The sense of compulsion they brought to the study of their past was hardly surprising. The yearning to understand the reason for the spectacular upsurge in their fortunes, to clarify the process by which it had been brought about, and to elucidate what it revealed about the character of their god, never ceased to gnaw. Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven. “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models. God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces. “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.”8 This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world.
But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad. Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis. Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ ”9 Muhammad, understandably enough, had been left most unsettled. Voices were rarely heard in the places where he chose to wander, on his lonely quest after spiritual enlightenment. Mecca, the nearby town, stood in the depths of the Arabian desert: the ring of mountains that surrounded it, baked black by the pitilessly broiling sun, rose barren, wind-lashed and empty. Yet, it was on the slope of one of those same mountains, lying at night inside a cave, that Muhammad heard the most startling voice of all. He felt it at first as a vice tightening around his body: the grip of some terrifying supernatural entity. Next came a single command: “Recite!”b Then, as though his words were a desperate, violent exhalation of air, Muhammad himself started to gasp out whole lines of verse:
Recite: in the name of your Lord!
He Who created!
He created man from a blood clot.
Recite! Your Lord is most bountiful.
He taught with the pen.
He taught man what he knew not.
10
Muhammad was speaking, but the words were not his own. Then whose? Muhammad himself, it is said, initially suspected a jinn, a spirit of the deserts and winds. Perhaps this was not surprising. Mecca was, according to Ibn Hisham, a hag-ridden, demon-haunted place. Right in the centre of the city there stood a shrine built of stone and mud—the Ka’ba, or “Cube”—in which there squatted a whole host of fearsome gods, totems of such sinister power that men from across Arabia would gather there to pay their respects. On top of these, every household in Mecca had its own private idoclass="underline" there to be rubbed against for luck before a journey. So inveterately pagan were the Meccans that they even offered sacrifices to boulders: among which were a couple of one-time lovers who had dared to have sex in the Ka’ba, and promptly been turned to rock. It was only natural, then, in a city so eerie, so perfumed by blood and magic, that clairvoyants should have been a common sight, rolling about in the dirt of its narrow streets, vomiting up revelations, possessed by jinn in the depths of their guts. So overwhelming was Muhammad’s dread that he might now be suffering an identical fate that he thought to take his life. Rising to his feet, he left the cave and stumbled out into the night. Up the side of the mountain he hurried. Heading for the summit, he prepared to hurl himself from the peak, to dash himself on to the rocks.
But now the voice returned: “O Muhammad! Thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.” Could it really be so? Gabriel was a mighty angel, the messenger of the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians, who back in ancient times—or so it was said—had revealed visions to the Prophet Daniel, and told the Virgin Mary that she was to bear a son. Looking up to the heavens, Muhammad saw the figure of a man, his “feet astride the horizon”:11 who else but the angel himself? Returning down the mountain, seeking comfort from his wife, reflecting upon the shattering trauma he had been through, Muhammad dared to contemplate a truly awesome possibility: that the voice had spoken the truth. He would not hear it again for another two years—but when at last Gabriel returned, and the silence was broken, Muhammad had no doubt that he was hearing, courtesy of the angel, the authentic words of a god. And not just any god, but the one God, the true God, the indivisible God. “There is no god but He, Creator of all things.”12
Here, in this uncompromising assertion that there existed only a single divinity, lay the key to a starkly new vision of the universe: monotheism in the raw. With each successive revelation, Muhammad’s understanding of God’s oneness—and of what was owed to Him as a result—was burnished to an ever more awesome sheen. The people of Arabia—with their idols of stone, or wood, or dates mixed with rancid butter—were merely repeating what had been, since the dawn of time, humanity’s greatest delusion: that the heavens and the earth were thronged with a whole teeming mob of gods. So Muhammad, ordered by his voice to “proclaim aloud”13 God’s revelations, began to preach. Again and again, he warned, mankind had succumbed to the one sin that could not be forgiven: shirk—the belief that God can be associated with other beings. Again and again, however, because He was all merciful, the “Lord of the Worlds”14 had sent prophets to open the eyes of people to their folly, and summon them back to the primordial way of truth. Noah and Abraham, Moses and Jesus: all had preached the one identical message, a call for submission to God. Now, it appeared, with revelations being granted to Muhammad in ever increasing length and number, there had arisen, six centuries after Jesus, a new prophet. Indeed—the very “Seal of Prophets.”15 As the years passed and the divine continued to speak through him, so Muhammad and his growing band of followers came to realise that he was the recipient of the ultimate in messages: the definitive revelation of God.