The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad Read Online Free PDF Page A

out from from this dismal record, however: throughout the world, infant survival was higher in rural areas than in cities. If the specific reasons weren’t understood, the concept of fresh air was. Cities were not healthy places to be, and for all its new prosperity, sixth-century Mecca was no different. At the height of summer, when daytime temperatures regularly reached well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the air was barely breathable. Fumes from cooking fires were held in by the ring of mountains around the city, and vultures wheeled above the dung heap on the edge of town, a noxious dump where refuse rotted and fermented, earning it the name “mountain of smoke.” Hyenas snuffled and scavenged there by night, and the narrow alleys echoed with their howls. With no sewage system or running water, infections spread rapidly. Earlier that same year of Muhammad’s birth, there’d been one of the localized outbreaks of the smallpox that ravaged the Middle East as though by whim, disappearing as suddenly as it had arrived. Cities were thus dangerous places for vulnerable newborns, and Amina must have been desperate to find a wet nurse who’d take her only son to the safety of the high desert. Why else would she settle on so poor a prospect as a woman who had barely enough milk for her own child, let alone someone else’s? And equally to the point, why did Halima settle for an orphan child?
    Perhaps she caved in and took Muhammad simply because she didn’t want to be the only one of her group to return across the mountains without a foster child. Perhaps she took him out of pity, or in open-hearted good faith, or impelled by a certain peasant pride: she had come to find an infant to nurse and was stubborn enough not to leave without one. She certainly claimed no special foresight. Instead, as she’d tell it, “When we decided to depart, I said to my husband, ‘By God, I do not like the idea of returning without a suckling; I will go and take that orphan.’ He replied, ‘Do as you please. Perhaps God will bless us on his account.’ So I went back and took him for the sole reason that I could not find any other infant.”
    The story reverberates with echoes of the Christian nativity story. Halima and her husband are the humble shepherds, and if there are no tales of wise men bringing gifts or of comets streaking across the night sky or of paranoid retaliation by a vicious king, popular belief demands its share of omens nonetheless. So the moment Halima decides to take Muhammad, the whole tone of her speech as relayed by ibn-Ishaq changes. The chatty style, the exchanges with her husband, the donkey’s pathetic gauntness all disappear, and her story becomes a miracle one. Her breasts fill with milk, as do the udders of a she-camel they had brought with them, so that Halima and her family now drink all they want. The donkey is suddenly strong and fast, and when they arrive back at their encampment in the high desert, their sheep and goats are thriving, producing unprecedented amounts of milk even as the drought persists. It is clear to Halima that her decision to adopt Muhammad has brought her family divine good fortune. Or at least it was clear in retrospect, by the time she told the story—or by the time it was elaborated in the re-telling by others, turned into the apocryphal tale that piety and reverence demanded, much as the miracle stories of the infancy of Jesus were and still are treasured items of popular belief.
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    omething in us still believes that far more than nutrition and antibodies are involved in the act of breast-feeding. In ancient Rome, for instance, it was believed that a baby with a Greek wet nurse would drink in her language along with her milk and thus grow up speaking Greek as well as Latin (which was often the case, since the child was surrounded by the sounds of Greek for its first two years of life). Today we talk of the physiology and psychology of mother-child bonding, but we also tend