And yet, all the while, there was anxiety. Even amid the wealth and splendour of a great empire, vast on a scale beyond anything that Muhammad would have imagined possible, the Muslim people could not shake off an uncomfortable sense of their own decay. A generation after Ibn Hisham had completed his biography, and the scholar who would end up crushed to death beneath his toppled books, an astounding polymath by the name of Al-Jahiz, could view the entire triumphant course of Islam’s history as embodying nothing but a dying fall. There had been only the one truly golden age. Those who had heard the Prophet actually talk, who had ridden by his side, who had served him as his Sahabah, or “Companions”: they alone could be reckoned to have practised “the authentic monotheism.” Hence, of course, their astounding success. It was their generation, fresh from the burial of the Prophet, which had first embarked upon the conquest of the world—and achieved it, what was more. The men who had presided over this glorious victory charge, a sequence of leaders known as “Caliphs,” or “Successors” of the Prophet, had all of them been noted intimates of Muhammad. The first, a grizzled veteran by the name of Abu Bakr, had been his companion during the perilous flight to Medina, and the father of his favourite wife; the second, Umar, had been his brother-in-law; the third, Uthman, had been married to one of his daughters. The fourth, Ali ibn Abi Talib, had rejoiced in the most splendid pedigree of alclass="underline" the first male ever to convert to Islam, a step he had taken at the precocious age of nine, he was also the Prophet’s cousin, before finally graduating to become, just for good measure, his son-in-law as well.d These four men had reigned for just thirty years in total, but already, by the time that Al-Jahiz was putting pen to paper, they were well on their way to being enshrined by the vast majority of Muslims as veritable paragons—ar-Rashidun, or “the Rightly Guided.” Not, of course, that their period in power could quite compare with Muhammad’s at Medina; but still, as a golden age, it came in a glorious second. “For at that time,” as Al-Jahiz put it wistfully, “there was nothing in the way of offending action or scandalous innovation, no act of disobedience, envy, rancour or rivalry.”24 Islam had been pristinely Islamic still.
But after every summer there must be a winter; and after every golden age an age of iron. In 661, the era of the Rashidun was brought to a bloody and tragic end. The Caliph Ali was murdered. Then, two decades later, his son was cut down in battle; lips that had kissed the Prophet were prodded mockingly by a conqueror’s stick. By now, a dynasty of Qurayshi despots, the Umayyads, had dug their claws deep into the Caliphate and made it their own—to the scandal of the God-fearing. The new Caliphs drank wine; they kept pet monkeys; they termed themselves, not the Prophet’s Successors, but “the deputies of God.” Monstrous behaviour such as this was bound to tempt the wrath of heaven; and sure enough, in 750, the Umayyads were toppled, forced to flee, and systematically hunted down by vengeful death squads. Nevertheless, the blots and stains of their near century in power were not so easily erased. No matter that the dynasty that succeeded them to the caliphal throne, the Abbasids, claimed descent from the uncle of Muhammad himself—the golden age of the Rashidun was not restored. Instead, no less than in the dark days that had preceded the coming of the Prophet, novelty and division seemed rife. Rival sects proliferated—and rival Caliphs too. Meanwhile, beyond the palaces in which the Successors of the Prophet dressed in silks and ate from plates of gold, the poor found themselves as oppressed as they had ever been by the arrogance of the powerful, the wealthy, the cruel. Remorselessly, the question nagged: how had it all gone wrong? And even more remorselessly: how was it best to be set right?
Two centuries on from the hijra, and the last man to have seen the Prophet alive was long since departed from the face of the world. Nevertheless, confronted as they were by the splintering of the times, most Muslims knew that there could be no true solution to any problem that lacked the sanction of their beloved prophet. “In the Messenger of God,” the Almighty Himself had informed the faithful, “you have an excellent example to follow.”25 To sketch him was therefore to sketch the ultimate in role models: a pattern of behaviour fit to serve all mankind, and all eternity. As the years went by, and ever more biographies were written in ever more extensive detail, so the Prophet came to be ever more venerated. That his birth had been marked by incontrovertible wonders, whether the appearance of strange stars in the sky or the whisperings of jinn in the ears of clairvoyants, foretelling a new age to come, had been well known to Ibn Hisham; but time would radically improve on this record of miracles. Fresh evidence—wholly unsuspected by Muhammad’s earliest biographers—would see him revered as a man able to foretell the future, to receive messages from camels, and palm trees, and joints of meat, and to pick up a soldier’s eyeball, reinsert it, and make it work better than before. The result was one yet additional miracle: the further in time from the Prophet a biographer, the more extensive his biography was likely to be.
Not that it required a whole book to spell out a lesson from the life of Muhammad. A single anecdote, a single phrase, would do. Hadiths, these snatches of biographical detail were termed—and already, a bare century after the time of Ibn Hisham, they existed in their tens, perhaps their hundreds, of thousands. Anyone with a taste for lists could consult one of a number of vast compilations, arranged neatly by subject. There was barely a topic, it seemed, on which Muhammad had not opined. Should the God-fearing wish to know whether they could marry demons, or why most of the damned in hell were women, or how an orgasm during procreation would affect the appearance of the resulting child, then a hadith would provide the answer. Scraps from Muhammad’s biography they might have been; but they were also a record, preserved for the edification of later generations, of the Prophet’s entire outlook on life. What could possibly be more precious to the Muslim people than that? Taken together, as the hadiths increasingly were, they constituted something infinitely more significant than a mere anthology of quotations. What they embodied was a quite exceptional body of law, one that touched upon every conceivable facet of human existence and left almost nothing unregulated, almost nothing to chance: “Sunna,” as hadith scholars termed it. Here, then, was yet another of the glories of the Muslim people. Not for them laws dredged up from the sump of worldly custom or invention—their laws, they proudly boasted, derived directly from heaven. It was the Sunna, by instructing the faithful in their duties towards the poor, and by prescribing for them with great precision how to pray, where to go on pilgrimage, what to eat, and when to fast, that had succeeded in taming the instincts of previously savage societies, and granting them a glimpse of what a civilised community of human beings might truly become. Those who lived by its tenets viewed this as an accomplishment so miraculous that they never doubted its divine origin. As one renowned hadith-master put it, with a triumphant show of logic, “It was brought to the Prophet by Gabriel, and Gabriel was sent from God.”26