` Unsheathed The Story of Muhammad Tara MacArthur Unsheathed: The Story of Muhammad. © 2016, 2020 Tara MacArthur. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2016, 2020. Cover image by Nikolayenko Yekaterina. Cover background image by Chandra Sekhar. Back cover image by argus456. All images are used under licence. The artists are not known to the author and they did not in any way collaborate with the production of this book. Cover design © The Author, 2016. All rights reserved. Genealogies are in the public domain because they are facts with little or no original interpretation of those facts. The map on page 6 was accessed courtesy of University of Texas Libraries and modified by the author © The Author, 2016. All other diagrams © The Author, 2016. All rights reserved. Contents Foreword 5 Arabia in Muhammad’s Time 6 1. An Arab Orphan 7 2. Life Begins at Forty 27 3. The Angel in the Cave 47 4. Hellfire in Mecca 67 5. The Satanic Verses 87 6. Sorrows and Strife 107 7. The Flight to Medina 127 8. The Great Robbery at Badr 147 9. Poets, Polytheists and Jews 167 10. Defeated and Destroyer 187 11. Confederates of the Ditch 207 12. Warlord of the West 227 13. Khaybar 247 14. The Year of Victory 267 15. The Year of Deputations 287 16. The Final Year 307 Epilogue 327 Appendix: The Sharia 331 Bibliography 345 About the Author 353 Truly the Messenger is a light that enlightens and a drawn Indian sword, a sword of Allah. When they professed Islam in Mecca’s vale, the Quraysh tribe ordered them to leave. They departed, but they were no weaklings; they had arms for the battle and courage. When Allah’s Messenger sent me a death-threat, I feared him more than a hunting lion whose lair is hidden in the jungle thicket. Fools walked on both sides of my camel, saying, “Truly, O Kaab, thou art as good as slain!” And every friend in whom I hoped said, “I cannot help thee; I am too busy to mind thee.” Yet I pushed across the desert in the dark, still hoping for pardon from Allah’s Messenger, until I laid my right hand irrevocably in his, the Avenger who speaks the Word of Truth. Be guided by Allah, whose warnings are plain, who gave thee the gift of the Quraan! Kaab ibn Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma, Medina, 630 paraphrased from Ibn Ishaq (Guillaume) 600-601. Foreword Islam affects all of us. In the major cities of the West, we hear the call to prayer; we see veiled women walking the streets; and we find halal slaughter packaged in our supermarkets. We would not think much about those things if they were all we observed. At the same time, sober newscasters inform us of jihad warriors who commit murder, rape, arson and suicide in the name of Islam. We hear whispers of secret sharia tribunals that flout our national laws; a rumbling rumour of ferocious levels of domestic violence; and shouts that Islam must never be criticised. All this, we are told, has nothing to do with true Islam. It’s just a distortion. This book is not about the distortion of Islam or even about why Islam is so easily distorted. It is an attempt to describe the undistorted, original Islam by explaining how Islam began. I have not tried to decide whether “original” Islam is the same thing as “true” Islam. I have only shown what Muhammad believed, taught and did. Our teachers advise us to study history in order to avoid repeating its mistakes. By knowing the history of Islam, perhaps we shall also learn about some mistakes of history that we should avoid repeating in future. Nevertheless, I have tried to document the facts of Muhammad’s life without making endless commentary on them. I have not drawn attention to the parallels between historical events and current affairs. Readers can easily do that for themselves. This is the story of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and of his vision for the world. Tara MacArthur Arabia in Muhammad’s Time An Arab Orphan April 571 – July 595 When Muhammad was born, nobody guessed that he was destined to change the world. His home city, Mecca, was a self-important little trading-post high in the desert-mountains of western Arabia. It was famous for its Kaaba Temple but, in the eyes of its larger neighbours, it had no political or military power and less scholarship or science. His parents were both from the Quraysh, which was the dominant tribe of Mecca, but they were not from high-status clans within that tribe. His father, Abdallah Hashim, was a clay-worker and date-merchant. His mother, Amina Zuhra, had no money. They had no other children, for Abdallah had died only a few months after their marriage. The young widow gave birth in April 571.* She named her child Muhammad, which means “praiseworthy”. Her father-in-law took the newborn to the Kaaba Temple. There he stood before the god Hubal, a red agate idol with a golden right hand, and thanked Him for the gift of a healthy boy. Amina did not spend much time with her baby. For several days she left him with a slave to be wet-nursed.1 Then she sent him out of Mecca to a paid foster-family in the desert. So the baby Muhammad lived in a Bedouin’s tent in the barren wilderness, where his foster-parents, Harith and Halima, herded camels and goats. For two years he was breast-fed along with Halima’s own son. Halima brought Muhammad back to Mecca every year to show him to his biological family. When he was one year old, Amina saw that he had grown into a large, strong child. When he was two, * All Arabian dates have been translated to their Gregorian equivalent. 8 Unsheathed: the Story of Muhammad Halima weaned him; but she was not ready to give him up. She pleaded that in the city he might catch the plague, and the outcome was that Amina agreed to let the foster-family keep him for a few years longer. By the time he was three, Muhammad had learned to speak Arabic with the clear accent of their desert tribe. Muhammad and his foster-brother used to play in the goats’ pasture-land. When they were four years old, Muhammad suffered a seizure and was hurled to the ground. His foster-brother ran for help, crying that Muhammad had been murdered, and their parents arrived to find him pale and rigid. Halima feared he might be possessed by the jinn,* and Harith thought it was a stroke. He said they must return the boy to Mecca before they were accused of not looking after him properly. They explained to the Hashim clan† what had happened but they found that Amina was in no hurry to reclaim her child. She dismissed their fears and told them she wanted Muhammad to continue living in the desert as before. Halima obeyed for a while, but she was always careful to keep him close to her tent. Muhammad watched the women making cheese, spinning goatshair and weaving tents and carpets. His foster- mother became more and more frightened of caring for him. When he was five, she gave up and took him back to Mecca. Amid the city crowds, Muhammad managed to slip away from his foster-mother. He wandered around the city for hours. Halima searched until she was exhausted, but finally she had to go to the Hashim clan’s house and confess that she had lost him. Muhammad’s grandfather also combed the crowds. When he could * The jinn were malicious fire-spirits that the Arab polytheists tried to appease. Muhammad believed in and feared the jinn throughout his life. In the familiar story of Aladdin, the word jinn is usually rendered “genie”. † A “clan” is a division of a tribe. The Quraysh tribe had sixteen clans: Abdaldar, Abdshams, Adiy, Amir, Asad, Harith, Hashim, Juma, Makhzum, Muharib, Muttalib, Naowfal, Sahm, Taym, Umayya and Zuhra. An Arab Orphan 9 not find the child either, he went to the Kaaba Temple to implore the gods for mercy. While he was still praying, a man named Waraqa entered, leading Muhammad by the hand and saying he had found the lost boy in Upper Mecca. Muhammad’s foster- mother then walked out of his life while his grandfather lifted him onto his shoulder to carry him to his new home.2 City life in Mecca must have been bewildering after the open desert. The Hashim household was very crowded, for Muhammad’s grandfather had three young wives and eight children under ten. Amina, though a kindly mother, was a distant figure. She delegated the daily tasks of caring for him to her Ethiopian slave, Baraka, a devoted nurserymaid who was only a child herself. When Muhammad was six, Amina took him to visit his relatives in Medina, a city to the north where his father was buried. The journey took a week, and they stayed a month. Muhammad had a happy holiday: he played with the neighbours’ daughter just outside the stone houses, climbed up to the roof with his cousins to scare the pigeons into flight and learned to swim in the family’s pond. On their homeward journey, Amina became ill.