The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (5 page)

Psychologists have pointed to the remarkably long list of “high- achievement” figures orphaned young. They include Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, William the Conqueror, Cardinal Richelieu, the metaphysical poet John Donne, Lord Byron, Isaac Newton, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name just a few, and possibly also Jesus, since Joseph disappears from the Gospel narratives almost the moment he is born. Against all expectation, it seems, early loss can be a stimulus to achievement. As one researcher puts it, the awareness of vulnerability can have a paradoxical strengthening effect: “The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood,” and eventually develops into “a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world.”

If such a thirst could indeed be said to exist in Muhammad, it would very quickly be doubled. We can only speculate as to why Amina had left her child for so long with his Beduin foster family, because she would not live long enough to tell her own story. And this may have been why she took him on the two-hundred-mile trek north to Medina just a few months after he had been returned to her.

For a woman of the time, this was not a journey to be made lightly, least of all with a child in tow, so one has to ask why she would undertake it. Did she know she was going to die? Had she been frail ever since her son’s birth, which might have been another reason she had not remarried? If she was indeed already sick, the journey would have been all the more arduous, so she must have had a compelling reason.

As things stood, her child’s future in Mecca did not look bright, but Medina might offer an alternative. Muhammad’s greatgrandmother had been Medinan, and his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib had been born there, so Amina may have made the journey in the desperate hope of a sick woman to find a secure home for her child before she died. But the visit apparently made little if any impression on Muhammad’s distant Medinan relatives. When he did finally find refuge there, forty-six years later, there is no mention of any special welcome from kin, merely a note registering his partial local ancestry. Any meaningful blood connection, it seems, had been lost.

We have no details of what illness Amina suffered. All we know is that on the way back from Medina, at the caravan halt of Abwa, halfway between the two cities, the boy born without a father would watch his mother die. The small caravan they’d traveled with delivered him back to Mecca, to his grandfather’s house. At age six, he was now doubly orphaned, his sole inheritance a radical insecurity as to his place in the world.

he traditional accounts maintain that Muhammad was his grandfather’s favorite. This is, after all, what emotional logic demands. For believing Muslims, the idea of such a treasured figure ignored and neglected hurts, so the reality of sixth-century

Mecca would be subsumed to a more comforting one: the doubly orphaned boy discovering his identity at his grandfather’s feet, hearing the legends of clan and tribe from the lips of the man who had played such a central role in those same legends.

Abd al-Muttalib had become so infirm that even walking with a cane was painful. Each day he was carried to the Kaaba precinct on a rug-covered litter, there to lie in the shade of a palm canopy and be deferred to and consulted, longevity rewarded with honor. It’s tempting to imagine his eyes lighting up as his favorite grandson climbs onto the litter beside him and listens wide-eyed while the old man tells him of his heritage, one as rich and complex as the patterns in the rugs they lie on. This was his ancestry—in Meccan terms, his pride. Who you were was determined by your forefathers, so much so that there was practically a cult of ancestors, their tombs venerated close to the point of worship, as is still done throughout North Africa and the Middle East, from Abraham’s tomb in Hebron to those of famed rabbis and imams.

But exactly what comfort could the young Muhammad have derived from an ancestry such as his? What was he to make, for example, of the dramatic tale of how he had come into being? Of the fact that this old man had nearly murdered his own son, Muhammad’s father, in front of a mere block of stone? Did he take it as a mark of his specialness, as the early historians assume? Did it give the boy who had never laid eyes on his father a sense of pride in who he was, a kind of genetic memory of greatness? This was surely what was intended, but one can’t help thinking that a child with neither father nor mother may have heard it another way altogether, his eyes gone wide not with pride but with horror. For all he knew, the old man could kill him as easily.

In fact the whole issue is probably moot, since it’s unlikely that Muhammad ever heard the story from his grandfather. Before what Philippe Ariès would call “the invention of childhood” in eighteenth- century Europe, children were seen simply as small adults. With such high mortality rates, there was no room for sentiment. Especially not for orphans. If Abd al-Muttalib even registered the boy’s existence, it was doubtless as just another child scurrying around. And if Muhammad saw his grandfather at all, it was probably only from a distance, a remote figure too highly placed to pay attention, and one with plenty more progeny with far more promising futures. He would not have dared approach the old man, knowing he’d be shooed away, called a pest, a daydreamer, a good-for-nothing. “Make yourself useful,” he’d be told. “Go gather fuel, draw some water. Scram, away with you.” And a slap about the head for good measure.

He’d have been grateful in the end to simply be ignored and given room to learn, as the marginalized always must, how to adapt and survive. A boy without a birthright, his existence was conditional, dependent on making himself unobtrusive, keeping to the background. Yet this was precisely what would enable him to see his own society with such clear eyes. Treated by his own people as one of them yet not one of them, he couldn’t help but be aware of the contradictions inherent in a society that was supposed to be his, but seemed to have no place for him.

hat the six-year-old saw was a society in which the sacred and the profane mixed so easily that there was no saying where one left off and the other began. Mecca was not the backward, isolated enclave most modern Westerners seem to imagine. It was a thriving capitalist hub, a central point on the north–south trade route that ran the length of western Arabia from the ports of Yemen up to the Mediterranean, and to Damascus and beyond. The genius of the Quraysh was their canny combination of commerce with pilgrimage. Piety and profit were the twin engines of their city’s prosperity.

It had been only five generations since the Quraysh had taken control of Mecca, refurbished its ancient shrine, and appointed themselves its new guardians. They had migrated north from Yemen, their movement impelled, like so many mass migrations throughout history, by disaster. In this case, the disaster was the collapse of the giant Marib dam, whose ruins can still be seen in the hills outside Sana, the biblical Sheba.

A quarter million acres of irrigated fields had been created thanks to the dam. Along with irrigation came a vibrant civilization, funded in large part by the cultivation of the native spindly thorn trees that looked utterly negligible to anyone who failed to realize the value of their sap: myrrh. But with wealth, as always, came greed. And with greed instability. Control of Yemen shifted from Byzantine-backed Christian Ethiopia to Zoroastrian Persia to independent kings (one of them, in the fifth century, Jewish) and then through the whole cycle again, each shift accomplished by force of arms. The chaos of warfare took its inevitable toll, and the upkeep of the Marib dam was neglected. In the end, its collapse was due to something ridiculously simple: moles had burrowed so deep into its huge clayey base that it gave way, and the land reverted to high desert. A northward exodus began, including several clans led by the legendary Qusayy, Abd al-Muttalib’s great-grandfather. Banding into a single tribe, they adopted the name Quraysh, meaning “those gathered together,” and turned their backs not only on Yemen but also on agriculture. When they settled in Mecca, they realized that if you controlled the sacred, you would never starve.

The sanctuary they adopted was soon to be known as the Kaaba, though it was not yet the tall cube-shaped structure (the word “cube” comes directly from the Arabic kaaba) that was to become the focal point of Islam. When Muhammad first laid eyes on it, it was a relatively modest affair, at least by modern standards. Its stone and clay walls were still only the height of a man, and its roof was merely palm fronds draped with cloth. To the boy fresh from the life of nomadic herders, it was reassuringly familiar since it was often referred to as the arish, the word used for a palm-covered sheepfold or livestock pen. But this term also had profound mystical significance throughout the Middle East. It was the ancient Semitic name for the tabernacle built in the wilderness by the Israelites under Moses, and indicated not just a protected place but a place of protection—a sanctuary and shelter for humans as well as animals, as in “The Lord is my shepherd.” The shrine was thus the ultimate enclosure, holding the spirit of God within itself: the godhead al-Lah, literally “the high one” like its Hebrew equivalent Elohim or the still more ancient Mesopotamian El—the one supreme divinity reigning above all lesser tribal gods and totems.

In keeping with the age-old metaphors of height and grandeur, you might expect such a sanctuary to tower imposingly above its city as the Parthenon did above Athens or the Temple above ancient Jerusalem. But the early Kaaba defied the tradition of “high places” for communion with the divine. It was at the lowest point of Mecca, deep

[Author: was already introduced (about 20 ms. pages earlier) as “literally ‘the high one’ ”; might “literally” be deleted
here?]

in the hollow carved out by intersecting wadis, the dry riverbeds created by flash floods. And somehow this only added to its sense of mystery. The small open precinct around it was hidden by houses so that you came on it suddenly, emerging from the warren of dusty alleys overhung with latticed balconies to the light of open space. It was as though the city were sheltering the Kaaba, folding in on it. In effect it was not the crown but the navel of Mecca—the core of its being, around which everything else revolved. Even literally so. When Meccans returned from a journey, they’d do as pilgrims did and circle the sanctuary seven times, left shoulder inward: a ritual circumambulation that was a kind of seal made with one’s own body. “Here I am,” it said. “Here is where I belong.”

This sense of belonging was echoed by the tens of thousands who came from all over the Arabian peninsula during Dhu al-Hijja, “that of the hajj,” the central of the three consecutive sacred months in which the whole of Mecca was considered a sanctuary city, with all fighting banned within its limits. Pilgrims tripled its population in these months, thronging the alleys and chanting invocations as they made their way to the Kaaba. Labbayka allah-umma labbayka, they intoned: “Here I am, oh God of all people, here I am.” And La sharika laka illa sharikun huaw laka, “Thou hast no partner except such partner as thou hast”—a mysteriously ambiguous formulation that seemed to include and acknowledge all the other tribal divinities while still keeping them, as it were, in their place.

That place was not in the Kaaba itself, but in the open precinct surrounding it. How many of them there were, however, remains an open question. Three centuries later, one Damascus historian would assert that there were three hundred sixty of these “idols,” as he called them, a number much repeated by modern historians. But aside from the practical impossibility of so many in such a small space, the number itself is probably anachronistic, since it was the number of degrees in a circle as determined by the Islamic science of mathematics, which developed only in the ninth century. In reality there can have been no more than a dozen such idols, and they acted not as gods per se but as tribal totems. The fact that they were arrayed around the Kaaba, not inside it, made it clear that they were subordinate to the one god whose shrine this was. That, after all, was how polytheism worked. Despite the misleading modern idea of a cluster of gods duking it out with each other, all ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others. These others were said to be “associated” with the supreme god, and this term, used in both the Hebrew bible and the Quran, makes it clear that they were of lesser rank: not “partners of God” so much as junior associates.

To call them idols is equally misleading, bringing to mind oldfashioned Hollywood images of garishly painted and gilded statues. The whole point was that they were not statues. The Hebrew bible had been insistent that the twelve stones for the altar were to be “unhewn,” not shaped in any way by human hand. In the same way, the totem stones of Mecca were objects of mysterious power precisely because they had not been sculpted, at least not by humans. Some other, greater force had shaped them: the power of wind and time on sandstone, or the volcanic power behind quartz and feldspar and mica, or the other-worldly power of meteorites falling in fire from the heavens. They could be as small as the football-size Black Stone set into one corner of the Kaaba shrine, or as rounded and smooth as the three “daughters of God” known as Manat, Lat, and Uzza, or as large as Hubal, towering over the tallest man. Whether by virtue of size or shape or sheen, each had stood out so sharply in the desert landscape that even the most secular modern mind might sense some spirit force in the fact of their existence, and look for some way to bring them home.

These stones were venerated, garlanded, given offerings and animal sacrifices, but nobody bowed down to them or prayed to them. The stones themselves did not have power; the spirit they represented—the spirit that created them— did. But the stones were palpable; you could see them and touch them. They offered the reassurance of physical presence, expressions of the human yearning for a god made manifest, a god who spoke and could be spoken to. A personal god, you might say, functioning as a kind of user-friendly subordinate to the ineffable, invisible mystery of the force that animated the world.