Bilal

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal </b>
tells of the marriage of Muhammad


We can safely say- and Sura 93 of the Holy Qur’an supports us- Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija was made in Heaven.


I first heard her name when my slave mother put a honey biscuit into my mouth. I was, I suppose five, the biscuit had come from Khadija, she said, so the name will always be sweet to me. For Khadija was kindness. She gave, front door and back door, to whoever needed; she walked out of her way to give. She was also very rare- a rich woman who was able to imagine herself inside another woman poverty.


At that time, before the Prophet gave women their rights, Mecca was a city of scandalous inequality. A few women were well placed and well to do like Hind and Khadija, but the rest of the sex were poor and oppressed. They were men’s chattels and their cisterns; by day their backs bent forward and by night their backs bent back. There had been few poets of love, like Antara, who gave women their looking glass. But they were dead.


Indeed, it was a mystery. In Mecca, women were either prayed to or preyed upon. Three of the highest gods in the Kaa’ba, Al- Uzza, Manat, Al- Lat, were female. But they did as little for their own sisters as they did for my brothers.


I tell you all this to show you the great gift Muhammad had in his wife. Their relationship always prospered, although it began in an unusual way. She employed her future husband as the master of her caravan trading up to Syria.


Muhammad was twenty-four years old when he led Khadija’s camels north. Of course there are the usual spate of miracles told about that journey- how he put the force of life back into his two camels and so on. But they overtook the greatest miracle fo all, which is man and his nature.


Consider the caravan. The slow soft thud of the camels walking in the desert night, each stride a measure of journey; beast and man joined in a single purpose, the end of their travel; both tied to the same ground. But man has his head and, with his head, the heavens.


Man’s upturned face to Heaven that is the page of miracles.


Here the life and soul begins, as the sparks sly upwards. God works in mysterious ways bu I believe He works His greatest miracle within man himself. That is why you should consider the caravan.


When he came to Damascus, Muhammad declined to join the familiar carousals of the thirsty camel drivers in the city stews. He stayed by his charges in the suburbs- knowing, I suppose that more sailors are drowned in port than on the open sea. He served his employer with a sober head and came back to her with more than she expected.


Khadija was always quick to see and when Muhammad came home from Syria she saw her husband.


She sent Nafisa, a go-between, to ask him in a roundabout way if he had any intentions of marrying.


‘But I possess nothing to marry with.’ Muhammad replied.


Nafisa poked him in the ribs pretending that his plea of poverty was merely coy hesitation.


‘But suppose there was someone who had enough for two?’


Then she leaned closer and continued to whisper.


‘Suppose you were invited to beauty, to wealth, to a position of honour, the master of a noble house…would you accept?’


Muhammad was wary. ‘It might depend upon the woman.’


‘Naturally.’


‘Who might the woman be?’


‘Khadija.’


Muhammad jumped up full of happiness. ‘What must I do?’


Nafisa sat him down again. ‘Leave everything to me.’


But Muhammad was up again. ‘No, no. I must go and tell her that I have admired her since I first met her, but could never dare to speak.’


A giggling Nafisa followed after a young striding caravan master.


Khadija was then nearly forty years old and twice widowed; Muhammad was twenty-five. I’ve heard some cynics here in Damascus saying that he, not she, was caught. But they know nothing.


This marriage was so perfect that it might have been an angel, not a go-between that proposed it. It was the first step up towards his mission. Khadija freed him from poverty, allowing him to undergo the hard work of the soul, the lonely agonies and contemplations, the doubts and uncertainties that were his education. She comforted him in his despair and, I heard him say once, ‘when they called me a liar, she alone remained true.’


She was the first to believe in his mission, before anyone, even he himself believed in it.


Yet in their bearded opinion of Mecca their marriage had a flaw. Muhammad had no male heirs. In compensation he was awarded four girls, of whom Fatima was one. It was as though God had decided for His Prophet that woman was indeed ‘the proper companion of man.