Mohammed (PBUH)

ISLAM, IT used to be said, grew up in the full light of history. Within a single lifetime that light has grown steadily dimmer. Under critical examination the foundations of the old tradition have dissolved into enigmas and hypotheses. The Quran emerges so far unscathed, and the bare historical framework survives. But the gap between the bare facts and the tremendous results, between cause and effect, has to be filled up somehow. Consequently, there are almost as many theories about Mohammed as there are biographers. He has, for example, been portrayed as an epileptic, as a socialist agitator, as a proto-Mormon. All such extreme subjective views are generally repudiated by the main body of scholars, yet it remains almost impossible to avoid importing some subjective elements into any account of his life and work.

            Mohammed suffered, on the one hand, like every other creative personality, the constraints of external circumstances, and on the other he broke a new channel through the ideas and conventions of his time and place. To study and elucidate this interplay between genius and its environment is the task of historical research. In the context of this book the study must be limited to his religious mission. But this is, indeed, the fundamental aspect of Mohammed. The one certain fact is that his impulse was religious through and through. From the beginning of his career as a preacher his outlook and his judgement of persons and events were dominated by his conceptions of God’s government and purposes in the world of men.

            Of his early life and circumstances little is known with certainty. That he was born (the traditional date is A.D. 570) into a cadet branch of one of the leading families of Mecca, was left an orphan in early life and brought up by an uncle, engaged in the caravan trade, became commercial agent to a widow named Khadija, married her and had children (of whom four daughters survived)–all this is commonplace and gives no hint of future greatness. The anecdotal detail with which pious tradition delighted to fill out these bare outlines must be provisionally set aside. Of much greater importance is his social background. Mohammed was a citizen of no mean city. Nothing can be further from the reality than to picture him as a Bedouin, sharing the ideas and outlook of the Bedouin tribesmen.

            Mecca at this time was no sleepy hollow, remote from the noise and bustle of the world. A busy and wealthy commercial town, almost monopolizing the entrepot trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, it recalls Palmyra without the flashy Greek veneer. Its citizens, while preserving a certain native Arab simplicity in their manners and institutions, had acquired a wide knowledge of men and cities in their intercourse, commercial and diplomatic, with Arab tribesmen and Roman officials. Amongst their leaders these experiences had stimulated intellectual faculties and moral qualities of prudence and self-restraint rare in Arabia. The moral predominance so acquired by the Meccans over the tribesmen was further strengthened by possession of a group of sanctuaries in and near the city. The impress of this exceptional background can be traced throughout Mohammed’s career. Humanly speaking, Mohammed succeeded because he was a Meccan.

            But there was a darker side to the prosperity of Mecca. It displayed the familiar evils of a wealthy commercial society, extremes of wealth and poverty, an underworld of slaves and hirelings, social class- barriers. It is clear from Mohammed’s fervent denunciations of social injustice and fraud that this was one of the deep inner causes of his unsettlement. But the ferment within him did not break out in the preaching of social revolution; it was thrust instead into a religious channel and issued in a deep and unshakable conviction that he was called by God to proclaim to his fellow-citizens the old warning of the Semitic prophets: Repent, for the Judgement of God is at hand.

            Everything that followed was the resultant of the clash between this conviction and the unbelief and resistance of one group after another. Mohammed was not at the outset the conscious preacher of a new religion. It was opposition and controversy with the Meccans that forced him on from stage to stage, as it was the later opposition in Medina that led to the final emergence of Islam as a new religious community with its distinctive faith and institutions.

            The resistance of the Meccans appears to have been due not so much to their conservatism or even to religious disbelief (though they ridiculed Mohammed’s doctrine of resurrection) as to political and economic causes. They were afraid of the effects that his preaching might have on their economic prosperity, and especially that his pure monotheism might injure the economic assets of their sanctuaries. In addition, they realized more quickly than Mohammed himself did that their acceptance of his teaching would introduce a new and formidable kind of political authority into their oligarchic community.

            Against their self-interested opposition Mohammed struggled in vain. After ten years labour at Mecca he had gathered only a small band of devoted adherents. A complete standstill followed. At this point he was driven to contemplate the necessity of a decisive and revolutionary step. He must break those sacred ties of kinship which had hitherto protected him, and transfer his mission to a new centre. His first essays brought nothing but vexation. But suddenly and unexpectedly the way opened before him. Two hundred miles north of Mecca, the city of Medina was suffering from a prolonged fratricidal war between rival Arab tribes. Exhausted, and fearing lest their weakness should be exploited by the Jewish tribes under their control, they besought Mohammed to come to Medina as arbitrator and peacemaker. With his habitual prudence he first exacted guarantees for the security of his own position and for the right of his followers to precede him to Medina. Negotiations were prolonged over one or two years; but at length, in the autumn of 622, Mohammed fled secretly from Mecca, escaped his pursuers, and established himself in his new base.

            The Hijra is often regarded as marking a new era in the character and activities of Mohammed, but the sharp contrast which is generally drawn between the obscure and persecuted prophet of Mecca and  the warrior theocrat of Medina is not historically justified. There was no break in Mohammed’s own consciousness and conception of his office. Externally, the Islamic movement assumed a new shape and formed a definite community organized on political lines under a single chief. But this merely gave explicit form to what had hitherto been implicit. In the mind of Mohammed (as in the minds of his opponents) the new religious association had long been conceived of as a community organized on political lines, not as a church within a secular state. In his expositions of prophetic history this was an essential part of the Divine purpose in sending prophets. We need not look outside Arabia for the source of this conception, although if Mohammed had done so he would have found religion and state bound up together in all contemporary organizations, Persia, Byzantium, and Abyssinia.

            The novelty, then, at Medina was that the religious community was translated from theory to practice. Even then, it was primarily not as a result of Mohammed’s own efforts, since Medina had sought him, not he Medina. This was a clear proof for him and his followers of Divine support. All later developments in his preaching and in early Islamic conceptions derive naturally from the fact of the corporal existence of the community and the necessary (but not always easy) accommodation of the ideal to the stubborn facts and practical conditions of mundane life.

            It remained now to establish it securely, but how? Mohammed had tried peaceful persuasion, and it had failed. The opposition of the Meccans had been founded on political and economic grounds; only through political and economic pressure could he break it down. Henceforward his political action revolved round two poles: the internal consolidation of the Muslim community and the coercion of Mecca. To put this second object down to mere desire for revenge is clearly insufficient. Even if he may have nourished at first some bitter feelings towards the city which had rejected him (and thereby, in his view, rejected the Divine message with which he was charged), Mecca soon resumed its place in the centre of his affection. Less than a year after the Hijra it was proclaimed the central Shrine in ill the Islamic system, and thus became a kind of spiritual   irredenta.

             Mohammed’s attitude towards Mecca was by this act elevated above the plane of personal feeling. Mecca was moreover the intellectual and political leader of Western Arabia; so long as Mecca remained hostile the Islamic community was in danger of extinction. More positively, Mohammed earnestly desired to enlist the talents of the Meccans in the service of Islam. Nowhere else in Western Arabia was there such intellectual grasp or such political capacity, though he realized as clearly that in depth of religious conviction Medina was the real spiritual centre of the new community.

            At Medina he sat astride Mecca’s vital trade route to the north. All his expeditions against the Bedouin tribes seem to be part of a master plan, elaborated with great skill and insight, to take advantage of this position and to blockade Mecca into surrendering. That this would provoke an armed conflict must have been foreseen, but the three major battles of Badr, Ohod, and the ‘Ditch’ fought in the second, third, and fifth years of the Hijra, have little more than episodic value, large as they may loom in Muslim tradition. It was essential for Mohammed’s purposes that Mecca should come in eventually of its own volition, and his outstanding political genius is shown by the way in which Mecca was finally incorporated, after seven years of struggle, not as a beaten and resentful enemy but as a willing, if not enthusiastic partner. And when, two years later, Islam had to face its first great crisis on the death of Mohammed, Mecca was in fact foremost in lending its support to the re-establishment of the Islamic supremacy in Arabia.

             Even in Mohammed’s recourse to warfare against the tribes we must see more than a simple reflex of Arabian political and social conditions, although certainly something of that as well. Whatever worldly motives may from time to time have consciously or unconsciously influenced his course of action, his fundamental purpose remained exclusively religious. To the end, military and diplomatic action–for he never used the former if the latter sufficed, and after the surrender of Mecca purely military operations were discontinued–were regarded by him as an instrument for bringing moral and religious influences to bear on the proud and intractable tribesmen. It must be added that every historical consideration which can be applied to the situation bears out the rightness of his view.

            It would, however, be a serious mistake to imagine that Mohammed’s interest and attention during these years were given up solely to politics and war. On the contrary, the centre of all his preoccupations was the training, educating, and disciplining of his community. They were to be the leaven to leaven the whole lump–for he had no illusions about the Arab character and realized that any genuine conversion of the majority could only be the end of a long process extending far beyond his own lifetime. His last two years were largely devoted to instilling into his former Meccan opponents something of the moral earnestness of his earlier followers and to fitting them to carry on his work after him. Consequently, the individuality of the Islamic community was progressively defined on parallel lines to its establishment as an independent political unit.

            At the same time, whether deliberately guided by Mohammed in this direction or under the unconscious play of forces which swept him along in their current, the Islamic movement became, to an increasing degree, a focus of Arab feeling. In his later years, at least, Mohammed seems to have been aware of this tendency. It may have partially contributed to (and been confirmed by) his measures against the Jewish tribes. And whether or not the story be true that in 628 he sent summonses to the Roman Emperor, the Persian King of Kings, and other ruling princes, he was certainly contemplating some action against the Byzantine power in the north before his death in 632. The almost immediate launching of the first expeditions towards Syria by his successor Abu Bakr can hardly be explained otherwise. It is indeed quite possible that Mohammed’s later change of attitude towards Christianity reflects his growing hostility to the Greeks and their Christian Arab allies, Orthodox or Monophysite.

            When one turns from Mohammed’s public life to his personality and his moral and social influence, it is not always easy to steer a straight course between the odium theologicum of most earlier Western critics and the unconvincing apologetic of modern Muslim writers. The study of the sources has not yet gone far enough to enable us to distinguish with confidence genuine early tradition from later accretions. For it must be confessed that the figure of Mohammed has suffered greatly from the hodge-podge of trivialities fathered upon him by later generations of his followers. Yet through the mass of all-too-human detail there shines out unmistakably a largeness of humanity–sympathy for the weak, a gentleness that seldom turned to anger save when dishonour seemed to be done to God, something even of shyness in personal intercourse, and a glint of humour–all of which contrasts so strangely with the prevailing temper and spirit of his age and of his followers that it cannot be other than a reflection of the real man. During a Pilgrimage Abu Bakr started to beat a man for letting a camel stray; Mohammed ‘began to smile and said “Just look at what this pilgrim is doing” ’. A trivial story; but nothing perhaps illustrates better the gulf between Mohammed and the human material with which he had to deal than the fact that the narrator adds ‘but he did not actually forbid him’.

            It is at bottom the same incomprehension which leads critics to rely exclusively upon the Quran in their judgement of Mohammed. No doubt the Quran reflects in its basic religious attitudes the personality of the preacher; but the mistake lies in equating the preacher with the man. Mohammed seems to have been sharply aware of the distinction between legislation on the one hand and personal precept and example on the other. In laying down laws he took into account the conservatism and resistance of Arabian society and recognized just how far he could enforce the reform of its usages by decree. Thus the Quran sanctions, under legal regulation and safeguards, such practices as retaliation, but seldom fails to add in the same breath recommendations to temper the rigour of justice with mercy and the charity that comes from the realization of one’s own need of forgiveness.

            The most striking example is to be found in his legislation on divorce and family life. That his reforms enhanced the status of women in general by contrast with the anarchy of pre-Islamic Arabia is universally admitted. Yet the Quran explicitly maintains the superior right both of the father and of the husband, and legalizes polygamy up to four wives and repudiation under certain restrictions. Further than this Mohammed evidently could not go by the method of legislation, and even so it was not long before most of the rights accorded to women and of the restrictions imposed upon their guardians were substantially curtailed by the ingenuity of Muslim casuists.

            The tradition on the other hand unanimously emphasizes his personal disapproval of repudiation as a thing ‘odious in the sight of God’. His own family life at Medina and his numerous marriages have been the subject of much insinuating comment on the one side and of heated and disingenuous apology on the other. The traditions make no secret of the attraction which he felt towards women, or of the fact that it was combined with a peculiarly strict regard for the proprieties. But critics have tended to overlook the almost unfailing patience which he displayed even under provocation and the gentleness with which he attended to the grief’s of all sorts of women and comforted them, even at times to the extent of revising his legislation.

             For us it goes without saying that the hold which Mohammed gained over the wills and affections of his Companions were due to the influence of his personality. Without that they would have paid little heed to the claims of the Prophet. It was because of his moral qualities, not because of his religious teaching, that the men of Medina invoked his assistance. Ultimately, no doubt, even for the Companions, the two aspects of his life became indistinguishable, as they have remained for all Muslims of later generations.

             It was natural, therefore, that as soon as the compelling personality of the man was withdrawn, veneration for the Prophet led almost at once to the enhancement of the story of his life by internal development and by elements introduced into it from without. At a later stage, when the social and ethical conceptions of Muslims had been refined under the influence of new literary and philosophical currents, the figure of the Prophet was continually readjusted to the new ideas and ideals. In a later chapter it will be seen how Sufis fitted Mohammed into their mystical cosmology and system of saint-worship. By this time, idealization of the Prophet had passed from the field of ethics into something like a necessity of the spiritual life; but however far it went, Muslim thought never quite lost touch with the human figure of Mohammed ibn Abdullah, the man of Mecca.