target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">5 Any society that was divided against itself would be destroyed, because it was going against the very nature of things. This was a frightening period. The incessant wars between Persia and Byzantium seemed to herald the end of the old world order, and even within Arabia, tribal warfare had reached chronic proportions. During the last twenty years, the ghazu, which had traditionally been short and sharp, had escalated into long, drawn out military campaigns as a result of unprecedented drought and famine. There was an apocalyptic sense of impending catastrophe. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world.
Under the inspiration of Allah, Muhammad was feeling his way towards an entirely new solution, convinced that he was not speaking in his own name, but was simply repeating the revealed words of God. It was a painful, difficult process. He once said: “Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.”6 Sometimes the message was clear. He could almost see and hear Gabriel distinctly. The words seemed to “come down” to him, like a shower of life-giving rain. But often the divine voice was muffled and obscure: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.”7 He had to listen to the undercurrent of events, trying to discover what was really going on. He would grow pale with the effort and cover himself with his cloak, as if to shield himself from the divine impact. He would perspire heavily, even on a cold day, as he turned inwards, searching his soul for a solution to a problem, in rather the same way as a poet has to open himself to the words that he must haul from the depths of himself to the conscious level of his mind. In the Qur’an, God instructed Muhammad to listen intently to each revelation as it emerged; he must be careful not to impose a meaning on a verse prematurely, before its full significance had become entirely clear.8
In the Qur’an, therefore, God spoke directly to the people of Mecca, using Muhammad as his mouthpiece, just as he spoke through the Hebrew prophets in the Jewish scriptures. Hence the language of the Qur’an is sacred, because—Muslims believe—it records the words spoken in some way by God himself. When Muhammad’s converts listened to the divine voice, chanted first by the Prophet and later by the skilled Qur’an reciters, they felt that they had an immediate encounter with Allah. Biblical Hebrew is experienced as a holy tongue in rather the same way. Christians do not have this concept of a sacred language, because there is nothing holy about New Testament Greek; their scriptures presented Jesus as the Word spoken by God to humanity. Like any scripture, the Qur’an thus provided an encounter with transcendence, bridging the immense gulf between our frail, mortal world and the divine.
Muhammad’s converts eagerly awaited each new revelation; after he had recited it, they would learn it by heart, and those who were literate wrote it down. They felt moved and stirred by the exquisite language of their scripture, which, they were convinced, could only have come from God. It is difficult for a non-Arabic speaker to appreciate the beauty of the Qur’an, because this is rarely conveyed in translation. The text seems wearyingly repetitive; it has no apparent structure, no sustained argument or organizing narrative. But the Qur’an was not designed to be read sequentially. In its final form, the chapters or surahs of the Qur’an have been arranged arbitrarily, beginning with the longest and ending with the shortest, so the order is not important. Each surah contains essential teachings and it is possible to dip into the text at any point and imbibe crucial lessons.
In common with the majority of Arabs at this time, Muhammad could neither read nor write. The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.9 Bards chanted their odes at the annual trade fairs to excited audiences from all over the peninsula. Every year there was an important poetry contest at the fair of ‘Ukaz, just outside Mecca, and the winning poems were embroidered in gold on fine black cloth and hung on the walls of the Kabah. Muhammad’s followers would, therefore, have been able to pick up verbal signals in the text that are lost in translation. They found that themes, words, phrases, and sound patterns recurred again and again—like the variations in a piece of music, which subtly amplify the original melody, and add layer upon layer of complexity. The Qur’an was deliberately repetitive; its ideas, images, and stories were bound together by these internal echoes, which reinforced its central teaching with instructive shifts of emphasis. They linked passages that initially seemed separate, and integrated the different strands of the text, as one verse delicately qualified and supplemented others. The Qur’an was not imparting factual information that could be conveyed instantaneously. Like Muhammad, listeners had to absorb its teachings slowly; their understanding would grow more profound and mature over time, and the rich, allusive language and rhythms of the Qur’an helped them to slow down their mental processes and enter a different mode of consciousness.
The American scholar Michael Sells describes what happens when the driver of a hot, crowded bus in Egypt plays a cassette of Qur’anic recitations: “A meditative calm begins to set in. People relax. The jockeying for space ends. The voices of those who are talking grow quieter and less strained. Others are silent, lost in thought. A sense of shared community overtakes the discomfort.”10 Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions. Yogins have found that it brings a feeling of expansiveness, comparable to the effect of music, especially when played by oneself.11 Qur’anic reciters chant long phrases on a slow exhalation and, when they inhale, leave silent pauses for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.
God was not booming clear instructions from on high. The divine voice constantly changed the way it referred to itself—as “we,” “he,” “your lord,” “Allah” or “I”—shifting its relationship to both the Prophet and his audience. Nor was God distinctively male. Each recitation began with the invocation: “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and the Merciful (al-Rahim).” Allah was a masculine noun, but the divine names al-Rahman and al-Rahim are not only grammatically feminine but related etymologically to the word for womb. A partially personified female figure was central to nearly all the early revelations. We find veiled allusions to a woman conceiving a child or giving birth; the image of a woman who has lost her only child, and the poignant evocation of a baby girl, murdered by her disappointed parents.12 This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur’an.
In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question—“Have you not heard?” “Do you consider?” “Have you not seen?” Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer.13 This new religion was not about achieving metaphysical certainty: the Qur’an wanted people to develop a different kind of awareness.
The Christian notion of the Last Judgment was central to the early message of the Qur’an. Muhammad believed that Mecca was in crisis because the Quraysh no longer felt accountable for their actions. In the steppes, the karim may have been arrogant and egotistic,
