This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next Thursday: ‘The seal of the prophets’
EVERY YEAR during Ramadan, traditionally a month of spiritual retreat, the young Muhammad would climb Jabal al-Nour, a mountain outside Mecca, and pray in the Cave of Hira.
On the tenth day of Ramadan in 610 CE, a strange power or presence, accompanied (according to several accounts) by the clanging of bells, entered the cave as Muhammad slept.
This invisible power seized Muhammad’s body and tried to shake him awake.
Fearing that a jinn, or demon, was trying to possess him, Muhammad leapt up to defend himself.
Jinns were thought to have the power to enter and animate human life. Neither good nor evil, they were said to possess the minds of the finest poets and soothsayers in pre-Islamic Arabia.
‘Iqra!’ (‘Recite!’) a voice boomed.
Muhammad shrank back into the shadows. ‘I am no reciter!’ he cried out. (Another version records that he pleaded, ‘I am no poet!’)
‘Recite!’ the voice commanded him again.
Was it an evil spirit? Should he escape?
In one account, Muhammad is said to have started running down the mountain; in another, he thought of throwing himself off the mountain.
‘Muhammad, you are the messenger of God, and I am Gabriel,’ the voice said.
Had Muhammad received the message in a dream? According to this account, the words were ‘written on his heart’ as he slept.
‘Recite!’ Gabriel ordered a third time.
Muhammad opened his mouth. In one telling, Gabriel tried to stuff the sacred text, inscribed on a cloth, into Muhammad’s mouth, almost choking him.
Strange words, in lines of High Arabic, started to flow from Muhammad’s lips, summoned by a mysterious power that seemed to have taken possession of his soul.
This is the genesis of Islam: the moment the archangel Gabriel flew to Earth to deliver Allah’s message to Muhammad, his chosen prophet.
This is how Muslims believe the Koran entered the world.
It began with an invocation: ‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionate [al-Rahman] and the Merciful [al-Rahim] . . .’ Al-Rahman and al-Rahim were feminine spirits etymologically linked to the word for ‘womb’.
And then:
‘Recite in the name of the Lord who created,
Created man from a clot of blood.
Recite: And your Lord is the Most Generous,
He who taught by the pen,
Taught man what he knew not.’
—
Muhammad fell silent, shocked. Those words were not his; that voice was not his.
It spoke from somewhere beyond him; the voice spoke as if through him.
An enormous angelic figure, Gabriel, appeared on the horizon ‘moving neither forward nor backward’, and gazed on Muhammad.
Wherever Muhammad turned, ‘towards whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before’.
The voice ceased. Muhammad, frightened and confused, rushed home to tell his wife what had happened.
The Islamic world celebrates this night as the ‘Night of Power’ – Laylat al-Qadr – venerated as the holiest event in the history of Islam.
For another twenty-three lunar years, Muhammad would receive further revelations from Allah. The clanging of bells and a strange buzzing sound often heralded the return of the booming voice.
At the sound, Muhammad would fall into a trance and yield to a force that seemed to possess him: ‘Never once did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me,’ he would later say.
—
Why had Allah chosen Muhammad? A reputedly illiterate orphan seemed an unpromising choice as the transmitter of the word of God.
Let’s look at him more closely. Muhammad was, by all accounts, an honest merchant raised by a respectable Quraysh family.
He had had the good fortune, at the age of twenty-five, to marry the woman he loved, the wealthy widow Khadijah, then fifteen years his senior, for whom he worked as a steward on trading trips to Syria. The couple would have four daughters.
Muhammad possessed an honest, intelligent face, a florid complexion and beaming black eyes, according to his earliest biographers.
His outstanding attribute was his sincerity, earning him the nickname ‘the trustworthy’ and ‘the faithful’. His devotion to virtue, his humility and his unusual air of inner peace touched and consoled all who met him.
He was intellectually curious, quietly charismatic and genuinely interested in the thoughts and doings of others.
He listened to anyone ‘who had something to say about the meaning of human life in this world’, according to the great historian of Islam, Marshall G. Hodgson.
Muhammad was ‘a man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spoke and thought’, wrote the 19th century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Carlyle. A ‘solid, brotherly, genuine man’, Muhammad chose silence ‘when there was nothing to be said’ and was ‘pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter’.
Muhammad had a bright sense of humour, unusual in a prophet. He was ‘amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even’, with ‘a good laugh in him’. His laugh came from deep within him, unlike men whose laughter was ‘as untrue as anything about them’.
—
Muhammad’s fascination with philosophy and the mystery of life began a decade before his epiphany in the cave.
At around thirty (the age Christ also began his mission), Muhammad craved answers to the great metaphysical questions: Who am I? What is this unfathomable thing I live in, which men name the universe? What is life? What is death? What am I to believe? What am I to do?
Such questions about ‘how to live a serious life in truth and purity’, as Hodgson puts it, crowded his mind.
Muhammad respected the rites and customs of the clans, he knew their gods and goddesses, and he understood the practice of endowing an inanimate object, a rock, a seed or an animal with spiritual meaning.
His need for isolation, however, for somewhere to pray and meditate in peace, spoke of his desire for something his society had been unable to provide.
A new spiritual direction for the Arab people was taking shape in Muhammad’s mind. Muhammad saw the futility and unwieldiness of worshipping multiple gods. He observed the Christians and Jews who passed through Mecca and admired their faith in one deity. Might not Allah serve as the god of the Arabs, Muhammad asked. Would Allah solve the problem of inherent evil, of how one should live in a world ravaged by temptation, greed, lust, deceit and cruelty?
The answer came to Muhammad during the Night of Power. From that point, his mission was sealed: to reveal to his people the words of Allah, and to enjoin them to worship Allah, to choose to submit their hearts and souls to Allah, the one true god.
—
Muhammad’s wife Khadijah believed him when he said the words he’d heard in the cave had emanated from Allah.
She and the family kept his secret until his prophecies flowed so plentifully that they wondered whether he should confide in the leaders of the Quraysh.
Until 615 Muhammad had preached only to family and trusted friends. That year Allah ordered him to deliver his message to the whole tribe, according to the revelations he heard.
The Quraysh elders listened in dumbfounded silence, and when a thirteen-year-old boy cried out that Muhammad was the ‘prophet of God’, they fell about laughing.
Muhammad persisted. He preached openly around Mecca. And gradually the people, at first women and the young, were drawn to him and his message.
The tribal elders were not among them. Their initial curiosity turned bitter. Muhammad had dared to mock their stone and wooden idols: ‘Who is this who pretends to be wiser than we all, who rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood?!’
Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib, his protector and ally, warned him not to offend the leaders of the tribe. Would he please stop insulting their idols, and avoid infuriating the keepers of the Kaaba and the superintendents of the old gods?
Muhammad would not. Even if the Sun and the Moon had ordered him to hold his peace, he said, he could not obey. He would tear the old gods from their plinths and dash them on the ground.
—
Allah’s revelations flowed as a series of surahs, or stanzas, as transmitted to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel.
The early surahs contended that the world would end and that God would come to judge them all. The souls of the faithful would be rewarded with eternal bliss, while the wicked would be doomed to the fires of Hell.
Muhammad revealed the new faith in the surah of sincerity, grounded in the oneness of Allah: ‘Say he is God, one God forever Not begetting, unbegotten, and having as equal none.’
The Muslims would – must – unify around that message, Muhammad preached.
Henceforth converts to Islam were obliged to utter the shahadah, the declaration of faith recited by all Muslims today: ‘I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.’
The Arabs came and listened to Muhammad and marvelled at what they heard. ‘He invited us to embrace his religion,’ an Arab leader was said to have told the Persian shah, many years later.
‘He spoke the truth and we lied. He grew in stature, and we became smaller. Everything he said came to pass. God instilled in our hearts belief in him and caused us to follow him.’
—
Muhammad’s revelations spoke directly to women, who flocked to listen to him. His sermons were leavened with strikingly sympathetic images of women in childbirth, in marriage, abandoned or violated, or having lost a child, as the historian Karen Armstrong observes.
He mourned a dead little girl, unwanted and murdered by her parents, infanticide being a common enough practice at the time, and one he condemned.
In time, rugged desert warriors lent their ears to Muhammad, and a fledgling faith coalesced around the revelations that Allah was sending to him. That faith would be called Islam, meaning ‘submission to God’.
Islam’s disciples – al-Muslimun or ‘one who has submitted to God’ – worshipped Allah as the one true deity and venerated Muhammad as his prophet: ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger,’ they believed. ‘ Allahu Akbar!’ they cried. ‘God is great!’
Next Thursday, 24th April 2025: ‘The seal of the prophets’
Selected sources and further reading:
Armstrong, K. (2007) Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time, London: Harper Perennial.
Carlyle, T. (1993) On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Hisham, I. (2022) The Biography of the Prophet, Independent.
Hodgson, M.G.S. (1977) The Venture of Islam (Vols. 1–3), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hourani, A. (1991) Islam in European Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ishaq, I. and Guillaume, A. (transl.) (1989) The Life of Mohammad, Oxford: OUP Pakistan.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Kennedy, H. (2008) The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Boston: De Capo Press.
Khaldun, I. and Rosenthal, F. (transl.) (2005) The Muqaddimah, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Moreman, C.M. (15 July 2016) ‘Rehabilitating the Spirituality of Pre-Islamic Arabia: On the Importance of the Kahin, the Jinn, and the Tribal Ancestral Cult’, Journal of Religious History.
Powers, D.S. (2015) ‘The Finality of Prophecy’ in Silverstein, A.J. and Stroumsa, G.G. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Rodinson, M. and Carter, A. (transl.) (1985) Mohammad, London: Penguin Books.