Not that everyone concurred. “Prophecy,” as Ibn Hisham would sagely observe, “is a troublesome burden. Only strong, resolute messengers can bear it by God’s help and grace, because of the opposition which they meet from men in conveying God’s message.”16 Which was putting it mildly. Muhammad’s fellow townsmen regarded him first as a diversion; then as a provocation; and finally as a mortal danger. Particularly outraged by his uncompromising message were the members of his own tribe, “Quraysh” as they were known: a consortium of clans who had long enjoyed a peculiar respect among the scattered tribes of Arabia.17 The prestige they enjoyed as a “People of God” reflected the lucrative role that the Quraysh had grasped for themselves as the guardians of the Ka’ba, and its multitude of idols: a role that Muhammad, with his wild talk of there being only a single god, seemed determined to sabotage.c The unsurprising consequence was that Mecca grew increasingly hot for the Prophet and his followers. By AD 622, twelve years after the first revelation had descended from the heavens, the threat was directly to their lives. One night, Gabriel appeared to the Prophet and warned him that the Quraysh were plotting to murder him in his bed: the time had come to leave. Following in the footsteps of his followers, many of whom had already abandoned Mecca, Muhammad obediently slipped out from the city and vanished into the night. The moment had been long anticipated: what the Prophet had now embarked upon was not some aimless flight into the wilds of the desert, but rather a meticulously planned migration—a hijra.
An escape that would come to be seen, in due course, as having transformed the entire order of time. The year in which it took place still serves Muslims, to this day, as Year One. Dates in their calendar continue to be defined as AH, or “Anno Hegirae: In the Year of the Hijra.” To Ibn Hisham, the central episode of Muhammad’s life was not his first revelation, but his departure from Mecca. No longer simply a preacher, he was now embarked upon a spectacular series of exploits that would see him emerge, in due course, as the leader of an entire new political order. His destination, an oasis to the north of Mecca known as Yathrib, stood in desperate need of a guiding hand. The tribes who lived there, an uneasy mixture of Jewish and Arab settlers, had long been great enthusiasts for savage feuding; but increasingly, as the violence spiralled ever more out of control, there were many weary of the perpetual bloodshed. Pressure was building in Yathrib to find a peacemaker. Someone neutral, someone trustworthy, someone authoritative. Someone, perhaps—just perhaps—with a channel direct to God. In short, between Muhammad, a prophet in need of a refuge, and Yathrib, a city in need of a prophet, there could hardly have been a more perfect fit. A match made literally in heaven, as Ibn Hisham would choose to cast it.
It is the measure of what Muhammad ultimately achieved in Yathrib that its very name would end up erased from the map. It was the fate, and the undying glory, of the oasis that had offered him sanctuary to be commemorated as “The City of the Prophet,” or “Madinat an-Nabi”—Medina. Muhammad would spend the rest of his life there, building a society that has served as the model for Muslims ever since. Angry and clear was the reproach delivered by the Prophet to those who lived by the murderous ethics of the desert. To love gold “with a love inordinate,”18 to steal from orphans and squander their inheritance, and to dispose of unwanted daughters by burying them alive in the sands, was, so Muhammad warned, to be bound for eternal fire. “Account is demanded of those who oppress people and commit transgression on earth, unjustly. To them there is painful torment.”19 Before the awesome infinitude of God, enthroned upon His judgement seat, even the haughtiest or most rumbustious clan chief was but the merest speck of dust. The squabbling tribes of Yathrib, overwhelmed by the floodtide of Muhammad’s revelations, increasingly found their old antagonisms, and their old loyalties, dissolving amid the urgency and grandeur of his message. Yet the Prophet, even as he tamed their addiction to the more traditional pleasures of chauvinism, did not think to deny them all sense of community. On the contrary. Although Muhammad would certainly succeed in bringing peace to his oasis refuge, just as he had been invited to do, peace was hardly the limit of what he brought. Something more, very much more, was on offer to the people of Yathrib: a radically new identity, forged out of the whirling atoms of their pulverised tribal order. An identity as a single people—as the members of a single Umma.
“Seal of the Prophets” Muhammad may have been—but he did not disdain to found an earthly state. God continued to speak to him. His self-confidence did not dim. Obstacles in his path were swept aside or else trampled down. When the gap between rich and poor—which offended Muhammad to the core of his being—refused to narrow, he summarily outlawed usury and established an equitable taxation system. When the Jews of Yathrib, disconcerted by the transformation of their hometown into the “City of the Prophet,” presumed to manoeuvre against him, they were variously expelled, enslaved or massacred. When the Quraysh, informed that Muhammad was planning to raid one of their caravans, sent a military escort out into the desert, it was met by the Prophet and his tiny band of followers beside a watering hole named Badr, and put humiliatingly to rout. Angels, “white turbans flowing behind them,”20 shimmered in the sky above the battlefield, flashing their fiery swords, and sending Qurayshi heads flying.
Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!”21 Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrection day.”22
This assurance, even in the bleak days following Muhammad’s death two years later, offered the faithful much comfort. It suggested to them that they had not been abandoned by God. Despite the loss of their Prophet, Arabia remained transfigured by the sacred still. Nor was it only Mecca, “the holy of holies,” that still endured upon the face of the earth. So too did the Umma—and to the greater glory of all that the Prophet had taught. Over the succeeding years, the succeeding decades, the succeeding centuries, the Muslim people would serve to make of the entire world a Ka’ba: conquered, cleansed and sanctified. By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet. Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it, “and is pleased with our faith, namely that He has given us dominion over all peoples and religions.”23