a thing, and abu-Talib saw it as a sign of how low honor had sunk that abu-Jahl would even demand such a thing. But there was another factor too.

Even if abu-Talib had not formally accepted Muhammad’s message, something in it resonated with him. He could, after all, have declared that his nephew’s preaching was against the tradition of the clan itself; he could have commanded him to stop on penalty of expulsion. But he did not. Instead, he finessed the situation, safe in the knowledge that abu-Jahl’s threat on Muhammad’s life could not be carried out without his cooperation. This was just heated talk, he must have thought; there would be no blood spilled. So he deflected abuJahl and the others with, as ibn-Ishaq puts it, “a soft answer and a conciliatory reply.”

Surely Muhammad would be open to reason. Surely abu-Talib could persuade him to tone down his message, if only as a personal favor to himself. We know he tried, pleading with his nephew at least to be more discreet in his preaching. But however torn Muhammad may have been between seeing his uncle under such pressure on the one hand and the mandate of his message on the other, there was no doubt in his mind as to which had to prevail.

The record of their exchange is fraught with tension. “Uncle, by God,” said Muhammad, “if they put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left on condition that I abandon this path, I would not abandon it, even if I perish in the course of it.” And having practically given abu-Talib permission to expel him and thus sanction his execution, he broke down in tears and made for the door, only to hear abuTalib, himself now in tears, call him to stop: “Come back, nephew. Say whatever you want, for by God, I will never give you up on any account.”

f abu-Jahl was unaware of exactly what had transpired between abuTalib and Muhammad, the sight of Muhammad continuing to preach at the Kaaba precinct was enough to tell him the upshot of it, and his fury now focused as much on abu-Talib as on Muhammad himself. He began to talk openly about collective punishment of the Hashims for harboring this subversive in their midst, even hinting at outright warfare. But the other clan leaders still sought more judicious ways to deal with the dilemma posed by Muhammad. They were agreed that he had to be silenced, and that to do this they would need abu-Talib to expel him; but to declare open war would only be to roil the whole city in mayhem, and that was the last thing they needed. They decided instead on another tactic: go back to abu-Talib and offer him a new son instead.

This time the delegation was led not by abu-Jahl but by abuSufyan, the head of the Abd Shams clan, and it included Umara, “the strongest, brightest, and most handsome” scion of the Quraysh elite. With his arm around Umara’s shoulders, abu-Sufyan addressed abuTalib. “We hereby offer you a man for a man,” he said. “Take Umara as your own, and you will have the benefit of his intelligence and support. Adopt him as your own son and in return give us this nephew of yours, the one who has opposed your tradition and the tradition of your fathers, who has severed the unity of our people and mocked our way of life, so that we may kill him.”

Abu-Talib’s response was as shocked and outraged as one might expect. “This is an evil thing that you would put upon me,” he said. “You want to give me your son so that I can feed him and nurture him for you, while I give you my nephew so that you can kill him? By God, this shall never be.”

That was the end of soft- spoken deflection from abu-Talib. In disgust at the level the other clan leaders had descended to, he called his clan and their allies together to take a united stand against the demand for Muhammad’s expulsion. With the Hashims refusing to bend to the decision of the other clan leaders, the internecine warfare abu-Jahl had been advocating began to seem less unthinkable. People talked about it with alarm in the alleys and the markets, in private courtyards and in the Kaaba precinct, and though most condemned the idea, the fact that they were even discussing it brought it within the realm of possibility.

As the whole city debated the issue, the Meccan leadership made one last attempt at behind-the-scenes negotiation. They sent a third delegation, this time directly to Muhammad, and made what they evidently thought was an irresistible proposal: to buy him off. All he had to do was stop insulting the tribal gods and declaring that the tribal ancestors were unbelievers, they said, and the world would be his. “If what you want is money, we will gather for you of our property so that you may be the richest of us. If you want honor, we will make you our chief so that nothing can be decided without your agreement. And if this ghost which comes to you is such that you cannot get rid of it, we will find a physician for you and exhaust our means in getting you cured.”

The proposal smacked of desperation, of course, let alone deceit. They intended to give Muhammad neither money nor power, hoping instead to tempt him into agreeing so that they could then claim that he was nothing but a hypocrite, a man who said one thing in public while accepting quite another under the table. There is no record of him laughing in response—he reportedly replied only with a Quranic verse about disbelievers “veiling their hearts”—but one suspects at least an inward smile at the culpable naïveté that could produce so blatantly bogus an offer. Unable to conceive that what drove Muhammad was anything other than self-interest, the Meccan leaders had merely emphasized the extent of their own.

It’s not hard to understand their mounting frustration. Their aim was to silence Muhammad, yet everything they had tried so far only made him—and his message—all the more talked about. Now their problem assumed greater urgency as the date of the annual hajj neared, with tens of thousands due to descend on Mecca and on the annual Ukaz fair just outside town. Word was that the amped-up debate over Muhammad’s preaching would bring even more pilgrims than usual, allowing him to “infect” the visitors with his radical ideas. How could the ruling elite contain his influence? How could they counter Muhammad without making him seem more important?

At a meeting recorded by ibn-Ishaq, one clan leader suggested, “We should say he’s a kahin”—a soothsayer, that is, given to trances and possession by spirits. No, said ibn-Mughira, the man whose son Umara had been offered in exchange for Muhammad, that wouldn’t work: “He doesn’t speak like a kahin, with wild mutterings and incoherent rhymes.”

“Then we should say he’s possessed by a jinn,” said another, but ibn-Mughira shot this one down too: “He’s not that. We’ve seen plenty of possessed people, and with him there’s none of that choking, no spasms, no incomprehensible muttering.”

“So we’ll say he’s just another poet,” came a further suggestion. But again, no: “We know poetry in all its forms, and his speech doesn’t conform to that.”

“A sorcerer?” Ibn-Mughira shook his head. “No spitting,” he pointed out. “No magic charms, no chanted spells.”
Finally they agreed: “These are just old wives’ tales he spins, nothing but fantasies.” That would be the line. Which turned out to be entirely counter-productive. The eagerness with which they insisted that Muhammad be paid no attention merely focused more attention on him. Anyone who could get the elite this riled up, after all, had to have something going for him.
Those in power are generally blithely unaware of how unpopular their exercise of that power can make them, and in this the Quraysh leaders were no exception. The hordes of visitors and pilgrims from other tribes were all too conscious of how they were being exploited. They had no choice but to pay the tolls and taxes, access and usage fees imposed by the city leaders, or to purchase over- priced food and water, but this did not mean they were happy about it. The Quraysh monopoly on power engendered resentment, and thus admiration for anyone who dared openly challenge it. What had been intended as a smear campaign turned out as such campaigns often do: it backfired on its authors. “The Arabs went away from the Ukaz fair that year knowing about Muhammad,” ibn-Ishaq would write, “and he was talked about in the whole of Arabia.”
Angered by their failure, Mecca’s leaders became less rational than they might otherwise have been. Abu-Talib’s stubborn refusal to give up Muhammad had struck a nerve, since the principles on which he based his refusal were exactly the principles by which they too were supposed to be living. They had revealed themselves as shallow and hypocritical, and just as modern regimes tend to do in the face of such exposure, they over-reacted. Urged on by abu-Jahl, they declared a boycott of the whole Hashim clan.

he proclamation was inscribed on sheepskin vellum, sealed by the leaders of the two largest clans—abu-Jahl of the Makhzum and abu-Sufyan of the Umayyads—and nailed to the door of the Kaaba. It ordered that nobody was to have any commercial dealings of any kind with members of the Hashim clan, not even for basic foodstuffs. They were to be barred from the caravans, banned from the markets, excluded from all business deals and partnerships. No member of any other clan was to marry one of them. In a form of internal exile, they were to be shunned, treated as though they did not exist, made to feel like outsiders in their own home.

The intent was to force abu-Talib to hand over Muhammad, or if that could not be done, to squeeze the Hashims so hard that they’d oust abu-Talib and select another leader who would be either easier to intimidate or more amenable to doing as the power elite wanted. Whatever the rationale, however, it was collective punishment, unprecedented in Mecca.

An effective boycott is one that is widely observed, and for that to happen, its justice has to be acknowledged. But it escaped nobody’s notice that only the two largest clan leaders had signed the declaration. Abu-Jahl’s virulent rhetoric seemed to have swayed the usually more judicious abu-Sufyan, at least for now, but to what purpose? The real target was Muhammad and his followers, who at this stage called themselves simply mu’uminin, believers. But few Hashims were among them at this point. And whatever many Meccans thought about Muhammad, they still respected abu-Talib’s principled stance as leader of the Hashim clan. Like every other clan, the Hashims did not exist in isolation, no matter how much abu-Jahl wished them to. Marriage ties had created a deliberately dense network of kinship across clan lines so that to boycott any one clan was, in a sense, to boycott oneself.

Throughout Mecca, group loyalty was already being stretched to the breaking point as dissent over Muhammad’s message began to split families apart. After the respected abu-Bakr had accepted islam, for instance, his wife and two of his adult children followed his example, but one son remained vehemently opposed. And even as Khadija’s half-brother was one of Muhammad’s most bitter opponents, his own two sons were divided. One was an ardent believer while the other held back, despite having married Muhammad and Khadija’s eldest daughter; now, under pressure from his clan, he divorced her.

Not even Hashim solidarity was complete. The most vehement exception was abu-Talib’s half-brother abu-Lahab, the “father offlame” who had walked out when Muhammad first recited the Quranic verses to his kinsmen. Abu-Lahab strongly supported the boycott of his own clan, evidently expecting the Hashims to knuckle under the pressure, oust abu-Talib, and select him as their chief instead—a stance that was to help earn him the unenviable distinction of being the one person singled out by name for condemnation in the Quran.

The boycott would become a perfect illustration of the degree to which traditional Meccan values had been distorted, and in this it only served to emphasize what Muhammad had been preaching. So while those who backed it blamed him for dividing families against each other, those who opposed it now blamed the boycotters instead, and organized to quietly defy them. They smuggled food into the Hashim quarter by night, and began to act as “fronts” to represent the clan’s interests in the markets and on the caravans. But wary of reprisal, they remained careful to give any Hashim the cold shoulder whenever others could see them. Nobody yet dared stand up in public denunciation of what was happening.

Everyday life for the Hashims became a struggle, and one that extended beyond the effort to secure food and meet other basic needs. Being shunned ate at their self-respect. The respectful pleasantries of casual encounters in the street, the leisurely give-and-take of buying and selling in the market, the camaraderie of discussion and consultation in the Kaaba precinct—all the small things that made up the feeling of being an integral part of the larger community—were suddenly gone, and the insult was immense, especially to abu-Talib.

He was in his sixties by now, an old man for the time, yet even as his health suffered under the pressure, his determination to resist only increased. He issued a stinging rebuke of the Quraysh leaders in poetic form, and the rhymes he wrote went viral as they made the rounds of alleys and markets, private courtyards and public precincts. If this is what it meant to be Quraysh, he wrote, their honor was worthless. Who would want the protection of cowards like them? “Rather than your protection, give me a young camel, / Weak, grumbling, and murmuring, / Sprinkling its flanks with urine, / Lagging behind the herd and not keeping up. / When it climbs the desert ridges, you’d call it a weasel.”