Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time. Karen Armstrong
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a century after their Prophet’s death, Muslims ruled a vast empire, stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. Their circumstances were entirely different from those of the Prophet and the first Muslims, and Islam had to change and adapt. The first essays in Muslim history were written to address current perplexities. How could Muslims apply the Prophet’s insights and practice to their own times? When the early biographers told the story of his life, they tried to explain some of the passages in the Qur’an by reproducing the historical context in which these particular revelations had come down to Muhammad. By understanding what had prompted a particular Qur’anic teaching, they could relate it to their own situation by means of a disciplined process of analogy. The historians and thinkers of the time believed that learning about the Prophet’s struggles to make the word of God audible in the seventh century would help them to preserve his spirit in their own. From the very start, writing about the Prophet Muhammad was never a wholly antiquarian pursuit. The process continues today. Some Muslim fundamentalists have based their militant ideology on the life of Muhammad; Muslim extremists believe that he would have condoned and admired their atrocities. Other Muslims are appalled by these claims, and point to the extraordinary pluralism of the Qur’an, which condemns aggression and sees all rightly guided religions as deriving from the one God. We have a long history of Islamophobia in Western culture that dates back to the time of the Crusades. In the twelfth century, Christian monks in Europe insisted that Islam was a violent religion of the sword, and that Muhammad was a charlatan who imposed his religion on a reluctant world by force of arms; they called him a lecher and a sexual pervert. This distorted version of the Prophet’s life became one of the received ideas of the West, and Western people have always found it difficult to see Muhammad in a more objective light. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center on September II, 2001, members of the Christian Right in the United States and some sectors of the Western media have continued this tradition of hostility, claiming that Muhammad was irredeemably addicted to war. Some have gone so far as to claim that he was a terrorist and a pedophile.
We can no longer afford to indulge this type of bigotry, because it is a gift to extremists who can use such statements to “prove” that the Western world is indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world. Muhammad was not a man of violence. We must approach his life in a balanced way, in order to appreciate his considerable achievements. To cultivate an inaccurate prejudice damages the tolerance, liberality, and compassion that are supposed to characterize Western culture.
I became convinced of this fifteen years ago, after the fatwah of Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death because of what was perceived to be a blasphemous portrait of Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. I abhorred the fatwah and believed that Rushdie had a right to publish whatever he chose, but I was disturbed by the way some of Rushdie’s liberal supporters segued from a denunciation of the fatwah to an out-and-out condemnation of Islam itself that bore no relation to the facts. It seemed wrong to defend a liberal principle by reviving a medieval prejudice. We appeared to have learned nothing from the tragedy of the 1930s, when this type of bigotry made it possible for Hitler to kill six million Jews. But I realized that many Western people had no opportunity to revise their impression of Muhammad, so I decided to write a popular accessible account of his life to challenge this entrenched view. The result was Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, which was first published in 1991. But in the wake of September 11, we need to focus on other aspects of Muhammad’s life. So this is a completely new and entirely different book, which, I hope, will speak more directly to the terrifying realities of our post-September 11 world.
As a paradigmatic personality, Muhammad has important lessons, not only for Muslims, but also for Western people. His life was a jihad: as we shall see, this word does not mean “holy war,” it means “struggle.” Muhammad literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia, and we need people who are prepared to do this today. His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice, and arrogance. He realized that Arabia was at a turning point and that the old way of thinking would no longer suffice, so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution. We entered another era of history on September 11, and must strive with equal intensity to develop a different outlook.
Strangely, events that took place in seventh-century Arabia have much to teach us about the events of our time and their underlying significance—far more, in fact, than the facile sound bites of politicians. Muhammad was not trying to impose religious orthodoxy—he was not much interested in metaphysics—but to change people’s hearts and minds. He called the prevailing spirit of his time jahiliyyah. Muslims usually understand this to mean the “Time of Ignorance,” that is, the pre-Islamic period in Arabia. But, as recent research shows, Muhammad used the term jahiliyyah to refer not to an historical era but to a state of mind that caused violence and terror in seventh-century Arabia. Jahiliyyah, I would argue, is also much in evidence in the West today as well as in the Muslim world.
Paradoxically, Muhammad became a timeless personality because he was so rooted in his own period. We cannot understand his achievement unless we appreciate what he was up against. In order to see what he can contribute to our own predicament, we must enter the tragic world that made him a prophet nearly fourteen hundred years ago, on a lonely mountain top just outside the holy city of Mecca.
AFTERWARDS HE FOUND IT almost impossible to describe the experience that sent him running in anguish down the rocky hillside to his wife. It seemed to him that a devastating presence had burst into the cave where he was sleeping and gripped him in an overpowering embrace, squeezing all the breath from his body. In his terror, Muhammad could only think that he was being attacked by a jinni, one of the fiery spirits who haunted the Arabian steppes and frequently lured travellers from the right path. The jinn also inspired the bards and soothsayers of Arabia. One poet described his poetic vocation as a violent assault: his personal jinni had appeared to him without any warning, thrown him to the ground and forced the verses from his mouth.1 So, when Muhammad heard the curt command “Recite!” he immediately assumed that he too had become possessed. “I am no poet,” he pleaded. But his assailant simply crushed him again, until—just when he thought he could bear it no more—he heard the first words of a new Arabic scripture pouring, as if unbidden, from his lips.
He had this vision during the month of Ramadan, 610 CE. Later Muhammad would call it layla al-qadr (the “Night of Destiny”) because it had made him the messenger of Allah, the high god of Arabia. But at the time, he did not understand what was happening. He was forty years old, a family man, and a respected merchant in Mecca, a thriving commercial city in the Hijaz. Like most Arabs of the time, he was familiar with the stories of Noah, Lot, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and knew that some people expected the imminent arrival of an Arab prophet, but it never occurred to him that he would be entrusted with this mission. Indeed, when he escaped from the cave and ran headlong down the slopes of Mount Hira’, he was filled with despair. How could Allah have allowed him to become possessed? The jinn were capricious; they were notoriously unreliable because they delighted in leading people astray. The situation in Mecca was serious. His tribe did not need the dangerous guidance of a jinni. They needed the direct intervention of Allah, who had always been a distant figure in the past, and who, many believed, was identical with the God worshipped by Jews and Christians.*
Mecca had achieved astonishing success. The city was now an international trading center and its merchants and financiers had become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Only a few generations earlier, their ancestors had been living a desperate, penurious life in the intractable deserts of northern Arabia. Their triumph was extraordinary, since most Arabs were not city dwellers but nomads. The terrain was so barren that people could only survive there by roaming ceaselessly from place to place in search of water and grazing land. There were a few agricultural colonies on the higher ground, such as Ta’if, which supplied Mecca with most of its food, and Yathrib, some 250 miles to the north.