The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (4 page)

The stark fact is that she had not married again. Traditionally, a newly widowed woman, especially one in her early twenties with a newborn infant, would have remarried very quickly. If need be, one of her husband’s brothers would have stepped up. Even as a second or third wife, she’d thus be ensuring both her own protection and the child’s status. But in newly prosperous Mecca, the old rules were breaking down. In principle, Amina was under the protection of her father-in-law, Abd al-Muttalib, but after the trauma of having nearly killed his own son, that legendary leader of Mecca was aging fast. With his decline, his Hashim clan was also beginning to wane in influence and wealth. The Umayyad clan was in ascendance, and though the Hashims were hardly reduced to the status of poor cousins, at least not yet, there was no advantage for anyone in marrying Amina and adopting a son with no inheritance. She was destined to remain a widow, and her son an only child without even half-brothers and half-sisters, cut off from the dense tangle of family relationships that defined Meccan society. She must have felt she had no option but to leave him with his foster family, especially since they were still willing to postpone that matter of a fee.

Muhammad was taken back over the mountains, and Beduin life would become deeply ingrained in him. “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” said Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuits, anticipating modern psychology by several centuries, and so it was with Muhammad. His Beduin childhood would play a major role in making him who he was.

The much-touted purity of desert life was in fact the purity of near-poverty, with no room for indulgence. Once weaned, he’d eat the regular Beduin fare of camel milk along with grains and pulses grown in winter pastures—a sparse diet for a sparse way of life, with an animal slaughtered for meat only for a big celebration or to honor a visiting dignitary. There were no luxuries, not even the sweetness of honey and dates. But if it was a sparse life, it was also a healthy one, spent almost entirely outdoors.

The high desert steppe was an early education in the power of nature and the art of living with it: how to gauge the right time to move from winter to summer grazing and back again; how to find water where there seemed to be none; how to adjust the long black camel-hair tents to give shade in summer and create warmth on winter nights. Every child did whatever work he or she was capable of. As soon as he could walk, Muhammad was sent out to herd the flocks under the protective wing of one of his foster sisters, Shayma. As older children do with youngsters in large families, she carried him on her adolescent hip when his legs gave out, and kept a watchful eye on him. He in turn watched her, learning how to handle the goats and camels and becoming to all intents and purposes a Beduin boy except that he was always called “the Qurayshi,” the one from the Quraysh tribe.

The name was a constant reminder that though he was living with Halima’s clan, he was not one of them; he belonged somewhere else, on the other side of the forbiddingly jagged mountain chain aptly called the Hijaz, “the barrier.” Though Mecca was only fifty miles away, it could as well have been a thousand. The Beduin talked of the place with a shudder. All those people hemmed in by walls with no space to roam? Even something as basic as the open horizon blocked by mountains all around? How could anyone live that way? Yet there was an undertone of grudging respect in acknowledgment of their economic reliance on the townspeople—a reliance of which Muhammad himself was a daily reminder.

By the time he was five, he could handle the animals by himself. He’d wait by a well while the camels drank seemingly endlessly, their humps fattening as the red blood cells in them hydrated; fight sleep as he stood night watch, guarding the flocks against hyenas howling at the scent of prey; listen for the rustle of desert foxes in the brush or the restless anxiety of his charges as a mountain lion prowled silently nearby, its tracks clear in the dust the next morning. He didn’t need to be told that the desert was a lesson in humility, stripping away all pretense and ambition. He knew in his body how large and alive the world was, and how small a human being within it.

Even the sun-seared desert rock seemed to breathe as it released the accumulated heat of day into the cold night air. The vast canopy of stars moved overhead, each constellation playing out its story, impervious to the boy below. It was a world inhabited by spirits, palpable presences all around. How else explain a solitary tree defying all probability to stand tall in an otherwise barren valley? Or the landmark of a singular stone monolith standing out as though dropped from above by a giant hand? Or the way a spring hidden deep in the cleft of a rock wall suddenly came to life, bubbling as you bent down to drink from it as though it were speaking to you? The spirits of these places, the jinns, were unpredictable, capriciously capable of either good or evil. Either way, they demanded respect. In much the same way as Christians might cross themselves to ward off evil, travelers camping for the night would chant an incantation: “Tonight I take refuge in the lord of this valley of the jinn from any evil that may lie here.” And if you were ever tempted to take this world for granted, there were times when the ground itself would remind you of your folly and the rock you thought so solid would began to shake and tremble, even to groan, leaving you no place to hide or take cover from what felt like the wrath of God.

In the desert, nobody needed to preach that there was a higher power than the human. Whether you think of it as natural or supernatural—and in the sixth century there was no difference between the two—anyone unaware of it did not survive. But how, then, was Muhammad to survive when this whole world was abruptly taken from him? Without warning, the five-year-old was separated from the only brothers and sisters he’d ever have, taken over the mountains to a city that seemed an unutterably foreign country, and handed over by the only mother he’d ever known. It would be fifty-five years until he saw any of his foster family again.

he traditional story of why Halima brought Muhammad back to Mecca tells of a kind of divine open-heart surgery. Ibn-Ishaq narrates it first in Halima’s voice: “He and his foster brother were with the lambs behind the tents when his brother came running to us and said, ‘Two men clothed in white have seized that Qurayshi brother of mine and thrown him down and opened up his belly, and are stirring it up.’ We ran toward him and found him standing up, his face bright red. We took hold of him and asked him what was the matter. He said ‘Two men came and threw me down and opened my belly and searched in it for I don’t know what.’ ”

Two later versions of the same story are told in the adult Muhammad’s own reported words. In the first, he doesn’t say how old he was when it happened: “Two men came to me with a gold basin full of snow. Then they seized me, opened up my belly, extracted my heart, and opened it up. They took a black drop from it and threw that drop away, and then they washed my heart with the snow until it was thoroughly clean.”

In the second and more ornate of these later versions, however, Muhammad places the angelic visitation not in childhood but in adulthood, after he’d left Mecca for Medina. “Two angels came to me while I was somewhere in the valley of Medina,” he said. “One of them came down to earth, while the other remained between heaven and earth. The one said to the other, ‘Open his breast,’ and then ‘Remove his heart.’ He did so, and took a clot of blood which was the pollution of Satan out of my heart, and threw it away. Then the first said, ‘Wash his heart as you would a receptacle, and his breast as you would a covering.’ Then he summoned the sakina, the spirit of the divine, which had the face of a white cat, and it was placed on my heart. Then the other said, ‘Sew up his breast.’ So they sewed up my breast and placed the seal of prophecy between my shoulders, and then turned away from me. While this was happening, I was watching it all as though I were a bystander.”

As the detail accretes with each repetition—the snow in the desert, the white face of the divine spirit, the dialogue between the angels—you can see the story taking shape. It becomes less specifically Arabian as it develops, calling on elements of hero legends worldwide: on Greek and Egyptian god legends (the golden bowl, the cat face); on the Christian idea of Satan lodged like a black clot in the heart; on Jewish mysticism (the sakina being the Arabic counterpart of the Kabbalistic shekhina); and on Buddhist tradition (the mysterious seal of prophecy between the shoulder blades). In fact it becomes almost dream-like.

Whether as boy or man, Muhammad’s calmness and the almost serene beauty of the scene have none of the terror he would experience on Mount Hira. This was part of the biography he should have had— one created by later believers who, despite the Quran’s insistent abstention from miracles and omens, had the very human desire for miracles to be performed and omens to be fulfilled. They needed faith bolstered by physical evidence, and thus insisted that Muhammad conform to popular expectations of a man blessed by the divine. However un-Quranically, they called on the tradition of miracle to create a physical image of Muhammad’s purity of heart, a miraculous apparition that people could grasp and hold on to. In a world where mystery was tangible, this was something familiar. It was what was expected, of a piece with other stories like the blaze of white light on Abdullah’s forehead the night Muhammad was conceived, or the glow from Amina’s pregnant belly, or the sudden abundance of Halima’s milk.

In Halima’s version, however—or at least the one attributed to her—neither she nor her husband saw the episode this way. They paid no attention to their own son’s tale of having seen two men clothed in white, doubtless attributing it, as any sensible parent might, to a child’s overactive imagination. Being practical people, they put the episode down to illness. “We took Muhammad back to the tent,” Halima would remember, “and my husband said, ‘I am afraid that this child has had some kind of fit, so we should return him to Mecca before it happens again.’ ” What they really feared, she added, was that he was possessed by a jinn and that “ill will befall him.”

It seems absurd to play armchair diagnostician on the basis of such evidence and use what is clearly a miracle story to argue, as some have done, that Muhammad suffered from epilepsy. Especially since whatever this was, it was evidently a one-time event. If he were in fact subject to epileptic fits, his many opponents in Mecca would certainly have made much of his condition, yet even though they would use every argument they could muster against his preaching—he was a fabulist, they’d say, a dreamer, a liar, a sorcerer—they would never use this one.

In the end, the most important function of this angelic intervention is probably quite mundane: it serves as a narrative device. It’s a means of transporting Muhammad back to Mecca, and one that provides a more satisfying explanation for the Muslim believer than the more likely reason for his return: since there had been no improvement in Amina’s fortunes, Halima and her husband saw no possibility of ever being paid for their trouble. Muhammad at age five had become just one more mouth to feed, and for a family living on the edge, one mouth too many.

he child Halima delivered back to his mother was more Beduin than Quraysh: a lean, hardy boy, with none of the chubbiness usually associated with his age. The desert was written on his hands, criss-crossed with a fine tracery of dust worked deep into the pores; in his eyes, narrowed against sun and blowing sand; on his hard-soled feet, with widespread toes and deeply cracked heels. Riding into Mecca on that well-used donkey, he was unmistakably the country boy in the big city, overwhelmed by the rush of sensation, by the smells, the noise, the sounds, the colors, the press of people, the finery of their clothes, the smoothness of their skin. One imagines him shrinking back and clinging to his foster mother’s skirts as they entered Amina’s house, though more likely he stood straight and tightlipped in a young boy’s imitation of the stoicism so admired in the desert.

Now he’d sleep within hard stone walls instead of the animal warmth and softness of a camel-hair tent, alone on a pallet with a stranger-mother instead of in the familiar huddle of foster brothers and sisters. He has to have felt hemmed in by those walls, as Beduin always have, and hemmed in too by the mountains that practically encircled the city, creating “the hollow of Mecca.” The stars that had seemed so close in the high desert were suddenly far away, dimmed by the stale haze of cooking smoke. Longing for the pure air and open spaces he was used to, he must have experienced a loneliness he had never known possible. He was familiar with the solitude of the desert, but this was different: not solitude—that was impossible with so many people packed so closely together—but a sense of isolation. Among the people who were supposed to be his own tribe, he found himself a stranger.

Just the way he talked marked him as an outsider, his Beduin accent and gestures mocked by other boys until he learned to adapt to the Qurayshi ones, eager as any child to be accepted. A certain wariness crept into the corners of his eyes, and his smile became tentative and cautious; even decades later, hailed as the hero of his people, he’d rarely be seen to laugh. He was Quraysh, and Hashim within the Quraysh, but his existence did not appear to count. In a society where you were defined by who had sired you, he seemed fated to be haunted by his father’s absence. Even if he had no words for it as yet, he must have sensed that he would have to prove himself again and again, always wondering on what terms he existed, and by whose grace.

This was what it meant to be an orphan: the ordinary childhood freedom of being without care would never be his. He would never have that blithe ability to take things for granted. Yet this was precisely the key to the man he would become. Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers.