One of the companions standing behind Muhammad cleared his throat. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
I suppose he was coaxing me. If I didn’t repeat the words, who knows what would come next? For all his mercy, I had fought Muhammad bitterly in one campaign after the next.
Holding my feelings in, I rose to my feet. “Give me time to think.”
I strode out of his tent without looking back. For all I knew, a dagger could have plunged into my skull.
Few here in Mecca remember old Muttalib, the Prophet’s grandfather. If they do, it’s because he used to dote on his grandson, bouncing him on his knee while we drank and argued at the inns around the Kaaba. But I remember something else.
I returned to Muhammad’s tent the next day.
“You’ve made up your mind,” he said. “I won’t ask. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t ready to submit.” He saw how I faintly cringed. “You aren’t submitting to me.”
I had wasted enough time. I knelt before Muhammad and proclaimed, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
Muhammad gave a faint nod, satisfied, and I rose to my feet.
I could have walked out, but instead I asked, “When is God’s love so intense that it feels like hate?”
“My grandfather, Muttalib, used to ask that question,” said Muhammad soberly.
“I know. I heard him. I was almost a man when you sat on his knee. But no matter. Your grandfather planted a seed. That’s undeniable. He worried about his soul while the rest of us were only worrying about money and women. You have the same strangeness about you. No wonder.”
Muhammad nodded. “And I still ask the same question. You aren’t my brother, not yet. Allah means nothing to you. I imagine you’re the one who tried to humiliate me at the Kaaba.”
“Perhaps.”
He died two years later, at the age of sixty-two. There was no great crisis, just a steady withering. He lost his strength the way a great tree loses sap. His last moments, they say, were spent with his head resting in the lap of his favorite wife, Aisha. The end was gentle; the faithful were certain that the Prophet would be waiting for them in Paradise, where the trees are greener than any in Arabia, the virgins more beautiful, the crystal rivers sparkling under the sun.
Even in death, Arabia is his. Syria and Egypt will fall soon. The emperor of Persia trembles when the Prophet’s emissaries appear before his throne. Muhammad was told by God to send letters to all the rulers of the earth, informing them that they must heed the Lord’s word and convert. Without hesitation he sent the letters. Imagine.
The Prophet died in Medina, and it was deemed best to bury him there, in the courtyard of the house where he had lived. I watched the funeral without rancor. Beside me was Abu Bakr. Tribe and trade once united us, before we became sworn enemies. Now he is calmly accepting of my conversion. We are tied by faith, and Abu Bakr makes that a cause for smiles. In the confusion after Muhammad’s death, several companions had a claim to his leadership. Ali had been chosen years ago, but he was a boy then. Umar and Uthman led strong factions. I imagine their heads swam at the prospect of ruling the world that Allah had handed them. But in the end it was Abu Bakr whom the chiefs chose. They call him caliph, successor to the Prophet’s authority in heaven and on earth. A good choice. Abu Bakr is loved by everyone. One of his most lovable qualities is his age. The old man won’t sit on the throne for long. The young rivals still have hope.
I move among them freely, a prize convert and a harmless dog with its teeth pulled. My end is near. My wife is sick, soon to leave me. She is half blind already. She can’t see me when I sit by the lamp and read the Koran. What would she do if she could see that? My eyes fall on words that God must have sent especially to old men:
Every soul will meet death.
You will find your true reward only on the Day of Resurrection.
This world is nothing but illusory pleasure.
I have known illusion and pleasure, and both to the fullest. Is that my real bond with the Prophet?
When I laid my wife in the earth, Aisha came to see me. She married so young, as a mere child, that she still looks beautiful. She entered my house looking stately, and for a moment her eyes and the pearls she wore around her neck made the dim room shuttered against the sun seem bright.
“You will meet her again in Paradise,” Aisha murmured, taking my hand. It trembled slightly in hers. I couldn’t tell if it was from grief or age. Both, no doubt.
“My wife didn’t convert,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean she is lost?”
“Love will draw her to you. That will be her way to God.”
It was a comforting lie, and I was glad to hear it. Aisha sat with me for a while. The sunlight that seeped through the shutters glanced off her necklace, turning it into glistening tears.
“I want you to believe something,” she said. She saw me stiffen. “I didn’t come to preach. This is a story, the one I hold closest to my heart. On a cool night in Mecca the Prophet was walking to his house when he suddenly was overcome with sleep. He lay down in a doorway near the Kaaba. The next thing he knew, the angel Gabriel appeared and sent his light into the Prophet’s chest. The intensity of the feeling sharpened every sense, and the Prophet realized that his heart was being purified for something wondrous. Gabriel pointed to the end of the street where a winged beast stood. It was white and shaped like a donkey, yet larger. Calling the creature Buraq, the angel bade the Prophet to mount it. The instant he did, he discovered that Buraq was a lightning steed. Each of its steps reached as far as the horizon. The Prophet was struck with awe and fear. In a matter of minutes they made a journey as far as the farthest mosque, which stood in Jerusalem. At that time there was no mosque there, but Gabriel assured the Prophet of their destination. Inside the mosque were many holy fathers and prophets who had come before. After praying with them, the Prophet was told to remount Buraq, for his night journey was only half begun.”
Aisha’s voice rose and fell in the dark. Her eyes sparkled in the near darkness. Among the Arabs, no one is more esteemed than a poet. I never knew of a woman poet, but she could have been one. I felt myself filled with the scent of roses.
“When the Prophet got back on Buraq, he looked to the horizon, where the next step would land them. Instead, with a clanging hoofbeat that printed the rock beneath its feet, the creature soared into the sky. The stars came as near as a bonfire in the Prophet’s courtyard. They passed through the crystal dome of the sky, higher and higher. How could this be? He was still alive, yet the Prophet was entering the seven heavens. Each was dazzling to the eyes and blissful to the heart. When they reached the seventh heaven, a tree blocked the way. This was the sacred tree that no angel could set foot beyond. And yet the Prophet was allowed to enter. He exchanged holy words with the great forebears of Islam, first Abraham, then Moses, and finally Jesus. The final gift was to be ushered into the presence of Allah. Before the Most Glorious the Prophet was reduced to awed silence. Allah spoke and gave him guidance for the faithful. Their first duty, said God, was to pray fifty times a day. The Prophet bowed in obedience and withdrew. When he was back among the elder prophets, Moses asked him what God had said. When he heard about the duty to pray fifty times a day, Moses shook his head. ‘That is impossible. Go back and ask for an easier way.’ The Prophet returned to Allah not once but several times, until his pleas were heard. God granted that the faithful should pray not fifty, but five times a day.”
In the dark Aisha heard me chuckle. She stopped telling me her tale.
“Don’t be angry,” I said. “You’ve brought me a smile. I always knew the Prophet was canny. He even talked God around to his way.”
I couldn’t see Aisha’s reaction, but she didn’t scold me. Maybe she smiled, too. But the story came to an abrupt end. The lightning steed brought Muhammad back to earth, and he woke up shivering in the night air where he had fallen asleep.
“Was it a dream?” I asked.
r /> “Many thought so, even those among the companions. They were shaken. The Prophet had received revelations, but he always insisted he was a man among men, not a miracle worker. One of them rushed to tell the story to my father, Abu Bakr.”
“Ah,” I said. In those days I shunned Abu Bakr and barely recalled that he was Aisha’s father. “And he believed?”
“Without hesitation. He said, ‘If Muhammad tells us that his journey wasn’t a dream, I have no choice but to believe him. Don’t I already accept that the angel comes to him?’ It was from my father that I heard the story.”
I felt Aisha’s hand press into mine again. “But you began by saying that you live this story,” I said.
“Every day. I take a journey to heaven, you see. That’s the treasure the Prophet gave us all. He opened the way so that we can follow him. We don’t need Buraq to reach God. Our steed is the soul.”
Forgive me, but I was overcome. It was too much. My wife was gone. My body would lie next to hers very soon. What was left to me but a journey to heaven, if that’s possible? I held Aisha’s hand with a tight grip. Tears ran down my cheeks and were caught in the deep wrinkles there.
“Allahu Akbar,” I whispered. “God is great.”
“Allahu Akbar,” she repeated and slipped from the room, leaving behind the glimmer of pearls and the faint scent of roses.
AFTERWORD
A WALK WITH MUHAMMAD
Few can read the life of Muhammad without feeling excited and disturbed at the same time. I think he must have had the same conflicting reactions himself. Islam was born in a cradle of turmoil, and the arrival of Allah, one God who vanquished hundreds of ancient Arabian gods, caused an upheaval. A single individual had to carry the burden of violence with the awe of revelation.
Muhammad didn’t see himself like Jesus, called the Son of God, or like Buddha, a prince who achieved sublime, cosmic enlightenment. An Indian proverb holds that it only takes a spark to burn down the whole forest. Muhammad struck that spark.
If the Prophet’s life were a fairy tale, he would march down from his mountain cave, spread his arms like a latter-day Moses, and tell the people what God wanted them to do. In real life, Muhammad reacted with fear and trembling. You and I would also fear madness if the angel Gabriel appeared in a flash of blinding light and told us that our mission was to redeem the sinful world.
God did not leave Muhammad alone. When a revelation was at hand, Muhammad went into a trance state that deprived him of his own will. His face became flushed; he sweated profusely. The messages he received were dire. The fate of the Arabs depended on him. Muhammad’s divine task was to convince his people to renounce their ancestral idol worship and superstitious veneration of multiple gods. If they didn’t, Allah had apocalyptic punishment in mind. No sinner would be forgiven. Only those who feared God and obeyed him to the letter would be saved. As for the Prophet himself, his freedom of choice was steadily removed, until the only path left was the proverbial razor’s edge: every word, act, and thought was surrendered to God.
A more fearful destiny is hard to imagine. Muhammad said, on various occasions and in various ways, “The best in life comes from Allah. The worst is my fault.” He took that attitude, giving all the praise to God and taking all the blame on himself. Not that every moment was about life and death. God had a way of solving Muhammad’s everyday problems. One of his favorite wives, Aisha, stopped at an oasis by herself one day. A dashing Muslim rider came by and offered to escort her on her journey. They were alone together for a night, and tongues began to wag. Eventually petty gossip turned into a major scandal. The Prophet prayed to Allah, and a revelation came. Aisha was innocent. Anyone who spoke out against her was to be whipped.
In the same vein, Muhammad had helpful revelations that his various wives should stop bickering among themselves. God told the women around him to obey their husband in all things. The Almighty sometimes mentioned the Prophet’s enemies by name in the Koran and roundly condemned them. He offered hints about how to debate with critics and naysayers. When the Muslim exiles tried to reenter Mecca and were turned back, there was a revelation to tell them that their apparent defeat was really a victory.
Muhammad could count upon God’s counsel to extricate him from almost any tight place. Scholars divide the revelations, amounting to thousands of separate messages, into two main parts. The ones that came in Mecca focus on theology; the messages that came in Medina, after the Hijra, or migration, of 622 CE, mostly center on managing the new faith and the newly faithful.
The Koran is about salvation and apocalypse—just as in Jesus’s lifetime, the early converts to Islam believed that the end of the world was at hand. But the Koran is also about war, politics, infighting, treaties, jealousies, and the everyday headaches of running the government in Medina, including the collection of taxes.
PRACTICAL REDEMPTION
All religions attempt to bring worshipers closer to God, but few are as explicit as the Koran. The famous “five pillars of Islam” prescribe the duties of the faithful:
The profession of faith, declaring that Allah is the one God and Muhammad his prophet.
Prayer, which takes place five times a day facing Mecca, the most sacred place on earth.
Charity, through the giving of alms to the poor.
Fasting during the month of Ramadan.
Pilgrimage, at least once in a lifetime, to Mecca.
Each of these duties is a reminder that earthly life exists for one purpose: to redeem fallen humanity. One can see a common thread in the five pillars: by prayer, professing one’s faith, or taking a month off to turn inward, the worshiper sets ordinary affairs aside, allowing space for God to enter. Redemption is turned into a practical matter of things to do, and you can look out your window to see how your neighbors are coming along, as they can with you. This became deeply important when the first Muslims had to defend themselves from persecution by drawing into a tight community of believers, the Ummah. The image of presenting a united front against a hostile world remains potent today.
The tight bonding of believers didn’t leave out theology. There are six core beliefs that would be agreed upon even by sects that otherwise divide along fierce lines like the Sunni and Shia. These beliefs are:
Belief in Allah as the only true God
Belief in the prophets sent by God as well as lesser messengers and warners
Belief in angels
Belief in the books sent by God: the Torah, the Gospels, and the Koran
Belief in judgment day and the resurrection of the dead
Belief in fate, whether good or bad
These beliefs overlap closely with those of both Judaism and Christianity. But no religion can escape the claim that it surmounts all others. This is also true with Islam, which sees itself as “confirming” the past, meaning that God updated his old message as written in the Torah and the New Testament. He sent a new prophet whose word was final; therefore Jews and Christians should pay attention and convert. This would show their true belief in the one God. Naturally, there was much resistance to this idea, and the result has been a long, sad history of religious conflict.
Allah wanted the updated message to be complete. As a result, Islam became more than a religion; it is a way of life so all-consuming that nothing has been left to chance. God has a commandment for everything. In case there are any gaps, thousands of hadith exist to guide the course of everybody’s daily affairs. A hadith is a story or incident in the Prophet’s life. It indicates how he reacted when somebody brought a problem to him or a lawsuit or a question about right and wrong. Aisha, the favored wife whom Muhammad married when she was a small child, long outlived him. She became the source of some two thousand hadith. These have the force of law, even today. So while Christians may muse over “What would Jesus do?” the parallel question has a literal answer for Muslims. There are few crises in life, major or minor, where the faithful don’t know exactly what Muhammad would do.
One sh
ould note that a great deal of Islamic doctrine evolved after the Prophet’s death, which came suddenly. Jesus’s disciples were also suddenly bereft after the crucifixion. Muhammad’s followers were disconcerted, but quickly began to assemble a complete, authorized Koran from all the existing suras. The compilation went through struggles and arguments, needless to say, leaving enough disputes to occupy generations of scholars and interpreters.
THE PATH OF SUBMISSION
Because the Prophet’s life was filled with God’s instructions, almost by the minute, for today’s Muslims the path to leading a good life leaves no room for doubt. The highest virtue in Islam is surrender or submission. Those of us standing outside the faith may have a difficult time understanding this virtue. We reject the absence of free choice. Most of us want to have it both ways, to obey God some of the time and make up our own minds the rest of the time. Islam, to be blunt, considers that the path to damnation. Why would anyone willingly set his or her own sinful desires against the precious word of God? Why would a person choose to live a single moment apart from the divine?
There’s no getting around this vital difference, and it explains many things. For one, it explains the spread of Islam, which happened like wildfire within a few years of Muhammad’s death. His companions, the handful who migrated to Medina with him, began life as merchants and traders in Mecca. But Ali, Umar, and Uthman ended their lives as caliphs, rulers of an empire that extended from Egypt to Persia. This vast expansion wasn’t due to warfare, although the Muslims were fierce warriors. Instead, Islam offered closeness to God. Closeness to God is a human yearning that wants to be fulfilled. Islam didn’t fulfill it in theory, but in everyday actions.