links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians. The nephew of Zayd ibn ‘Amr, who attacked the pagan religion of Mecca so vehemently that he was driven out of the city, became one of Muhammad’s most trusted disciples. It seems, therefore, that Muhammad moved in hanafi circles, and may have shared Zayd’s yearning for divine guidance. One day, before he had been expelled from Mecca, Zayd had stood beside the Kabah inveighing against the corrupt religion of the Haram. But suddenly, he broke off. “Oh Allah!” he cried, “If I knew how you wished to be worshipped, I would so worship you, but I do not know.”35
Muhammad was also seeking a new solution. For some years, accompanied by Khadijah, he had made an annual retreat on Mount Hira’ during the month of Ramadan, distributing alms to the poor who visited him in his mountain cave and performing devotions.36 We know very little about these practices, which were believed by some of the sources to have been inaugurated by Muhammad’s grandfather. They seem to have combined social concern with rituals that may have included deep prostrations before Allah,37 and intensive circumambulation of the Kabah. At this time, Muhammad had also started to have numinous dreams, radiant with hope and promise, that burst upon him “like the dawn of the morning,” a phrase that in Arabic expresses the sudden transformation of the world when the sun breaks through the darkness in these eastern lands where there is no twilight.38
It was while he was making his annual retreat on Mount Hira’ in about the year 610 that he experienced the astonishing and dramatic attack. The words that were squeezed, as if from the depths of his being, went to the root of the problem in Mecca.
Recite in the name of your lord who created—
From an embryo created the human.
Recite your lord is all-giving
Who taught by the pen
Taught the human what he did not know before
The human being is a tyrant
He thinks his possessions make him secure
To your lord is the return of everything
This verse was an extension of the Quraysh’s belief that Allah had created each one of them. It identified the proud self-sufficiency of muruwah as a delusion, because humans are entirely dependent upon God. Finally, Allah insisted that he was not a distant, absent deity but wanted to instruct and guide his creatures, so they must “come near” to him. But instead of approaching God in a spirit of prideful istighna’, they must bow before him like a lowly slave: “Touch your head to the earth!” God commanded39—a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh. From the very beginning, Muhammad’s religion was diametrically opposed to some of the essential principles of muruwah.
When Muhammad came to himself, he was so horrified to think, after all his spiritual striving, that he had simply been visited by a jinni that he no longer wanted to live. In despair, he fled from the cave and started to climb to the summit of the mountain to fling himself to his death. But there he had another vision. He saw a mighty being that filled the horizon and stood “gazing at him, moving neither forward nor backward.”40 He tried to turn away, but, he said afterwards, “Towards whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before.”41 It was the spirit (ruh) of revelation, which Muhammad would later call Gabriel. But this was no pretty, naturalistic angel, but a transcendent presence that defied ordinary human and spatial categories.
Terrified and still unable to comprehend what had happened, Muhammad stumbled down the mountainside to Khadijah. By the time he reached her, he was crawling on his hands and knees, shaking convulsively. “Cover me!” he cried, as he flung himself into her lap. Khadijah wrapped him in a cloak and held him in her arms until his fear abated. She had no doubts at all about the revelation. This was no jinni, she insisted. God would never play such a cruel trick on a man who had honestly tried to serve him. “You are kind and considerate to your kin,” she reminded him. “You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens. You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear.”42 Muhammad and Khadijah had probably discussed their dawning understanding of the true nature of a religion that went beyond ritual performance and required practical compassion and sustained moral effort.
To reassure Muhammad, Khadijah consulted her cousin Waraqah, the hanif, who had studied the scriptures of the People of the Book and could give them expert advice. Waraqah was jubilant: “Holy! Holy!” he cried, when he heard what had happened. “If you have spoken the truth to me, O Khadijah, there has come to him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of his people.”43 The next time Waraqah met Muhammad in the Haram, he kissed him on the forehead and warned him that his task would not be easy. Waraqah was an old man and not likely to live much longer, but he wished he could be alive to help Muhammad when the Quraysh expelled him from the city. Muhammad was dismayed. He could not conceive of a life outside Mecca. Would they really cast him out? he asked in dismay. Waraqah sadly told him that a prophet was always without honor in his own country.
It was a difficult beginning, fraught with fear, anxiety, and the threat of persecution. Yet the Qur’an has preserved another account of the experience on Mount Hira’, in which the descent of the spirit is described as an event of wonder, gentleness, and peace, similar to the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.44
We sent him down on the night of destiny
And what can tell you of the night of destiny?
The night of destiny is better than a thousand months
The angels come down—the spirit upon her—by permission of their lord from every order
Peace she is until the rise of dawn.45
In this surah (chapter) of the Qur’an, there is a suggestive blurring of masculine and feminine, especially in pronouns, which is often lost in translation. In the Qur’an, the question “What can tell you?” regularly introduces an idea that would have been strange to Muhammad’s first audience, indicating that they were about to enter the realm of the ineffable. Here Muhammad has self-effacingly disappeared from the drama of Mount Hira’, and the night (layla) is center stage, like a woman waiting for her lover. The Night of Destiny had inaugurated a new era of communion between heaven and earth. The original terror of the divine encounter has been replaced by the peace that filled the darkness as the world waited for daybreak.
Muhammad would have understood the German historian Rudolf Otto, who described the sacred as a mystery that was both tremendum and fascinans. It was overpowering, urgent, and terrible, but it also filled human beings with “delight, joy, and a sense of swelling harmony and intimate intercourse.”46 Revelation cannot be described in a simple manner, and the complexity of his experience made Muhammad very cautious of telling anybody about it. After the experience on Mount Hira’, there were more visions—we do not know exactly how many—and then, to Muhammad’s dismay, the divine voice fell silent and there were no further revelations.
It was a time of great desolation. Had Muhammad been deluded after all? Was the presence simply a mischievous jinni? Or had God found him wanting and abandoned him? For two long years, the heavens remained obdurately closed and then, suddenly, the darkness was dispersed in a burst of luminous assurance:
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