The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (6 page)

Accounts of what was inside the Kaaba would become as exaggerated as what was outside. While some early Islamic historians favored comparative restraint, saying it contained only the horns from the ram sacrificed by Abraham in place of Ishmael, or just a single solid gold dove, others insisted it was full of statues representing all the many tribes of Arabia. And Christian paintings of Mary and Jesus. And hordes of treasure. And ancient swords. And still more ancient scrolls. Each version was sworn and attested to, each one seen with someone’s own eyes or with the eyes of someone close to them, and each one contradicted by the next. But the most haunting possibility, as well as the most likely, is that as in the holy of holies of the Jewish temple that had once stood far to the north in Jerusalem, the Kaaba was empty. No physical object could possibly contain the essence of the one god, so that the emptiness constituted a much greater mystery than any number of idols or piles of treasure.

t’s not hard to see why historians writing in the sophisticated urban milieux of later Damascus and Baghdad (a city that did not even exist in the sixth century) would insist that pre-Islamic Mecca was mired in idol worship. What guided them was the Quranic concept of jahiliya, variously translated as “idolatry,” “barbarism,” “darkness,” or “ignorance,” and taken as a kind of shorthand for the all-purpose idea of paganism—a word that evokes the idea of godless creatures living in benighted ignorance of all things holy.

But paganism was not godlessness. Quite the contrary, it was an over-abundance of gods: polytheism. The image of it as involving a total lack of morals and values, a chaotic infinity of competing deities, barbaric rituals, and erotically charged lasciviousness, was a product of emerging monotheism’s need to claim the higher moral ground. The concept is thus more a political creation than historical fact. All the great thinkers of antiquity were pagan, yet they lacked neither soul nor a sense of the sacred. The last way any of the great Greek philosophers would have described themselves was pagan. Then as now, the word was used derogatively. It came from the same root as the English word “peasant” (pagus in Latin, meaning a rural district); to the Roman aristocrat, a peasant was by definition a pagan, and vice versa.

The Islamic image of pre-Islamic Mecca would closely parallel the image of Israel painted by the Hebrew prophets before monotheism prevailed. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel wrote metaphorically when they described all of Jerusalem, and indeed all of Israel, as “playing the harlot.” They were accusing the ancient Israelites of selling not their bodies but their souls. And they knew what they were doing when they chose the word “harlotry.” Then as now, sex sells; use a sexual metaphor and you have people’s attention. Sooner or later, however, you’re going to be taken literally.

The irony is that the early Islamic historians, like the Hebrew prophets before them, thus proved themselves as Orientalist as any of the nineteenth-century scholars and writers so effectively dissected by Edward Said in his classic critique Orientalism. Orientalism, that is, began in the Middle East itself, long before European imperialism, and for the same reason: intellectual snobbery. These supremely urban eighth- and ninth-century men took understandable pride in the cultural and intellectual achievements of the Muslim empire, from the splendor of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock to the academies laying the foundation of modern medicine and science. They contrasted their own sophistication with the presumed primitivism of what had gone before, painting an Islamic picture of pre- and post-enlightenment. As we tend to do in the West today, they nurtured the fond idea that they and their contemporaries were the peak of civilization, the sophisticated heirs who had come so far since those days of darkness. Like us, they couldn’t help seeing the past through the lens of their own accomplishments and thus distorting it in the process, as though looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

This is how they would come to interpret a single Quranic reference to “abominations” at the Kaaba to mean nakedness, which was exactly what they would expect of unenlightened pagans. But like those who read the Hebrew prophets’ condemnation of harlotry literally, they grasped the image but missed the point. Pilgrims would indeed cast aside everyday clothes in acknowledgment of the presence of the sacred, but then they’d don the two seamless lengths of homespun unbleached linen still worn on the hajj today and known as ihram. By comparison with the usual billowing robes covering everything but the hands and feet, this was nakedness. The pilgrims made themselves deliberately vulnerable, assuming the simplest and humblest possible covering in order to allow no distinction of status or tribe, emphasizing that all were equal in the presence of the divine. All, that is, except those who supplied the homespun garments: the people who ran the business of pilgrimage, the Quraysh.

t is nothing new that there is a lot of money to be made in religion. The sixth-century Quraysh knew this as well as any modern televangelist. In the equivalent of a Wall Street bull market, the elite of Mecca ran the city as a kind of oligarchy, with power in the hands of the wealthy few. Access was always mediated, and always for a fee.

Selling the special ihram clothing was part of the business of pilgrimage, as was the provision of water and food for the pilgrims, and the sale of fodder for their camels and donkeys and horses. Which clans controlled which franchises was determined by the Quraysh leadership, who essentially parceled out monopolies (Muhammad’s own clan, the Hashims, held the one on providing water, thanks to Abd al-Muttalib’s ownership of the treasured Zamzam well. Every aspect of the pilgrimage had been carefully calculated down to the last gram of silver or gold or its equivalent in trade. Fees for the right to set up a tent, for entry to the Kaaba precinct, for the officials who cast arrows in front of Hubal or cut the throats of sacrificial animals and divided up the meat—all these and more were predetermined, and to the sole profit of the Quraysh. Their business was faith, and their faith was in business.

To a boy imbued with the rough egalitarianism of Beduin life, all this could only have come as a shock. His own people had co-opted faith, piously declaring it even as they contravened its most basic principles. From his perch on the sidelines, he saw the social injustice of what was happening all too clearly. Much like large urban areas in Africa and Asia today, the city offered both hope and despair, pulling people in from its hinterland but then condemning them to lives of poverty. Its success rode on the backs of an ever- growing underclass, drawn by dreams of wealth but condemned to the nightmare of poverty.

Muhammad was unable to close or avert his eyes as the wealthy had learned to do. He could not ignore the constant presence of the maimed reduced to begging or of once proud nomads selling themselves as indentured servants, let alone the lifelong dependence of slavery. As he lingered on the outskirts of the Kaaba precinct, always alert for an errand to be run, he learned how the system worked. He noted how the powerful always seemed to come out ahead and the powerless behind. Saw the self-satisfaction of the wealthy, as though wealth were a virtue in and of itself, a sign that they had been favored by God. Listened carefully as arbiters settled disputes over property and privilege—urban arguments in another world from the Beduin one, where all property was held in common—and admired their skill at shaping the compromises by which both sides would come away satisfied. Watched as oaths were taken and business deals concluded, pacts made and agreements witnessed, prices fixed and franchises portioned out, all sealed and pledged in the name of the one god whose precinct this was.

If any doubt lingered in his mind as to how deep the connection between piety and profit had become, it was dispelled by the blatant mix of the two at the great trade fair held just outside the city each year, at Ukaz. As vital and rambunctious as American state fairs once were, it ran in parallel with the main pilgrimage, the profane twin to the sacred hajj. This was when Mecca became not merely a trade hub but a destination, and the Quraysh took full advantage of that fact. The designated area of Ukaz was carnival, bazaar, and trading floor combined, packed with stalls and tents, animal pens, and carpeted reception areas under palm-covered shades. Everything was for sale here, every purchase lubricated with copious amounts of potent date wine and the fermented mare’s milk known as kumys.

Stalls sold potions and salves, concoctions and decoctions made from such ingredients as the livers of “decrepit camels,” scorpion tails, and spider webs fermented in the sun and then buried in jars to just the right degree of mold and fusty spores. There were healing herbs for those who sought them, and quietly, under the table, poisonous ones for those who sought the opposite. Amulets were made from animal parts and hair, parchment and rare shrubs, pieces of gold thread and precious stones, and they could make you fertile or virile, protect you against evil or call it down on those you wished. Sideshows featured Indian fakirs walking over coals and African snake charmers, dancing monkeys and fighting roosters. Bards competed with each other in the sixth-century equivalent of poetry slams while soothsayers traded in the future, preachers in faith, and prostitutes in the flesh. Shamans went into their trances, rolling and writhing in the dust; exorcists reached deep into ailing bodies and pulled out diseased organs dripping with blood, miraculously leaving no sign of incision; wild-eyed visionaries proclaimed themselves prophets.

But there were already so many prophets. Muhammad heard about them from the Jews who came to Ukaz from the great palm oases of Medina and Khaybar to the north, as well as from the Christians who came from Yemen and the cathedral city of Najran to the south. They were known as the People of the Book, and the very idea of a book—of words having their own separate physical existence, not in the mouth or the ear but before one’s eyes, inscribed on parchment scrolls—itself exerted a magical force on a boy who could neither read nor write. These were people with physical proof that their god had spoken to them, or at least to their prophets. But how then could this god have said such different things, and how could one people’s prophet be denied by another? How could every tribe revere its own totem in the Kaaba precinct but not all the others? How could there be so many truths?

To a young boy uncertain of his place in the world, this hubbub of voices has to have been as bewildering as it was enchanting, arousing in him an inchoate longing for clarity, for a unitary vision that would bring people together instead of dividing them. But if he was even aware of such a longing, there was nothing a boy like him could do about it—least of all when just two years after his mother’s death, his grandfather also died. With his nominal protector gone, his life would be divided yet again.

n effect, Muhammad was now triply orphaned. Th eeight-year-old was shunted between households yet again, to become the responsibility of the new head of the Hashim clan: his uncle abu-Talib.

On abu-Talib’s part, taking in the youngster was a matter of filial obligation; he had assumed his newly deceased father’s liabilities as well as his assets. In this he acted out of honor, and it was as a man of honor that he would play such an important role in his nephew’s life in years to come. But how glad he could have been in the year 578 to find himself with yet another mouth to feed— one with no inheritance and seemingly no future—is quite another matter.

Muhammad appears to have been more an appendage to the extended abu-Talib household than an essential part of it. And he would have to earn his keep. So while wishful accounts would have it that the uncle took special care of his nephew from the beginning, the record is clear that Muhammad was put to work as a lowly camel boy, and that within two years he was working in that capacity on the Meccan trade caravans.

His years with the Beduin had served him well. He had a way with camels, among the most ornery of animals unless one knows how to cajole them: the particular clicks of the tongue, the exact tug on the lead rope, the hand on the flank with just the right amount of pressure to make them stand or kneel. Those who were bad with camels yelled at them and jerked the ropes, making the animals all the more stubborn and hard to control. Dealing with them was a skill, and the best handler was one whom nobody noticed because he never had to stamp and prod, and never yelled. The sounds he made to urge the camels on were so soft and sibilant, they were more like breath than noise.

At first Muhammad worked just with the milk camels. Only when he’d proven himself with them was he allowed to work with the castrated males that made Mecca’s trade possible. These single-humped dromedaries had been introduced from Ethiopia in the third century, and turned out to be perfectly suited to the climate and terrain of Arabia. Not only could they vary their body temperature according to conditions, but they could store water in their red blood cells (legends of parched travelers slitting open the hump to drink from it may spark the imagination, but the hump actually stores fat, not water). This meant that they could go for days without drinking, spanning the distances between wells or springs. They were, that is, uniquely well adapted to the desert. But humans weren’t, which is why so many caravan travelers, like Muhammad’s father, never returned. It’s a measure of how much they risked that of the four ancestors who had given their names to the main clans of the Quraysh, only one had died at home in Mecca; the other three, including Muhammad’s forebear Hashim, had ended their lives far away in Gaza, in Iraq, and in the Yemen.

Besides sickness and accident, there was always the danger of bandits or of rogue Beduin raiders tempted by the drawn-out line of heavily laden beasts. Plus of course the sheer arduousness of travel in the scorching heat and light, magnified by the stone and packed dust of the desert pavement, which was seared to a crust. You needed to be hardy for such long treks. The heavily laden pack camels mostly carried goods, so only the wealthiest merchants rode. Those doing “Beduin work” like the young Muhammad walked alongside, and once they’d unloaded the camels, fed them, and hobbled them at the end of each day’s stage—some thirty miles if the going was smooth and level, less than twenty if it was not—their work was still not done. They’d collect the oblong pellets of camel feces, so dry and densely fibrous that they gave off no odor even when broken open, and coax them into a slow burn for cooking fires; fetch water for their bosses from a well or a spring if there was one, or else from the bulging goat-bladders slung over the camels’ flanks; make sure the merchants were well fed, taking for themselves only what was left; and then stand watch through the night against predators like wolves, hyenas, and mountain lions.