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Muhammad and His Quran:

Blood and Lies at the Root of Islam

Mohammad Asghar

Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light

of the world, and the chief glory of man.

— Bertrand Russell

The Haunting

^{Because Muhammad’s favorite wife lost a necklace, Muslim women can rarely prove rape. Because Muhammad grew up poor, Muslims conquered a larger empire than Alexander the Great. Because the Prophet needed an excuse for a dalliance, Palestinians launched the second intifada.}

^{Muhammad haunts us, in ways that often defy comprehension.}

^{His Quran is the world’s most poorly understood book. Its commands seem universal and urgent, and one in five people on earth treats it as a guide to life. Yet the Prophet’s spur-of-the-moment needs led to key precepts, and they only make sense in the context of his career. This book shows how it is less a guide to life than a record of gambits in Muhammad’s stunning rise.}

For instance, no holy book rouses the bloodlust quite like the Quran.

Jesus never said, “The sword is the key of heaven and hell.” Confucius never said, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” Buddha never told his followers to behead the non-Muslims in war and slice off their fingertips. None of them ever asked their followers to collect booty and share it with Allah (God). Muhammad made all these statements and more.

In fact, no founder of a major world religion has ever resembled Muhammad. No other prophet grew rich stealing others’ property. No one else kept a harem. No one else assassinated poets. No one else was a child molester or mass murderer.

These facts tend to surprise Westerners, yet they are beyond debate and scholars and historians know them well. However, they have typically soft-focused them. For instance, regarding Muhammad’s massacre of 600-700 Jews, Karen Armstrong says, “In the early seventh century, an Arab chief would not be expected to show any mercy to traitors like [them].” But Muhammad was not just an Arab chief and it’s disingenuous to judge him by that standard. He claimed to be the voice of Allah and he preached a moral code, yet the slaughters he had carried out with Allah’s blessing have entered the Quran and Islam for his followers to emulate.

Why do so many scholars, historians and authors condone crimes by Muhammad that they would condemn in anyone else’s case? We believe it stems from a wish not to seem intolerant, and certainly religious bigotry has bedeviled humanity. But it’s no virtue to whitewash brutality.

The author was a Muslim himself. He knows most Muslims are as kind and loving as anyone else — his own family members are Muslims — and he does not have to prove it. As an insider, he believes he can treat Muhammad and the Quran honestly.

And they badly need such a treatment. Muslim extremists have seized the world spotlight by destroying the World Trade Center, threatening death to novelists and cartoonists, and, in Iran, seeking to build a nuclear bomb. Westerners advance numerous explanations for such violence, many are partly true. But they too rarely cite the Quran itself, the source fundamentalists rely on for their anti-human activities.

Westerners misunderstand the Quran because they hear such contradictory evidence about it. One day former President George W. Bush would call Islam a religion of peace and the next a jihadist would shout an inflammatory verse from the Quran as he died. Non-Muslims naturally wonder.

However, most Muslims don’t understand the Quran either. Many are illiterate. And those Muslim children who do attend Islamic seminaries and regular schools must read the book in Arabic, which only about 18 percent of Muslims know. The author grew up in Bangladesh, and along with his young friends he had to read the Quran in this foreign tongue. It might as well have been in Braille.

The nature of the Quran itself worsens the problem. It arose piecemeal, as a collection of Allah’s revelations to Muhammad.^ Muhammad didn’t even assemble it. His followers put it together after his death from scraps others jotted down during his lifetime, and there is no evidence he wanted posterity to see his ploys. In fact, when he had Allah said, “For each period is a Book (revealed),”¹ he implied it was meant for his time.² Clearly, the Quran is not a book for our time, nor was it intended to impart lessons on good morality, good living and the value of human life to its followers. Had Muhammad compiled it himself, thinking of universality and the world opinion, he might have omitted those passages that plague the Quran today.

Since the Quran replicates Muhammad addressing the faithful,¹ it speaks directly to the reader. It thus has a powerful sense of command to Muslims, largely devoid of environment, time and space.

The Quran is also non-chronological, a fact that further obscures its historical meaning. Compilers simply arranged its chapters by length, from longest to the shortest, as if any structure would suffice. So while the sayings of Jesus Christ appear in well-sketched stories, in context, those of Muhammad emerge from air. The book thus gains a further sense of universality.

The Quran hardly deserves it. In fact, many of its pivotal revelations from Allah arose directly to solve Muhammad’s personal crises.² Their convenience is breathtaking and, rather than universal, they are as limited as an alibi.

For instance, when others charged Muhammad’s favorite wife with sexual indiscretion, Allah spoke to him. The verdict? Muhammad was not a cuckold, Allah said, adding that Muslims needed four male witnesses to prove such an offense. This expedient became hardened in the Islamic law. It has not only made rape almost unprovable in lands with Sharia — how many rapes have four witnesses? — but subjected countless victims to lashing, imprisonment and stoning to death for alleged adultery.

The Quran really expounds two different philosophies, again because of its history. The verses delivered in Mecca, when Muhammad lacked power, are gentler and more conciliatory. This is Armstrong’s Quran. Those delivered in Medina, when he was raiding caravans and confiscating the wealth of Jews, are militaristic and even savage. This is the jihadists’ Quran. As a result, the Quran describes both a creed of peace and one of war. The theological cherry-picker has a choice.

Despite the inconsistencies, Muslims consider the Quran a constitution handed down to them from heaven. Its contents, they believe, were valid in the past and will remain so until the world ends. Therefore, Muslim theologians maintain that every Muslim man, woman, and child must read the Quran and follow it to his or her fullest capacity. It “has to be read,” one asserts, “not only with the tongue and voice and eyes, but with the best light that our intellect can supply, and even more, with the truest and purest light which our heart and conscience can give us.”¹

It is an excellent advice, yet most Muslims do just the opposite. They read the Quran with their eyes open, but their minds and hearts closed. They hardly realize what guidance, if any, the heavenly constitution provides to help them lead their lives in our modern time. Muhammad’s environment directly shaped the Quran; today’s environment rarely shapes its interpretation. Overall, Muslims fail to consider whether or not all the Quranic stipulations, in their present form, can be acceptable today to a rational mind.

The upshot is an array of problems. Many of the schisms and antagonisms among Muslims arise from varying interpretations of the Quran by innumerable Muslim theologians, belonging to myriad schools of thought, belief, and practice. All too often, the Quran and its explicators so mold Muslims that they fail to distinguish worldly matters from spiritual aspirations, making it difficult for unbiased people to communicate reasonably with them.

Muslim theologians use the Quran’s teachings to gain ardent followers for them. Yet they interpret identical verses very differently, without considering the impact of their conflicting opinions on the minds of the faithful. Hence, theological controversies and polemical arguments, inter- and intra-sectarian feuds, have long been an integral part of the Islamic world.

Nonetheless, dissent by common followers remains taboo. To squelch it, religious authorities threaten dissenters with the torments of Hell. Because the Quranic dictates and theological interpretations are sacrosanct in Islam, Muslims follow them absolutely, often unsettling the normal flow not only of their own lives, but of others’ as well.

Hence, Quranic exhortations and their interpretations can prove fatal to most Muslims. Some become zealots who, in their religious fervor, often transgress the norms of human behavior. They may even slaughter their fellow-religionists over mere disagreements on their own Islamic concepts.

The Quran is written in Arabic, one of the world’s most mellifluous, exhilarating, and expressive languages. Hardly any language seems capable of exercising over the minds of its users such irresistible influence as Arabic. The triumph of Islam was, and remains, to a certain extent the triumph of this language.¹

All Muslims, regardless of their native tongue, must use Arabic in prayers and the numerous Islamic rites. The power of this beautiful language, mesmerizing even to the rational minds of casual listeners, influences devout Muslims further when they recite it in rhythmic harmony. In religious ecstasy, these Muslims become oblivious of their own existence and actions, and thus Islam can harm even those who don’t participate in the Muslims’ fanatical deeds.

At the same time, the saner and less religious Muslims — who abhor the violent acts of their Islamic-minded brethren, purportedly to advance Islam — feel appalled when non-Muslim communities label them leftists, terrorists, rebels, insurgents, or fanatics. Some Muslims have helped foster perceptions against all, and as a result, peace-loving persons with the so-called Arabian names can become objects of ridicule and distrust to people unaccustomed to violence on the scale now afflicting the world.

The causes that spur Muslims to violence deserve a serious examination. Conventional wisdom holds that economic deprivation and lack of political freedom turn Muslims to terrorism. Though these causes might seem fully explanatory, in fact they are only two facets of a complex phenomenon intrinsically associated with the Muslim mentality, which is shaped by the Quran.

The time is long overdue for a detailed, objective study of the Quran and the teachings of Islam. Thus, we here examine the roots of Islam, its origin as a very specific tool in time and place, and its usefulness for Muhammad in the many crises he faced throughout his life. We present in the following pages our analysis of some of the beliefs and practices that Muslims the world over hold dear to their hearts.

For instance, why are most Muslims poor? The world’s first cities arose in southern Iraq, now Muslim, and presumably the world’s first markets also arose in the Muslim-dominated lands. At times in history, Muslims have developed well-deserved reputations as traders. Yet today, even though some Muslim countries abound in oil, the most traded natural commodity on earth, their people usually remain poor. Few Islamic countries have developed effective, competitive market economies for themselves.

The reasons for the Muslim poverty are complex, but the Quran has played a key role in its creation. For instance, Muslims treasure those Quranic exhortations, which require them to remain content with whatever Allah gave them in this world. They consider inviolable its commands not to strive for anything beyond their bare needs. They highly value Quranic teachings, which regard the world and all its contents as ephemeral. They believe that eternal life with the promised bliss in a world hereafter will compensate for all their sacrifices during their earthly sojourn. They obey the Quran when it asks them to shun this world and all the materialistic achievements, and to devote their time and energy to the service of Allah.¹ It has not clearly asked them to work hard to improve their lot. This outlook is precisely the opposite of the Protestant Ethic, which sociologist Max Weber famously said has helped spur the prosperity of the West.

Clearly, if Muslims want independence from their political and economic enslavement, they must loosen their bonds with the pre-capitalist Quran. They must rise up and adapt to the modern market economies before time runs out and they remain stranded where they find themselves today.

Illiteracy is another problem in the Muslim lands. In every developed economy, most people can read and write. But while some Muslims are literate, the vast majority of them are not. Their ignorance is a boon to the powerful and others who derive sustenance from their victims. For instance, politicians find it easy to exploit the illiterate masses for their personal gains. Similarly, religious leaders find the uneducated convenient targets, and extract their livelihoods from them by invoking their victims’ religious sentiments.

And hostility toward other creeds remains prominent in Islam. Although a fraction of Muslims adopt a logical and moderate attitude toward their religion, most are irrationally arrogant about what they claim to be its superior teachings. In their blindness, they even defend those inflammatory statements of the Quran that teach hatred toward Jews, Christians, and those who “believe not in Allah, Last Day nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Apostle.”¹ To many Muslims, the Prophet’s recollected sayings are as important as the contents of the Quran. One reads:

Abu Hurairah reported Allah’s Messenger (peace be on Him) as saying: “The last Hour would not come till the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them until the Jews hide themselves behind the stones and trees, and the stones and trees would speak up saying: ‘O Muslims! O slave of Allah. There is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.’ The Gharqad tree would speak, for it is the tree of the Jews.”²

This saying would have found favor with Hitler.

We will explore these issues more deeply later, clarifying the connection between Muhammad and the Muslims’ pocketbooks, reading ability, and tolerance. We will also address Muhammad’s pervasive influence in other important areas, such as the subjugation of women and the toleration of slavery and prostitution.

Interpreting the Quran

First, however, we must provide background on the Quran itself. To understand its full impact on the Muslim minds, one must read it very carefully. One must also know the conditions under which Allah purportedly conveyed His messages to Muhammad, since that context narrows their meaning and often shows that their raison d’etre was to solve problems in Muhammad’s hectic life. One must also understand its history, and its compilation 23 years after his death. One must examine a plethora of traditions, also known as Hadith, without which many Quranic stipulations are opaque. Finally, one must also refer to various exegeses known as Tafsir to understand its contents.

How much do we know about Muhammad himself? The answer is: A lot. In 1851, French academic Ernest Renan wrote that he lived “in the full light of history,”¹ and indeed whereas the historical Buddha and Confucius flicker in shadow and Jesus appears in brief sketches, Muhammad is visible in detail. He also enjoyed an earthly career as a ruler and general, and contemporaries paid far more attention to him than, say, to Jesus Christ. Hence we have copious material, and the biography of Muhammad, called the Sira, and his Sunnah (practices) along with the Quran and his sayings. His practices and sayings are collectively known as the Hadith.

However, this material has suffered sifting, through lapse of time and human expurgation. The first biography of Muhammad appeared 150 years after his death — as if the first biography of Lincoln appeared today — written by Muhammad Ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar (704-773). The original has more or less vanished, and today we possess a version edited by a man who died 60 years after Ibn Ishaq and who eliminated “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people.”¹ One wonders what matters “disgraceful to discuss” an editor might cut from the life of Buddha, say. But there were no doubt plenty with Muhammad, judging from the embarrassing material that remains. In any case, the version that has reached us exhibits both fawning reverence and apparent concern for truth, as shown by numerous qualifiers. It also contains tales almost impossible to believe and hence modern biographies by scholars such as Martin Lings and Maxime Rodinson have become indispensable.

How did the Quran arise? According to Islamic traditions, it is a document of fabulous purity. Indeed, based on a Quranic statement, Muslims believe that Allah wrote the contents of their holy book on a Tablet² and preserved it in Lauh-e-mahfooz,³ a sacred place in the seventh sky, so that He can keep His eyes on it. He revealed a portion of the holy book to Moses and Jesus Christ and then wanted their followers to “settle their dispute”⁴ according to what is written in the entire celestial book! The Tablet was eventually brought down in the time of Muhammad to the sky that is nearest to the earth. The exact location where the celestial Quran remains even today is called Baitul Izzat and it lies just above the Ka’aba in Mecca. Here, angels congregate, reciting from the Quran and praying to Allah on a regular basis. Because angels are believed to be free from all sins, why they pray to Allah regularly is a difficult question to answer.

Curiously, the Quranic verse from which Muslims draw the above inference does not describe where in the sky Allah might have preserved the Tablet. Curiously, too, in a modern world unanticipated by the Prophet, where planes have traversed almost every part of the earth’s atmosphere and satellites repeatedly photograph every square inch of ground, no one has ever found it. Thus, we must regard Baitul Izzat (or Baitul Mamoor, as it is also called) as a figment of the ardent Muslim theologians who, seeking to ensure Islam’s survival and prosperity, concocted ludicrous visions, even ones that defy their own common sense.

Historians, however, tell us a different story. According to them, the Quran is a collection of revelations that Muhammad issued to his followers throughout his life. One of his scribes, Zayd ibn Thabit, wrote them down, possibly improving them, and he used whatever material lay at hand, such as stone, bone, and even leaves. Another scribe was Abdullah b. Sa’d, who “used to write down the revelations; then he apostatized and returned to Quraysh, and fled to ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan whose foster-brother he was.”¹ The reasons for his apostasy and fleeing are not clear to us.

Leaves, of course, are highly fragile, so some content must have gotten lost. Bone is also biodegradable, and stone can get scuffed. The Prophet apparently never collected these scraps. That is why none of them can be found today. But after his death, the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, set about gathering them and assembling them into a book. Why? We’ll explain why more fully later, but let us say here that Islam was a critical foundation of his rule. Yet Muhammad’s career had inspired a throng of imitators in Arabia, such as al-Aswad in the Yemen, and by assuring Muhammad’s primacy, the Caliph wanted to secure his government. In addition, Muhammad’s teachings were a source of law for Muslims, and their compact presentation helped people understand the Prophet’s utterances. The effort culminated with the first Quran in 656, in the final year of the third Caliph, Othman.

Thus, 23 years and three Caliphs passed between Muhammad’s death and the advent of the first Quran. The implications are unavoidable. We have no idea which of the Prophet’s scattered revelations the compilers found or missed — and those from earlier Meccan period are notably shorter. We have no idea, if strong-willed rulers — especially Omar, the second Caliph — might themselves have dictated what in the Suras and phrases appeared and what didn’t. Certainly individuals who have mastered the exercise of power typically use it freely, in every sphere available. We have no idea if forgeries entered the Quran, and though it does tend to speak with a consistent authorial voice, good writers can imitate style. Overall, we don’t really know how complete or accurate the Quran is — a concern that led some scholars to conclude that the “text [of the Quran] was finally fixed by the two vizirs ibn-Muqlah and ibn-Isa in 933 with the help of the learned ibn-Mujahid. Ibn-Mujahid admitted seven readings, which had developed because of lack of vowel and diacritical marks, as canonical.”¹

The concern about accuracy becomes especially acute in light of later interpretations of the Quran. Tradition says that the need to explicate Quranic statements arose during the lifetime of Muhammad himself. People often asked him questions about the meaning of certain words, such as al-Furqan,² or about the bearing of statements on particular problems, or about details of certain historical or spiritual matters. Muhammad’s Companions, called As-hab, carefully stored his answers in their memories, together with the revelations from Allah. Though they were normal human beings, we are told, they could remember his countless sayings instantly and infallibly for years, after hearing them once or twice from the Prophet’s mouth.

Over 230 years after the death of Muhammad, people like Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari, Muslim ibn al-Hijjaj al-Quraishi, and others collected his practices and sayings and explanations from various sources and called them Hadith. The process was an invitation to fraud — much as if individuals could alter the U.S. Constitution by inventing memories of the words of Madison or Jefferson. Because so many Hadiths are inauthentic, commentators today often add the word Sahih or “sound” before each Hadith they quote in their commentaries (“sound” in the sense of solid, trustworthy). It is a ploy to make them seem believable to individuals who seek the truth behind Quranic statements, whose incredible nature the Hadiths often try to rationalize. As most Hadiths are spurious, learned but liberal Muslim theologians refuse to recognize them and instead urge their followers to rely only on the Quran. Therefore, the number of the “Quran only” Muslims is on the rise.

However, most obsessive theologians, preachers, and common Muslims are not so careful. They use inauthentic Hadiths to interpret the Quran according to their fancy, typically in a way that advances their personal interests. To them, consistency is unimportant. They will support even a fantastic Hadith when it suits their purpose, and belittle it when it goes against their interest!

To compound an already complicated situation, Muslims developed the “science” of Tafsir or Exegesis, supposedly “to examine the correct hadith originating from various authorities and to investigate the philological significance of the Quranic words.”¹ In the process, vast learning was supposedly collected about the root meanings, their usages by the Quraish tribe of Mecca (to which Muhammad belonged), and the meaning of words in the purest original Arabic, before foreign usages corrupted them. But despite an enormous expense of talent, labor, and money, the Tafsir is still in disarray and the Muslim doctors remain divided on fundamental issues as well as on sophistries that they invent in defense of doctrines that are supposedly divine. Hence, interpretation of the Quranic verses varies widely, and persons uninitiated in the Islamic methodologies fail to understand what coherent and practical messages Allah intended to convey to people in order to better their lives. (One wonders why Allah did not foresee this problem, and why He has not found another vehicle to clarify matters.) When the confused people express their dismay, Muslims label them enemies of Islam, worthy of hatred — even destruction, where possible — to safeguard Islam from their vile designs!

Although unanimity hardly exists among the Muslim interpreters, some go so far as to explain pre-historical matters relating to Adam and Eve. They feel no embarrassment in using their own imagination to explain such matters as the celestial mysteries to their ignorant audiences. To impress the credulous, they even invent grossly disgusting stories. They imbue these tales with such a deep religious hue that ignorant Muslims, always in extreme fear of flames in the next life, gladly accept them as divine and true. The explanations that follow these inventions are often dumbfounding — close to insanity — and can be repugnant to human taste and decency.

In fact, the interpreters’ efforts to explain the Quran run counter to the declaration of the Quran itself for, according to Allah, it is a complete, straight, and perspicuous Book.¹ Elsewhere in the book, Allah appears to retract this claim and adds that the Quran contains two kinds of verses or statements: Basic ones that form its foundation and the allegorical ones whose hidden meaning only Allah can understand and that “none will grasp its messages except men of understanding.”² But He has given us no clear guidelines for recognizing these “men of understanding,” whose grasp of the Quran must equal Allah’s, so the Islamic savants have tacitly implied for years about the obscure passages, but without resolution.

Some Muslim interpreters concur with Allah and tell us that the Quran does, indeed, contain some mystical words, such as Alif, Lam, Mim,¹ whose real meanings we humans can never comprehend. They also say that even Muhammad, the direct recipient of those words, had not grasped them, much less his disciples, who had the duty of following him without asking embarrassing questions. After the example of Muhammad’s disciples, Muslim theologians and interpreters ask their compliant fellow believers not to try to decipher the supposedly mystic words of the Quran, thus sparing themselves the punishments that they must otherwise face on the Day of Resurrection!

Nevertheless, our search into the origin of the so-called mysterious words reveals a different story. We are told that before the birth of Muhammad, the Quraish people of Mecca spoke a beautiful Arabic, even though they lacked formal education, since no institutions to teach them their language existed at the time. However, Arabs in the north of the Arabian Peninsula are believed to have the ability to read and write the language with great sophistication. Whether they had institutions to acquire the ability, or some of them acquired it through an exercise of their own, is not known. Well-versed in the tongue, they are, however, said to have composed lyrical and eloquent poems, which they recited in fairs held periodically in the neighborhoods of Mecca. People respected the best poets and women sought them as mates. Poetry was, and remains, an essential part of the Bedouin life.

Over time, poets began introducing meaningless words into their poems to make them more melodious and rhapsodical. They resembled the “hey, nonnie nonnie” of Shakespeare’s lyrics and the nonsense syllables in certain popular songs today. Listeners knew that these terms had no actual referents, yet they did not object as long as the additions soothed the ear.² Muhammad grew up hearing these compositions, and he, too, included such meaningless words in his speeches, aware that they would resonate with the listening sensibilities of his audience and help Allah establish a bond with His otherwise less-receptive subjects.

It is a misunderstanding that highlights, in miniature, the much larger problems with the Quran today. Nonetheless, this book remains the soul, heart, mind, and the body of Islam. It makes a Muslim a Muslim. No one can stay a Muslim without following all of its dictums. Therefore, everyone who wants to understand Islam and all that it stands for must know as much as possible about it.

***

We have briefly introduced the Quran. Let us now look into the life and deeds of Muhammad, the charismatic founder of the religion of Islam. It was he, who transformed the nomad people of his land into a formidable force, which not only spilled beyond the periphery of his own country in his lifetime, but thrives today in almost every nook of our present world.

Part I

The Outcast: Muhammad in Mecca

An Accidental Conception?

A long time ago, a tiny spot in the sandy soil of Arabia became the focal point of the Pagan nomads of the desert. Known to them as Bakka,¹ it had a well they called Zamzam, which supplied them with water throughout the year. Water was one of the rarest commodities in their lives and to find it so easily seemed a miracle. Believing that Allah had wrought the miracle, they built a House to Him nearby so that they could thank and worship Him for His favor. They named it Ka’aba, or the House of Allah.

Over time, the name of this little town evolved into Mecca and it acquired great importance for two reasons. First, it was the center of idol worship, and many nomadic tribes from all across the Peninsula regularly made pilgrimages to it, greatly enhancing the prestige and well-being of the Quraish, the city’s dominant tribe. Second, it had become an active center for commerce, and caravans — both seasonal and occasional — halted here for relaxation and replenishment of their water supply and then departed to distant lands on their trading missions.

Yet Mecca was still a tiny township with less than a few thousand people. It lay in an arid, inhospitable land unable to produce anything to support its inhabitants. Its pathways were dusty and it had no civic facility worth the name. Its denizens knew little about personal health or hygiene. Dwelling in tiny roofless homes built of clay, most lived in great poverty, and many had to wear the skins of goats and sheep. No schools of any kind existed here.

In contrast, Jews of Medina seem to have run their own schools, instructing their children primarily in religious matters. They were more enlightened and prosperous than the Meccan Pagans.

Because both the sedentary and Bedouin Arabs could hardly light a fire, either for cooking or illumination, they regularly ate dates, locusts, and lizards raw, and used camel’s milk as a substitute for water. However, the Quran says that Allah had provided them with a “green tree” from which they obtained fire to meet their needs.¹ At night, the Arabs stayed inside their tents and homes, fearing mischief from capricious Jinns, which they believed attacked humans in the darkness of solitary places.

The economic condition of the Bedouin Arabs was worse than their Meccan cousins. They normally lived in a condition of semi-starvation and to them the fighting mood was a chronic state of mind. Vendetta was one of the strongest religio-social institutions in their lives.²

Having little worthwhile to do either during day or night, most Arabs spent their time gossiping, drinking, gambling, or narrating the fables of the past.³ Their other main preoccupation was sex, both hetero- and homosexual, for they reputedly possessed a strong carnal passion.

The Arabs practiced pederasty, which they considered normal. Their womenfolk also seem to have led licentious lives, engaging in sex with any men they felt attracted to. Men apparently felt this behavior was normal for their women. It is said that in the evening when Abdullah, Muhammad’s father, would walk to the cabin of his wife, Amina, to sleep with her, the belles of the town would line up on the street and openly express their desire to sleep with him.

The city’s Quraish tribe consisted of three groups. One was the priestly class, which controlled the Ka’aba and lived on income it generated from pilgrims. The second group consisted of a small number of traders. The third was large, and comprised of people, who earned their livelihoods by supplying water and other services to pilgrims as well as to caravanners who halted in the city before taking off for their destinations. Such occupations did not, however, guarantee them a regular income; when the visitors to the city were plentiful, they thrived, but when their number declined, so did their revenue. Those people resembled the modern laborers, who get paid only when employed for performing a specific service.

Muhammad’s father Abdullah belonged to the third tier of the Quraish. Because he lacked a good, reliable income, his household repeatedly suffered deprivation. Often, he and Amina had to go to bed without food. Recurring poverty had its impact; the couple fought frequently, arguing about their financial condition and future prospects.

Recognizing that she and her husband lacked the means to feed another mouth, Amina did not want to have children. Her husband helped her avoid pregnancies, using the method the Arabs called ajal, or “coitus interruptus.” But this approach is hardly foolproof, and based on her subsequent behavior toward Muhammad, we believe that it failed once, with colossal consequences for history. Against her will, Amina found herself with a child.

Amina would have been upset. She may well have tried to end the pregnancy, without success. Thwarted, she resigned herself to her fate and decided to carry the child to term. Abdullah felt compassion for her discomfort and sought to help by providing her with the services of a slave-girl of Ethiopian origin, named Barakat.

But as misfortune would have it, Amina’s husband died, when she was about six months into her pregnancy. This tragedy increased her hatred of the child in her womb. She considered it a jinx and worried that many more mishaps would befall her after she delivered the baby.

At his death, Abdullah is believed to have owned five camels, a few sheep, and a female slave. We do not know how Amina supported herself after her husband’s untimely death.

In time Amina gave birth to a baby boy. She called him Kothan, but his grandfather renamed him Muhammad.¹ Contrary to the general belief of the modern Muslims, Muhammad is not a Muslim name. Rather, it is an Arabian name, which the Pagans gave to their male children before Muslims existed.²

We do not know the actual date of Muhammad’s birth and scholarly opinion varies. Philip K. Hitti says that he was born in or around 571 A.D.³ Abdullah Yusuf Ali maintains, “The year usually given for the Prophet’s birth is 570 A.D, though the date must be taken as only approximate, being the middle figure between 569 and 571, the extreme possible limits.”¹

On the other hand, some Muslims insist that Muhammad was born in the early hours of Monday, August 29, 570 A.D.² Each year they observe this occasion with great fanfare. Yet just as with Jesus Christ, the date and hour of Muhammad’s birth are completely unknown to scholars and the students of Islam. Hence, the celebrations held now to honor his birth have no evidentiary basis and are mere traditions.

Muslims claim that Muhammad was a descendent of Ismail who, the Bible implies, was an illegitimate son of Abraham, born of Hagar, an Egyptian handmaid of his wife Sarah.³ It was this son Ismail, most Muslims believe, whom Abraham attempted to sacrifice upon Allah’s command in a dream, and who, as a consequence, earned the heavenly title of “Zabi-Ullah,” that is, “the one to be sacrificed in the name of Allah” (rather than his legitimate son Isaac, as the Book of Genesis claims).

Was Muhammad truly the son of Abdullah? As noted above, the Arabs lived in a state of moral decadence at the time. Though marriage existed among them, they pursued extramarital sex at whim. On the subject of the Arabs’ fornication, Maxime Rodinson quotes Rabbi Wathan:

“Nowhere in the world was there such a propensity towards fornication as among the Arabs, just as nowhere was there any power like that of Persia, or wealth like that of Rome, or magic like that of Egypt. If the entire sexual license in the world were divided into ten parts, nine of these would be distributed among the Arabs and the tenth would be enough for all the other races.”¹

R.V.C. Bodley implicitly concurs, saying:

“There was Amr Ibn al as Aass, the son of a beautiful Meccan prostitute. All the better Meccans were her friends, so that anyone, from Abu Sofian down, might have been Amr’s father. As far as anyone could be sure, he might have called himself Amr Ibn Abu Lahab, or Ibn al Abbas or Ibn anyone else among the Koreishite [Quraishite] upper ten. According to Meccan standards of that time, it did not matter who had sired him.”²

Muhammad was born during this period and, if Bodley is correct, Meccan society did not care who had fathered him. All children, including Muhammad, born in these circumstances could reasonably face questions about their fathers’ true identities.

Mohammed Taha Mohammed Ahmed, editor of Al-Wifaq newspaper in the Sudan, openly questioned Muhammad’s paternity. According to him, Abdullah was not the Prophet’s father. Ahmed faced a death sentence for his claim.³

Despite becoming the mother of a son, whom her society greatly valued, Amina continued to despise the newborn boy, as she remained “very unhappy” at the death of her husband, and, consequently, was “not much good to him.”⁴ For instance, she refused to suckle him, even when she knew he was very hungry.

Seeing the child’s suffering and wishing to help him survive, Thuwaibah, a slave-girl of the child’s uncle Abu Lahab, assumed responsibility for breastfeeding him¹ until someone else might take him into her permanent care.

The Spring and the Rock

The Pagans were a deeply religious people. They were also polytheistic. They thought that a god existed to look after every aspect of their lives. Above all, they believed that there was a god who gave them life. The same god, whom they called Allah,² created the earth and the heavens, subjected the sun and the moon to his law, gave all creatures their sustenance, protected them from the hazards of the earth, and rained water from the sky.³ To the Pagans, this Allah was true and just, and He was the Most High and Most Great.⁴ But they also believed there were other gods who, apart from carrying out their varied duties, made them successful in their battles.

The Pagans worshipped lesser gods partly because, they believed, they had the power to intercede with Allah on their behalf. Notable among such gods were al-Lat, al-Manat and al-Uzza. The Pagans believed they were the daughters of Allah⁵ and, and as such, they had special sway with Him. However, al-Uzza (the most high, Venus, the morning star) was the most venerated idol among the Quraish.

The Pagans believed in and worshipped 360 gods, all represented by idols. They kept these idols inside and outside the Ka’aba, a cubic structure built by the founding fathers of Paganism to protect their idols from the hostile and unpredictable climate of Mecca. The Pagans worshipped these statues not because they believed the idols were gods, but because they felt they could thereby draw themselves nearer to the living gods, whom the idols represented.¹

The entire population of the Arabian Peninsula also believed in the invisible angels, who visited those destined to receive special favors from Allah. Because the Arabs thought the angels were close to Allah, many also worshipped these beings with the hope that, if pleased, the angels would petition Allah to relieve them from their endless sufferings.

We do not know for sure when the Pagans began living on the Arabian soil, and since culture is always changing, such origins can be hard to pinpoint. But archaeological investigations in the 20th century brought certain facts to light. They revealed that around 3500 BC, Semitic-speaking peoples of Arabian origin migrated into Mesopotamia, supplanted the Sumerians, and became the Babylonians and Assyrians. Some archeologists argue that another group of Semites left Arabia about 2500 BC, settled in the Levant, and mixed with the local populations, and that some of these migrants became the later Amorites and Canaanites. Other scholars contend that the immigrants, instead, came from the northern Levant, and still others say that no migration at all took place, and that the outside influences in the Levantine population came from traders.

What caused such migrations? Bernard Lewis writes in The Arabs in History:

“Arabia was originally a land of great fertility and the first home of the Semitic peoples. Through the millennia it has been undergoing a process of steady desiccation, a drying up of wealth and waterways and a spread of the desert at the expense of the cultivable land. The declining productivity of the peninsula, together with the increase in the number of the inhabitants, led to a series of crises of overpopulation and consequently to a recurring cycle of invasions of the neighboring countries by the Semitic peoples of the peninsula. It was these crises that carried the Assyrians, Aramaeans, Canaanites (including the Phoenicians and Hebrews), and finally the Arabs themselves into the Fertile Crescent.”

It is thus clear that the Pagans had long inhabited the Arabian Peninsula. For instance, there is a lost city in The Empty Quarter known as Iram of the Pillars. It is estimated that it lasted from about 3000 BC to the first century AD.

The better-watered, higher portions of the extreme southwest portion of the Arabian Peninsula supported three early kingdoms.

The first, the Minaean, was centered in the interior of modern-day Yemen, but probably controlled most of southern Arabia. Although dating is difficult, scholars generally believe that it existed from 1200 to 650 BC.

The second kingdom, the Sabaean, arose around 930 BC and lasted until about 115 BC. Eventually, it probably supplanted the Minaean Kingdom and occupied substantially the same territory. The Sabaean capital, Ma’rib, likely flourished more than any other city in ancient Arabia, partly because of its position astride the caravan routes linking the Mediterranean seaports with the frankincense-growing region of the Hadhramaut and partly because a large nearby dam provided water for irrigation. The Sabaean Kingdom was widely referred to as Saba, and some have suggested that the Queen of “Sheba,” who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem in the 10th century BC, was a Sabaean.

The Himyarites followed the Sabaeans in southern Arabia, and their kingdom lasted from about 115 BC to about AD 525. In 24 BC the Roman Emperor Augustus sent the prefect of Egypt, Aelius Gallus, against the Himyarites, but his army of 10,000 was unsuccessful and returned to Egypt. The Himyarites prospered in the frankincense, myrrh, and spice trade until the Romans began to open the sea routes through the Red Sea in order to facilitate their own trade.

We have outlined this history of the Arabian Peninsula to make one point: The Pagans had dwelt here for thousands of years and Allah never sent them a single prophet or apostle¹ to lead them to His righteous path. As a result, the Pagan beliefs and rituals became deeply ingrained in them. Consequently, the Pagans refused to believe in Muhammad’s declaration about an alien and brutal Allah as opposed to the Allah they worshipped and who they believed was kind, compassionate, forgiving and generous to all of His creations.

Was Muhammad Switched?

From time to time in this era, poor Bedouins from the desert flocked to Mecca to collect alms from those few who could afford to give them (as people do even today in the Muslim communities of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Following the tradition, Halima, a poor Saadite shepherd woman, knocked at Amina’s door one day. Being herself an impoverished widow, Amina had nothing to offer her. Instead, she unloaded her burden by handing her newborn son into Halima’s custody.

The assertion that Amina merely gave Muhammad over to Halima’s care, in keeping with the tradition of the Bedouin wet nurses breastfeeding the noblemen of Mecca, does not rest on fact. We have no record telling us that any Bedouin women had wet-nursed Muhammad’s father, grandfather, or any of his uncles — all noblemen of the Quraish. Muslim historians invented a “tradition” that never existed in the Arabian Peninsula to hide a truth of gigantic proportions from Muslims and the rest of the world. We will discuss it shortly.

Halima was dumbfounded, for in her judgment, no sensible and loving mother would ever dispose off her baby in this way. Knowing well her own situation, she at first hesitated to accept the custody of the child. But when she considered that she would have, in due course, two more hands to help her family out in its dire circumstances, she took the baby and left for home.

Halima’s tribe lived in one of the pastoral valleys of Northern Arabia. Though poor, they had a bold, industrious character. They subsisted on camel’s milk, rice, dates, occasionally a piece of mutton or gazelle. After a locust storm, they ate locusts fried in fat. They respected the sun and gave thanks for the rain, to meet the sandstorm and fiery simoom with their faces covered. They implanted primitive lore in the minds of their children as well as the code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – some of the lessons Muhammad later incorporated in the Quran. Unlike the Quraish, the people of the Saadite tribe excelled in the use of sword and lances. Their dexterity with the tools of war often earned them triumphs in their struggle to survive in the harsh desert.

Halima’s son Abdullah was almost of Muhammad’s age. She began rearing them to the best of her ability. She suckled both and cared for them equally. She looked forward to the day when those two would grow up and provide her with the help she yearned for to ease her life.

During her rare interludes for reflection, Halima, a loving and caring mother, often mulled over the future of her own son. She herself had been living the life of a Bedouin. Her long experience convinced her that no matter how industrious and brave her son turned out to be, the barren desert could never afford him a life remotely comparable with that of the Meccans. She therefore wanted her son to go to Mecca to pursue a more comfortable existence there. But how could she send him to Mecca?

Halima thought and thought. Lost in this question, she often spent nights without sleep. Even during the day, the great challenge — how to induct Abdullah into the life of Mecca — occupied her mind.

Her thorough exploration of possibilities eventually rewarded her. She realized that she could achieve her ambition easily if — with the Saadite boldness — she switched Abdullah with Muhammad, and sent Abdullah to Mecca to grow up in Amina’s house. It was purely a selfish instinct of a caring, biological mother. The plan was simple and safe, for she was confident none from Mecca would ever question her son Abdullah’s identity.

We can see exactly how Halima would have carried it out. First, she began calling Muhammad “Abdullah” and Abdullah “Muhammad.” The infants were confused for a little while, but they soon got used to the change in their names.

Step two required Halima to facilitate her son’s induction to Amina’s house. She needed a strategy that would not only fit in with the Pagans’ age-old beliefs, but would also soften Amina’s attitude towards her despised son. So she set about finding a strategy that would convince Amina that her son was not a jinx, but actually a prodigy. But such a strategy required groundwork, so she gave it much thought and succeeded in developing it to her satisfaction.

As soon as Muhammad entered his fifth year, Halima began telling everyone about his extraordinary gifts. She took special pleasure in narrating the child’s encounter with two angels whom, she claimed, her son Abdullah had seen with his own eyes, around Muhammad in a broad daylight.

Pressed for details, she would tell her listeners that one day Abdullah and Muhammad were playing in the field. Suddenly, two angels appeared out of nowhere before Muhammad. They laid him on the ground and one of them, Gabriel, opened up the child’s heart. He cleansed it of impurity, wringing from it those black and bitter drops of sin that all humans inherit from Adam and that lurk within even his best descendents, inciting them to evil. After thoroughly purifying the infant Muhammad, Gabriel filled his throbbing heart with faith, knowledge, and prophetic light and then replaced it in his bosom.

During this visitation, Halima would tell them, the angels also impressed the seal of prophecy between Muhammad’s shoulders. To prove her claim, she would make Abdullah-turned-Muhammad bare his body so that those who doubted her sanity could see the mark with their own eyes. Interestingly, Muhammad never referred to his birthmark, probably because he could not see it, and nothing he said ever suggested that he thought it had anything to do with his prophetic calling.

Halima needed this cunning tactic to hide a serious problem: Abdullah had a prominent birthmark between his shoulders, and Muhammad, the child born to Amina, didn’t. If she had not invented the story of the angels and “the seal of prophecy,” her plan to plant her son in Amina’s house would have remained unfulfilled.

The ground thus prepared, Halima carried Muhammad – her son - to Mecca and sought to deposit him on Amina’s lap. Seeing her reluctance, Halima explained all that had allegedly happened to the child and spoke of the seal of prophecy on his back. Her account of the child’s supernatural qualities changed Amina’s opinion of him. She relented and took him back.

Halima returned to her tent in the desert, with the satisfaction that she had placed her son in a Meccan home, where he would grow into a man and, like the Meccans, lead a life of relative ease and abundance.

And this switch altered the destinies of two innocent infants, one who was going undeservedly to live the life of an anonymous Bedouin, and the other who would change the history of the earth!

Muhammad remained with Amina until his sixth year, occasionally pining for Halima. He played with the local children, joined in their merrymaking, watched pilgrims pray at the Ka’aba, and welcomed and said goodbye to caravans that halted at the city before departing for their trading destinations. All the town’s activities fascinated him, for he found them quite different from those he’d grown up with in the desert. At the same time, he felt irremediably like an outsider, and that outsider sense would shape his outlook and remain with him for the rest of his life.

All the misconceptions that Amina had about the child after his birth slowly disappeared, and she treated him as a loving and caring mother. She fed him to the best of her ability, clothed him, and saw to his well-being. She also took him around in the city and introduced him to her near and distant relatives.

A few months after his return to Mecca, Amina took Muhammad to Medina and introduced him to her maternal relatives there. On her journey home, she died and was buried at Abwa, a village between Medina and Mecca.

Barakat, the slave-girl, now acted as mother to the orphan and delivered him to his grandfather Abd al-Mutallib, in whose household he would spend three years of his life.

The Orphan’s Ordeals

Abd al Mutallib was the guardian of Ka’aba temple and enjoyed a good income. But he had a large family and often found it difficult to meet all of their needs. As a result, tension generally prevailed among his family members, though they put up a smiling face outside their home.

Muhammad’s arrival in Mutallib’s family did not help the situation; rather, it added a further load. All the family members wanted him gone, but as he was under his grandfather’s protection, none dared ask him to leave. Unable to get rid of him, they began to hate him. They missed no opportunity to harass him and often deprived him of food and other necessities. They may not have had inflicted bodily injuries on him, but they almost certainly harmed him psychologically.

Whenever he suffered in his grandfather’s home, none of its female members consoled him afterwards. Their attitude made him recall his mother keenly. He longed to be with her, to be loved and hugged by her. Despite his moaning and cries, he lacked the comfort of Halima’s bosom, for she had gone back to the desert, after abandoning him amid the strange people of Mecca. He slowly began to hate his mother.

About three years after Muhammad joined this new family, Abd al Mutallib found his end approaching. He called his son Abu Talib and bequeathed him his grandson. Once more, Muhammad changed his home in which, he lived a number of years. His life was developing into a series of violent contrasts.¹

On the death of his father, Abu Talib became the guardian of Ka’aba, assuming the religious functions performed by all of his predecessors. His priestly office required that his sacerdotal household rigidly observe all the rites and ceremonies of the sacred House of Allah. The young Muhammad could thus observe them closely and record them in his retentive memory. He would later incorporate most of them, sans idol worship, into his own religion, Islam.

The Caravan Trader

Muhammad’s move to his uncle’s home brought him no relief from domestic suffering. Abu Talib was not rich, but he too had a large family. Beyond his duties at the Ka’aba, he had begun trading to supplement his income, yet he still could not provide for all the needs of his family. Scarcity was the rule rather than the exception in his household, and Muhammad’s arrival proved an extra burden for Abu Talib and everyone else. Consequently, family members made him feel unwelcome and used words and gestures in his presence, which acted as salt in the wounds from his grandfather’s house.

Abu Talib realized that his nephew was suffering and he wanted to help, but he was handicapped. Had he been able to meet his family’s immediate needs, he could have justified Muhammad’s presence in his house, but he wasn’t and hence he could do little for him but play the role of a silent spectator. When he could live no more with his nephew’s anguish, he found him a job as a shepherd.

Child Muhammad’s job required him to take his employers’ camels, sheep, and goats into the plains for grazing. He thus had to spend most of each day alone in the grim desert outside Mecca, where he let the animals roam about in search of a blade of grass among the pile of stones. We can visualize how a young, intensely sensitive and intelligent boy of Muhammad’s age must have spent his time.

We all know that misfortune and sufferings create bitterness in a person and make him conscious of his situation, especially when nothing else distracts him from his thoughts. Such a person grieves over his ills and tries to discover their causes. While doing so, he develops a strange internal feeling, which only a person who has undergone the experience can describe.

Since the above observation amply applied to young Muhammad, we may safely conjecture that in the midst of his frustrating loneliness, he must have asked himself why he had come into the world as a fatherless orphan, and why he had to work as a shepherd in desolation at such a young age, while other children of his age were living with their parents. He must also have asked himself why his mother had left him at the mercy of the people he did not know, and why they treated him so differently from their own children.

Even though he was now bringing his meager income into his uncle’s family, its members still treated him as before. Their continued scorn hurt him deeply, and the pain deepened his hatred towards his mother. He knew that if he had been living with her, he never would have endured the degrading insults from his purported relatives at the homes of his grandfather and uncle. He must have repeatedly asked himself: Why am I here, among the people who have no love or respect for me? And he blamed his mother for all his mental and physical sufferings.

Dejected, young Muhammad stopped playing with other children in his spare time. Instead, he felt more comfortable talking with people who visited Mecca on pilgrimage or trade. He enjoyed their conversation on religious matters. He also derived immense pleasure from their story-telling. Very often, he prompted them to narrate the tantalizing and fascinating Arabian tales of the past. Most of these fables acted like balm for his wounds. When he got the opportunity, he retold them eloquently to his listeners. These tales later became an integral part of the Quran.

When he had no story-telling session to attend, he enjoyed watching the arrival and departure of the caravans, which thronged at the gate of Mecca before setting out for destinations like Syria and the Yemen. The very thought of visiting those faraway lands fired young Muhammad with excitement and charged his mind with visions he hoped to see himself one day.

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