The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (9 page)

Meanwhile, in 579 AD, when Mohammed’s grandfather died, his uncle, Abu Talib, the new head of Mohammed’s Banu Hashim
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clan, took over as his foster parent, sticking by him for the next 40 years.
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This was yet another disadvantage. As we’ll see in a moment, Abu Talib didn’t have a real knack for Mecca’s major source of income—international transport and trade. The one thing he did have was the strength of character to defend Mohammed from attack.
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And Mohammed would continue to be attacked for the next 35 years.

In 581 AD, Mohammed turned eleven and, like other kids his age in Mecca, became a shepherd and grazed goats.
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But keeping goats company would not prove to be Mohammed’s calling. When Mohammed turned twelve, the youngster forced his uncle, Abu Talib, to slip him into in the commercial and entrepreneurial currents that plugged Mecca into the larger world, the world of the superpowers—Persia and Rome. Abu Talib planned his clan’s annual trading expedition to the Roman
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province of Syria.
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Abu Talib had no intention of taking his nephew. But Mohammed begged and begged, then finally held on to his uncle’s neck and refused to let go.
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Abu Talib gave in, and Mohammed began his indoctrination into Mecca’s major business, long-distance trade, with his first trip to a land of big-city sophistication. The swatch of Roman territory Mohammed traveled to was al-Sham
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, “Greater Syria,” a land that included modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine,
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the most intensely Christian and Jewish territory on the face of the earth. Greater Syria was the birthplace of Judaism, the location of the traditional Jewish “promised land”-- Israel, Judaea, and Samaria. It was also the cradle of Christianity—the location of Jesus’ birth and life, of St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus (the famous incident in which Paul was blinded by a divine light and fell off his ass), and was the home base of the apostles and the fathers of the church. In addition to meaning “Greater Syria,” by the way, al-Sham, the destination of Mohammed’s first trip beyond the Arab deserts, meant “Damascus”—the capital city of Syria.

One of Mohammed’s chief biographers, Muhammad Haykal, is convinced that, “It was in al Sham that” Mohammed “came to know of Byzantine and Christian history and heard of the Christians' scriptures.”
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These were things Mohammed would never forget. When the pedal hit the metal, they would turn him into a globalist.

In all probability, Mohammed’s guardian uncle, Abu Talib, did not do well for his clan on this trading expedition. How can we tell? Some Meccans—the chiefs of the Banu Ummaya among them—carried goods from Yemen to al-Sham every year. But not Abu Talib. Once his first expedition was over, he never mounted another one.

Ten years later, from his 21
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to his 24
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year, Mohammed got his first taste of what biographer Muhammad Abdul Hai calls the Arab “hobby”--war. An intertribal conflict broke out for four years running, and Mohammed’s tribe was caught up in it. At first, the conflict appeared to be a mere nothing, just a persistent scuffle of the kind that the Arabs used for sport—two clans battling each other until they grew tired of the fight, reached an agreement, and the winning tribe paid the losers blood money for the dead. In this four-year-long affair, The War of the Wicked, Mohammed collected the arrows fired at his tribe by the enemies and handed them to his uncle to present to the more important warriors, who fired them back in the other direction.
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But over time, the war impoverished the Meccans, lowered them in the eyes of their neighbors and made them vulnerable to raids. So the warring tribes got together for dinner and concluded a truce. Mohammed was one of those at the dinner who swore to uphold the peace agreement.
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Mohammed would later upscale the nature of war—and of alliances--among the Arabs dramatically.

In 594 AD, when Mohammed hit the age of 23, he lucked out. He was too poor to marry. But the most successful businessperson in Mecca was a woman—the 40-year-old Khadija, a widow who’d already had two husbands
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die out from under her. Khadija didn’t need a husband with money. Like Mohammed’s uncle, Abu Talib, Khadija was in the trade and transport profession. Like his uncle, she was a traveler who had seen the world beyond the desert. But unlike Mohammed’s uncle, who never went on a trade expedition again after the trip he made when Mohammed was twelve, Khadija was a dedicated practitioner of commerce and an entrepreneurial organizer, always on the prowl for talented men she could send on trade missions. The result: she was rich, the wealthiest woman in Mecca
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. She’d amassed a fortune larger than those of all the other members of Mohammed’s tribe, the Banu Quraish
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, combined. Meanwhile, Mohammed had earned a reputation for honesty.
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If you were going on a business trip and wanted to leave your goods with someone trustworthy, everyone in town knew that Mohammed was your man. Or so says Islamic tradition.

Khadija decided to test Mohammed’s reputation. She hired the 23-year-old Mohammed to travel on her behalf to Syria, carrying and selling her merchandise. She loaned Mohammed one of her male slaves to keep him company, to help him lug things, and to spy on him. Mohammed’s powers as a salesmen and his skills at bargaining were apparently above average…though it was his “honesty and fair dealings” that Islamic biographers like Sarwat Saulat try to stress. Mohammed returned from Syria with a handsome profit.
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And Khadija’s slave reported to her privately that Mohammed hadn’t skimmed any of the proceeds off for himself.
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So in 595 AD, Khadija made Mohammed an offer he could easily have refused. She asked him to marry her. The future prophet was only 25 years old and Khadija was forty. But Khadija was offering Mohammed a jackpot--access to all of her wealth and slaves. So Mohammed said yes. Once the marriage was consummated, the groom made a noble decision. He set all of Khadija’s slaves free.
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That move would later prove critical when Mohammed needed followers for a new way of thinking and behaving. But we’ll get to that later. Mohammed summed up his marriage to Khadija like this: “When I was poor she [Khadija] enriched me and when they called me a liar, she supported my mission.”
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Mohammed’s career was about to be catapulted to a higher level by a powerful, supportive, and brainy woman. It’s ironic that the religion he would found would eventually reduce women to invisibility.

The first eleven years of Mohammed’s marriage were so uneventful that they’ve nearly disappeared from sight. Khadija gave birth to seven children. Two of them died very early in life. More important, Khadija had a Christian cousin, a man who Mohammed’s first biographer, the eighth century scholar Ibn Ishaq, says was
“well versed in sacred and profane literature”
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—the literature of the Christians and the Jews. When Khadija and her cousin discussed the people Mohammed had met on his first trade trip to Syria for Khadija, they suspected that some of them may have been angels sent to protect Mohammed. This was the first hint of yet more things to come—Mohammed’s one-of-a-kind relationship with God.

Meanwhile in 606 AD, when Mohammed was 26 years old, he showed signs of a new skill—a talent for social organization. The Kaaba—the cube-shaped building that housed the wooden idols of the gods of tribes for hundreds of miles around, the building that attracted the lucrative pilgrimage business--was damaged by rain. The Meccans wanted to rebuild it, but were terrified that if they laid a hand on the Kaaba’s divine stone and timbers, the gods would strike them dead. They allowed one brave citizen, al-Walid, to do what no one else dared. Walid grabbed a pickaxe and demolished an entire section of the Kaaba’s wall. The Meccans waited breathlessly until the next morning to see if Walid would survive the wrath of the gods. When Walid woke up alive and went back to demolishing walls, the men of all the tribes of Mecca breathed a sigh of relief and pitched in to join him.

But once the old building was gone and the new building erected, there was a problem. The sacred black stone—the cube-shaped meteorite--had to be put in place in the new building, and every tribe wanted the honor of completing this last and most holy of tasks. The tribes quarreled for four days, began to form factions, and started muttering about war. Who would save Mecca from civil strife? And how?

One elder suggested that the arguing crowd let whoever walked through the door next act as umpire and decide the matter. Surprise, surprise. The next man to come through the door was…Mohammed. Mohammed asked for a cloak, put the black stone on it, and said, “Let every group take hold of a part of the cloak.” The tribesmen each gripped a bit of the cloak’s fringe and lifted the stone to the height of its resting place. And Mohammed himself slid the stone from the cloak onto its base. All earned the honor of elevating the stone!
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Did this mean that Mohammed had a gift for uniting men in new ways? And a gift for compromise? We shall have to see.

609 AD was the year that would change the world…literally. In the ninth month of each year, Every year in the month of Ramadan, Mohammed followed the Meccan religious tradition of taking his family into the mountains above town, secluding himself in a cave, then praying and meditating
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. All kinds of shenanigansthings were going on back in town, forms of behavior that Mohammed despised. According to biographer Sarwat Saulat, there was a laundry list of sins: “idolatry, dishonesty, murder, civil strife, gambling, robbery, usury, and drinking of wine”.
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During his Ramadan retreat, Mohammed was asleep in his cave when he was sideswipedpounced on by an odd experience. He dreamed that a massive and indistinct forcethe Angel Gabriel came to him carrying a brocade coverlet with words stitched into it, then ordered him to “recite, to read.” In his sleep, Mohammed admitted that he was illiterate:
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“I can not read,”
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he said. But the forceGabriel wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mohammed felt himself being crushed three times so hard that, “I thought it was death”. “What can I read?
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” pleadedasked Mohammed finally, caving in to the pain.
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Said the voice of the force, “Read in the name of thy lord who…created man from a clot. Read: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous.” These words and a few more stuck with Mohammed as though “they had been graven on my heart”
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. They also convinced him that he’d turned overnight into either a mystic poet or a lunatic, two sorts of humans he despised.
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