The people of Medina, not controlled by a merchant aristocracy, eagerly accepted Muhammad’s message, and the first mosque was built there. Now he could deal from a position of growing political strength. The pagan Quraish in Mecca tried to halt the spread of Islam by military action, and Islam’s first battle took place at Badr, an oasis halfway between Mecca and Medina. Although outnumbered 1,000 to 314, the Muslim forces were victorious. Further battles took place over the next eight years, until Muhammad was able to command an army of ten thousand, which advanced on Mecca. When the dust settled, the Meccans, tired of war, accepted Muhammad, especially in view of his promise to give the Kaaba a major future role in Islam.
He entered Mecca triumphantly in 630 and formally cleansed the Kaaba of its evil spirits. Then he made it an obligation for every Muslim at least once in a lifetime to make a pilgrimage to Mecca to visit the Kaaba, if physically and financially able. Jon knew that if he himself were a Muslim and made the hajj-the pilgrimage-he could thenceforth be known as Jonathan Hajji-Weber.
Muhammad issued a general amnesty to his opponents in Mecca, which only added to his reputation, and a firestorm of conversion to Islam swept across Arabia. The polytheistic desert tribes had been looking for something to unite them, and Muhammad now provided that.
But his own lifestyle seemed to go beyond his teachings, Jon noted. His male followers were limited to no more than four wives-actually making something of a women’s liberator of Muhammad, strange as that may seem, since previously there had been no limit to the number of wives a man might have. But did Muhammad limit himself to four? He was faithful to Khadijah for as long as she lived, but when she died, the Prophet married no fewer than eleven other wives. One of them, Zainab, had been the wife of an adopted son, who willingly stepped aside when he learned of the Prophet’s interest in her. Muhammad’s last wife-little Aisha-was just six years old when he married her, but nine when the marriage was consummated. And it was in her arms that the sixty-three-year-old Prophet died at Medina in 632, where he was also buried.
Jon now pondered a dilemma. How many of the questionable details in Muhammad’s life would be off-limits for discussion in the debate because, were they discussed, they could cause riots worldwide? In contrast, he thought wryly of all the current attacks on Jesus and the church that he founded. In the world’s new double standard, evidently it was politically correct to attack only Christianity but no other religion on earth. Not fair. Not fair at all.
Imagine if a distorting book like The Da Vinci Code had targeted Muhammad instead of Jesus. The fatwa imposed on the author would have been far more lethal than was his, Jon knew-at least to date. In Christianity, at least, multiple targets-like Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, or Luke-helped cushion the attack. In Islam, there was only one person and one book: Muhammad and the Qur’an. Both were regarded by pious Muslims with sacrosanct awe and were barred to criticism of any kind. He was preparing for a debate with the cards stacked against him, Jon finally realized.
While Muhammad’s wives should have been fair game in the forthcoming debate, Jon wondered whether to play that card. He knew the Muslim response. The marriages were conducted for political and social reasons, such as to give protection for women in need of such; most of the women were nonvirgins-if that could be considered justification-and Henry VIII’s reason: Muhammad wished to have a son. And of course, al-Rashid would raise an even more obvious precedent: the polygamy among Old Testament leaders. Solomon, after all, made Muhammad look like a master of restraint when it came to wives.
Perhaps the Prophet’s wives, then, would have to be off-limits. Again, though, how superior was the analogous situation in Jesus’ case, who had no multiple-wife problem whatever-in fact, no wife at all, despite recurring attempts among sensationalist authors to get Jesus married off to Mary Magdalene.
And finally there was the question of whether or not to bring up Muhammad’s fabled night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. He claimed to have mounted a winged horselike creature and flown to Jerusalem, and thence to the seven heavens-all in one night. While in Jerusalem, he also claimed to have seen the Jewish Temple-a historical impossibility, since the temple had been destroyed by the Romans 550 years earlier. Even his beloved Aisha said that Muhammad was at home that night, and the whole thing was a vision. Since it was not mentioned in the Qur’an-only in the hadith, the traditions-Jon decided not to use it. After all, medieval Christianity also had its own collection of legends.
Other aspects of Jon’s preparation involved direct research, such as wandering into a local mosque and checking out its tract rack. Here there was plenty of free literature, including short biographies of Muhammad, guides to understanding Islam, excerpts from the Qur’an, as well as CDs and DVDs on Islam. Jon stocked up on this material and even left appropriate cash in a contribution box nearby.
What intrigued him the most, however, was a broad display sign across the whole width of the tract area with the words: ISLAM IS THE
WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING RELIGION FIND OUT WHY!
He had heard this claim so often in the secular press and even among Christians that he was intrigued enough to test it out. It took a bit of doing-more than simply checking Wikipedia.
The careful research of David Barrett, who had been tracking religious numbers for years, proved very helpful. Statistics in the World Christian Encyclopedia easily demonstrated that the banner over the tract rack in the mosque was quite mistaken and that the world’s fastest growing religion was, in fact, Christianity. With the southern hemisphere-Africa in particular-exploding for the faith, the conversion rate to Christianity was double that of conversion to Islam, and in some places, triple.
Even more compelling was evidence from Islam itself. Nearly by accident, Jon stumbled across comments by Ahmad al-Qataani, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera on December 12, 2006. Al-Qataani, leader of an organization advancing the science of Islamic law in Libya, stated, according to the translated Web transcript from Al Jazeera, “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert, and every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.”
Jon doubted, though, that there would be any value in using statistical claims in the debate, since numbers alone did not prove all that much. When the Christian church was founded on the Day of Pentecost, it numbered only some three thousand members.
Osman al-Ghazali proved very helpful in marshalling the most important arguments that Muslims use in defending their faith, and Jon found books by other Muslim converts to Christianity, such as by the Caner brothers, to be very helpful as well. The literature on Islam and Christianity was becoming a major genre in the publishing industry.
So, once again, it would be the Crescent versus the Cross, and the Cross versus the Crescent, Jon reflected. Would their forthcoming debate bring anything fresh to the table or become nothing more than a footnote in a fourteen-century face-off?
Two weeks before “the great debate,” Jon, Shannon, Richard Ferris, and Osman al-Ghazali were on a Turk Hava Yollari jet-Turkish Airlines flight 25 from JFK to Istanbul, a ten-hour odyssey. With a nod to American presidential election debates, they had already had a practice session at Harvard, in which al-Ghazali had presented Islam with such passion that Jon nearly thought he had returned to the teachings of the Prophet.
Jon had planned to use frequent flier miles to upgrade them all to business class, but Richard Ferris told him it was unnecessary. Although the ICO had made no fund appeal in any medium, financial gifts had poured into their Cambridge headquarters anyway. The American public was clearly sensitive to the world importance of this particular Muslim-Christian engagement.