Bilal

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal
tells of persecution and the flight to Abyssinia</b>


Old as I am, near death as I must be, I still outrage at cruelty. I damn cruelty. I who have known cruelty have, more than most, the knowledge to pray against it. Surely Heaven listens to a man who knows what his prayers mean.


I pray that the torturer be compelled to see himself in the body he abuses. Grant him this one sight only because he deserves no other.


I pray that the hangman be not denied his own neck or the judge his own justice.


Let those who stand waiting before judges be the judge of them.


Let no judge sanctify law unto himself and make it his calf, for earthly law, like heavenly law, in is the dominion of God and he who abuses it with cruelty abuses God’s mercy. Let torturers be exceptional and answer twice for their sins. I pray they be struck for their sins, even as they commit them.


This is the prayer of Bilal
, who is black, born a slave and who damns cruelty. But I moralize. I promised you history and you shall have it like meat turning over on a spit.


Suddenly they were down on us with cruelty and murder. Not a day passed without some act of injustice against the soul of man, until Heaven itself wept in the Prophet’s eyes- or so we felt, as we watched his grief.


But he would not, could not, step out of his path. It sees to be God’s will that the footsteps of prophecy be set painfully in solid rock, yet those who come after seem light and happy with great and good news.


The first martyr to suffer death for Islam was a woman. She was awarded Paradise when Abu Jahl, in a fury of paganism drove his spear into her side. Her name was Sumaya and she was the mother of Ammar.


Her crime? She refused to pray to Hubal.


Others were staked out and flogged to death or to its door. A few gave in and foreswore Islam, it is true, but, I, who knew the lash, forgive the flesh.


Perhaps God did not wish them to suffer more than they could bear and allowed them to deny Him. God is ever merciful. God never puts on a man more than he can bear.


Muhammad had to act. They were taking us one by one. He decided that the weakest, those who had no family protection, should run from the country; the others, whom they dared not harm without risking family feuds or even tribal encounters, could stay for the time being. I, who was now protected by Abu Bakr, was chosen to stay.


One night Jaafar, Ali’s older brother, with ten men and three women slipped off into the desert. Their destination was Abyssinia, my never-known country across the sea, then ruled by a Christian king famous for his quality of justice.


They dared not take the usual tracks and had to push through the hardest part of the desert, without wells or people. It is said of these first refugees that their only shade was the wings of the vultures wheeling over their heads, waiting for them to die.


But there are more eyes in a small town than a big city and the flight was soon discovered.


Abu Sufyan sent out a party of horsemen to bring them back or, depending on the going, to finish them off in the desert.


The horsemen found their footprints and even rode beside them for a mile. But God did not permit them to see or their horses to smell. Jaafar passed unharmed through hoofs and swords, and if you want to believe a miracle, you can. I rather believe that Jaafar knew how to use the desert, its blinding glare and long black shadows of the dunes.


If they were miracles, they were his, for he was a man who could hide himself in his own shadow. But, without doubt, God gave Jaafar his wits.


When we saw Abu Sufyan’s horsemen come dragging back to Mecca with nothing to show for their search but their sore eyes, we put our policy into escape. We began sending away others, until eighty-three of us, men and women, had crossed the Red Sea to Abyssinia.


But even in Abyssinia our people were not safe.


At home Abu Sufyan’s voice became softer, lower and even more dangerous. I’m told that at this time you had to lean forward to hear him. If you sat back his words dropped down in front of you and you heard nothing. But if you leaned an inch forward, you heard everything, clearly, exactly and in fine sentence.


You see, his dignity was in question. Mecca could not allow eighty-three dissidents to run loose in a neighbouring country- it was bad for trade. If they failed to get them in the desert or on the sea, then they would go to where they were hiding- behind the throne of the king, who called himself the Lion of Judah.


An embassy led by Amr ibn al- As was sent to the Lion of Judah, armed with presents, apologies and letters of friendship.


Amr, who had since conquered Egypt, was then a smooth boy with everything at his fingertips. But thank God he was too clever to succeed or else he would have put eighty-three souls into chains and his own soul into hell-fire. As I will tell you, God granted Amr the mercy of failure.


The king called the Muslims before him and asked them to show cause why they should not be returned to Mecca in chains. Poor Jaafar was like Daniel in the lions’ den. He stuttered, stammered, even stumbled, hardly able to put two words together or his two feet together.


Amr, for his part, shone with indignation, mounting his arguments on the very back of the scripture until it seemed that prophecy was the donkey he rode.


He accused Jaafar of sedition, of using the pretext of a false prophet to undermine the social order, of blasphemy, desertion, and finally and empathetically he proved all of Islam to be absurd.


Amr, was of course, as pagan as a piece of stone, but even then he knew a little about religion and a lot about mockery. In a few minutes he had the whole court of Abyssinia laughing and the chains for Jaafar clinking on the floor.


But God who made the cleverness of man, also gave him his stupidity and sometimes He mixed the two in the same head. So it was with Amr, who lost when he had won- or, as surely as I sit here in history, won when he had lost.


It happened this way, Jaafar spoke of Jesus Christ, as we Muslims know Christ, a prophet in the line of prophets who came before Muhammad, who is the seal of all the prophets and the last. Yet Christ was so loved by his people that they fell into the error of worshipping him.


Even in Abyssinia, Jesus was loved to such a depth that the mention of his name brought a tear to the eye of the Christian king. Amr saw the tear but mistook it for a glisten- surely blindness of the spirit is a condition so terrible that Christ himself needed a part of his own body, his spittle, to cure it.


Amr, at that moment, was blind. He flipped his cloak and stood with both legs astride- like a headsman upon his axe, Jaafar told me- then he delivered what he thought was the finish.


‘They lie about Christ,’ he said.


‘They say your Christ was merely another prophet and not the son of God. They say you worship three gods, one a father, one a son and one an invisible. They deny the divinity of your Christ and make him a dead man.’


How well versed this pagan was; how well he seemed to know every religion; how subtly he put the Muslim understanding of Christ into a contradiction with the Christian understanding of their Lord.


The king turned at Jaafar.


‘Tell me about the mundane birth of our Lord.’


He swept the word ‘mundane’ off with the back of his hand and motioned to the jailers to come forward. But Jaafar stepped through the jailers.


‘I will tell you what the Holy Qur’an says about the birth of Christ, which is all I know.’


It was at best a despairing shout, but it lifted the head of the king. Jaafar then found his voice. He had to. His only hope was to speak out, speak at the chains, speak at the frown of the king, speak at the four lions that growled in heavy stone about the throne.


Some may say, though I apologise for the use of the name, he spoke as well as Bilal- Amr ibn al- As himself said it to me ten years later. But Bilal is only a trumpet, the orator of the time of prayer, who has the advantage of speaking from a height; Amr can still catch flies in his own honey.


Jaafar that day knew how to speak persuasively, like a man who has no choice. He recited to their astonished faces the verses in the Sura of Mary, Sura 19, that tell of the birth of Jesus Christ from the womb of a virgin. He placed the lines properly in their understanding, so that they knew that it was God Himself who was speaking, not ‘God the Father.’ But God.


<b>Relate in the Book</b>


The story of Mary.


How she withdrew


From her family


To a quite place.


Then We sent to her


Our Angel, who appeared


In the shape of a man,


Fully grown.


When Mary saw the man


She cried out for help,


Imploring him not to molest her


If he feared God.


But Our Angel replied:


‘I come from your God


To announce to you


The birth of a holy son.’


‘How shall I have no son.’ She said,


‘When no man has touched me,


And I am still a virgin?’


‘To your God all is easy,’


Our Angel said.


‘And He will appoint your son


As a sign to men


And a mercy sent from God.


It is a matter determined.’


Thereupon she conceived her son


And retired to a remote place.


In the pains of childbirth


She lay down under a palm tree


And cried out:


‘Oh that I had died before now


And passed into oblivion and become


A thing forgot.’


But the voice of the Babe from below


Spoke to her.


‘Do not despair. You Lord


Has caused a brook to run


At your feet.


And if you but touch the tree


It will let fall


Ripe dates into your lap.


So eat, drink and


Rejoice.’


The whole court was moved to tears and murmurs and the Lion of Judah left his throne to embrace Jaafar. Instead of chains he now had the arms of a king about him.


‘Not for a mountain of gold will I give you up to them,’ he said and drew a line on the floor with his staff to show how narrow was the difference between our Qur’an and his Gospels.


Amr stood by shuffling his feet. Then, Amr, being Amr, nodded to the king with a smile as if everything was just a gamble and a dice he threw had rolled wrongly.


That was Abyssinia, the land of lions and honey- and justice. But in Mecca, a city of caravans and rates of exchange, it was silk, spice and perfumes, not justice, that was weighed in scales. The Word was still unseen; their ears heard it but their hearts remained blind.


A new persecution, more cold-blooded than the whippings, now fell upon Islam. It was nothing less than the punishment of a people. The entire Bani Hashim, the family tribe of the Prophet, was put under ban.


No one could treat them, give them shelter or hospitality, a pinch of salt or a stir of sugar, not even shade could be given to them.


They were declared outcast and exiled to the desert, carrying only what their backs could support. Whether they believed in Muhammad’s message or not, whether they listened to him or not, liked or disliked him, they were all persecuted equally with him.


It was enough to be a member of his family, even the cousin of a cousin, to find oneself driven out into the open desert like a man with a disease. It was a solution worthy of its author, Abu Sufyan- send Islam out to die of itself, of its own madness, in the sun.


For three years we suffered the hunger and thirst of the desert, lying in makeshift shelters behind hedges of thorn. Children died by day in the heat and the old died by night in the cold. Everywhere we walked we had to step over misery.


We looked to the sky but no manna fell to us as it had come to Moses. Still, we endured and came to realise that if cruelty does not break a man’s back, it will strengthen his spine. Perhaps this was a gift more than manna.