Smell the frankincense

Francis Spufford5 April 2012
The Weekender

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Biography is not quite as central and unproblematic in Islam as it is in Christianity. Christians believe that God's most important action in all human history was the sending of a person, Jesus. Muslims believe that it was the sending of a book, the Qur'an. And much Islamic thought has therefore seen the Qur'an as a perfect, timeless thing, existing in the will of God since the beginning of creation and just waiting for the right moment in 7th century Arabia to be delivered to humanity.

Compared to the permanent majesty of God-in-the-book, biographies of the Prophet must always be secondary, and also have a subtle potential to disturb, with their reminder of the time when the retrospective certainties of Islam were still coming together.

Christians need the four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament to get closer to God-the-person, but Muslims don't need lives of Muhammad. Yet they have rejoiced in them all the same, reading over and over how the Prophet was born, in AD 570, into the merchant aristocracy of the city of Mecca, and how he lived quietly as a seeker after truth, happily married to a widow with a trading-business, till the night in AD 610 when the Angel Gabriel seized him, and squeezed him, and compelled him to recite the first verse of what would later be the Qur'an.

Then, how he fled Mecca in 622 to found the first Muslim state in the oasis of Medina, and how he returned to Mecca in triumph at the end of his life, as the ruler of all Arabia.

To Muslims, he is the perfect man, the example of examples, the model all should emulate; and the events of his lifetime form the underlying story, endlessly retold, by which the Islamic world understands both the past and the present.

As Barnaby Rogerson puts it, "It provides all the parallels one might ever need for the goodness, the wickedness, the comedy, majesty and tragedy of mankind... It has all the ingredients a Muslim might ever require for reflection on the ways of the world..."

His biography of the Prophet was sparked by hearing Muslim friends relaxing around a cafe table in Tunisia after a day guiding tourists, and talking through an incident of the late seventh century as if it were happening right now, with a cast of variously innocent and villainous characters everyone knew.

He resolved to write a book for Westerners vivid enough and immediate enough to enable us to join that circle, at least in imagination. It is a fascinatingly contradictory piece of work. On one level, it is extremely traditional. The author has achieved his immediacy by using a sort of modern equivalent of the lush voice of old-fashioned travel-writing about the Orient.

He can sound almost Edwardian as he evokes the beauty of camels in the desert, or the "breathless virility" of the pure Arabic language of the Bedouin. You think of Gertrude Bell, of T E Lawrence, of Freya Stark - of the tradition of ceremonious imaginative response in English to the imaginative datum of Islam. It works very well.

Rogerson can do the epic scale, the show-stopping geography, the pressing presence of the three empires contending for influence in Muhammad's-Arabia. He makes you smell the frankincense. And traditional too is his courtly civility to a religion that's not, I think, his own, despite some ambiguous discussion of conversion early on.

Just as descriptively, he always inclines toward enchantment rather than scepticism or deflation, so when dealing with ideas he faithfully endorses the orthodox Muslim judgment of them.

You will not find a single word of criticism of the Prophet in this book. I'm not surprised to read that, in its original form as a 7,000-word essay, it attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales's interfaith committee, who considered distributing a free copy to every schoolchild in the country. It is a book that shakes Islam warmly by the hand, and says, "Jolly good!"

At the same time, he draws quietly on a large amount of recent scholarship which pious commentators in the Muslim world have often preferred to ignore, because it seems to inject an unwelcome contingency into holy events.

It has become much clearer over the past few decades that there were complexities to the Muslim experience in the very first years of Muhammad's mission that didn't make it into the later accounts.

Rogerson sensitively incorporates new work on the Christian and Jewish presences in Muhammad's Arabia, and on the nature of the Meccan paganism he rejected, with its three-faced fertility goddess, al-Lat, and her sky-god consort, al-Lah. He is not writing a revisionist biography, but there the new material is, for those who want to think about it.

What he communicates wonderfully is how extraordinary Muhammad must have been as a character, and how attractive, in that place and that time: the shy businessman with the glowing expression, whose tender consideration for the rights of all ignored clan and tribe, whose revelations came out of his mouth as verses too powerful for a poetry-revering society to resist.

It isn't always possible to share the attraction, though, as a Westerner reading the book. The Prophet's life followed a rising curve to victory, away from a ministry of preaching and persuasion to one conducted through sieges, raids and cavalry charges.

As it progressed, it diverged more and more from the model in the Christian gospels for how a holy life should go - still a template deeply embedded in Western culture. Jesus never wanted a poet assassinated. Or allowed anyone to be tortured. Or presided over the mass execution of 700 prisoners.

Barnaby Rogerson suggests that modern Western sympathy with Muhammad may falter at the moment when he changed the rules to allow himself more than four wives, but there are quite a few other candidates.

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