The Book Of Muhammad Read online

  Muhammad is the Prophet, the messenger of God. But for the vast majority of people outside the Islamic faith, he remains a mystery, and myths and misconceptions about him abound.

  Born in a time of moral despondency and despair, Muhammad spent his entire life trying to transcend human pettiness, searching for absolute values, the meaning of life and what it meant to be a human being. The Book of Muhammad recounts this journey—Muhammad’s early struggles to bring his message to the people in Mecca, the Revelation, his flight to Medina and the establishment of Islam and an ideal city-state there, and his triumphant return to Mecca. Mehru Jaffer’s own search to understand the teachings of Islam informs this lucid yet profound retelling of the life of one of the most mesmerizing figures to walk this earth, thereby making his teachings and spiritual significance accessible to all.

  In this short biography, Mehru Jaffer presents Muhammad as an extraordinary prophet and leader, a man of God who succeeded in uniting all of Arabia through his new faith and exerted enormous influence over centuries of human history. In her detailed introduction to the book she also examines why the fundamental tenets of his teachings—that to be a good human being is to be kind, compassionate and charitable—is particularly relevant in our troubled times today.

  Originally from Lucknow, Mehru Jaffer is a Vienna-based journalist. She is the author of The Book of Muinuddin Chisti (Penguin India, 2008).

  ‘I am only a human being like you. God has sent me as an apostle so that I may demonstrate perfection of character, refinement of manners and loftiness of deportment.’

  Books in this series

  The Book of Buddha

  The Book of Devi

  The Book of Durga

  The Book of Ganesha

  The Book of Hanuman

  The Book of Kali

  The Book of Krishna

  The Book of Muhammad

  The Book of Muinuddin Chishti

  The Book of Nanak

  The Book of Ram

  The Book of Shiva

  The Book of Vishnu

  The Book of

  Muhammad

  MEHRU JAFFER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2009

  Text copyright © Mehru Jaffer 2003

  Illustrations copyright © Penguin Books India 2003

  Illustrations by Subroto Mallick

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-01-4306-768-9

  This Digital Edition published 2011. e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-020-1

  Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.

  This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.

  To Farrukh

  my mother, whose fantastic interpretation of

  Islam inspired me to find out for myself

  and

  to Syed Muhammad Jaffar

  who never tired of repeating ‘Go to

  China if you must in search of knowledge’.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Birth of Muhammad

  Pre-Islamic Arabia and the Kuraish

  The Orphan

  Growing up with Abdul Muttalib and Abu Talib

  Marriage to Khadija

  The Wives of Muhammad

  The Revelation and Flight to Medina

  Medina: The Ideal City

  The Science of Biography

  The Kaaba

  The Five Pillars of Islam

  The Message of the Koran

  The Last Sermon

  After Muhammad

  Introduction

  Once upon a time there lived a man who changed the course of history simply by being good.

  Years of intense introspection finally revealed to Muhammad Abdullah of Mecca that the natural state of all human beings is goodness. And if that fundamental law is violated, the meaning of life is lost. To be good is to be kind, compassionate and charitable. And God, Muhammad believed, is the ultimate idea of goodness. Muhammad spent his own life living up to that ideal of perfection and asked others to do the same.

  The Prophet’s message is as simple as that. In fact, it is so simple that it is almost a disadvantage. Dr John A. Hall finds Muhammad’s humanity so full-blooded that he feels the religion is too advanced for its own good. In theory at least, Hall says in Powers and Liberties, there is nothing to prevent human beings from trying to perfect themselves in the image of God. The very austerity, the very openness of Muslim society, he adds, makes it impossible to respect anything that interferes in man’s relationship to the creator.

  Muhammad himself said, ‘You are all answerable to God. You have been given unlimited freedom to act as you deem fit and to forage whatever pasture you like without being answerable to anyone. Rather you shall be held accountable before your Creator for each act, each word, in fact for the whole course of your life when you have been given autonomy. You will be raised after death and presented in the court of your Lord for reckoning.’

  But the way this simple message is put into practice today is at the root of many problems.

  Over time, the idea of Muhammad has come to mean many things to many people. To his followers he is a prophet, but for the vast majority he remains a mystery. About himself, he says, ‘I am only a human being like you. God has sent me as an apostle so that I may demonstrate perfection of character, refinement of manners and loftiness of deportment.’

  Surely Muhammad must be one of the most mesmerizing men to walk the earth, and also the most maligned. Therefore the yearning remains, even 1500 years after his time, to know more about the merchant who is remembered today as the Messenger of God. The most interesting attempt is made by those constantly trying to free the memory of Muhammad from the common cage of cliché where he is imprisone
d by a past blurred with age, by legends so loving that they make him seem unreal. But Muhammad is very real. He remains extraordinary as a prophet and a leader for having realized his dream in his own lifetime. Before his death in 632 AD, he succeeded in uniting all of Arabia through his new faith. In fact, at no other time in history except for a few years at the beginning of the Islamic era has Arabia been united under a single power.

  For years the different families of Arabia had felt fenced in by the encroaching influence of the Romans and Persians, the two super-powers of that time. They lived under constant fear that forces more powerful than their own cantankerous clans might colonize them one day. By uniting over 200 tribes under the banner of Islam, Muhammad also liberated the Arabs from the confines of a peninsula that they were forced to circle for centuries in search of the most basic necessities of life. He turned the tattered tribal strength of a scattered population into a single military movement that became legendary for its might. This eventually led to the united desert tribes swarming out of the peninsula in single strength to hold both cultural and military sway over most of the world for over a millennium, beginning with Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Carthage, the Indus Valley and Spain.

  At the time of Muhammad’s birth Arabia was dismissed as an arid, godless zone where a wild race of people survived in small gangs in search of opportunities to plunder and loot. The Greeks called the inhabitants of this sparsely populated area Sarakenoi, or those who live in tents. Muhammad was probably saddened by this reputation planted upon his people. His broad forehead must have creased up with concern as he wondered what it was about the Arabs that made them appear so shabby in the eyes of the world.

  The landscape of Muhammad’s homeland, Hijaz—literally, barrier—is named after the vast, forbidding stretch of rough, treeless countryside that naturally separates it from the fertile plains to its north, east and south. There is not one river that flows from its source to the sea in the entire peninsula. Sharp, stony steppes rise knife-like from the west along the Red Sea and slope gradually eastwards towards the coast of the Gulf. To this day the amount of land cultivated in Saudi Arabia is less than one per cent. The intense heat of the plains is enough to singe anything that dares to dream of breathing and the most difficult to nurture here is hope itself. Bands of people in tiny groups have roamed the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years, from even before Muhammad’s time, trying to eke out a living literally from bare rocks, and in search of that elixir of life called water.

  By the time Muhammad came of age, the city of Mecca, where he was born, had grown into an important urban centre of trade due to its excellent location in the middle of a road that went north to south from Palestine to Yemen and the presence of Zamzam, the only spring of freshwater in the vicinity that made Mecca so precious to both peddlers and pilgrims. The other roads at this junction went east to west, connecting the Red Sea coast with the route to Ethiopia and the Persian Gulf. Weary travellers broke their journey around Zamzam, discovered it is said by Bedouins in the Biblical times of Abraham. Apart from the Zamzam, whose waters are described poetically as being sweeter than honey and made cooler than ice by the constant touch of seven heavenly creatures, Mecca was also home to the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine built beside the holy waters and that has been sacred to the Arabs from times not recorded by history. Till the time of Muhammad the Kaaba was home to hundreds of idols and was the site of polytheistic worship for all Arab tribes.

  Traders and pilgrims who constantly came here to rest, to cut a better deal and to pray also brought affluence to Mecca. The caravan trade poured great amounts of money into Mecca, but wealth also made individuals eventually very selfish. Muhammad grew up in the midst of hectic commercial activity in an urban atmosphere where wealth was worshipped in the form of idols. Most Meccans, including Muhammad, belonged to the ruling tribe of Kuraish (shark) because they had settled in the hollow of the valley around the waters of the Zamzam. But countless other offshoots of the same family continued to roam the periphery of the desert and with time were divided into numerous smaller clans that forever fought for supremacy over each other. In the pursuit of more power and wealth, people showed little compassion even for members of their own family, and it was often the more upright and less cunning that suffered the most. In the name of trade, merchants practised usury at the expense of the weakest members of society. Muhammad was pained to witness the daily intrigues practised by the elite. There were many clever ones who benefited from the unjust profits they made—profits that brought them so much wealth that they thought nothing of wasting it—while the plight of the poor worsened.

  Muhammad saw in this state of affairs the ruin of his people. He wanted the wealth generated in the city to be fairly distributed for the maximum good of the maximum number of Meccans. Throughout his life he angered authorities with his insistence that the city’s earnings should also benefit the most needy. Muhammad did not disapprove of riches, only the immoral and cruel deeds of the rich. He said, ‘God loves the pious rich man who is inconspicuous,’ and often repeated, ‘The best of you are those who have the best morals.’

  Immorality and cruelty was what Muhammad saw at the Kaaba. He liked to be at the Kaaba and often meditated at the shrine of his forefathers. But it upset and hurt him to see some pilgrimages performed in the nude and ritual fornication acted out at the feet of hundreds of idols. Another favourite sport of the day was to tie up the limbs of those who were helpless and no longer useful or pleasing, and leave them to broil in the naked heat of the desert sun. Since women did not often become warriors, when it was thought that too many were born they were killed. Muhammad saw fathers bury newborn daughters alive, and young girls being traded as slaves, sometimes to appease the gods. All this turned him against polytheistic worship. He was consumed with thoughts of an alternative way of expressing his spirituality and the seed of monotheism began to take root into his mind. Instead of going through complicated lanes and by lanes to seek the source of all life he began to chalk out a single, straight path of righteousness to the Creator. He gave up the adoration of all other deities as false worship apart from the only One Ultimate Reality, or God. In fact, he ruled later in his life that the greatest sin of Islam was the worship of material things and putting one’s trust in idols to achieve either spiritual or worldly contentment.

  Muhammad singled out monotheism as a cure for tribalism gone astray; in a time of polytheistic prayers he chose to focus all attention on one point of worship, for society as well as the individual. As Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God, ‘Only by acknowledging him [the creator] as As-Samad, the Uncaused Cause of All Being, [would] Muslims address a dimension of reality beyond time and history and which would take them beyond the tribal divisions that were tearing their society apart.’

  Muhammad felt that unity and peace were the greatest needs of his time. And none was more aware of the exigencies of his time than Muhammad himself, who predicted that a time would come when the accidental and temporary regulations would have to be differentiated from the permanent and general.

  ‘You are in an age in which if you abandon one tenth of what is ordered, you will be ruined . . . but a time will come when he who shall observe one tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed,’ he said. Muhammad also said that religion is easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. ‘So you should not be extremists but try to be near to perfection and receive the good tidings that you will be rewarded and gain strength by worshipping in the mornings, afternoons and during the last hours of the night.’

  What Muhammad taught then remains relevant now, as the moral despondency faced by Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries seems a mirror image of our own troubled times. Apalled at all the cheating and lying around him when many a thought and action was termed relative, Muhammad tried to search out absolute values. He looked for the mea
ning of life and wanted to find out what it meant to be a human being. Born in an atmosphere of waste and utter urban despair, he probably feared the future, which make his personal and public concerns similar to our own. His message taught people to correct greed and corruption and he spent his own life trying to transcend human pettiness. He readily asked to be forgiven whenever he felt that he had wronged in the eyes of the Ultimate Reality he called God or even in the eyes of his fellow human beings. On numerous occasions he recited: ‘Oh Allah! I am but a man. If I hurt anyone in any manner then forgive me and do not punish me.’

  Overcoming greed, pettiness and learning to share money as well as experiences with each other was an absolute must if the Arabs were to prosper both politically and spiritually. Muhammad sensed the trouble brewing beyond the border of his home. There were forces far more powerful than the people of Arabia that played deadly politics at the Arabian doorstep. He saw the possibility of one greedy super-power or the other gobbling up all of Arabia if the Meccans continued to live in a world of their own. Muhammad warned the Meccans, but they seemed to have no thought for tomorrow.

  Muhammad had learnt to ask the question why from an early age. His inner world brimmed over with sorrow as he dealt with loneliness that comes from being an orphan. Why was it that his father had died even before he was born, he must have wanted to know. And where did his mother go away forever when he was barely six years old? Muhammad was born into the family of Hashim or bone breakers, named after the great number of animals the clan’s ancestors were famous for slaughtering and for their unbounded hospitality in equally sharing parts of the animal with others. But at the time of Muhammad’s birth the fortunes of the clan had collapsed due to counter plotting by cousins far more worldly wise than his immediate elders. It must have bothered Muhammad why a gentleman as kind and generous as Abdul Muttalib, his grandfather, was deprived of his position as top man of the Kaaba. Or why did the custodians of the Kaaba who had taken over the leadership from his grandfather were not able to fulfill their responsibility with a similar nobility and vision?