Part 6

BAN IMPOSED ON THE MUSLIMS

The custodianship of the Ka'aba, which generated the life-supporting revenues for its custodians and others affiliated with its functions had rested in the hands of the Hashimite clan for a long period of time. To perpetuate the practice, Abu Talib was desirous of transferring to his own line the honors of being the custodian of the Ka'aba, thus dismaying Abu Sofian and others interested in assuming the honors themselves. The last measure of Abu Talib, in providing Muhammad with a safe haven for refuge, was seized upon by Abu Sofian and his adherents as a pretext for a general ban of their rival line. They, accordingly, issued a decree, forbidding the rest of the tribe of Quraish from intermarrying or holding any intercourse, even commercial deals, with the Hashimites until they delivered up their kinsman, Muhammad, to be restrained from committing blasphemy against their ancestral gods and religion. This decree, which took place in the seventh year of what is called the mission of the Prophet, written on a parchment, was hung up on the wall of Ka'aba. Muslims claim that the ban had caused great difficulty to Muhammad and his followers. We do not know how the proclaimers of the ban implemented the decree, for, according to the Muslim assertion, they had failed to nab Muhammad when he walked away, before their eyes, out of his door in front of which, they were assembled with the intention of murdering him.

The short period of Muhammad's banishment rolled into the annual season of pilgrimage, when pilgrims flocked to Mecca from all parts of Arabia to fulfill their religious obligations. During this sacred occasion, according to ancient law and its usage among the Arabs, all hostilities ceased, and warring tribes met in temporary peace to worship at the temple of Ka'aba. Utilizing the truce that this sacred occasion provided, Muhammad and his disciples ventured out of their shelter, and returned to Mecca.

While at large, Muhammad made full use of the opportunity that the pagan religious immunity afforded him. He mingled freely among the pilgrims - -preaching, praying, propounding his doctrines, and proclaiming his revelations. In this way, he made many converts who, on their return to their destinations, carried with them the seeds of the new faith. The Meccan pagans did not obstruct Muhammad in his mission, as they were bound to follow the sanctity of their religion. Muhammad, on the other hand, flaunted their religious dedication and violated the truce they expected him, as well, to honor. Instead, he went about unhindered, conspicuously propagating his divine faith among the visitors, who, it seems, had remained unaware of the volatile religious situation that was then obtaining in Mecca.

At end of the pilgrimage, Muhammad and his followers retuned to their safe haven. The pagans are not known to have done anything either to prevent their return, or to cause them any hardships. On the contrary, the Meccan pagans, it seems, remained engaged with him, for a period of time, in endless arguments, which he followed with new revelations that denounced those who opposed him and his religion. The Quran, which contains, in Muhammad's own words, the exaggerated details of all the events that had unfolded during twenty-three years of his apostolic mission, does not give us any indication that he was ever persecuted, in the real sense of the word, by his opponents. Nor, does it, for obvious reasons, have the details of how Muhammad must have treated his foes, especially in a situation where they were vehemently opposed to the spread of his religion among the Arabian population.

As the history of the time we are discussing here was tailored over a period of time after Muhammad's death, to favor the Muslims only, it is now impossible for us to know precisely the intrinsic beliefs of the idolaters. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the crudity of their statuary did not necessarily mean that they worshipped stones or trees, any more than the Christians worshipped plaster figures or painted canvasses depicting the saints. It seems probable that the pagans appreciated that the idols were merely symbolic of spiritual beings in the same way in that Muslims now venerate the edifice of Ka'aba as being the House of Allah, though He is believed not to remain confined to a structure of four walls.

Three years had passed since Muhammad and some of his followers took refuge in the safe haven provided by his uncle Abu Talib. During this period, he must have remained the target of his opponents' opprobrious language, but in spite of this, it seems, he continued to walk about the streets and sit, recite and argue in the public square, without ever having had to fear for his life.

In the meantime, the parchment, which contained the ban imposed on Muslims, was partly destroyed and nothing of the decree remained except the initial words, "In thy name, Oh Almighty Allah," the customary ancient formula with which the pagans began their writing. Muslims use this formula today with a slight change brought about in it by Muhammad to fit a doctrine of his religion.

Under the circumstances, the decree was deemed annulled, whereupon Muhammad and his band of disciples were permitted to return to Mecca, unopposed and unhurt.
Pious Muslims consider the mysterious destruction of the decree as another miracle wrought by Allah to help Muhammad; unbelievers, on the contrary, contend that the mortal hands secretly defaced the document, which had become embarrassing to Abu Sofian due to its ineffectiveness.

In our earlier discussion on the use of parchment by the Arabs, we maintained that it was not possible for them to use it for the simple reason that it was not available to them at the relevant time. As to its alleged use for writing the decree of banishment, we hold the view that the pagans had not written the decree on a parchment; instead, they might have had hung up a piece of rag on the wall of the Ka'aba, it being symbolic of the message they wanted to convey to all those who were supposed to implement the ban.

In any event, Muhammad returned to Mecca and it coincided with the victories of the Persians over the Greeks, by which they conquered Syria and a part of Egypt. The idolatrous Quraishites exulted in the defeat of the Christian Greek, whose faith being opposed to the worship of idols; they associated it with the new faith of Islam. Muhammad, on the other hand, was disheartened by the Greeks' defeat but, nevertheless, he replied to the pagans' taunts and exultation by producing the thirtieth Sura or chapter of the Quran, which opened with the following words:

"The Roman Empire
Has been defeated -
In a land close by;
But they (even) after,
(This) defeat of theirs,
Will soon be victorious -
Within a few years.

This prediction was verified and found to be true. Muslim theologians cite this as a proof that the Quran came down from heaven, and that Muhammad possessed the gift of prophecy. In reality, the whole prediction was no doubt a shrewd guess into futurity, aided by the knowledge of the actual events taking place contemporaneously around the Arabian Peninsula. The politicians and statesmen of our time make these kind of predictions almost on a daily basis, hence to claim what Muhammad had predicted about the Greeks as being a heavenly act, is nothing, but an aspersion on his political and statesman-like astuteness.

Not long after Muhammad had returned to Mecca, his uncle Abu Talib, as a result of his old age, was facing death. This man, though supported and protected Muhammad from his infidel enemies, had not converted himself to the faith of his nephew. Many a time, the Muhammad implored him to accept his religion and to die a Muslim, but he always put him off, pleading that he could neither give up his ancestral religion, nor could he join in the exercise which his religion required its adherents to undertake; i.e. the act of placing their "backside above their heads," as the old man described the prostration, which he had seen his nephew performing three times a day.

Muhammad approached Abu Talib once again on his deathbed and beseeched him for the last time to accept the religion of Islam. He declined and breathed his last as an infidel. Abu Lahab, his brother, succeeded him as the head of the clan of Bani Hashim.

Scarcely a few days had passed from the death of the venerable Abu Talib, when Khudeija, the dedicated and faithful wife of Muhammad, also took her leave from this world. This happened in 619 A.D., when she was sixty-five years old.

Though Khudeija was much older than Muhammad himself and past her bloom when women are desirable in the East, and though he was known to have an amorous temperament, yet he is said to have remained faithful to her and avoided taking additional wives, in spite of the fact that the Arabian laws permitted him to do so.

Pious Muslims point to this while highlighting his virtues. But an objective analysis of his relationship with Khudeija does not support the aforesaid Muslim hypothesis.

It is true that so long as Khudeija had lived, Muhammad had taken no additional wives, but it was not purely out of his love for her: it was rather dictated by his circumstances.  He was, perhaps, fearful of his wife and apprehended her retaliation.  He must have realized that if he took another wife while Khudeija was still alive, she might react by depriving him of his sustenance. She might even divulge the secrets that revolved around his prophethood and divine mission, thereby destroying him along with his ambitions. Muhammad's conduct after Khudeija's death lends credence to our hypothesis: there is no record that tells us that he felt deeply sad at the death of his wife and that he mourned it in the manner of an aggrieved husband.

Soon after Khudeija's death, Muhammad sought to compensate himself by entering into multiple wedlocks, and taking a plurality of wives. He permitted, by his own law, four wives to each of his followers but did not limit himself to that number, reasoning that a prophet, being gifted with enormous manly prowess and special privileges, was not bound to restrict himself to the same laws as those of the ordinary mortals. Of his numerous marriages and wives, we shall speak later in a separate chapter.

 

VISIT TO TAIF

Muhammad soon realized the irreparable loss that he sustained in the death of his uncle and protector, Abu Talib. After his death, he found no one who could check and react against the hostilities of his inveterate foes - Abu Sofian and Abu Jahl - - who are alleged to have soon stirred up such a spirit of opposition that he deemed it unsafe to continue living in his native town. He set out, therefore, accompanied by his freed slave Zaid, immediately after the death of his uncle and wife, to seek refuge in Taif, a small walled town some seventy miles from Mecca, inhabited by Arabs of the tribe of Thakeef. It was one of the favored places of Arabia, situated among vineyards and gardens. Here grew peaches and plums, melons and pomegranates; figs, blue and green; and the palm trees with their clusters of green and golden fruit. So fresh were its pastures and fruitful its fields, contrasted with the sterility of the desserts, that the Arabs fabled it to have originally been a part of Syria, which had broken off and floated to the site at the time of Noah's deluge.

Muhammad entered Taif hoping to procure some degree of protection on account of the influence that his uncle al Abbas was supposed to have wielded by virtue of his possessions there. But he was totally wrong in selecting Taif as a place of refuge; for it was a stronghold of idolatry and its inhabitants maintained in full force the worship of al Lat, they believed it to be one of the three daughters of Allah.

He remained in Taif for about a month, seeking in vain to convert its inhabitants to Islam. When he tried to preach his doctrines, his voice was muffled by ribald remarks. On many an occasions, stones were thrown at him, which the faithful Zaid warded off. So violent did the popular fury become that he was finally driven out of the city, and even pursued for some distance by an insulting rabble of slaves and urchins. Surprisingly, Allah had given Muhammad no revelation prior to his arrival, forewarning the hostility that he was destined to encounter during his futile visit to the city of Taif.

The visit to Taif may have proved disastrous for Muhammad insofar as his mission for conversion and protection was concerned, but in actuality the sight of the city had immensely benefited him. It enabled him to conceive the layout of the celestial Paradise and to describe it in the Quran, filled with all amenities he had seen in the city. He also had this Paradise peopled with black-eyed virgin houris to be had as consorts by those men who entered it after being judged by Allah on the Day of Resurrection, a licentious temptation that had induced many pagans to embrace Islam, in spite of their being opposed to it in the beginning. However, driven out so ignominiously from the place where he hoped to obtain refuge, Muhammad dared not return to Mecca, fearing persecution at the hands of his enemies. He, therefore, decided to remain in the desert until Zaid found him asylum with his friends in the city. In this extremity, he had one of those visions, which always seem to have appeared in his lonely and agitated moments.

He had halted in a solitary place in the valley of Nakhla, which was situated between Mecca and Taif. Here, while he was reading from his compositions to overcome the feeling of loneliness, he was overheard by a passing group of spirits, known forever as Jinns to the Arabs. They are the beings supposed to have been made of fire, some good, others evil, and liable to judgment on Dooms Day together with men. They are invisible, and maintain residences at isolate places as well as within the proximity of human habitations. They produce children. They also had apostles, like the ones mankind had been having from Adam to the time of Muhammad. Pious Jinns shall be awarded Paradise where they would enjoy felicities at par with the humans, while the evil ones shall be consigned to hell where they shall burn for eternity. The Jinns, made of fire, would be neutralized in order for the hell's fire to have its burning effect on their bodies. The group of the passing Jinns paused and listened to what Muhammad was reading. "Verily," they said at its conclusions, "we have heard an admirable discourse, which directeth us unto the right institution; wherefore we believe therein." Their confession to his religion consoled Muhammad, proving that though men might ridicule him and his doctrines, they were held in high reverence by spiritual intelligence. At least we may infer as much from what has been mentioned about the Jinns in the forty-sixth and seventy-second Suras of the Quran.

From that moment onward, Muhammad declared himself to be the one, sent by Allah, for the conversion of the Jinns, as well as of the human race, to Islam. Interestingly, science and human logic do not recognize Jinns and deny their existence, in any form, on earth.

 

THE ASCENSION TO SEVENTH HEAVEN
 

Muhammad, through the good offices of his freed slave Zaid, having been granted asylum by Mutim Ibn Idi, chief of the Nofal clan of the Quraish, returned one evening to Mecca. The following day, Mutim with his sons and nephews went fully armed to the public square of the Ka'aba and announced that Muhammad was henceforth under their protection. Muhammad was delighted, but it seems that at this crucial juncture of his mission, he refrained from preaching and persuasively converting the members of the Quraish pagans to his religion. Instead, he used his time and energy in attempting to convert those tribesmen who visited Mecca from time to time, as well as those nomads whom he could reach without being impeded by his enemies.

During this period when Muhammad was maintaining a low profile in Mecca, it is said, he, for an unexplained reason, was sleeping one night of the year 620 A.D., in the house of his cousin, Umm Hani. She was a widow whose husband had died when the couple was living in Abyssinia. In the dead of the night, angel Gabriel came to him and "spurred him with his foot" (Martin Lings, op. cit. p. 101). Thus awakened, he was instantly transported to Jerusalem by means of the "winged horse with a woman's face and peacock's tail," called the Burraq. While there, Muhammad tied up the Burraq to a post and thence led all the prophets of bygone days, including Adam, in a prayer at the holy temple known as the "Dome of the Rock." Some Moslem commentators, however, say that the temple in question remained in ruins from the fortieth year of Christ's ascension to heaven till the time of Caliph Omar (634-44) who had restored it to its original shape during his reign. How Omar retrieved the original design of the edifice, however, remains to us an unsolved enigma.

On the issue of morality, critics question the purpose of Muhammad's presence, at dead of night, in the house of a widowed woman, who was living alone, as well as God's decision for inviting him to heaven from the widow's house, instead of his own.
We believe that Muhammad had invented the story of Miraj to hide his presence in Umm Hani's house. In spite of being a polytheistic society, the Meccans honored their dead, and refrained from doing things for some time that would cause pain to the departed souls. Having illicit sex was one of the forbidden things. Muhammad failed to live by that standard, and immediately after Khudeija's death, he sought to satisfy his sexual needs by engaging himself with Umm Hani.

The following morning, people wanted to know about his whereabouts the night before. Not being in a position to disclose the fact that he spent the night at his paramour's house, he told the questioners that he had been on a trip of the celestial world. As the trip involved no other human beings, nor were any humans expected to be existing in the celestial world, to witness his arrival and departure, it prevented the questioners from demanding eyewitnesses to prove his claim, thus extracting himself from a quagmire that could have destroyed, forever, not only him, but also his apostolic career.

The prayer over, angel Gabriel opened up Muhammad's heart for the second time and, cleansing it of all sins that had accumulated in it from the time of the first cleansing performed when he was five years old, the angel replaced the heart back in his chest. Thereafter, a ladder was installed, connecting the site of the Dome with all the seven heavens in the sky. He climbed, one after another, through all the seven heavens. In the course of his tour, Muhammad was shown the Paradise, as well as, the Hell. He saw more women than men burning in its fire. Al Aqsa, as the Dome is also referred to, thus became one of the three holiest places of Islam, because, as Muslims insist, the Muhammad had ascended to the throne of God from its vicinity.

During his celestial visit, Muhammad is said to have had an audience with God, and held confidential parleys with him. In the course of this audience, commentators say, God charged Muhammad and his followers with the mandate of saying prayers fifty times a day, which was subsequently reduced to five on Muhammad's repeated representations. These daily five prayers eventually became a central part of the Islamic practice. The Quran, which is supposed to contain all the essential doctrines of the faith, however, does not specifically say that Muhammad had corporeally ascended to heavens, and spoke to God. This is because, some say, he withheld parts of the episode from his followers for personal reasons, thus giving the impression that the Quran, as a whole, may be containing only as much material as Muhammad, in his discretion, had chosen to divulge to his followers.

As far as the daily five prayers are concerned, the Quran does not explicitly mention these prayers, nor is there hard evidence that Muhammad himself prayed five times a day during his lifetime. Rather, what the Quran mentions, though not clearly, are the three daily prayers: one to be said in the morning, the second in the evening and the third during the night. Neither are the specifics of prostration described; all that the Quran requires of the Muslims is a simple inflection, followed by prostration in their prayers. Nor does the Quran require them to recite anything during their prayers.

Furthermore, the Quran does not mention anything about Muslims being circumcised; nor is it known that Muhammad had ever had this procedure done on his person, though it is obligatory for Muslim parents to have their male children circumcised in their childhood.

Concerning Muhammad's Miraj or Ascension to the heaven, many historians of repute contest the commonly held doctrine of his physical ascension to the seventh heaven. One of them is Fazlur Rahman, who says that the "spiritual experiences of the Prophet were later woven by tradition, especially when an 'orthodoxy' began to take shape, into the doctrine of a single, physical, locomotive experience of the 'Ascension' of Muhammad to Heaven, and still later were supplied all the graphic details about the animal which was ridden by the Prophet during his ascension, about his sojourn in each of the seven heavens, and his parleys with the Prophets of bygone ages from Adam up to Jesus." (Rahman has not mentioned prophet Idris, who is believed to have entered one of the seven heavens surreptitiously; and taken residence in it by hoodwinking Gabriel, his best friend). He concludes by saying that "the doctrine of a locomotive Miraj or Ascension developed by the orthodox (chiefly on the pattern of the Ascension of Jesus) and backed by Hadith is no more than a historical fiction whose materials come from various sources."

What Rahman really implies is that Muhammad did not physically ascend to heavens; that he did not have an audience with God and, consequently, he and his followers were not mandated to say any prayers.

Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, a respected scholar of Islam, appears to agree with Rahman's position. Consequently, he has not mentioned anything in his works on the Quran (see The Meaning of the Glorious Koran) about the mysterious Miraj; this despite the fact that Muslims consider the putative journey to be an essential component of their faith.