Mohammed’s First Glimpse of Empire
Meanwhile, in 579 AD, when Mohammed’s grandfather died, his uncle, Abu Talib, the new head of Mohammed’s Banu Hashim[132] clan, took over as his foster parent, sticking by him for the next 40 years.[133] This was yet another disadvantage. As we’ll see in a moment, Abu Talib didn’t have a real knack for Mecca’s major source of income—international transport and trade. The one thing he did have was the strength of character to defend Mohammed from attack.[134] And Mohammed would continue to be attacked for the next 35 years.
In 581 AD, Mohammed turned eleven and, like other kids his age in Mecca, became a shepherd and grazed goats.[135] But keeping goats company would not prove to be Mohammed’s calling. When Mohammed turned twelve, the youngster forced his uncle, Abu Talib, to slip him into in the commercial and entrepreneurial currents that plugged Mecca into the larger world, the world of the superpowers—Persia and Rome. Abu Talib planned his clan’s annual trading expedition to the Roman[1081] province of Syria.[136] Abu Talib had no intention of taking his nephew. But Mohammed begged and begged, then finally held on to his uncle’s neck and refused to let go.[137] Abu Talib gave in, and Mohammed began his indoctrination into Mecca’s major business, long-distance trade, with his first trip to a land of big-city sophistication. The swatch of Roman territory Mohammed traveled to was al-Sham,[138] “Greater Syria,” a land that included modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine,[139] the most intensely Christian and Jewish territory on the face of the earth. Greater Syria was the birthplace of Judaism, the location of the traditional Jewish “promised land”—Israel, Judaea, and Samaria. It was also the cradle of Christianity—the location of Jesus’ birth and life, of St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus (the famous incident in which Paul was blinded by a divine light and fell off his ass), and was the home base of the apostles and the fathers of the church. In addition to meaning “Greater Syria,” by the way, al-Sham, the destination of Mohammed’s first trip beyond the Arab deserts, meant “Damascus”—the capital city of Syria.
One of Mohammed’s chief biographers, Muhammad Haykal, is convinced that, “It was in al Sham that” Mohammed “came to know of Byzantine and Christian history and heard of the Christians’ scriptures.” [140] These were things Mohammed would never forget. When the pedal hit the metal, they would turn him into a globalist.
In all probability, Mohammed’s guardian uncle, Abu Talib, did not do well for his clan on this trading expedition. How can we tell? Some Meccans—the chiefs of the Banu Ummaya among them—carried goods from Yemen to al-Sham every year. But not Abu Talib. Once his first expedition was over, he never mounted another one.
Ten years later, from his 21st to his 24th year, Mohammed got his first taste of what biographer Muhammad Abdul Hai calls the Arab “hobby”—war. An intertribal conflict broke out for four years running, and Mohammed’s tribe was caught up in it. At first, the conflict appeared to be a mere nothing, just a persistent scuffle of the kind that the Arabs used for sport—two clans battling each other until they grew tired of the fight, reached an agreement, and the winning tribe paid the losers blood money for the dead. In this four-year-long affair, The War of the Wicked, Mohammed collected the arrows fired at his tribe by the enemies and handed them to his uncle to present to the more important warriors, who fired them back in the other direction.[141] But over time, the war impoverished the Meccans, lowered them in the eyes of their neighbors and made them vulnerable to raids. So the warring tribes got together for dinner and concluded a truce. Mohammed was one of those at the dinner who swore to uphold the peace agreement.[142] Mohammed would later upscale the nature of war—and of alliances—among the Arabs dramatically.
In 594 AD, when Mohammed hit the age of 23, he lucked out. He was too poor to marry. But the most successful businessperson in Mecca was a woman—the 40-year-old Khadija, a widow who’d already had two husbands[143] die out from under her. Khadija didn’t need a husband with money. Like Mohammed’s uncle, Abu Talib, Khadija was in the trade and transport profession. Like his uncle, she was a traveler who had seen the world beyond the desert. But unlike Mohammed’s uncle, who never went on a trade expedition again after the trip he made when Mohammed was twelve, Khadija was a dedicated practitioner of commerce and an entrepreneurial organizer, always on the prowl for talented men she could send on trade missions. The result: she was rich, the wealthiest woman in Mecca[144]. She’d amassed a fortune larger than those of all the other members of Mohammed’s tribe, the Banu Quraish,[145] combined. Meanwhile, Mohammed had earned a reputation for honesty.[146] If you were going on a business trip and wanted to leave your goods with someone trustworthy, everyone in town knew that Mohammed was your man. Or so says Islamic tradition.
Khadija decided to test Mohammed’s reputation. She hired the 23-year-old Mohammed to travel on her behalf to Syria, carrying and selling her merchandise. She loaned Mohammed one of her male slaves to keep him company, to help him lug things, and to spy on him. Mohammed’s powers as a salesmen and his skills at bargaining were apparently above average…though it was his “honesty and fair dealings” that Islamic biographers like Sarwat Saulat try to stress. Mohammed returned from Syria with a handsome profit.[147] And Khadija’s slave reported to her privately that Mohammed hadn’t skimmed any of the proceeds off for himself.[148]
So in 595 AD, Khadija made Mohammed an offer he could easily have refused. She asked him to marry her. The future prophet was only 25 years old and Khadija was forty. But Khadija was offering Mohammed a jackpot—access to all of her wealth and slaves. So Mohammed said yes. Once the marriage was consummated, the groom made a noble decision. He set all of Khadija’s slaves free.[149] That move would later prove critical when Mohammed needed followers for a new way of thinking and behaving. But we’ll get to that later. Mohammed summed up his marriage to Khadija like this: “When I was poor she [Khadija] enriched me and when they called me a liar, she supported my mission.”[150] Mohammed’s career was about to be catapulted to a higher level by a powerful, supportive, and brainy woman. It’s ironic that the religion he would found would eventually reduce women to invisibility.
The first eleven years of Mohammed’s marriage were so uneventful that they’ve nearly disappeared from sight. Khadija gave birth to seven children. Two of them died early in life. More important, Khadija had a Christian cousin, a man who Mohammed’s first biographer, the eighth century scholar Ibn Ishaq, says was “well versed in sacred and profane literature”[151]—the literature of the Christians and the Jews. When Khadija and her cousin discussed the people Mohammed had met on his first trade trip to Syria for Khadija, they suspected that some of them may have been angels sent to protect Mohammed. This was the first hint of yet more things to come—Mohammed’s one-of-a-kind relationship with God.
Meanwhile in 606 AD, when Mohammed was 26 years old, he showed signs of a new skill—a talent for social organization. The Kaaba—the cube-shaped building that housed the wooden idols of the gods of tribes for hundreds of miles around, the building that attracted the lucrative pilgrimage business—was damaged by rain. The Meccans wanted to rebuild it, but were terrified that if they laid a hand on the Kaaba’s divine stone and timbers, the gods would strike them dead. They allowed one brave citizen, al-Walid, to do what no one else dared. Walid grabbed a pickaxe and demolished an entire section of the Kaaba’s wall. The Meccans waited breathlessly until the next morning to see if Walid would survive the wrath of the gods. When Walid woke up alive and went back to demolishing walls, the men of the tribes of Mecca breathed a sigh of relief and pitched in to join him.
But once the old building was gone and the new building erected, there was a problem. The sacred black stone—the cube-shaped meteorite—had to be put in place in the new building, and every tribe wanted the honor of completing this last and most holy of tasks. The tribes quarreled for four days, began to form factions, and started muttering about war. Who would save Mecca from civil strife? And how?
One elder suggested that the arguing crowd let whoever walked through the door next act as umpire and decide the matter. Surprise, surprise. The next man to come through the door was…Mohammed. Mohammed asked for a cloak, put the black stone on it, and said, “Let every group take hold of a part of the cloak.” The tribesmen each gripped a bit of the cloak’s fringe and lifted the stone to the height of its resting place. And Mohammed himself slid the stone from the cloak onto its base. All earned the honor of elevating the stone![152] Did this mean that Mohammed had a gift for uniting men in new ways? And a gift for compromise? We shall have to see.
609 AD was the year that would change the world…literally. In the ninth month of each year, the month of Ramadan, Mohammed followed the Meccan religious tradition of taking his family into the mountains above town, secluding himself in a cave, then praying and meditating[153]. All kinds of shenanigans were going on back in town, forms of behavior that Mohammed despised. According to biographer Sarwat Saulat, there was a laundry list of sins: “idolatry, dishonesty, murder, civil strife, gambling, robbery, usury, and drinking of wine.” [154] During his Ramadan retreat, Mohammed was asleep in his cave when he was sideswiped on by an odd experience. He dreamed that a massive and indistinct force came to him carrying a brocade coverlet with words stitched into it, then ordered him to “recite, to read.” In his sleep, Mohammed admitted that he was illiterate:[155] “I cannot read,” [156] he said. But the force wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mohammed felt himself being crushed three times so hard that, “I thought it was death.” “What can I read?[157]” pleaded Mohammed finally, caving in to the pain.[158] Said the voice of the force, “Read in the name of thy lord who…created man from a clot. Read: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous.” These words and a few more stuck with Mohammed as though “they had been graven on my heart” [159]. They also convinced him that he’d turned overnight into either a mystic poet or a lunatic, two sorts of humans he despised.[160]
Rather than be ridiculed by his fellow Meccans as a madman, Mohammed trekked up into the mountains to find a convenient cliff from which he could fling himself “and gain rest.”[161] But a man showed up like the Jolly Green Giant, straddling the horizon with his torso in the sky, his feet planted on the ground, and with wings outstretched from one end of the sky to the other.[162] This oversized apparition spanned the horizon no matter which way Mohammed turned his head. Said the super-sized humanoid, “Oh, Mohammed, thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.” Mohammed stopped still in his tracks.
Meanwhile, his wife, Khadija, was worried and sent out servants to find her missing spouse. The servants brought back a seriously shaken man. Sitting at Khadija’s thigh, Mohammed told his wife that he thought he was losing it. “None of God’s creatures was more hateful to me than an (ecstatic) poet or a man possessed,” he said, “I could not even look at them.”[163] Yet that was the level of delusion to which he felt he’d sunk. Khadija reassured Mohammed that God would never implant madness in a man so honest and kind.
But beneath her soothing manner, Khadija, too, must have been disturbed. When the family returned home from the mountains, Khadija gathered her robes about her[164] and paid a visit to her cousin the Christian, the man schooled in the Jewish Torah and in the Christian Gospels. The cousin came up with the perfect face-saving solution. Mohammed’s visions were not a humiliation, he said, they were a promotion. Explained the cousin, “the law of Moses has been bestowed on him and he is the prophet of this nation!”[165]
That was it. A new calling. In 610 Mohammed started his career in prophecy. For its first three years, it was at best a home business, a mom-and-pop cottage industry. Mohammed’s first convert was just a few inches away in his bed—Khadija, his wife. Doesn’t sound like much, but with Khadija signed up as a believer, Mohammed had her fortune as funding. Convert number two was a newly-arrived[166] house-guest, Mohammed’s ten year old nephew. Abu Talib, Mohammed’s uncle and guardian, had been too strapped financially to continue taking care of his own son, Ali. Mohammed, flush with Khadija’s money, had taken over the task and Ali had moved in to Mohammed’s home. Now the ten-year-old signed up eagerly as a follower of Mohammed’s still rudimentary belief system. But Mohammedanism would have a tougher time with adults. Abu Talib, Ali’s father and one of the men closest to Mohammed, gave the self-styled spokesperson for Allah a turndown, explaining that, “I cannot abandon the religion of my forefathers.”[167] Then came a big score, an actual jump outside the immediate household—Mohammed’s best friend Abu Bakr, who pulled in six of the heavyweights who would someday play a role in militant Islam’s blitzkrieg of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. But there would be many difficulties to overcome before Islam could pull that blitzkrieg off.
It took three years, but by 613 AD Mohammed’s new religion, Islam, which Sarwat Saulat says means, “the religion of obedience, peace, and security”[168] had taken shape in Mohammed’s mind. The angel Gabriel taught Mohammed how to wash up five times a day, then to pray.[169] God, Allah, revealed enough scriptures to Mohammed to fill a small Quran. The big He in the sky drove home a core belief: “Anyone who does not admit the existence of God or believes in polytheism is a rebel. This was the real and true religion of Adam, the first man, of Abraham, of Moses, and of Jesus.”[170] In other words, God told Mohammed that the religion of the Jews and the Christians was distorted, dishonest, and corrupt, but that He, the Most Gracious Most Merciful,[171] was going to hand Mohammed the REAL religion the Jews and Christians should follow.
What’s more, by 613 Mohammed had worked out his way of introducing himself to strangers: “I am an apostle from Allah to you and command you to adore Allah and not to bestow this adoration on any other; to renounce the worship of idols; to believe me, His apostle, and to defend me that I may explain to you the revelation with which Allah has sent me.”[172] He was asking a lot. That may be why the new belief system, still limited to a hidden existence in Mohammed’s house, had only worked its way up to 40 believers.
So God sent Mohammed the word that it was time to get serious. It was time to go public. Very public. Or, as God put it, it was time to “publish.”[173] But Mohammed couldn’t read or write and the printing press hadn’t been invented yet. So Mohammed followed god’s instructions and told his family, ““O children of Ka’ab Ibn Lu’ay, save yourselves from Hell. O children of Murrah lbn Ka’ab, save yourselves from Hell. O children of Hashim save yourselves from Hell.”[174] How? Basically, by doing anything and everything Mohammed demanded.[175] After those cheerful words, Mohammed went to one of the highest soap-boxes around, the sacred Mount of Safa, a hill topped with the idol of the goddess Na’ila.[176] He asked the people of Mecca to gather ‘round, then gave his equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, a speech that showed just how dramatically Islam would be a religion of fear, not a religion of love:
Would you believe me if I tell you that a large army was hidden behind this hill ready to attack you? Well, if you think so, I ask you to believe in one God, and if you refuse to do so God will give you severe punishment.[177]
With these uplifting words, Mohammed loses his audience, who promptly head for just about any part of town where Mohammed isn’t standing.[178] One reason for this instant departure: much as the Meccans love mocking their fellow humans—and they do—they prefer to laugh[179] about Mohammed behind his back. For the moment.
613-619 Why be laughed at for taking an inch when you can be hated for stealing a mile? For the next six years, from 613 AD to 619 AD, Mohammed takes his religion a giant step forward. He turns it, says Sarwat, into “a call to create a whole new society, free from all evils and exploitations, on the basis of Divine guidance.”[180] This doesn’t go down well with the Meccans in power, those who benefit from the existing status quo. Says Mohammed’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, when Mohammed insults their idols, the folks at the top, “accuse him of seeking power, deny his revelation, and unite to injure him.”[181] Then comes the heavy-duty persecution. Depending on whose version of the story you listen to. And there’s only one left. The Muslim version. Which goes like this. Something rather hard to gather together on the planet earth of the year 613 AD or so—a group of Mohammed’s followers—goes out to a valley to pray. A group of something not quite so hard to find—idol-fearing Meccans—comes across the Mohammedans, insults them, and “provokes them to fight”[182]. One of the Muslims, a bloke named Sad, clobbers one of the Meccans with the jaw of a camel, a natural lever long and hefty enough to kill someone. In this case, the Meccan victim is only injured. But Ibn Ishaq notes a critical fact: this is “the first blood shed in Islam.”[183]
The Meccans try to figure out how to handle the trouble Mohammed’s causing. He is undermining the fabric of society. And he’s doing it big-time. Says one of the Meccans, Mohammed “has come with words …which separate a man from his father or from his brother, or from his wife, or from his family.”[184] So the Meccans make a singularly poor decision. The annual Holy Months have arrived, the time when everyone within hundreds of miles has to schlep to Mecca to amble around the Kaaba, to honor the idols, and to trade. The Meccan elders take up a position by the roadside, stop every incoming visitor, and warn him about Mohammed and his anti-social poison. Without knowing it, they’ve just given Mohammed something he’s never had before—a public relations campaign. Word of Mohammed spreads far and wide.
So the Meccans try to convince Mohammed to return to his position as a respectable member of the community. They offer him money. They offer to make him a prince. They offer to make him a king. They ask him to produce a few miracles to prove that his claims of prophecy are legit. Nothing works.[185] So the Meccans turn to cruder techniques of cult-deprogramming. One believer’s uncle ties him up hand and foot, beats him with ropes, and locks him in a room, and tells him he’ll stay there until he agrees to leave the Mohammed-cult and return to his senses.[186] The Mohammedan doesn’t abandon his wild and crazy belief in Mohammed and his preachings. Another uncle of a believer tosses his cult-ridden nephew into a room filled with choking smoke. When yet another convert announces in public that he’s switching over to the Mohammed sect, the public responds by beating him up. Others are beaten, then locked up without food and water until they can’t stand it and do more than merely abjure Mohammed. They promise to worship a dung beetle.[187] But to the extent that Islam is catching on, it is doing best with the poor and with the slaves. And it’s the slaves who get the really heavy-duty de-Mohammedification treatment. The desert sands outside of Mecca heat up like a hamburger grill when the sun hits them. The master of one Muslim slave forces his victim’s back down on this searing desert surface at noon, when the heat would char a slice of camel liver into solid carbon, then loads the slave’s back with a huge stone to pin him in place and to make sure that he bakes evenly. The slave refuses to leave the Mohammed cult. So the master takes another approach. He ties a rope around the broiled slave’s neck, then takes advantage of a powerful motive force—adolescent boys, some of whom are always up for a joy-ride. The slave owner asks the boys if they’ll oblige him by dragging the sautéed slave “from one corner of town to the other”[188]. The slave can barely talk, but still manages to spit out the Muslim catchphrase, “God is one” [189]. Finally Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s best friend and second male convert, offers the owner a trade—a black slave of his own in exchange for the cooked and dragged Muslim slave—and gains the char-broiled Muslim his freedom.[190] Another slave is beaten into unconsciousness, wakened, then beaten again. To make matters worse, his father is battered, bloodied, and bruised, and his mother is run through with a lance. This cocktail-toothpick treatment is fatal to the old woman. Another slave gets an even more decisive detoxification. He’s spread out on burning coals until the melted fat of his body finally cools the embers. By then, he is presumably dead. [191] But Mohammed himself is untouched. No one dares cross his uncle and his uncle’s allies.[192]
In the deserts of Mecca, even bad publicity is good publicity. All this persecution spreads the word of Islam and its essential messages, and keeps new converts trickling in.[193]
615 Mohammed gets one group of believers out of the firing line by telling them to take refuge in Africa—in the Christian superpower of Ethiopia.[194] News of Islam inches its way through tiny portions of the Ethiopian population and fires up curiosity. So 20 Christians take the long trip from Ethiopia to Mecca to check out the self-proclaimed “Apostle of Allah” for themselves. When Mohammed recites the Koran to them they cry, they believe, and they apparently convert.[195] This takes Islam international for the first time. But it’s only a nano-preview of the international surprises Islam will spring a mere 20 years down the line.
615-618 The Meccans decide to choke Islam before it can get more threatening. Their tourniquet of choice? Economic sanctions. They ban all trade with the Muslims, ruling out even the sale of food to Mohammed’s followers. The goal is what Muhammad’s biographer Muhammad Haykal calls: “boycott, isolation, and starvation”[196]. Meanwhile five Meccans amuse themselves by mocking Mohammed. Allah taps Mohammed’s shoulder to deliver one of the revelations—one of the direct communiqués from God The Merciful, The Compassionate—that now pop into Mohammed’s life on a regular basis. These bulletins will someday be collected in the Koran. The message, in this case, concerns the five wise guys who are making fun of Mohammed. “They will know,” says Allah. In other words, they’ll get the message. But what message and how will they get it?
Gabriel stands by Mohammed’s side when the five wise guys are worshipping by circling the Kaaba. One of the jokers is hit by a green leaf in the face and goes blind. Gabriel points to the stomach of another, his stomach swells (technically, this unfortunate is stricken with “dropsy,” a form of edema) and he dies. Gabriel points to a wound on the heel of the third man who has dared to make fun of Mohammed. The wound the scar covered opens and kills him. Three taunters down, two to go! Gabriel does something normally only worms and contortionists can pull off. He points to the sole of the fourth target’s foot. A thorn penetrates the sole and kills the guy. For his final act, Gabriel points to the head of the fifth mocker, which “ferments with poison”[197] and sends the cut-up directly to the new home of his four co-mockers, hell. The lesson? It’s handy to have a merciful and compassionate God on your side. And sometimes the fact that He shows His mercy and compassion by killing can give you a competitive edge.
619 Mohammed’s two protectors, Khadija, his venture capitalist, and Abu Talib, his uncle and his muscle,[198] die.[199] Things have been bad in Mecca for the Muslims, and now Mohammed is afraid they’ll get worse. He sets out on a trip to find new backup—allies from other tribes who will protect him. He works out a minor variation on his opening line: “I am an apostle from Allah to you and command you to adore Allah and not to bestow this adoration on any other; to renounce the worship of idols; to believe me, His apostle, and to defend me that I may explain to you the revelation with which Allah has sent me.”[200] And he tries another tack, the export market. Mecca still has its trade fairs, events that attract the visits of tribes from great distances.[201] If your neighbors won’t buy your spiel, why not try it out on strangers? Especially ones who’ve shown up in a buying mood? So Mohammed tries winning over the tourists. In the process, he meets the folks from Medina, a hamlet 280 miles up the road, who seem far more interested in what he has to say than most of the folks at home.
When he returns home, things are worse than ever. The Meccans have come to the end of their rope. Once simply playing practical jokes and mocking Mohammed was enough. Like the day a bunch of Meccan pranksters slid a camel foetus or a camel’s guts, depending on whose account your reading, down the back of Mohammed’s robes. But those days are over. Now the Meccans plan to solve their unwanted prophet problem by doing away with its cause, Mohammed. Mohammed gets wind of this scheme, and hot foots it out of town with his best friend and first adult convert, Abu Bakr—a man who will someday be rewarded for his loyalty with conquests beyond most men’s dreams. The two head the 280 miles to Medina, leaving behind another convert, Mohammed’s teenage cousin Ali. Ali sleeps in Mohammed’s bed that night, setting himself up as a decoy. It turns out that the rumor of Mohammed’s assassination was true. A gang of Meccans intent on murder enter Mohammed’s home in the middle of the night armed to the teeth. But when they peel back to covers to give them clear aim at their victim, all they find is a boy. Killing kids is not what they have in mind. Ali leaves for Medina to join up with Mohammed and Abu Bakr. The Meccans will someday rue their mercy. Ali will someday become one of Islam’s greatest slayers, a man who hones his blade on the bodies of Meccans.
A handful of other followers join Mohammed in Medina, including his wife, Khadija. 622 AD, the year of this relocation of the Allah operation, known hejirah, is year zero on the Islamic calendar. It’s the point Muslims will come to regard as the beginning of history. All that came before will be considered Jahiliyyah—the years of darkness, when chaos, ignorance, and evil ruled mankind. What would banish that black and endless night of humanity? The light Mohammed bore like a lantern. The light of Islam.
Tribal wars were a constant. One of Mohammed’s Islamic biographers, Sarwat Saulat thinks this strife went against Mohammed’s grain. “The Prophet,” he says, “was by his nature a human[e] and peace loving person…[who] hated war.”[202] Mohammed’s life in Medina would tend to argue otherwise.