Bilal

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal
tells when the laughing stopped</b>


Sooner or later the laughing had to stop. Abu Sufyan was not a comedian; his fly-swat rose and fell in monotonous motion, in a kind of thought. He knew from the start that Islam was a revolution.


Muhammad was not only preaching a new measure of God, he was also teaching a new measure of man.


Islam threatened property: whether large or small with a religious tax: those who have must share with those who have not, in money, produce and possession. Yes, this was revolution.


Islam threatened the power of the merchant nobility, whether personal or political, by giving rights to the weak and by denying the exclusive birthrights of the tribe.


Muslims owed themselves to God, not their families. Arabia could not tolerate such a future.


Abu Sufyan tried, they all tried, to make Muhammad see reason, meaning, of course, their point of view. They offered him bribes of position, authority, even income from the Kaa’ba.


They thought, poor fools, that prophecy might be bought with the minerals of the earth. But he turned the impossibility back on them.


‘Were you to put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left, I would not renounce my message, which is from God.’


Then he looked at them with pity for their souls.


‘Do not murder your children,’ he said and walked away.


I must explain to you what was meant by the murdering of the children, because in 30 years Muhammad had spun the world forward so fast that I wonder if we are still walking on it and not thrown amongst the stars.


He meant precisely what he said. ‘Do not murder your children.’


Before Islam, in the desert, a child’s fate was known even before its toes were out of its mother’s body. If the child was male it was safe and celebrated; if female, unsafe and whispered over. Had they a sufficiency of girls in the family or too many in the tents of the tribe, she could be doomed.


When they had bitten the cord, she was taken out into the desert and the sand was shovelled over her.


They did not commit murders without niceties, and their argument for female infanticide were, of course, logical.


They were saving life by taking it; the economics of the desert, not they, decided the issue; a new mouth was another’s empty belly; besides, the female will breed and multiply herself.


On and on they went improving even on the selection of God. More females were born than males; they were merely correcting the imbalance. A few grls were worth their puberty and they saved those for later use.


It was sad to hear them. The design of creation had no holiness for them. Yet who can cry shame upon whom?


When Muhammad was preaching the equality of women in Arabia, in France a council of Christian bishops was meeting to decide if women had souls or not. I don’t know how they decided- up here in Syria you’re told everything and nothing.


Yet I often wonder at the contradictions by which religions regard women and how the same people who venerate Mary, the mother of Christ, can so easily desecrate Eve, the mother of man.


What most angered them, more than even the denial of the gods and the saving of the children, was the limitation of wives.


Before Muhammad, a man might marry as often as his thighs desired or his camels provided. Some had ten in bed, some twenty, each one crawling over the other to get closest to her king.


Islam limited wives to four, with a commandment that it made it more comfortable to have only one. All four must be treated equally and their claims on marriage must be satisfied equally by turn. If these claims could not be satisfied, a man could take one wife only.


Did the women rush to their new dignity?


No, they too scorned the Prophet. Indeed, I can still hear the civil war of the women. If the fifth wife went away who would pick her up, who would take her in, who embrace her, who husband her, who feed her?


In the desert it was customary to have many wives, not just because men are rapacious, but also because men are generous. So the limitation of the wives was a bewilderment that at first seemed an unkindness, even a cruelty, to women.


Muhammad did not stop there- how could he, with an angel upon his heart?


He insisted that women, although different, were equal to men.


The difference is easy, men are clustered and women are cleft, but to see the equality in sex, you had to shade your eyes.


He told them that women are complimentary to men; each is the guardian of the other. Both must submit to the same last judgement and both will inherit the same fate.


The world that now loves Muhammad hated him then for these simple ideas. One age mocks what the nest adores, and fruit is bitter before it can be sweet. Yet give an old dog on the right road the right to bark.


I sometimes wonder if even God knows which of us, my wife or I, He made equal. She blew out the candle on me last night when I was in the middle of a book by Herodotus. If I didn’t love my wife more than my Herodotus, I’d have hot her on the head- but maybe she was saving me from reading the heathens.


But, as I’ve said, the laughing had now stopped.