The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (3 page)

Like many Beduin women, Halima avoided this fate by hiring herself out as a wet nurse. This is what poor women did for the rich everywhere in the world at the time. They did it until well into the twentieth century, when the widespread availability of baby formula and the breakdown of traditional rural life made wet-nursing obsolete in most societies, to be replaced by nannies and boarding schools. But until then, from early biblical times on through the Greek and Roman empires, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, urban children born to well-to-do families were regularly sent to wet nurses in the country until weaning. This was partly a matter of status—“what one does”—but it also served the interests of the wealthy in a very specific way.

The prime role of an aristocratic wife was to produce male heirs, but with infant mortality so high that barely half of all infants born alive survived into adulthood, this was not easy. Obviously the chances were improved the more often a wife became pregnant, so it was important that she be fertile again as quickly as possible after giving birth. Since nursing inhibits ovulation, the best way to ensure this was for someone else to breast-feed her infant. (The obverse was that the peasant and nomad women who served as wet nurses had far fewer pregnancies. The ugly upper-class stereotype of the lower class “breeding like rabbits” was in fact quite the reverse: the upper class were the breeders, and the lower class the feeders.)

By her own account, Halima was one of the hardest hit of the Beduin women trying to find a foster infant in the late spring of the year 570. She was from one of the semi-nomadic clans eking out a subsistence living in the arid steppelands over the mountains from Mecca. Like all those living on the edge, her clan was fighting for survival. Even the donkey she rode was weak and emaciated. There was hardly any milk in her breasts, so that her own infant cried through the night for hunger. She knew she presented a poor prospect to elite Meccans looking for a good healthy wet nurse but she tried nonetheless, only to watch enviously as others she had come with found infants to foster, and the available market dwindled. Soon “every woman who came into Mecca with me had gotten a suckling except for me,” she’d remember. There was just one child left, but “each of us refused when she was told he was an orphan, because we wanted to get payment from the child’s father. We said ‘An orphan? With no father to pay us?’ And so we rejected him.”

Halima had clearly heard nothing of the things people would later swear to: the flash of white light on Abdullah’s forehead as he went to Amina on their wedding night, or the way her pregnant belly was said to glow so brightly that “you could see by its light as far as the castles of Syria.” It would be at least a hundred years until such stories became widely circulated. So far as she and the other wet nurses were concerned, this was just an infant nobody wanted. Not even his grandfather. Though in principle Amina and her newborn son were under his protection as head of the Hashim clan, the aging Abd al-Muttalib evidently considered the fate of yet another grandson, and an orphaned one at that, no business of his, certainly not worth the payment for the customary two years of fostering until he was weaned.

Neither Amina nor Halima had statistics at their fingertips, of course, but they both knew that in the city, any child’s chances of surviving into adulthood were not good unless he could be sent away to a wet nurse. In fact to survive infancy at all before the age of modern medicine was itself an achievement. At the height of Rome’s power, for instance, only one third of those born in that city made it to their fifth birthday, while records for eighteenth-century London show that well over half of those born were dead by age sixteen. Whether in Paris or in Mecca, something as simple as a rotten tooth or an infected cut could kill you. Between disease, malnutrition, street violence, accidents, childbirth, bad water, and spoiled food, not to mention warfare, only ten percent made it beyond age forty-five. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, when the role of germs became clear and antibiotics were first developed, that life spans began to increase to what we now take for granted.

One statistic stands out from from this dismal record, however: throughout the world, infant survival was higher in rural areas than in cities. If the specific reasons weren’t understood, the concept of fresh air was. Cities were not healthy places to be, and for all its new prosperity, sixth-century Mecca was no different. At the height of summer, when daytime temperatures regularly reached well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the air was barely breathable. Fumes from cooking fires were held in by the ring of mountains around the city, and vultures wheeled above the dung heap on the edge of town, a noxious dump where refuse rotted and fermented, earning it the name “mountain of smoke.” Hyenas snuffled and scavenged there by night, and the narrow alleys echoed with their howls. With no sewage system or running water, infections spread rapidly. Earlier that same year of Muhammad’s birth, there’d been one of the localized outbreaks of the smallpox that ravaged the Middle East as though by whim, disappearing as suddenly as it had arrived. Cities were thus dangerous places for vulnerable newborns, and Amina must have been desperate to find a wet nurse who’d take her only son to the safety of the high desert. Why else would she settle on so poor a prospect as a woman who had barely enough milk for her own child, let alone someone else’s? And equally to the point, why did Halima settle for an orphan child?

Perhaps she caved in and took Muhammad simply because she didn’t want to be the only one of her group to return across the mountains without a foster child. Perhaps she took him out of pity, or in open-hearted good faith, or impelled by a certain peasant pride: she had come to find an infant to nurse and was stubborn enough not to leave without one. She certainly claimed no special foresight. Instead, as she’d tell it, “When we decided to depart, I said to my husband, ‘By God, I do not like the idea of returning without a suckling; I will go and take that orphan.’ He replied, ‘Do as you please. Perhaps God will bless us on his account.’ So I went back and took him for the sole reason that I could not find any other infant.”

The story reverberates with echoes of the Christian nativity story. Halima and her husband are the humble shepherds, and if there are no tales of wise men bringing gifts or of comets streaking across the night sky or of paranoid retaliation by a vicious king, popular belief demands its share of omens nonetheless. So the moment Halima decides to take Muhammad, the whole tone of her speech as relayed by ibn-Ishaq changes. The chatty style, the exchanges with her husband, the donkey’s pathetic gauntness all disappear, and her story becomes a miracle one. Her breasts fill with milk, as do the udders of a she-camel they had brought with them, so that Halima and her family now drink all they want. The donkey is suddenly strong and fast, and when they arrive back at their encampment in the high desert, their sheep and goats are thriving, producing unprecedented amounts of milk even as the drought persists. It is clear to Halima that her decision to adopt Muhammad has brought her family divine good fortune. Or at least it was clear in retrospect, by the time she told the story—or by the time it was elaborated in the re-telling by others, turned into the apocryphal tale that piety and reverence demanded, much as the miracle stories of the infancy of Jesus were and still are treasured items of popular belief.

omething in us still believes that far more than nutrition and antibodies are involved in the act of breast-feeding. In ancient Rome, for instance, it was believed that a baby with a Greek wet nurse would drink in her language along with her milk and thus grow up speaking Greek as well as Latin (which was often the case, since the child was surrounded by the sounds of Greek for its first two years of life). Today we talk of the physiology and psychology of mother-child bonding, but we also tend to think of breast-feeding as somehow more authentic than using baby formula, giving it moral value as more honest and more natural. In this respect, sixth-century Meccans may not have been so very different. They believed that there was a kind of rudimentary, earthy vitality in the milk of Beduin wet nurses, and that this vitality went far beyond the physical. As Amina saw it, what her son would drink in with Halima’s milk was authenticity: the essence of what it was to be a son of the desert, or as the Meccans called the Beduin, arabiya, Arab.

Honor, pride, loyalty, independence, defiance of hardship— these were the core values of Beduin culture, celebrated in the long narrative poems that were the most prized form of entertainment throughout the Arabian peninsula, everywhere from royal courts where cosseted bards were handed purses of gold in payment, to camel-hair tents where children would fall asleep to the rhythmic lullaby of an elder’s chanted verses. If most people could neither read nor write, that did not mean they were insensitive to words. On the contrary, oral culture had a passion for language, for the music and majesty of it in the hands of a master. And what people lacked in literacy, they more than made up for in memory. Hours-long poems were recited by heart—an apt phrase for memory when it went to the heart of culture. Bards mourned ancestral tribes that had all but disappeared in the proverbial mists of time. They celebrated the great battles fought in the constellations of the night sky, and the ones fought on earth just beyond living memory. They immortalized warrior legends of courage and self-sacrifice for the greater good, and in the process created a literary tradition so strong that the best-known of their work, “the seven golden odes,” are classics of Arabic literature to this day, epic tales alive with the particulars of sexual bravado, death-defying adventure, the pain of lost greatness, and the ache of lost love. And if the sense of loss was a recurring one, that made their work all the more hauntingly memorable.

To the urban elite of Mecca, Beduin poetry spoke to everything they wished to be and were uneasily aware that they were not. Their passion for it was fueled by nostalgia: a longing for a highly romanticized idea of a purity that once was, for a strong moral code uncontaminated by the exigencies of trade and profit. The Beduin warrior was a simpler, more honorable man for a simpler, more honorable time. Much as eighteenth-century Europe romanticized the presumed simple life of shepherds and shepherdesses, and twentieth-century America idealized the strength and flinty honor of the John Wayne cowboy, so sixth-century Meccans saw the Beduin as the human bedrock of Arabia.

But actual shepherds and shepherdesses, like actual cowboys, were something else. However pure and noble their past, real fleshand-blood Beduin were considered primitive in the present. The phrases “boorish Beduin” and “Beduin rabble” appear often in the early Islamic histories, always spoken by privileged urbanites who saw those still living in tents as unsophisticated rubes, mere goat and camel herders good enough for child care and as caravan guides, but not much more. For most of the Meccan aristocracy, the Beduin were an uncomfortable reminder that for all their urbanized airs, they themselves were only five generations “off the farm,” as it were.

Yet Mecca could not have existed without them. It relied on them not only for purebred horses and riding camels but for the mules and pack camels without which the trade caravans could never have crossed hundreds of arid miles at a time to make the city a major mercantile hub. And the Beduin produced the animal products so essential to everyday life: everything from harnesses and saddles to clothing and blankets, preserved dairy and meat staples, sandals and water-skins. Townspeople and nomads were caught in a symbiotic relationship that was valued and resented in equal measure by both sides. On the part of the Meccans, it was not unlike the way American political oratory still celebrates “the heartland” even while considering it relevant only at election times, when it is beholden on all candidates for political office, if they can, to hark back to their grandfathers living a hardscrabble life in middle America, thus celebrating the presumed virtues of hard work, perseverance, and thrift. If Meccans valued the Beduin past even as they abandoned its values, they were no more ambivalent in this respect than their modern Western counterparts.

In a way, then, it was perfect that Muhammad should spend the first five years of his life with the Beduin. Like him, they were valued and yet ignored, central and yet marginalized. Like those Roman infants hearing Greek and then speaking it, he absorbed Beduin values as naturally as that legendary mother’s milk. A respect for the power and mystery of the natural world; the idea of communal property where personal wealth was meaningless; the music and grandeur of poetry and history echoing in his dreams—all these and more would form the core of the man he would become, and would inevitably place him at odds with the city of his birth.

alima had taken Muhammad despite the fact that he was an orphan, yet this was also precisely the reason he would stay with her not just the customary two years, but far longer. This is not the accepted explanation, however. That is the one

given by Halima herself: her family saw the child as a kind of good- luck charm, allowing them to thrive despite the ongoing drought. “We recognized this as a bounty from God for two years, until I weaned him,” she’d say. “Then we brought him to his mother in Mecca, though we were most anxious to keep him with us because of the good fortune he brought us. I said to her: ‘It would be best if you were to leave your little boy with us until he is older, safe from diseases here in Mecca,’ and we persisted until she agreed.”

If it’s easy to imagine the peasant woman cannily crafting her argument that the boy would be safer with her, it’s equally tempting to imagine the tearful mother reaching her arms out to her toddler and hugging him close, torn between the desire to have him with her and concern for his well-being. But there is no record of any such scene, which is almost certainly more twenty-first-century sentiment than sixth-century reality. Amina had more than her son’s physical health in mind when she accepted the offer to extend his fostering and sent him back with Halima to the high desert.