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

valued and resented in equal measure by both sides. On the part of the Meccans, it was not unlike the way American political oratory still celebrates “the heartland” even while considering it relevant only at election times, when it is beholden on all candidates for political office, if they can, to hark back to their grandfathers living a hardscrabble life in middle America, thus celebrating the presumed virtues of hard work, perseverance, and thrift. If Meccans valued the Beduin past even as they abandoned its values, they were no more ambivalent in this respect than their modern Western counterparts.
    In a way, then, it was perfect that Muhammad should spend the first five years of his life with the Beduin. Like him, they were valued and yet ignored, central and yet marginalized. Like those Roman infants hearing Greek and then speaking it, he absorbed Beduin values as naturally as that legendary mother’s milk. A respect for the power and mystery of the natural world; the idea of communal property where personal wealth was meaningless; the music and grandeur of poetry and history echoing in his dreams—all these and more would form the core of the man he would become, and would inevitably place him at odds with the city of his birth.
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    alima had taken Muhammad despite the fact that he was an orphan, yet this was also precisely the reason he would stay with her not just the customary two years, but far longer. This is not the accepted explanation, however. That is the one
    given by Halima herself: her family saw the child as a kind of good- luck charm, allowing them to thrive despite the ongoing drought. “We recognized this as a bounty from God for two years, until I weaned him,” she’d say. “Then we brought him to his mother in Mecca, though we were most anxious to keep him with us because of the good fortune he brought us. I said to her: ‘It would be best if you were to leave your little boy with us until he is older, safe from diseases here in Mecca,’ and we persisted until she agreed.”
    If it’s easy to imagine the peasant woman cannily crafting her argument that the boy would be safer with her, it’s equally tempting to imagine the tearful mother reaching her arms out to her toddler and hugging him close, torn between the desire to have him with her and concern for his well-being. But there is no record of any such scene, which is almost certainly more twenty-first-century sentiment than sixth-century reality. Amina had more than her son’s physical health in mind when she accepted the offer to extend his fostering and sent him back with Halima to the high desert.
    The stark fact is that she had not married again. Traditionally, a newly widowed woman, especially one in her early twenties with a newborn infant, would have remarried very quickly. If need be, one of her husband’s brothers would have stepped up. Even as a second or third wife, she’d thus be ensuring both her own protection and the child’s status. But in newly prosperous Mecca, the old rules were breaking down. In principle, Amina was under the protection of her father-in-law, Abd al-Muttalib, but after the trauma of having nearly killed his own son, that legendary leader of Mecca was aging fast. With his decline, his Hashim clan was also beginning to wane in influence and wealth. The Umayyad clan was in ascendance, and though the Hashims were hardly reduced to the status of poor cousins, at least not yet, there was no advantage for anyone in marrying Amina and adopting a son with no inheritance. She was destined to remain a widow, and her son an only child without even half-brothers and half-sisters, cut off from the dense tangle of family relationships that defined Meccan society. She must have felt she had no option but to leave him with his foster family, especially since they were still willing to postpone that matter of a fee.
    Muhammad was taken back over the mountains, and Beduin life would become deeply ingrained