Chapter Two Jahiliyyah

      HE BEGAN QUIETLY, speaking about his revelations to a small band of friends and family members, who became enthusiastic and sympathetic disciples, convinced that he was the longawaited Arab prophet. But Muhammad realized that most of the Quraysh would find it well-nigh impossible to accept this. The messengers of Allah had all been towering figures, founding fathers of society. Some had even worked miracles. How could Muhammad measure up to Moses or Jesus? The Quraysh had watched him growing up; they saw him going about his business in the market, eating and drinking like everybody else. They had jettisoned many muruwah values, but had retained its elitist, aristocratic outlook and would expect God to choose a well-born karim from one of the more distinguished clans, rather than a minor member of Hashim. How would they react when Muhammad told them to abandon their lofty independence in a way that violated the sunnah of their forefathers?

      Even at this early stage, Muhammad had encountered opposition. Khadijah, their daughters, ‘Ali, and Zayd accepted his new status unconditionally, but though his uncle Abu Talib would continue to love and support him, he was deeply pained that Muhammad had the temerity to depart from the absolute authority of their ancestors. He was splitting up the family. Muhammad’s cousins—Ja’far ibn Abi Talib, ‘Abdullah and ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh, and their sister Zaynab—all accepted the revelations, but his uncles ‘Abbas and Hamzah did not, though their wives did. Muhammad’s son-in-law, Abu 1-‘As, who had married his daughter Zaynab, refused even to consider the new religion. Naturally, this was distressing to Muhammad. Family solidarity was a sacred value, and like any Arab, he respected the elders of his tribe and clan. He expected leadership to come from the top, but it was the younger generation who responded to his message. The revelations had already started to push Muhammad away from the norm. He could not help noticing that many of his followers came from the lower classes. A significant number were women, others freedmen, servants, and slaves. Foremost among the latter was Bilal, an Abyssinian with an extraordinarily loud voice. When the Muslims gathered to pray together in the Haram, Muhammad found himself surrounded by “the young men and weak people of the city.”¹ Muhammad welcomed them warmly into his little company, but he must have wondered how a movement of such peripheral people could succeed. Indeed, some of the Qurayshan elders, who as yet knew nothing of the revelations, had begun to ask him why he was consorting with such riff-raff.

      The “weak” people were not all down-and-outs; this technical tribal term denoted inferior tribal status rather than poverty. Muhammad’s most zealous follower at this point was his friend ‘Attiq Ibn ‘Uthman, who was usually known by his kunya, Abu Bakr.* He was a successful, wealthy merchant, but like Muhammad he came from a “weak” clan that had fallen on hard times. Abu Bakr was “well-liked and of easy manners,” Ibn Ishaq tells us, a kindly, approachable man, especially skilled in the interpretation of dreams.² Many of the younger generation, who were disturbed by the aggressive capitalism of Mecca, came to him for advice. Some of the young felt an urgent sense of personal peril, a torpor of depression from which they longed to wake, and a frightening alienation from their parents. The son of an important financier in one of the more powerful clans dreamed that his father was trying to push him into a pit that was filled with fire; then he had felt two strong hands pulling him to safety and realized, at the moment of waking, that his savior was Muhammad.³ Another youth, this one from the prestigious clan of ‘Abd Shams, came to Abu Bakr after dreaming that he had heard a voice crying aloud in the desert “Sleepers, awake!” and proclaiming that a prophet had appeared in Mecca.⁴ Both these young men became Muslims, but the first kept his new faith a secret from his father for as long as he could, and the latter’s conversion greatly displeased the elders of his clan, who were among the most influential men in Mecca.

      The revelations had brought to light a fault line in the city. Over the years, a worrying divide had opened between young and old, rich and poor, men and women. This was dangerous. The scripture that was being revealed to Muhammad, verse by verse, surah by surah, condemned this kind of inequality; one faction would inevitably suffer at the hands of another.⁵ Any society that was divided against itself would be destroyed, because it was going against the very nature of things. This was a frightening period. The incessant wars between Persia and Byzantium seemed to herald the end of the old world order, and even within Arabia, tribal warfare had reached chronic proportions. During the last twenty years, the ghazu, which had traditionally been short and sharp, had escalated into long, drawn out military campaigns as a result of unprecedented drought and famine. There was an apocalyptic sense of impending catastrophe. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world.

      Under the inspiration of Allah, Muhammad was feeling his way towards an entirely new solution, convinced that he was not speaking in his own name, but was simply repeating the revealed words of God. It was a painful, difficult process. He once said: “Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.”⁶ Sometimes the message was clear. He could almost see and hear Gabriel distinctly. The words seemed to “come down” to him, like a shower of life-giving rain. But often the divine voice was muffled and obscure: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.”⁷ He had to listen to the undercurrent of events, trying to discover what was really going on. He would grow pale with the effort and cover himself with his cloak, as if to shield himself from the divine impact. He would perspire heavily, even on a cold day, as he turned inwards, searching his soul for a solution to a problem, in rather the same way as a poet has to open himself to the words that he must haul from the depths of himself to the conscious level of his mind. In the Qur’an, God instructed Muhammad to listen intently to each revelation as it emerged; he must be careful not to impose a meaning on a verse prematurely, before its full significance had become