The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (9 page)

What commissions he earned, he gave away in alms to the poor. Other merchants undoubtedly thought him foolish for this. How did such a man expect to marry at all, let alone marry well? How did he expect to care for a family? To rise in society? They tried to use his lack of self-interest to their own advantage, which he certainly knew but did not care about. His values were elsewhere, though so long as they were not about money and self-advancement, few bothered to inquire exactly where. His disinterestedness set him apart, making him part of the culture but not of its values, and while this may have seemed odd to most people, Khadija saw it as admirable.

As a widow, and until Muhammad a childless one, she knew what it was to be uncertain of one’s place in society, and how hard it had been for him to work his way up through the ranks from camel boy to owner’s agent. She could see that in terms of maturity, he was far closer to middle age than to youth. So it’s not hard to understand how these two people, both unusual in their time and place, could have reached out to each other. Or rather, how she reached out to him, and by marrying him, brought the outsider inside.

It was she who proposed quite simply because he could not. Especiallyafter abu-Talib’s rebuff, he would not have dared take the initiative. Khadija was from the powerful Asad clan, which made her eminently marriageable. Her suitors included the wealthiest merchants in Mecca, all of them offering large gifts to her father as a way of sweetening the deal. Except that Khadija, unlike abu-Talib’s young daughter, refused to be auctioned off. She had no need for another conventional marriage; this time she would defy convention by marrying the man she chose, not the one chosen for her. So as ibn-Ishaq tells it, adding “so the story goes” in acknowledgment of the oddly stilted language, she said: “I like you, Muhammad, because of our relationship and your high reputation for trustworthiness and good character and truthfulness,” and asked him to be her husband.

Still, the formalities had to be observed. Having rejected Muhammad as his own son-in-law, abu-Talib could hardly represent him to Khadija’s father as custom demanded. Instead, another of the ten sons of Abd al-Muttalib, Muhammad’s uncle Hamza, formally asked on his behalf. One version has it that Khadija’s father willingly assented, though what he thought of his daughter marrying a “nobody” is something else, especially given the dowries being offered by other suitors and the probability that he was against the marriage, as another, racier version of events implies. Conscientiously included by ibn-Ishaq, this version has it that “Khadija called her father to her house, plied him with wine until he was drunk, anointed him with perfume, clothed him in a striped robe, and slaughtered a cow. Then she sent for Muhammad and his uncle, and when they came in, she had her father marry him to her.” By the time her father had sobered up, the deed was already done.

Perhaps such attempts to explain the marriage are understandable, given that a relationship based on genuine love, caring, and respect was a rarity at the time. But this one ignores Muhammad’s reputation for honesty, and from what we know of Khadija, she was no more likely than he to have taken part in a drunken deception. The story underrates her; she may have married down in terms of wealth and social status, but what she saw in Muhammad was more important than any of that.

Children arrived quickly, cementing the couple’s bond. They had four daughters together, and one son, Qasim. But Qasim died before his second birthday, and while the Quranic revelations would later make a point of celebrating daughters, inveighing against those who measured wealth and status in terms only of sons, the loss of this one son must still have hurt deeply. It meant that Muhammad would remain what was known as abtar, literally curtailed, cut off, or severed. Without male offspring, that is.

The sorrow of Qasim’s death would be assuaged to some degree by a boy already close to the household. Khadija had given Muhammad a young slave called Zayd as a marriage gift, but Muhammad treated him less as a slave than as a son, so much so that when the boy’s north Arabian clan raised the money to buy him back, Zayd begged to be allowed to stay. Muhammad refused the money, freed the boy, and formally adopted him, setting the stage for the Quran’s future encouragement of manumission. And there was another boy too: Muhammad’s nephew Ali, abu-Talib’s youngest son. His father’s business had begun to falter without Muhammad working by his side, so Muhammad offered to help out by taking the boy into his own household. The man raised by his uncle would now raise that same uncle’s son, and if Muhammad and Khadija did not formally adopt Ali, they considered him part of their family. Indeed he would eventually marry their youngest daughter, Fatima.

In his thirties, then, Muhammad seemed at last to be a happy man. With Khadija by his side, the respect of others, and a comfortable living, he seemed to have all a man could reasonably ask for. Despite the odds against him, he had thrived. But that did not mean he had put the awareness of those odds behind him. The experience of the boy could not simply be shucked off by the man; it was part of who he was, and part of what Khadija loved in him. She shared his values, and was as disturbed as he by the inequities of Meccan society. They lived their joint life accordingly, wearing homespun linen instead of the ostentatious silks of the elite, darning and mending clothes instead of purchasing new ones, and giving away most of their income in food and alms. And through Khadija’s cousin Waraqa, they found a framework for their values in a small group of independent Meccan thinkers known as hanifs.

inguists tend to hedge their bets by saying that the word hanif is “of obscure origin,” but it probably came from the word for “bending” or “turning,” as in someone who bends or turns to a greater power. We know of six of them by name, including Waraqa, who was reputed to have studied both the Hebrew and the Greek bibles deeply. By some accounts he was actually a Christian, by others a rabbi. More likely he was neither, the attribution being merely the result of the human need to categorize. The whole point, after all, was that the hanifs resisted categorization. Their search was for a purer form of monotheism, untainted by the sectarian divisiveness rife in the Middle East of the time. They were deliberately unaffiliated with any one sacred practice, instead recognizing the universality of the one high god, whether the name used was Elohim, al-Lah, or Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian “lord of light and wisdom.” Still, the Hebrew bible spoke to their sense of roots, and they harked back to Abraham—“the father of all who believe,” as Saint Paul had called him—as the founding ancestor of Mecca through his son Ishmael. It was to Mecca that Hagar had fled with her young son, they believed, and Abraham and Ishmael together who had built the Kaaba as the sanctuary of the sakina, the divine presence of God, thus establishing the true ancestral tradition, one far older and with far deeper meaning than the relatively recent tribal one of the Quraysh.

The word hanif would eventually be used in the Quran in praise of all those from Abraham on who acknowledged the one god and excluded all others. But in these pre-Quranic days, however respected the hanifs might be for their knowledge, they were tolerated rather than accepted—anessential difference, since in Mecca as in any modern society, the fact that something needed to be tolerated implied that it was still somehow distasteful. And as always, tolerance had its limits. When Muhammad was still a child, one hanif, Zaydibn-Amr, was hounded out of the city by his own half-brother after he publicly challenged the power of the totem stones. Known as “the monk,” he found solitary refuge in a stone hut at the foot of Mount Hira before leaving to pursue the life of a wandering dervish, seeking out the great spiritual masters of the day throughout the Middle East. Years later, he would make his way back to Mecca, eager to hear Muhammad’s preaching, only to be killed by bandits just a few days from home.

Was Muhammad himself a hanif? Like them, he was part of Mecca even as something in him remained apart. He saw his society too clearly for comfort: the contradictions, the hypocrisies and denials, the seemingly ever-widening gap between what people professed to honor and what they actually did. With his own immediate ancestry so embroiled in conflict, he may have been pulled toward this other, larger, and more ancient lineage embodied in the story of a child almost sacrificed, as his own father had nearly been, in submission to the one ultimate god. Even if he did not describe himself as a hanif, he must have felt a sense of kinship with this handful of men who had knowingly placed themselves outside the norm, responding to the purity of the idea of a god so great that he, if that pronoun could even be used, was beyond male or female, beyond any form of representation: a single, ineffable, universal idea of the divine.

The hanifs practiced a form of ascetic meditation in solitary vigil known as tahannut, and it seems clear that Muhammad adopted this practice in the mountains outside Mecca. There was a long tradition of such meditation, in the Hebrew and Greek bibles as much as in Indian and Chinese practice. Prophets, hermits, preachers, gurus, all sought the timeless vastness of the high desert for a clarity of vision, a sense of eternity uncluttered by everyday human concerns. What, after all, could be older and more long-lasting than stone? What could be cleaner and purer than a mountainside bare of all human habitation, even of trees and shrubs?

he red granite of the Hijaz mountains was no smooth Zen-like stone but jagged rock so harsh it would bloody your hands if you fell and clung to it. Yet there was also immense beauty in such harshness. Wrapped in his threadbare robe against the gathering chill of early evening, Muhammad would watch as the monotonous glare of day gave way to a rich light that mellowed the mountains into gold. There’d be a slight tremor inside him as the sun abruptly slipped from sight, leaving the western horizon to glow with color before fading as though someone were languorously drawing a heavy veil over it. A while yet, and moon-shadows would begin to silver the landscape, or there’d be the ethereal cold light of the star-studded sky at new moon, and then the quality of time itself seemed to change, as though he could sense it stretching into infinity until at last the merest hint of light paling the eastern sky brought with it a chill pre-dawn breeze— the signal that time had returned, and the night’s vigil was almost done.

Did he practice breathing exercises on these night vigils, the kind of exercises only now being rediscovered in the West but widely used by mystics throughout history? What is prayer, after all, if not a form of breath control? The long, rhythmic incantation, the trance-like meter, the reverberation of sound in the mouth and throat and chest, the cyclical act of inhalation and exhalation—all these create an awareness ofruh, a word that means “wind” in Arabic, but also “breath” and “spirit,” as though the spirit is borne on the wind, or in the breath. Did he repeat that pilgrim’s chant—“Here I am, oh God, here I am”— or find a new one taking form in his mouth, La ilaha illallah, “There is no god but God”? Did sibilance take over his body, his breath slowing and deepening as the soft, musical chant enchanted the tongue, rolling from deep inside him out into the empty night? Alone here on the mountain, away from the swirl of competing claims and narratives, did he find the clarity he was seeking? Or at least a calm acceptance of his apartness—a certain peace?

We know that he spent nights on end in such vigils, with just the barest amount of food and water, and that each time he came down, he made first for the Kaaba to circle it seven times, left shoulder inward, in the familiar ritual of homecoming. It was a rite of transition, of coming back to the everyday human world, grounding him before he returned home to the bedrock of his life, Khadija. But coming back down was not always so easy.

n the harsh Hijaz landscape of rock and dust, there is no such thing as a gentle rain. It comes instead in rare spasms, violent downpours as capable of wreaking havoc as the most malevolent of jinns. With a kind of warped vengeance, water turns from blessing into curse, and the stuff of life becomes the agent of death. The sky might be clear, with no cloud in sight, so that the first sign of rain cascading off rock miles away could be nothing more than a barely perceptible scent carried on a passing breeze. If humans don’t notice it, animals do. They stand still, ears alert, vaguely aware of something different. Minutes pass, even an hour, before the sand underfoot begins to dampen. It might be the merest trickle at first, as though someone had emptied a pail on the ground, but then the trickle builds, tugging gently at your ankles as a faint rumble echoes through the mountains. Before you quite know what is happening, you find you are stumbling in a current that seems to have come from nowhere. Thrown off balance, you flail and fall, trying to pick yourself up only to be knocked down again by the gathering weight of tumbling sand-laden water sweeping down through the wadi, hammering at your shins. The roar of it is on you now, the terrible sound of large stones grinding against rock. Branches of broom and acacia and saltbush and then whole bushes come hurtling at you, and there’s the flailing bulk of a drowning animal, legs akimbo, and you can’t hear your own voice crying for help as you fall again and again, caught up in the chaotic momentum of water and debris. If a stone hits your head and you lose consciousness, you can drown in just a few inches.

The worst place to be in Mecca in such a flood was at its lowest point, where all the wadis met, and that was exactly where the Kaaba stood. Most flash floods were relatively shallow, but as Muhammad began his retreat on Mount Hira in the year 605, a violent storm system to the south sent a foaming mass of water hurtling toward the sanctuary. Nobody in Mecca at the time could remember a flood of such magnitude. They had taken measures against flooding, of course, building a semi-circular wall upstream from the sanctuary to protect it. But against the fury of this much water, the wall gave way under the battering of boulders and debris. The torrent raced on into the Kaaba precinct, swirling around the totem stones and crashing into the sanctuary itself with such force that it washed away the clay mortar and loosened its stone walls until they collapsed. By the time it had abated, the Kaaba was rubble.