Bilal

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal is bought again</b>


I heard voices in argument, Umaya’s voice and a milder voice I did not know. I tried to open my eyes but the sun, now at its height, blinded me.


They were talking about money, which was not unusual. In Mecca money was an addiction, as if men’s bowels moved by money and time was told in dirham.


I had no interest. I longed to sleep again, never to wake in slavery; never to be under their faces; never to be within the distance of their call. For I knew now what I had never known.


Even in the worst death that a man can devise for his fellow man, God is kind. In the taking of souls God’s hand is ever kind.


I heard a third voice. Abu Sufyan, authority itself was speaking:


‘It is against social order to buy or sell a slave during his correction.’


I tried to collect my wits. Umaya was answering back:


<b>‘The slave is dead already! If Abu Bakr wants to buy a carcass for a hundred dirhams that is my windfall.’</b>


A new name had been spoken: Abu Bakr? Why was he here? Even against the sun I opened my eyes. There was a gasp and a stop in their talk. A moment passed. Then a voice I did not know came closer and called my name to me across the burning distance between us.


Umaya was beside himself.


‘The slave kicked. I saw him kick.’ Then he whispered into my head: ‘Breathe, you black animal.’


It was a turnabout, to say the least. The man who had been knocking the breath out of me for several hours was now exhorting me to hold onto my last gasp. Surely, life has more comedy than it has laughter.


More voices. Umaya again.


‘He’s kicked his price up, Abu Bakr. He is worth two; give me two hundred and take him.’


They lifted the rocks from me and untied me. Bilal was sold again. Yes. And Bilal was bought again- but only for a minute. A young man helped me up. I had difficulty seeing him the first time. Then I knew who he was. He was Saeed, the adopted son of Muhammad. I said nothing. I had no need, for he had said it all:


‘You are freed from slavery, Bilal.’


Umaya was counting and chuckling.


‘You paid two hundred dirham for him but let me tell you I’d have sold him for one hundred.’


There was laughter. Then I saw Abu Bakr, a man like a lamp.


‘You have cheated yourself Umaya,’ he said. ‘Had you asked a thousand dirham for him I would have paid it.’


Surely my price had shot up! Abu Bakr took me by one arm, Saeed by the other and together they half dragged, half walked me away. I was not much help to them for my legs would not hold me.


For five days I lay in a darkened room in Abu Bakr’s house, drifting in and out of consciousness. Vague whispering shapes hovered over me with oils, ointments and cooling cloths.


Once, when I woke, I saw a man praying in a corner of the room, but then I slept again. On the sicth morning I was able to get up and take my first steps out into the air. Abu Bakr was so pleased he brought in a goat and milked it for me.


Then he told me:


<b>‘The Messenger of God himself prayed beside you for three days until the fever dropped. Only when you were safe would he leave you. I never saw a man so happy. “Bilal is received into Islam,” he said. Tomorrow you and I will go to the Prophet together.’</b>



They say I was the third man to believe in Islam. But it is too great a place they give me. I was only the ninth. I take pride in the fact that I was the lowest of the first Companions, for surely I was found under a stone.

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal meets Muhammad </b>


His forehead was noble, prominent, and he bespoke a generous mind. His smile put joy into you. His eyes, black with a touch of brown, were well opened. His hand, on greeting, was strong. His step was as light as if he were treading on water. When he turned to look at you, he turned with his whole body.


He was Muhammad, the Messenger of God.


When I first came to him, he was sitting on a simple straw mat with Ali, his nephew. He looked at me and his eyes filled with tears.


Ali, who was only a boy then, took his hand.


‘Why are you crying Uncle?’ he asked. ‘Is he a bad man?’


‘No, no,’ replied Muhammad, <b>‘this man has pleased Heaven.’</b>


Then he got up quickly and embraced me.


‘It will always be told of you Bilal, that you were the first to suffer persecution for Islam.’


Not since my father and mother died, had I felt the tears of another’s love on my face.


I felt like one who had been lifted up safely from the bottom of a pit. Yet I cannot recall the moment the way you might expect, as one of happiness. How could it have been? Muhammad had wept for me, and I had brought sorrow to the purest of hearts.


Nor do I understand how my Christian friends can find solace in the tears of Christ, when Christ wept for them. I have my experiences and can tell them. It is no honour to be the cause of grief in a prophet. All men say because of these tears I am a richer man. It is not true.


Muhammad took my arm and brought me to sit beside him for the first time. I must have hesitated. You will understand that I had never before sat in the presence of a member of the tribe of Quraish. My station was to stand. I know I hesitated, because Muhammad made a small joke to help me: Ali, he said, would not show us his tricks while we were standing.


So I sat by him for the first time and began there my companionship. For twenty-two years, until the night he died, I sat with him, stood with him, walked and rode by his side with him. In Medina it was always I who woke him in the morning on my way to make the first call to prayer.


I would knock lightly on his door and say: <b>‘To prayer O Apostle of God.’</b>


Yes, I was one of the Companions of the Prophet, which is a title above princes. That day, I, Bilal, sat down to rise up.


Forgive my smiling, for my little joke is apt.


When Ali did his ‘tricks’ happiness filled the house. He bounced and bounded, juggled and somersaulted backwards into Muhammad’s arms. It was indeed a sight to see a prophet catch a flying child. Muhammad always attracted children as if he had some music within himself that only they could hear. He spoke the language of every age and would joke with children using jokes the same size as their own.


One day he came to prayer in the mosque with a little girl on his shoulders, perched like an angel high over everyone, irreverently pulling at his hair. He set her down only when he prayed and then picked her up again. Her name was Umamah.


But again I digress. I must keep to the banks of my story. My mind overflows when I think of the prophet of God. I am living out my old age in beauty, remembering what he said and what he did. And you must permit an old man some disorder in his story.


Soon the whole household was in. Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, and their four daughters, Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Fatima and Umm Kulthum, sat in a small group of their own. They all looked very kindly at me and Fatima began to ask me about the mountains and trees of Abysinnia, of which, of course, I had no knowledge.


Umm Kulthum brought round a basket of dates and the Prophet chose the softest and sweetest dates for me, trying them with his fingertips as if it would be a great disgrace should I get less than the best. For himself, he took the first that his hand found. Then Khadija poured us goat’s milk, still warm from the udder.


Though fifteen years older than her husband, Khadija was still a tall, handsome woman who walked with a fine carriage. They were married twenty-five years and, until she died in his fiftieth yeah, he took no other wife, nor did he cast an eye. Yet every heart as some sorrow that cannot easily be put off. The sorrow between Khadija and Muhammad was the death of their two male children in infancy.


Evening was settling and long shadows fell across the floor. The air stirred and Mecca, which had held its breath since noon, began again to breathe. On such days you can almost hear the air as everyone gasps for it at the same time. Muhammad rose.


‘Let us go out into the cool of the courtyard.’


I tried to follow him, when suddenly the shock and crippling of the torture overtook me again and I fell back in a spasm. Abu Bakr who was nearest, held me in his arms, while Khadija called to her daughters to bring blankets and warm oils. But Muhammad had other treatment.


‘Try to stand. Let the blood run,’ he said and reached down his hands. I didn’t think I could straighten my legs, much less put weight on them. But I took his hands, he lifted me, and I rose lightly. I left all my pain behind me on the ground.


You must not suppose that this was a miracle. Because it was not. Muhammad performed no miracles. He did not cure the sick or miraculously ease the hurt of the beaten slave or raise any dead; he did not walk on water or cause iron to swim, as Elisha did. When the pagans mocked him he passed them by and never once called up she-bears out of the ground, as Elijah did to tear apart the forty-two mocking children at Bethel. That evening, when he lifted me up and my pain went from me and the touch of his hand, he performed no miracle. I laugh at the word because I knew the man. He gave me strength to overcome my pain. No more. For Muhammad could find the strength in every man and show it to him, as he found pity in every man and showed it to him.


Muhammad lived within the human capacity and died the human death. Yet God gave him a gift greater than he gave to any of His Prophets, He revealed to him the Word. The Qur’an is a miracle for all.


As he walked out he said in a low voice, ‘Bilal, in what ways do you know God?’


‘I know Him in my heart,’ I said. But the answer did not satisfy me. We went a few more steps and I tried again.


‘I know Him but do not know Him,’ I said. ‘Can you by searching find out God?’


Muhammad continued a moment in silence. He seemed not to have heard my question. He stopped and then, in that wonderful motion of intimacy and concern, he turned his whole body to me.


‘Yes Bilal, by searching. By praying to Him, by praising Him and by doing good to your fellow man. But remember always it is not you who find God; it is God who finds you.’


A great serenity filled his face and his voice strengthened with assurance.


<b>‘I am the Messenger of God,’ he said. ‘and I know that the way to God is Islam.’</b>


This was the second time that memorable day I had heard the word Islam without knowing the meaning of it, although each time the word meant more. He saw my ignorance and put his hands on my shoulder:


‘Islam is the surrender to the will of God, who is one God without partners. Islam is doing right to all men, of every race, degree and colour. All men are equal in Islam, Islam is the religion chosen by God for man.’


Muhammad dropped his hand and turned away shyly, as if he had said too much to me too soon. ‘It is all from God,’ he murmured, more to himself than to me. ‘Now I must go pray.’


So ended my first meeting with Muhammad, the Messenger of God and so began my Islam.

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal
and Abu Bakr</b>


My circumstances had surely changed. I lived in a house without slave quarters or frightened faces. Abu Bakr was more servant than master to any who came under his roof.


His first work of the morning was to milk goats- no, I do him wrong. His first work of the morning was his prayer and after that he milked the three goats. Of all the Companions of the Prophet, men educated to kindness, Abu Bakr was the gentlest and most kind. Yet, later when the day called for bravery, Abu Bakr was always first with the brave.


Whatever humble task had to be done about the house he would do. Even history did not change him.


When he was Caliph, the successor of the Prophet, and the ruler of half the world, when he armies were overthrowing empires, you would find him…where? Sitting in his doorway mending his shoes.


At least that is where I found him the day I brought him the news of our great victory at the Battle of Babylon in the spring of 634. but that morning of my Islam there were not two handfuls of us and the great empire of the Persians was still sitting safely on its throne of a thousand years. I must not jump my story or overthrow Persia yet.


I met Abu Bakr coming in from the goats and thanked him again for buying me. But instead he began to thank me as if I had done a favour even to the money he had spent.


<b>‘Muhammad teaches us that the freeing of a slave pleases God,’ he said.</b>



He said it with embarrassment and a slight stammer- for I was the slave he had freed and he was too honest to hide from me the self-interest of his soul. But that is the crisis of charity in every religion.


<b>‘Ah, Bilal, Bilal,’ he said, ‘you have new work to do. Will you slave more than you ever slaved?’</b>


What could I say? ‘Yes, master,’ I said.


My reply hurt him and I knew I had stepped backwards into my own darkness and out of his sight. I had reverted to slavery and given him the ‘Yes, Master’ of a slave’s reply. To make it worse I hung my head.


He put down the bucket of milk and took me by the ears- yes, by the ears- and bumped his forehead against mine.


<i><b>‘Listen to me, Bilal. You are a free man, without masters. But you must learn to be free.’</b></i>


‘Yes…yes…yes,’ I said, in time with the bumping.


Suddenly he laughed and let go of my ears.


<b>‘What can I teach you? Not to be startled when you are spoken to…to look men in the face…to know that your own shadow is indeed your own? Yes, these are important…’</b>


he broke off. A pregnant cat was circling the milk and I had to wait until she was given her share. I was, I suppose, put out. I’d have kicked the cat away. But I had much to learn.


I remember when we were marching onto Mecca, ten thousand strong, Muhammad led the whole army a hundred yards off the road to avoid disturbing a dog in labour with a litter of pups. Muhammad, the last of the Prophets, was the first to teach mankind kindness to animals. You may go to Hell for cruelty to a cat, he said, and there will be a reward for anyone who gives water to a being that has a tender heart.


But I was new to such considerations. The cat was being fed and I was not. How could an emancipated slave be expected to enjoy second place to a cat? At last, the great, good, gentle man aquatting beside the cat continued the conversation from mid-sentence.


‘…but more important, Bilal, is a future. Slaves have no future…they are not permitted…’


He drifted back to watch the cat lapping at the milk as if cats might have something very important to tell him about the future. I was yet to learn that every stir of life, being a creation of God, was beautiful to Abu Bakr. Those who love God find schools in a creature and in a flower.


‘If I cut you a pen, will you learn to write?’


The question was too casual, almost too unasked, for me to hear it well. Yet this was the moment I passed out of slavery. It was what Abu Bakr gave to me, not what he gave for me, that set me free.


I learned to write. I made ink from the leaf of the indigo, soaking it from sunset to sunrise, pounding it, then drying it in the shade. I wrote on skins, on bark, on the dried shoulder bones of sheep, in mud, in ashes, on stones- whatever would take characters. I would write with my fingers in the air, so I could write.


Every day Abu Bakr cut me a new pen from the thorns of the cactus that grew around the paddock. So his day now had a new beginning- his prayer, my pen, the goats.


He would stand at my shoulder watching and helping my progress. He brought me the poems of Antara and word by word, then line by line, I learned to read them aloud.


Antara was the hero of the desert; he did his high deeds, fought alone against companies, performed his chivalries and sang songs all for the love of the Lady Abla. No man in the time of Antara could match either his sword or his rhymes. My wonder increased with every line for, you see, Antara was like myself, the son of an Abyssinian slave woman.


Then one day Abu Bakr came home in great excitement. I was making ink and the sight of this ordinary work increased his happiness; he took my ink- stained hands and pressed them to his lips.


‘Do you know what the Prophet said, what he said today…?’


He took me to a bench and told me to sit down. His news needed this small ceremony. It did indeed!


<b>‘” The ink of a scholar is even more precious than the blood of a martyr.” These were the Prophet’s words.’</b>



I went back to the basin and plunged my hands into the ink and the soaking leaves of indigo. For a long time I stared down at my hands, black dipped in black.

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal tells about the early life of Muhammad</b>


It is now time to tell you about the early life of Muhammad, the Apostle of God, up to the time he married Khadija.


Even in His Apostle’s birth, God tried him, choosing that he be born poor and an orphan. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, never held his great son. He died when Muhammad was still in the womb, leaving him a legacy of only five lean camels and a few sheep.


Muhammad was born- as tradition and the need to name a day has established- on 20 August, in the year 570 of the Christian era. No one knows for sure. But then was not Christ born, as it were, before himself, before his own calendar, in 4 B.C?


They say there was a festival in Heaven the night Muhammad was born and men heard the angels singing and saw torches in the sky.


They say the Eternal Flame which had burned in Persia for a thousand years went out.


They say that a dove with a jewelled beak flew down from Heaven and stroked its wings on the belly of Amina, the Prophet’s mother, so that the pains of childbirth left her.


They say this, and they say that.


They say a star led three kings to the crib of the infant Christ. They say there was a forth, a queen called Befana, who lost the star in the cloud and came late. But who can tell?


They say that two angels dressed in gleaming white took the heart out of Muhammad’s side when he was a child of four, washed it clean of Adam’s sin, and put it back, without pain. The miracle, they say, was seen by another child who was playing with the Prophet.


All this and more was said because sometimes people want more than they need. But we already have all that we need, the Holy Qur’an, which is a sure guide.


When he was 6, Muhammad’s mother died and he was left twice an orphan. His uncle Abu Talib took him in, loving him as his own, so the boy was never at a loss for a home. Abu Talib even brought him up to Syria with the caravan, schooling him in te occupations of Mecca, trade and transportation. Those merchants of Mecca counted well, but they couldn’t read or write. Muhammad was never taught.


God chose to reveal His Word to an illiterate man, as if He needed a man, who had neither guile nor sin in the written word, an untempted man, who could not fall into the traps of a little knowledge.


Surely I, Bilal, who have drunk ink know how badly, sometimes ink combines with midnight oil. Did Christ read and write? I’ve never known. Even when he wrote with his finger on the ground, it may have been a trick to distract attention- certainly Christ did not leave one written word.


Still stories of the signs and miracles attend Muhammad’s childhood.


On the journey to Syria, it is said that a cloud followed the caravan giving it shade. It is said that a Christian monk examined the boy and saw the seal of prophecy, a mark the size of a large coin, between his shoulder blades. Again, I can only tell you what I have heard, though, I confess that I’ve heard more of these miracles in the ten years since the Prophet died that I did in all the twenty-two years I was with him in his life.


Perhaps these miracles did happen. But as the Qur’an tells us, it is those without knowledge who have the biggest stomach for miracles. If I live long enough I may find some pattern in miracles- perhaps what is a miracle to one is only a parable to another.


Muhammad himself told me that he had been a shepherd and had led out the sheep in the morning, foraging for the black fruit of the arak thorn on the mountains of Mecca.


‘All the prophet’s,’ he said, ‘have been shepherd of sheep.’


Certainly, it is those who were alone in their occupation who became witnesses to the throngs of men; whether in Jerusalem or Damascus.


I’ve often wondered why the sixteen miracles of Moses did not immediately change the world, being witnessed by thousands. But God knows best, perhaps when he gave them the Qur’an, He departed from miracles, having no more need of them.


When he was fourteen, Muhammad was called away from his sheep to become a soldier. He was present at the Battle of the Breach, a vicious one-day war, remembered for the grief of the poetry it inspired.


He was too young for a sword. His duty was to run out and scoop up the spent arrows lying on the ground, then to run back with an armful to his uncle. When he had re-loaded his uncle’s quiver, he would run out again, ducking between the legs of camels, horses and fighting men in search of the terrible sticks.


He never liked to remember that day, saying he wished it have never dawned. The cause of the war, a tribal dance in blood, was the slaying of a sleeping man by a drunken man. It was called the Wicked War.


If we could remove Muhammad’s childhood from its sign’s and wonders, its following clouds and falling stars- which I am not sure we should- we might find it uneventful. In time and place, it might even be called ordinary. He began to trade in a small way, as his father had done, before him, although I’ve never known what goods he sold- fruit or fowl, salt or pepper, scent or silk? Yet, as always, even in his ordinary occupation, Muhammad was not an ordinary man.


In a town of merchants, dealers, money-changers, short-changers and other jugglers, he was known as a man who would sell nothing on its shine. He turned the whole apple over in a buyer’s hand. He could never, as the saying goes, wash a goat by moonlight.


The reputation for fair-trading was so much the talk of the town that other merchants, three times his age, would call on him to settle their disputes. Some of his judgements would do credit to Solomon.


Take that time when they were repairing the wall of the Kaa’ba and the day came to restore the jewel of the house, the Stone given by Gabriel to Abraham at the beginning of religion. You would think they would have lifted it up to its niche in triumph and with joy to everyone. But that was not to be. Four factions, each wanting the honour for itself alone, stood over the Holy Stone. Blood was rising. The young men were running home for their swords. No faction would give way and no one dared touch the stone without losing his hand to one of the other three.


It was then they turned to Muhammad. His solution was simple. He swept off his cloak and laid it on the ground. He put the Black Stone in the middle of the cloak and told a man of each faction to take a corner. Together all four lifted the cloak and carried the Stone to its place in the corner of the wall. With his own hand Muhammad set the Stone.

[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.

[NaSra]

<b> Bilal
tells of Muhammad’s call </b>


What I relate now, I have by authority. I was told it by Abu Bakr, who heard it from Saeed, who heard it from Ali, who knew it from Khadija, who received it from the lips of Muhammad, who experienced it.


Moreover it is confirmed, in the second part, by God in eighteen verses of the Surah of Najm (meaning the Star). Therefore, it is a fact irrefutable and an evidence of religion.


Muhammad was alone in a cave on Mount Hira when the Angel Gabriel came to him,


<b>Gabriel said:</b> ‘Read.’


<b>Muhammad replied:</b> ‘I cannot read.’


<b>Gabriel commanded again:</b>‘Read in the name of thy Lord,


Who created man from a sensitive drop of blood,


Who teaches man what he knows not,


Read.’


<b>Still Muhammad replied:</b> ‘I cannot read.’


Then Gabriel wrestled with him, pressed him down and smothered him until he thought he would die. But in his last extremity Gabriel released him and left the cave.


Muhammad knew that a message God to man was written within him. But he did not yet know what.


He could not bear the load. He wanted to kill himself. He went scrambling up towards a steep place on the mountain from where he might jump off into oblivion. But halfway up Gabriel again appeared to him.


Now he saw Gabriel clearly in the figure of a man standing on the horizon with crossed legs. Wherever he looked, wherever he turned his head, to north, south, east or west, at every turn he saw Gabriel.


<b>Again, he heard the voice of the Angel:</b>


‘Muhammad you are the Messenger of God and I am Gabriel.’


He ran home and hid, shivering under blankets. Was it a vision from God or was he the fool and victim of a devil? Was his mind diseased? Had the moon struck him? Was he swept by a storm in his brain? He knew he was only a man.


He piled up more and more blankets. Then Khadija came running and he told her what had happened. He laid his head in her lap and told her everything.


Now there are those who still must deal in the marvellous and must colour each occasion. They say the Angel followed Muhammad home and stood where only he could see him. He pointed to the place but Khadija was not permitted to see.


Then Khadija sat Muhammad on her knees, undid her clothes and exposed herself, whereupon the Angel fled. She had proved that the Spirit was good- an evil spirit would have stayed to look, whereas a good spirit must retire in shame. But pleasing stories are not always the best truth. I leave them to the smoke of the campfire.


I edge towards what I know.


God had gifted Khadija with her own insight. She comforted her husband, subdued his fears, reasoned with his uncertainty. Above all, she comprehended the mystery, and while, he himself was writhing in humility and self-doubt, she believed.


She fortified him. She told him that if God was God, God would not deceive a truthful man. Throughout the night she held him to what the Angel had said. ‘Muhammad, you are a Messenger of God.’


They call this night Laylat Al- Qadr, the Night of Majesty. In this night God gave man his daylight. In this night God permitted Gabriel to bring down the Holy Spirit. In this night God endowed His Apostle, Muhammad, with his first knowledge. In this night, Khadija also believed and became mother of the Believers. In this night God sent His mercy to mankind.


No one knows for sure when this night is. In Ramadan, yes. Ramadan is the month of fasting, revelation and mystery. But Ramadan has thirty nights, beginning and ending with the thread of the new moon, and the Night of all Nights, the Night of Majesty, is hidden among the thirty.


Some say it is the 17th, others the 23rd, or the 25th, while others insist on the 27th. In the Qur’an it is revealed that this night is better than a thousand months- yet only God Himself knows when this night falls.


I have since climbed the mountain many times to the Prophet’s cave. The mouth is so low you must stoop to go in and inside you can only crouch. Yet this is the first room of the Message, the auditorium of Heaven.


Each time I go up, I feel my knees begin to fail me and I have to clutch something for fear of falling. But the same happens when I see great beauty- then too, I must hold myself up. Our best moments often disable us.


A man can see far from the top of a mountain, out over the heads of small concerns. From Hira you look beyond Mecca into the brown distance of the Hijaz, where tribes move, where caravans journey and shepherds have stood alone since time immemorial beside their flocks.


It is a world laid out in beauty and occupation, in harshness and adaptation. Yet it moves in silence, for no discord or human voice reaches you on the top of the mountain. Your ears are open to God.

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal witnesses revelation</b>


You might envy us, who had the first bright happiness of Islam. But I’d also like you to pity us. We trembled lest our minds were unfit for the knowledge; even Noah ran and hid himself from the approach of the Divine. We were limited uneducated men, none of us equipped to bring an order, much less apply -ologies or –isms to the great truths we knew so clearly in our hearts.


Today the young know everything- I even catch my son at angles and triangles; he holds facts by the camel-load in his small head- but all we held were the small, immense lamps of the early verses.


<b>Say that God is One</b>


The Eternal God


He begot none


Nor was He begot,


No one is equal to Him.


Many and many a time I saw Muhammad, the Messenger of God, in the very moment a revelation came down to him. Suddenly he would start to tremble and look around for some corner or hiding place. In the coldest nights I saw the sweat run on his face. I saw the pain strike him, his body shuddering, his hands gripping his sides in the spasms.


He might lie for an hour without hearing one word spoken to him- and why not? He who is called by angels is deaf to men.


He never knew when a revelation might come down. He might be in the middle of a conversation or going about the house, or riding on his camel. Then he dismounted quickly and covered himself with his cloak. Sometimes, at the beginning, he heard bells or passing wings or a sound like the clinking of chains. Often an angel appeared and spoke to him, but we who were only an arm’s length away neither saw nor heard.


God’s revelations to His Prophet were not in words as we use them to each other- surely God made our mouths as the very hollows of our heads!


The Message was pressed down on Muhammad’s heart, and only after the Prophet had got up and come back to us did God permit him to recall the inspiration in words. But not one syllable, not one noun or verb was out of its proper order. Then it was written down on skin or bark or shoulder-bone of sheep- whatever was at hand. All was as Gabriel gave it, unaltered.


When I saw his human distress, I have to admit that sometimes my awe of prophecy was overtaken by my love for the man. I wanted to go to him, but my feet stood still- for who can dare God? He told us once when he underwent in these exalted moments.


‘I never receive a revelation,’ he said, ‘without thinking that my soul has been torn away from me.’


Revelation followed revelation, until Heaven itself seemed busy, and we lived in joy. We were young. We stood at the beginning. Every dawn rushed to our heads. But we saw no dancing sun.


For the Qur’an is a miracle without words, a victory without processions, even a book without writers.

[NaSra]

<b>Bilal tells of the hatred of Mecca</b>


Why did they hate us?


They were not evil men; they were out of old traditions, even out of old decencies. They followed customs of hospitality and obeyed their own rules of honour and dishonour, obligations in the give and take of a desert existence.


The hardness of their hearts was mostly the result of their lives, as those who live on the backs of donkeys are most terrible at beating them.


They did not hate us and our One God because they loved their many gods. The love of the gods was never much in paganism. Gods were exploited and anointed at the same time. It was a system of exchange, a merchant’s deal with the devil.


‘I will worship you, Hubal, and do you honour and bring you a present and continue your existence by coming to you- if you will help me find my lost camel.’


But, I, Bilal, who once worshipped pagan gods must not be too light with them now or I risk ignorance. I must tell you plainly about the strength and weakness of the gods.


We talk of gods of wood and stone, but no pagan was ever stupid enough to worship stone which he could crack or wood that he could burn.


He conceived a spirit residing in the wood or stone and worshipped that spirit.


Yet, here also, was the weakness. The gods had a residence, like the Kaa’ba, and their divinity stopped short at the next idol, the next temple, the next tribe, the next city, the next god. The god that opened the door in Mecca could not even shut it in Medina.


So much for the power of gods.


But worse. The gods were both above and below their worshippers. Even the Romans, in their pagan days, knew how gods depended on man. Gods fall out of service by not being named; when they are not worshipped they cease to exist.


Julius Caesar had his gods and Augustus Caesar had his; gods came and went in a change of togas. Men made or unmade their gods simply by giving them more or giving them less, bowing to them or walking past them, which was a very bad power to entrust to man.


Only by a blind gift from God can man remake himself.


One reason why they hated us was their incomprehension of the power of the One God. I remember how they used to fret when Muhammad preached the resurrection of the body. Once Abu Lahab, who was so fat that he had to be helped up, brought the Prophet a piece of human bone and began to crumble it between his soft fingers.


‘You say this can resurrect? This can be made man again?’ he asked and blew the powdered bone in the Prophet’s face.


Muhammad brushed off the dust and looked at the heaving, angry merchant prince.


‘God who made man in the first place,’ he said, ‘can remake him again if He wishes.’


I always feared Abu Lahab and I feared him most then. The ground around him shook with the weight of his outrage. But maybe even the devil is modest. Abu Lahab could not conceive that at least one part of his vast presence in this world, if not his importance, might be continued in another.


Yet every pagan I have ever met has suffered from too proud a logic. Unable to submit to what he cannot see, he reasons that man is all and each man is the end of himself. His afterworld is his underworld, a grave without opening.


Even mighty Julius Caesar on the day of his triumph, standing at the altar, declared: ‘Death is the end of everything.’ It was a proud mastery of fate and a contempt equal only to the omniscience of suicide.


But while man can endanger his soul, corrupt it, deform it and blacken it, he cannot kill it. There is hope only for the suicide of the body, none for the soul. Each man must answer to his own indestructibility. Yet Abu Lahab thought he could disprove God by rubbing a bone between his fingers.


But to give him credit, Abu Lahab’s anger had an eye. He attempted to dispel a mystery by digging up evidence form a grave. His friends were less perceptive and our small, ragged band was a cause for their merriment and jokes and an excuse for more wine.


They mocked us, spat at us, pelted us with dung and hatred. We might wash off their spit, which was merely their slime, but the insult to the Prophet bled within us.


How could he, beloved by Heaven and regarded by angels, be the laughing stock of dying men? We saw only light denied. Yet he bore it all with patience and mildness. Surely patience is the equipment of a prophet, a breastplate given to him by God. I was not so equipped.


They got round me one day, Ikrima and half a dozen more, and pointed their fingers at me. No one said anything: no word, no sound, just a small smile on every face. I was frightened, I suppose. Yes, damn them, I stuttered. If I turned to my right, one of them jabbed his finger into my left side until I was spinning like a top. I couldn’t hold my water.


My urine ran down my leg. I was caught in their net of fingers and smiles. They knew how to point and measure out an ex-slave.


They went away laughing.


Looking back at them now, I know that they hated us for the most of human reasons. It is an unhappy law that wherever truth raises its head you will find men rushing to cut it off, as if some monster had come into their lives.


Truth is always first seen as an enemy and run at with hatred and derision.

[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.

[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.