This vision, of a truth so blinding that earthly empires were as nothing before it but shadows, was hardly novel, of course. Even the candlelit golds of Hagia Sophia, even the fires in the three holiest temples of Iranshahr, blazed as the merest reflections of the effulgence of God. This, in the barren desert beyond Palestine, far from the cockpits of worldly power, was a truth that had long been appreciated. Not only in the souls of the fugitive and the penitent, but as words inscribed on manuscripts, many of them centuries old, the experience of the divine had taken many forms and left many marks. Whether they were otherwise forgotten gospels, or ancient Jewish writings discovered in caves, or copies of pagan epics that had been stashed in libraries for would-be lawyers to use, books as well as people might speak of the yearning to understand heaven. “Those who disbelieve say: ‘This is nothing but fables of the ancients.’ ”95 That the Prophet was sensitive to this particular accusation is evident enough from his repeated efforts, made throughout the Qur’an, to rebut it.96 Yet, never did he veer to the opposite extreme, and proclaim the novelty of his message. “It is indeed a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds, brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit, upon your heart, so that you may be a warner, in manifest Arabic speech—but it is also in the Books of the ancients.”97 Just as Jews might cast the Talmud as a record of eternity, and Christians see an image of the immutable order of the heavens in the Church, so did the Prophet—ever a man of his time—insist upon the timelessness of his message. Well might he have proclaimed “the straight path” to God with such boldness and conviction. When set against such a highway, what were the rutted and weed-covered strata, long since left in a state of chronic disrepair by Justinian’s budget cuts? One was eternal; the others were already returning to the desert sands.
And just as roads might crumble, so might confederations. Compared with a community of believers faithful only to God, what was a ragbag of mercenaries in hock to a foreign power? The Thamud had long since fallen, and so too, God willing, would their heirs. “We conferred guidance upon them—but they chose blindness over guidance.”98 The Prophet’s opponents were doubly Mushrikun: for not only did they partner angels with God as fit objects of worship, but they themselves were bound in a shared subservience as associates in a Roman-sponsored shirkat. They were not only blasphemers but collaborators. Naturally, it was the offence against God that stank most noxiously to the heavens—but there were hints as well, in the Qur’an, of more earthly crimes and follies. Remorselessly, the Prophet casts his followers as the mirror-image of the foederati. Just as whole tribes had long been emigrating northwards, eager for Caesar’s bounty, so in a similar manner, but now in the cause of God, were the Believers to rank as emigrants—as the Muhajirun. A manoeuvre of genius. Service was being offered to a monarch infinitely greater than either Caesar or Shahanshah. An entire pattern of mass-movement was being reconfigured and set in spectacular reverse. “Whoso leaves his home as an emigrant to God and His Messenger and is overtaken by death, his reward falls upon God, and God is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.”99
Not that one necessarily had to die before being rewarded for joining the Muhajirun. If it was the pleasures of heaven—the ox-eyed maidens and the pearl-like cup-bearers—that shimmered most deliciously before the gaze of the Believers, then earthly profits as well were far from being disdained. “They ask you about booty.” So begins one sura, in bald and ringing terms. “Say: ‘Booty belongs to God and His Messenger.’ ”100 Here, at a time of global calamity, was a message calculated to appeal to anyone feeling the economic pinch. Well and good as were the profits to be had from flogging leather to the Persians, these were hardly likely to compensate, even in small part, for the loss of subsidies from Caesar’s agents. The Arab tribes who had emigrated northwards on the scent of Roman gold—and who had relied on their paymasters’ lucre for decades—had grown much impoverished. Well, then, might the message proclaimed by the Prophet—that he had a licence from God to plunder unbelievers—have met with an enthusiastic up-take. “Remember a time when you were few in number and held to be weak on earth, when you feared men would tear you to pieces. He gave you refuge and aided you with His victory; and He bestowed His bounties upon you.”101 Bounties that once, perhaps, Muhammad’s followers would have been content to receive from the Roman authorities—but not anymore. A wellspring that had run dry was no longer a wellspring at all.
Here, then, was a crisis, and an attempt to resolve it, bred thoroughly of its time. The arc of its parabola can still just about be traced, discernible despite all the thick overlay applied centuries later by pious biographers and commentators. The Qur’an, far from standing at some fantastical remove from the currents and convulsions of the age, is the supreme monument to them. It is the record of a man living through an unprecedented period of upheaval, alert, in every way he can be, to the word of God, and betraying a sensibility, even as he contemplates the ruin of the universe itself, that is decidedly bookish. “That will be the Day,” so God says at one point, in a description of the looming End Times, “when We roll up the sky, as a writer rolls up his scrolls.” Such images, which occur throughout the Qur’an, suggest a man who was the polar opposite of illiterate, and who, even as he laid claim to traditions of divine inspiration that were immeasurably venerable, knew full well what he was doing. Such it was to be the Seal of the Prophets: “a herald of good tidings, a bearer of warning.”102 The good tidings provided a solution to humanity’s troubles that did not depend upon mortal agency; the warning explained what would happen to those who closed their ears to it.
But it was not enough for the Prophet’s message to be inscribed simply upon the souls of his audience. The evils of the time were as political as they were spiritual, and as economic as they were moral. Like the rabbis of Mesopotamia and Tiberias, like Justinian and his great team of jurists, the Prophet appreciated that not only individuals but society itself required moulding to the purposes of God. This was why, it seems, he set himself to the founding of a state—first among the Mushrikun, and then, in the wake of their rejection, among the Muhajirun. And its capital? Here, at any rate, there is no contradiction between the Qur’an and the great spider’s web of subsequent Islamic tradition. A battle fought against overwhelming odds, “a violent wind and invisible forces”103 sent by God against the Prophet’s enemies, a glorious victory snatched from the jaws of defeat: all this, so the Qur’an records, occurred at a place that, for once, it actually names. Yathrib, that fertile oasis in the northern Hijaz, was indeed, it would appear, ’Madinat an-Nabi—the “City of the Prophet.” Medina, just as tradition records, ranked as the very first bridgehead of the heavenly established by Muhammad on earth.
Does that mean, then, that the story told of a single, dramatic flight there, a hijra, is similarly based on fact? It is notable, certainly, that the word itself does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an; and, as with so many details of his biography, all references to the Prophet’s escape to Yathrib are frustratingly late in origin.104 Reason enough, then, perhaps, to be suspicious—and to wonder whether the whole notion of “emigration” might possibly have had a significance for the Prophet and his followers that subsequent tradition has obscured. Memorable the story of the hijra may be—and yet there seems to lurk behind it the hint of something much more seismic. In the Qur’an, emigration is cast as a duty incumbent upon all believers—no matter their circumstances, no matter their location. Far from alluding to a single journey into exile—whether to Yathrib or to anywhere else—it seems to imply a call to arms that is all-embracing, universal and unbounded by time or place. “Anyone who migrates for God’s cause will find many a refuge and great plenty in the earth.”105 Nothing could conceivably have sounded more radical or terrifying to the Prophet’s audience. Abandoning family and tribe was the most stomach-churning prospect imaginable for any Arab. And yet, if the Qur’an is to be trusted, this was precisely the commitment that the Prophet was demanding—and not just of his own people but of all the various descendants of Ishmael, wherever they might live, across the entire sweep of Arabia. The successful planting of his banner in Yathrib, set against the backdrop of the apparent breaking of the world, was to be only the start. All those with the courage—or perhaps the sheer desperation—to accept the Prophet’s challenge and embark on a new beginning were invited to join him on a journey that might lead God alone knew where.