The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad by Lesley Hazleton

Author:Lesley Hazleton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Religion, Middle East, Biography & Autobiography, Islam, Religious, History
ISBN: 9781594487286
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

News of Muhammad’s arrival spread fast. People ran out to greet him as he rode in, begging him to stop and accept their hospitality, but he turned everyone down. He would stop where his she-camel stopped, he said, and gave her free rein. She

went on into the center of the oasis, where she wandered into a stony yard that had once been a burial ground and was now used only for drying dates. There she knelt, first her front legs buckling in that seemingly impossible way, then her hind legs, until finally she settled to the ground with a kind of sighing grunt as though to say “This far and no further.”

Like the spiders that had spun dense webs across the entrance to the cave on Mount Thaur, this camel would be seen as a sainted creature, divinely led. When she knelt and Muhammad dismounted, the hijra was complete. Mecca had been the birthplace of Islam, but its cradle, the place where it would grow and thrive, would be Medina, and it was from Muhammad’s arrival in Medina that the Muslim era—After the Hijra, or AH—would eventually be dated. It would be seven years before he set foot in Mecca again.

The date-drying yard belonged to two young orphans from the same Khazraj clan to which Muhammad’s great-grandmother had belonged, and the two boys were under the guardianship of an uncle. The similarities between their backgrounds and Muhammad’s made the choice of locale seem inspired. Moreover since theirs was a small clan, a purchase of land from them was unlikely to make other more powerful clans feel that they had been snubbed. In the event, the boys’ guardian insisted that the land be a gift, promising that he’d pay his wards the purchase price himself (a promise Muhammad ensured was fulfilled), and so it was done. This unlikely patch would become the new center of the believers’ world.

What they built here in the next few months was strikingly simple: an open compound inside a mud-brick wall, with a palm-thatched covered area in the center for shade and lean-tos built against the south and east walls as sleeping quarters. There was none of the ornate sacred space of the mosques that would be built after Islam had claimed an empire. As the earliest synagogues and churches had been, this was a gathering place as much as a prayer space (in fact the word “synagogue” is from the Greek for “coming together”). The secular and the sacred would take place side by side, blending easily into each other as they did in most of the world at the time. The single feature a modern Muslim would recognize was a niche in one wall to indicate the qibla, the direction to be faced in prayer. But this was not toward Mecca, not yet. It was toward the city of the Night Journey, Jerusalem—the same direction in which both Jews and Christians turned to pray.

That first year in Medina, the emigrants worked harder than most of them ever had before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.