4
WARAQAH, THE BELIEVER
The best hiding place is inside your own heart. I’ve tried all the others. Even when I dug a hole by the open latrines and covered it with thatch, they dragged me out and beat me. I was young then, and they were thugs. A hideous idol with a serpent’s tail had been found smashed to bits outside the Kaaba. It was probably one of them, getting drunk and daring one another. But I was easier to blame.
I only wanted to be alone so I could think about God. How did that hurt anyone? But loneliness is the seeker’s affliction. It drove me to wander in the marketplace. I was overheard muttering to myself. Allah, endow my heart with wings, so that I may fly to the garden of eternity. I meant it as a prayer, but they took it as sacrilege.
One time a scrap of writing fell out of my pocket. Some Qurayshi roughs picked it up, and a wandering scribe recited it aloud: “The veil between God and his servant does not exist in heaven or on earth. It exists in himself.” I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to hide that kind of blasphemy.
Eventually I saved my skin by getting rich. Money is protection against persecution. Not perfect protection. If looks could kill, the Qurayshi youth who prowl the streets would send me to a shallow grave every day of the week and twice on feast days.
I straighten my spine and walk past them eyes ahead. Once I reach the inns by the Kaaba, my identity changes. I’m no longer “the believer” who cannot enter a house for dinner without the rooms being disinfected with musk after he leaves. I turn into a well-padded merchant whose shameful ideas are insignificant, once you hear the clink of gold in his purse.
“Waraqah ibn Nawfal, you are most welcome.”
“Waraqah, my brother, sit here next to me.”
“Waraqah, blessed by the gods, make me happy by sharing this wine.”
I never trusted any of them, and yet one time I let my guard down. My only excuse is gathering age. I took one of the Quraysh aside, a young man who stood out for being slightly more thoughtful than his peers. I unfolded a parchment before his eyes. It was wrinkled and yellow; it had been clumsily mended in several places.
“What do you think of this?” I asked.
The young man was barely literate, but he looked impressed. “Your will?” he guessed. He was an old camel trader’s son, not yet twenty. He probably dreamed about his inheritance every spare moment.
I smiled. “It’s more precious than my will. It’s a page from the Bible. I’ve been translating it.”
His eyes widened. “Better be careful,” he warned. I had pushed the page toward him, but he backed away as if I were offering him a hot coal.
It was comical, really. Everyone knows that such pages exist. A merchant whose route passes through the tiny communities of Jews and Christians may buy or sell an occasional tattered leaf from their jumbled scriptures. But we Arabs pretend that these communities have not sprung up in our midst. It would be like admitting a growth of black smut in your bags of wheat.
I reverently kissed the parchment. “It tells of Abraham and Isaac. You should let me recite the story to you sometime. There’s almost a murder in it. You like knives, don’t you?” I was toying with the young man, who looked relieved when I folded the scrap and thrust it back into my robe. I was lucky. He could have led a move against me.
What does “the believer” believe? No one ever asks me to my face. They only know that the idols are good business, and anyone who speaks out against them threatens everybody’s income. “Listen to reason, my dear Waraqah,” they say. “We will shrivel like a barren womb. Mecca will die without the pilgrims. You see how much they spend.”
It’s true. You can get money out of a pilgrim simply for letting him set eyes on a golden idol. They spend even more during the Hajj, when hundreds flood Mecca to run the circle around the Kaaba. No one knows when that started, but now it’s a fixed tradition.
I am approaching Muhammad, my spiritual son, in this roundabout way, because that is how he approached me.
One day, it was a dozen years ago, I was sitting in my courtyard. I was expecting a messenger momentarily and left the gate open. A little boy wandered inside. We looked at each other. I asked where his mother was, but he didn’t reply. He gazed at me shyly. From his dress I saw that he must be a nomad. They are fierce about keeping their children close by.
I went over and crouched in front of him. “Do you know me?” I asked. I had the strangest feeling.
He shook his head. “I don’t know you, but I hear your voice.”
Well, of course he did. I had just spoken to him. But the boy didn’t mean that. He turned and pointed past the gate. “I was playing by the well, and I heard you. What do you want?”
If he meant Zamzam, it was ten streets away. “I don’t want anything from you,” I said, feeling very queer talking this way to a five-or six-year-old.
“Then I must want from you,” he said.
Before I could question him, one of those Qurayshi toughs was at my gate. He didn’t dare come through it, but he started yelling. “Hey, hey, he’s here. I found him.”
A second later two of his fellows ran up and behind them a Banu Sa’d woman, red-faced and puffing. “Muhammad!” she cried and rushed into the courtyard to sweep him up. Immediately she realized her discourtesy and began spewing apologies, tangled with a disjointed tale about bringing the boy back to his mother, who hadn’t seen him in three years. I didn’t care. I assured her that her infraction was nothing. I escorted her back to the gate, glaring at the Qurayshi roughnecks, who lingered in case I gave them a coin. If I didn’t, they’d shake down the poor woman, so I slipped them the smallest piece of silver I had. Why not? God sees every good deed.
A tiny incident, but it preyed on my mind. Muhammad had wandered away from his wet nurse when her back was turned and headed straight for my gate.
Under my bed I have many pages of the Bible stashed away. It’s my habit to pull one out late at night and translate a few passages into Arabic. I also have another ritual that I keep to myself, for good reason. When I am puzzled over a mystery, large or small, I pull a sheet out at random, and whatever my eye falls upon I take to be a message. A few days after the boy appeared, I reached under the mattress and took out the first page my fingers touched. I shut my eyes and pointed to a passage at random, then took it over to the lamp to read:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
And his name shall be called Emmanuel.
These were not meaningless words. The man who sold me this particular page was a Christian beggar who followed my caravan many years ago. I threw him some bread, and as he wolfed it down he told me about his savior. He felt blessed, even though he lived in the gutter and fought with stray dogs over garbage.
The year the beggar sold me this scrap of scripture he had a terrible cough. He knew he wasn’t long for this world. This page from the Bible was precious to him, and the beggar wanted the message of his Messiah carried forward.
So I knew that the virgin had conceived, and Emmanuel had come. It happened long ago, and the only reason to keep the page was to remind me of how the beggar’s face glowed when he spoke about his savior. Why, then, had my finger landed on this verse?
Several years passed before a Jew came to Mecca whom I could trust. He plied gold and silver trinkets. His trade was so valuable that he bought his way out of the law that kept Jews from entering Mecca. I gave him wine and showed him the passage. The name Emmanuel brought a crooked smile to his face.
“Don’t trust your beggar,” he said. “What kind of a savior would allow someone to live like that?”
The messiah is yet to come, he said, to kill the enemies of the Jews and save them all. I was too impatient to wait that long, I told him. In Arabia, idols can save you today, if you‘re gullible enough. I pressed the Jew for an explanation that meant something real. More than a bit exasperated, he said that for my understanding “Emmanuel” meant the “king of prophets.”
Ah, well, that was a d
ifferent story.
Arabs put great store in prophets. If God pointed to the word “prophet” when I asked about Muhammad, something must be afoot. In Mecca some of the ignorant call me “the Jew,” but that’s just their crude way of insulting a servant of God. I have no religion. I am hanif, a believer without a faith, like a lone palm tree without an oasis.
I did not approach Muhammad the whole time he was growing up. That was far too risky. I watched from afar. Old Muttalib, his grandfather, was still alive then. It was a tragedy that he had survived his youngest son, Abdullah, but he found solace in Muhammad. He would take the boy to the inns and prop him on his knee while holding forth. Muttalib had gotten too old for trading. He was half blind and growing weaker by the month. It was a common sight, he and the boy, who kept his eyes on the ground. No one had ever seen a child who wanted to keep to himself so much. But Muhammad was obedient, and when Muttalib wanted to show him off, he would stand up like a man, even in front of half a dozen drunk Quraysh in a dingy, smoky wine house.
Then a peculiar thing happened. Many years later I was out walking and happened to see a figure crouched in an alley. The light was dim, but I made out Muhammad squatting on his heels. I nodded. He put his fingers to his lips and pointed at something on the ground. A mouse. The creature had been lured out into the open with a few grains of wheat.
Then Muhammad gazed up at the sky, where a black speck hovered. My eyes were failing, but I knew it was a hawk. Muhammad looked back at the mouse, then at the hawk again.
“It has no idea of the danger,” he said.
“Neither do we,” I replied.
You see the point? Like the mouse innocently eating its seeds, we go about our lives not realizing that death is watching us from afar, constantly stalking. Those were Muhammad’s inner thoughts. Why had he shared them with me? Our voices made the mouse scurry back into its hole. Muhammad stood up and walked toward me.
“I’m a man now,” he said. “We can talk.”
“A man? You’re seventeen,” I smiled.
He didn’t smile back. “Old enough to defend myself, if anyone catches us talking like this.”
That’s how it started. I never brought up the day his nurse lost him and he wandered into my courtyard, but he must have remembered. What kind of patience does it take to wait twelve years before speaking to someone again? He began coming to my house for tea and God. Only tea at first, because God remained a forbidden subject until later.
Naturally, he wanted to know about me. “What is a hanif?” he asked.
“One who believes in Allah, one who scorns idols and waits for the light to descend,” I said.
He nodded gravely. “Everyone says you’re different, but you look ordinary to me.”
Muhammad said this frankly and without apology, considering he was insulting an elder. I answered with a quote from one of my hidden books. “A man goes in and out among the people. He eats and sleeps with them. He buys and sells in the marketplace. This everyone can see. What they cannot see is that he never forgets God for a single instant.”
“Are you that man?” asked Muhammad.
“I will be, when I become a saint. For now, I can only try.”
“Why is one god better than many?” he asked.
I answered with another question. “Why is one faithful wife better than many whores?”
“What makes you call the gods whores?”
“In both cases you pay your money and get your wish. Only a whore is more reliable and trustworthy. Most idols take your money and give nothing in return,” I replied.
Muhammad seemed pleased that I spoke so freely. As for myself, I often had to conceal a burning excitement that agitated me every time I set eyes on him. How could I explain it? It was impossible. I would lose all respect. A grown man trembling like a bride waiting in the dark for her bridegroom.
We talked about everything, endlessly. Yet I could never draw Muhammad out about his own beliefs. This was a cause for concern. In Arabia, one belief swallows up every other: the tribe. The tribe tells you where you belong on earth. The tribe runs to defend you after you knife a stranger for spitting on your sandals. Like a monster with a thousand heads, the tribe sees everything and can eat whom it pleases. There is no room for belief in anything else, including God. God is just another thing for the monster to devour.
One day I’d had enough. I turned on Muhammad. “Talking to you is like talking to a respectful oyster. Open up. Who are you?”
He didn’t look startled. “I am one who selects friends carefully.”
An angel must have seen my impatience, because at that moment he brought me the perfect response. It was from an old verse. “I have a friend, and he fills my cup with wine that has no equal.”
Muhammad blushed. “You have been such a friend to me.”
After that, our bond was sealed. We became bold enough that we’d talk in public, late at night after everyone else had stumbled home. I was always eager for his company.
Word soon shot around town that he was my protégé. Just in case anyone took that amiss, I spread my money around more generously. I even sent a messenger boy to buy a calf and sacrifice it outside the Kaaba during the spring rites. He took my money and an hour later came racing back.
“Which god is it for?” the boy asked. “They want to know.”
“The one whose only name is ‘the One,’” I said. The boy looked confused, so I said, “The choice is theirs. Just make a good show of it.” He ran away still confused. No matter. I was used to being unfathomable.
Muhammad was balm to my soul. I had someone to hold in a spiritual embrace. The affliction of loneliness was lifted. But what good was I doing for him? I could always leave him my money. Mecca would have a second rich outcast. There had to be something else.
“Are there other hanif?” he asked me one day.
“You mean others who know better how to keep their mouths shut?”
He smiled. “I was thinking of those who might have a taste for wisdom.”
“Wisdom is like hot coals,” I said. “People enjoy the glow, but they’re not stupid enough to step in.”
It was the most cynical thing I’d ever said, and his face fell.
“You make me talk like a whore,” I murmured, and Muhammad knew it was an apology. We both knew I wasn’t ashamed to be a believer. But I never took him to meet another hanif. It was contradictory. Two hanif make a congregation, three a tribe, and four a faith to be defended against other faiths with arrows and spears. Each hanif travels alone, I told him, and it seemed that Muhammad was satisfied with that explanation.
Something gnawed at me, though. I pondered a long time, until I convinced myself that he needed to know about the verse my finger had lighted upon. And he shall be called Emmanuel. If I didn’t tell him, I would be hiding a great secret from him. The only way to bring up the subject was indirectly. One blazing afternoon we were lying in the courtyard on straw pallets that had been soaked down with water.
Muhammad raised himself up on his elbows. “What is it?”
I faced him. “What do you know about how your father died?”
For once the cautious youth looked startled. “I know he went on a journey and never returned.”
“There’s more,” I said. “Much more.”
Muhammad hesitated. He didn’t want his memories disturbed, I could tell.
“They aren’t your memories,” I said. “You never met him. He’s like water that someone else has drunk.”
“But he was loved,” said Muhammad.
That much was undeniable. From the day he was born, Abdullah had led a charmed life. Everyone said so, and that made it so. He was never insulted in the street by a reckless young tough or called out to a fight. He basked in the illusion that he was the first person ever to be loved.
“He wanted to be a hero,” I began. “A man who spoke like thunder and laughed like the sunrise. I knew him and saw what his imagination was like. He loved the Bedouin, an
d he envisioned himself in one of their legends.” I eyed Muhammad sharply. “Do you know why your father failed?”
“Because he died.”
“No. Because it was not God’s will.”
Then and there I unfolded the twisted whole story of Abdullah’s death, which had been carefully kept from his son.
Everything revolved around Zamzam. The joy that Abdul Muttalib felt when he rediscovered the well was short-lived. He became entangled in Qurayshi intrigues. He was resented for grabbing the rights to the sacred water, and in time Muttalib felt that his enemies would prevail. What he needed was ten strong sons, or so he convinced himself. But the gods had favored him so far with only one.
He spent his days and nights chewing over his obsession, until the situation took a desperate turn. Muttalib went to the Kaaba and gazed at the hundreds of idols that lined the chamber. All at once he believed in none of them. In despair he called on God instead. Deep inside every Arab is an ancestral memory of Allah. It was Allah, the one God, who had led Hagar and Ishmael, the very founders of the Arab race, to Mecca.
Muttalib had never considered Allah reliable enough. The creator of the world had lost interest in his creation. Why else did ill fortune and calamities befall his children? But Muttalib had to have those ten sons, and it was in God’s power to grant them. Muttalib knew nothing of Jewish or Christian beliefs. He knew, however, that every god loved sacrifices in his name.
The greatest of the gods would require the greatest sacrifice, he reasoned. Muttalib raised his arms to heaven and promised the most dreadful sacrifice possible, if only he was granted the blessing of ten strong sons to defend him from his enemies.
A decade passed. One after another Muttalib’s wives bore him healthy, well-formed sons, until the number reached ten. He was well satisfied, and his peace of mind was all the more profound, because he had forgotten his oath to Allah long ago.
But God can reach into any man’s heart. One day while walking to the Kaaba, where the most revered idol was Hubal, the moon god, Muttalib had a vision in bloody detail of his promised sacrifice. He had sworn an oath to give God back one of his sons if he was granted ten. Muttalib was horrified by the picture of himself cutting the throat of one of his precious sons, but the thought of reneging on his promise to God was more horrifying.