Muhammad Read online

  It was the end. All the Quraysh had to do was to pursue the Muslims. But inexplicably, they didn’t push forward. The Quraysh allowed Muhammad and his army to escape.

  Amazed, I asked, “Where are they now?”

  “Coming home,” the rider replied, still gasping from distress and fatigue. “See the dust?” He pointed to the horizon, where a line of dirty brown smudged the air.

  “Are they running with the Quraysh behind them?”

  He shook his head. “The enemy remains in camp. No one pursues us.”

  How could this be? Perhaps Allah really was on the Prophet’s side and had clouded the minds of the enemy. Perhaps Sufyan thought too much like a merchant instead of a general. He didn’t want Medina turned into an enemy fortress that would never trade with him again. For whatever reason, the cloud of dust swelled until it reached high overhead. Shrouded inside was the Muslim army, bearing their wounded Prophet home.

  Should I move to seize my power back? I wanted to, but my hand was stayed. Too many have converted to Islam. They won’t follow an infidel anymore. And there’s another thing. Muhammad’s God did keep the city from being attacked. It just took a rout to make it happen.

  I begged audience with the wounded Prophet to see for myself if he was really alive or on the verge of death. It took two days before I was allowed to enter his room, and by that time he was sitting up in bandages, weak but ready to get strong again.

  “What happened?” I asked, keeping my forehead to the floor in case he saw something in my eyes I didn’t want seen.

  “They disobeyed God,” he said grimly. “They stopped fighting for Him.”

  “Did God tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. Anyone who isn’t fighting for God defeats himself.”

  I felt Muhammad reach down and lift my face from the floor. “Including you,” he said. “I would lose any battle to win a great soul.”

  I can’t help now but hear those words over and over. With half my heart I praise Allah sincerely. I’m not the deep-dyed hypocrite they suppose. With the other half of my heart I fear Allah. Perhaps He is all-knowing and all-powerful. Or is He simply crafty beyond imagining?

  17

  UMAR, THE CLOSE COMPANION

  It never ended. Skirmishes, feints, raids, and attacks. The struggle was wearing us down. One day the word came that our implacable foe in Mecca, Abu Sufyan, had taken the profits of a whole caravan to buy weapons and mercenaries. Everything was closing in. The next day we heard that the hill stronghold of Taif would resist Islam to the last man. Syria refused peace terms, inflamed by lies about the Prophet. The Bedouin chiefs on the coast drifted from our side to the Meccans like waves on the beach.

  And yet he goes on. A recent revelation comes to his lips: “Allah taxes not one soul beyond its limits.”

  I am sahabi, one of the companions who has been by the Prophet’s side since the beginning. No one has kept a closer eye on him. Closeness doesn’t reveal his secrets, though. One waits for clues, like watching a lion who seems to sleep and then gives one small twitch before he leaps. A few months ago there was a lull in the raids and killings and betrayals. I found the Prophet kneeling in his garden. At first I hung back, so that I wouldn’t interrupt his prayers. He looked up and beckoned me.

  “Watch,” he said, pointing at the ground.

  A small anthill lay in front of him. Carefully the Prophet put a balled-up piece of bread next to it. At first only one or two ants came out to scout. They touched the bread with their feelers, then scurried back inside. In a minute dozens of ants trickled out to pick at the dropped food. I must admit I found nothing unusual to see. The Prophet was brandishing a twig, which he used to gently push the ants away. Every time he did this, more ants rushed out of the ground to fill in the gap.

  “This is our situation,” he murmured. “No matter how many enemies we drive away, more are sent after them.” He cocked his head quizzically at me. “What would you have me do? The faithful can’t face attack forever.”

  “Do you want me to show you?” I asked in return. He nodded. With my sandal I kicked the anthill, sending it flying. I stamped on the flattened ground, and the hole disappeared. The ants around the bread ball scattered in confusion.

  “If God wants us to fight our enemies, then He wants us to crush them. Mount a massive attack,” I said. “Every Muslim in creation will rush to fight. Do nothing, and the Quraysh will gather more allies, like flies to rotting meat.” On the wind we had heard of powerful tribes that were being bought off by Mecca with promises of plunder. The banished Jewish tribes were constantly trading with the enemy and nursing their dark grievances.

  The Prophet picked up an ant on his fingertip and examined it. “Tomorrow more will come out of the ground. You can’t kill them all.”

  “I can kill enough. I can kill until Allah tells me to stop.”

  I had worked myself half into a rage, but the Prophet gazed at the destroyed anthill in sorrow. “God has something better in mind,” he murmured.

  “Better than total victory?”

  The Prophet turned away and went back into the house. That’s what I mean about getting a clue to his mind. When you glimpse one, it is veiled. In the short run, events turned out the way I foresaw, but it was Mecca that mounted the massive attack, not us. It was in the spring two years after Uhud. This time the Quraysh were preparing for a long siege against Medina. Word came of ten thousand infantry led by a cavalry of six hundred horses. Our army was a third that size. Brave Muslims went to bed only to wake up wide-eyed, because they heard the clang of iron horseshoes in their nightmares.

  My nightmare was just as horrifying, but more real. When we were routed at Uhud, it took every fiber of strength to remove the wounded Prophet safely from the field. Trailing behind the retreat, I glanced over my shoulder. With shrill war cries the camp followers from Mecca had rushed onto the bloody ground, maiming and mutilating the fallen. They were human vultures, and the leader wasn’t a savage, but Hind, the wife of Sufyan himself. I wonder if she spied me, because her face was like a demon’s. I saw her raise a small curved blade, and when she brought it down, a wounded Muslim had lost his nose and ears. Sickened, I turned and galloped away. Later I heard that some women returned to Mecca wearing necklaces of body parts sliced from the dead and dying.

  Rumblings spread through the city after that defeat. It took all of the Prophet’s skill to calm the bickering chieftains. One bitter faction wanted to punish the reckless young warriors who had ignored the Prophet’s plan to defend Medina. There was even more disgust over the archers who had abandoned their post to loot the enemy camp. But the Prophet said quietly, “All that is good comes from Allah. All that is ill is my fault.” His humility swayed the chieftains, even as blood was shed among clans in Medina’s back streets at night.

  We gathered in council to argue about how to meet the massive army marching toward us. Spies had ridden ahead to warn us that we had only a week to prepare. The worst confusion is that born of panic. The Prophet sat silently, while the chieftains tore apart each other’s plans. One side shouted that Badr had been won by hitting the enemy full on and trusting in Allah. A quieter, more cautious faction pointed out that staying home to defend Medina from the inside would have avoided the humiliating defeat at Uhud.

  The Prophet turned to the quiet faction. “You do not call upon God to bring us victory?”

  “I would thank God if He brought us survival,” one of the chiefs muttered.

  The Prophet grew stern. “Where is your faith?” But he knew well enough that there was near famine already in the city. Reciters roamed the streets crying out verses from the Koran to raise morale. People listened, but continued to tremble.

  I stood up among the assembly. “The Prophet has taught us that faith has three parts. One part lies in the heart, another in our words, and the last in our deeds. Every action is holy. Therefore, this must be a holy battle, not a battle of fear. We should rejoice in being tested.”
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br />   Maybe I raised a few sunken hearts with this kind of boldness. But we all knew that there was a fourth part of faith, and it belonged only to the Prophet, the one man who could hear directly from God. We waited in nervous, rustling silence. He rose to his feet.

  “Our enemies fight against God, and therefore they are defeated in advance. Not knowing this, they assemble a great, futile army. But ten thousand blind men cannot defeat a handful who can see. Let me ask you, then, what do you see? If you tell me that you see a foe who hopelessly outnumbers us, then are you not as blind as they?”

  A mixture of bafflement and discontent greeted these words. A voice cried out, “Tell us what you see.”

  The Prophet shrugged. “I took a walk out of town yesterday. I saw hills and rocks and trees the same as you. But this time God showed them to me with new eyes, and I rejoiced.” He smiled beatifically. “Is it not wonderful how God brings us victory in His very creation?”

  The assembly was more baffled than ever by his words. A few of the sahabi who knew him well realized he was about to unveil a teaching.

  “Allah is all-merciful. He asks nothing of our souls except what he has already planted in them,” Muhammad raised his voice to silence the muttering doubters. “I will give you a plan, but never forget my words. God is all-merciful. This is worth more than victory, more than life itself.”

  Muhammad explained how the rocks, hills, and trees that he loved to walk among surrounded the city on three sides. An army couldn’t march through them without being picked off; horses couldn’t gallop through without losing their footing. Medina had only one open side, to the north. If we could stop the enemy’s horses there, they would lose most of their advantage. The tide would swing to us, because the Qurayshi infantry knew that in hand-to-hand combat a Muslim protected by his faith was worth three mercenaries fighting for loot.

  “Their warhorses have seen bloodshed. They won’t run from the glint of steel or the clash of swords,” said the Prophet. “So we must give them something they’ve never seen before. Only the unknown can frighten a warhorse.”

  By this time the assembly was hanging on to his every word. I don’t know if God enjoys creating suspense; if the Prophet does, it’s a small sin. “What we need is simplicity itself. It is written that long ago the Persians terrified the enemy by digging a deep trench in the front lines. If the walls are steep enough, no horse will plunge into such a trench. They will pull up short at the last moment in panic. We will defend ourselves against the siege by fighting from behind our trenches.”

  This strategy was delivered so skillfully that no one had time to consider the vast labor it would take to dig a single ditch deeper than a horse is tall, even when only on the north side of the city. The enemy army would be upon us in seven days, which meant that we had a mere six days to prepare our fortifications.

  I tell you, those six days were the noblest of my life. Medina worked with one back, digging night and day. Every child was given a shovel to work beside his father. Women hauled away dirt in baskets and took turns bringing food and water. The Prophet himself was seen digging, his white robes dirtied, his face caked with dust. All the better to goad our men to dig until their arms burned and trembled with exhaustion.

  As I was breaking my back, my heart repeated encouraging words given by God in His book:

  Lo, I swear by the afterglow of sunset,

  And by the night and all that it enshrouds,

  And by the moon when she is at the full,

  You will journey to higher and higher worlds.

  Wasn’t I doing that now? To mortal eyes I was no more than a sweaty soldier squeezed into a ditch beside a thousand other soldiers. Yet in my soul I was working toward a higher world. Nothing stronger can drive a man onward. When I fell into bed at night, I dreamed of Paradise. No more did the horrifying sight of women mutilating fallen bodies trouble me.

  The Prophet surveyed the work, sending in fresh replacements when a section of the trench fell behind. The fierceness of the task seemed to please him.

  Legends were already circulating about him, and I remembered one. The Prophet has a large band of horses that he loves. Being a child of the desert, he grew up with Bedouins, who took their favorite mares inside the tent with them at night, for fear that raiders would steal them while they slept.

  One day the Prophet had run his horses far out into the sands without water. In the distance an oasis came in sight. The animals were desperately thirsty; they bolted toward the oasis as soon as they smelled it. The Prophet watched them run away. At the last moment before they reached water, he rose in his stirrups and gave a sharp whistle, signaling for them to come back.

  Most of the horses ignored the whistle, but five mares turned and returned to his hand. These alone he selected for breeding. He said, “A horse can be whipped into running faster. With discipline it can be made to fight in battle. But what God values is complete loyalty, and that appears only when a soul meets the sorest test.”

  You see? We were loyal mares in a moment of desperation, which is why the fiercer the danger, the happier he grew.

  Finally the horizon was filled with black specks that advanced under a thin brown layer of dust. The specks grew into human shapes, and in less than a day the ranks of foot soldiers, cavalry, and fighters on camels filled our vision. The siege began. We had made life harder for the invaders by harvesting the crops early and stripping the land of forage. The Prophet emptied the city of men and boys over fifteen, stationing them on the hill above the trench. No one was allowed to go home at night; all were ordered to pray in loud voices and to spread out their campfires in long lines to make the Quraysh believe that there were more of us than there were.

  At the first charge the enemy was dumbfounded. Their horses were afraid to plunge into the trench, and when a few hotheads forced them to try and leap across, they fell short and tumbled to the bottom, writhing and whinnying in panic. After that, there was no second charge. For two weeks neither side moved. Ali killed one of their leaders in a duel. Otherwise, the casualties were one or two a day. Seeing this, the Prophet should have been encouraged, but he sat for hours in gloomy reflection.

  I went to cheer him up, and myself. The whole future rested on his mood. “How can I be happy?” he said. “God has granted us everything, but He can’t change human nature, not in a week, and among sinners perhaps not ever.”

  He suspected betrayals, and the longer the siege lasted, the more tempting it was for the hypocrites and unbelievers to turn against us. The nights grew colder; rain grayed the skies. I was sent underground, and a day later I returned with ominous news.

  “They’ve found enough traitors to attack us from within. I crawled to within twenty yards of the tents where the bargaining is going on. Already the people know. Rumors are flying everywhere that our women and children will be kidnapped at night while the men are on the barricades.”

  The Prophet listened as I unfolded my grim report. The key traitors were the Banu Qurayza, the last Jewish tribe in Medina to hold a peace pact with the Muslims. The others had all been banished.

  The Prophet’s eyes looked troubled. “What is the enemy saying to make the Jews betray us?” He raised his hand. “Don’t tell me. The slightest word would be enough.”

  He knew that the banished Jews had joined the enemy. A few of them came to the Qurayza and laid out the certainty that a vast army couldn’t be resisted forever. One enemy emissary, a powerful chief from Khaybar, where many Jews had fled to repair their fortunes, threw open the tent flap of the Qurayza chief.

  “What do you see?” the emissary asked. “Nothing but our forces, mile after mile. Yet it will take the whim of just one man, Muhammad, to wipe you out, if his God orders him to. Doesn’t he already preach that Jews and Christians should abandon their faith and be converted?”

  The emissary chose the right poison. The Qurayza wavered. What side did they want to be on when Medina fell? Up to that point, the pact with the Prophet had been h
onored on both sides. In return for remaining neutral, the remaining Jews in Medina had sent baskets and tools for digging the trenches.

  By then the siege had become a battle of nerves. Every day the two sides stood close enough to hurl insults at each other, but far enough apart that arrows couldn’t reach them. Food shortages hurt both camps. The rain and cold eroded morale. In the tensest hour we got news that the Qurayza had torn up the treaty with us. They would open up the city’s southern flank, which they controlled, and once that happened, the trench on the north would be useless. Worse than useless, since the men stationed there all day and night had grown exhausted.

  I sat in council with the trusted couriers who brought this news to the Prophet. Quietly he gave two orders. “Tell no one that the Qurayza have turned, or there will be panic in the streets. Bring several hundred soldiers and their horses into the center of town, to defend the women and children from attack.”

  The situation was dire. Muhammad turned to the Ghatafan, a nomadic tribe who had recently ignited the wrath of the Muslims, first by joining the Quraysh and lending them a major contingent of fighters and arms, but also by their relentless greed. God told the Prophet that he must break the alliance of his enemies. Looking to the weakest link, he landed upon the Ghatafan, because they could be bought off. The Prophet offered them a third of the date harvest if they abandoned the war.

  This was an excessive offer as far as Ali and the other fighters were concerned, but then the Ghatafan spat in our faces, demanding not a third but half the year’s crop as their bribe. At that moment God spoke in a mystifying way. He told the Prophet to agree. This decision was greeted with stunned silence.

  I was made deputy and ordered to take the agreement to the Ghatafan chiefs. It was a degrading mission, and my heart was heavy. Before I left, I went to the Prophet’s tent to make sure that this was his will. He nodded silently. As I was leaving, though, he said in a mild voice, “Out of respect, show the agreement to the Muslim chiefs.” It seemed like no more than a casual reminder.