A few miles from the eastern shore of the Red Sea, in the Sirat Mountains of Saudi Arabia, there is a sandy and inhospitable valley. It contains a well that is fed from a deep underground source, and which consequently never runs dry. Long before the Romans set foot in North Africa it had become a regular stopping place for caravans and for wandering Bedouins. The well – called Zem-zem -acquired a reputation for healing the sick, so that it became a place of pilgrimage. A cube-shaped house or temple was built over it, incorporating in one of its walls a black meteoric stone that was regarded as sacred; tradition declared that this House of God, the Ka’ba, had been built by Abraham; the historian Diodorus Siculus mentions that it already existed in 50 B.C. A town called Mecca sprang up around the sacred well.
In the time of Justinian, the Arabs like most ancient peoples were pagans who worshipped many gods. It is true that they regarded Allah as the creator of the universe, but they also believed that he was surrounded by a host of minor gods and demons. Some five or six years after the death of Justinian – around 570 A.D. – a boy was born into a poor household in Mecca. His father died before his birth, and the baby was handed to a wet nurse from a nomadic desert tribe – which suggests that his health was giving some concern. (Mecca was regarded as unhealthy.) His mother died when he was six, and the child – whose name was Mahomet (or Muhammad) – fell to the charge of his grandfather, a man who was a hundred years old and who seems to have doted on the handsome and lively boy. But the grandfather died after only two years, and Mahomet was brought up in the household of his senior uncle, Abu Talib, the head of the clan.
Little is known of Mahomet’s early years except that he probably worked as a shepherd. He also accompanied his uncle on trading journeys, and on one of these journeys to Syria, when he was fourteen, is said to have made the acquaintance of ‘Sergius, a Nestorian monk’, who told him something of the Christian religion. He must have been already acquainted with the basic elements of Christianity and Judaism; on the Ka’ba itself there was a portrait of Abraham carrying a bundle of arrows (for divination), and on a column nearby, the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus.
As a young man, Mahomet became the agent and steward of a wealthy woman named Khadijah, who was some fifteen years his senior; when he was twenty-five, he married her. Their married life was a happy one, and it was to last for twenty-five years.
Both Mahomet and Khadijah were deeply religious. During the month of Ramadan, held sacred by the Arabs, they moved into a cave on the edge of the desert and spent the time in prayer and meditation. And when Mahomet was in his fortieth year, he entered a period of inner crisis. We know little about it except that it was a ‘dark night of the soul’, during which he experienced profound depression and believed himself to be possessed by a demon. He told his wife that he saw lights and heard noises – there were sounds like bells and a humming like a swarm of bees. He spent much time alone in a cave on Mount Hara, or wandering on the edge of the desert, calling upon God for help; he was several times tempted to commit suicide by throwing himself from a cliff. In this state, he must have wondered to which of the pagan gods he could turn for aid. And finally, there crystallised out of his torment the conviction that there was only one God, the creator of the universe – that same creator who was proclaimed by Abraham and by Jesus Christ. One day, Mahomet had a vision of a majestic being – whom he later concluded to be the angel Gabriel – who told him: ‘You are the messenger of God.’
He told his wife what he had seen and heard: she believed him. But the rest of his family found it frankly incredible. Only his cousin Ali and his friend Abu Bekr were convinced. For the next three years – from 610 until 613 – Mahomet discussed his beliefs in private. Few were interested, and he made only thirty-nine converts, mostly from the young men of the town, who were impressed by his total conviction and by the force of his personality. He continued to behave like a man in torment. He would become depressed and fatigued, and begin to shiver. He would sweat like a man in a fever. Then he would speak the words he felt rising in his heart, and they were written down by his followers (Mahomet himself could not write). These early suras of the Koran came to birth with severe labour – Mahomet said that producing three of them, one after another, had turned his hair grey. In 613 A.D. he began to preach openly, and encountered immediate hostility.
Mahomet’s uncle, Abu Talib, was head of the clan and therefore its protector; if Mahomet was killed, it could mean a blood feud. Some of the leading Meccans went to Abu Talib and offered him the price of Mahomet’s blood; Talib curtly refused. But when, in 619, Abu Talib died, Mahomet found himself without a protector. The new head of the family was hostile. His wife Khadijah died at about this time – his sons had already died. He must have felt himself to be a man under a curse, who brought misfortune to all he cared for. At one point, the angry Meccans besieged Mahomet and his followers in their homes; he was forced to withdraw to a nearby oasis.
And now there came hope from an unexpected direction. The town of Yathrib – later Medina – was three hundred miles to the north. It had a large Jewish population, and the Jews were intolerant of their pagan fellow townsmen; they spoke of the coming of the Messiah who would crush the unbelievers underfoot. In 621, twelve citizens of Yathrib came to Mecca on pilgrimage, heard Mahomet preaching and became Muslims (a word meaning ‘those who submit to God’). Even more came in the following year. There was a suggestion that Mahomet should go to Yathrib; but after ten years of derision and hostility, he was understandably cautious – he was, at least, making slow headway in Mecca. Some of his followers emigrated to Yathrib and were well-received; the inhabitants of the town listened to the message of Islam (meaning ‘surrender’), read the verses of the Koran and decided that they would back the Prophet against the Jewish Messiah. Mahomet’s enemies in Mecca heard that he had been invited to Yathrib and saw their danger; as the dictator of another town (for that is what it amounted to) he could represent a real threat. The situation was desperate enough to make them decide to ignore the prohibition against shedding blood in the sacred city. On the night of 16 July 622 A.D., assassins burst into the Prophet’s house and rushed to his bedroom. They were too late. Mahomet had slipped away earlier and was now heading towards a cave in Mount Thaur, accompanied only by Abu Bekr. His flight to Yathrib – the hijra (or hegira) – was the turning point in his life. He arrived there two months later, on 20 September 622.
It must have been a strange and bewildering experience, to be received with interest and enthusiasm instead of angry derision. Mahomet was given a piece of land and had a house built. And he now became aware that the first business of a conqueror is organisation. Legal and other ties were instituted between his followers; he himself contracted a number of marriages for this reason (tradition says ten), one of them to Abu Bekr’s infant daughter. He also realised that one day his followers were going to have to fight for the right to be Muslims and began to think in military terms.
It was clear, for example, that sooner or later there would be a confrontation with Mecca. In his new, aggressive frame of mind, Mahomet decided to provoke one by sending out his followers to raid Mecca caravans returning from Syria. In fact, the year after his arrival in Medina, he himself went out on three such raids. They were unsuccessful, possibly because their movements had been betrayed. So Mahomet sent out a raiding party in the sacred month of Rajab, a time when Arab hostilities were normally suspended; the Muslims intercepted and plundered a caravan coming from Yemen. The Meccans were scandalised at this violation of the sacred month, and prepared for action. A month later, in March 624, Mahomet led a raid on another Meccan caravan; its supporting force of eight hundred men, led by Mahomet’s old enemy Abu Jahl, engaged Mahomet’s force – of around three hundred – at a place called Badr. And the Meccans learned what other armies would learn in the years to come: that men who fight with religious conviction may be outnumbered more than two to one and still win an overwhelming victory. Forty-five Meccans were killed, including Abu Jahl; the Muslims lost only fourteen. Although the engagement was a small one, it was perhaps the most significant in Islamic history, for it convinced the Muslims that Allah was fighting with them. It engendered the confidence that enabled the Arabs to conquer the Mediterranean.