We have already seen that Mohammed had informed Cadijah, and, of course, also his other disciples, that the chapters of the Koran were to be communicated to him by the angel Gabriel successively, and at his own discretion,—a master-stroke of policy evidently designed by the crafty Waraka to afford full time for the gradual concoction of the new creed, and worked out afterwards with such admirable skill by his illustrious pupil; indeed, the ingenuity of this provision may be said to be surpassed only by that of another saving maxim introduced into the angelic revelation, viz., that any text of the Koran is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage,—which, of course, at once removed the inconvenience of contradictory texts. Gabriel was accordingly now made to descend again to Mohammed, and to command him in the name of the Most High to throw off the reserve which he had hitherto maintained, and to announce his mission in the open light of day. In obedience to this pretended command, the prophet of Islam invited forty members of the race of Hashem to a banquet. He placed before them, it is said, a lamb and a bowl of milk, and, after the frugal meal, addressed them as follows:—“Friends and kinsmen, I offer you, and I alone can offer, the most precious of gifts—the treasures of this world and of the world to come. God has commanded me to call you to His service. Who among you will support my burthen? Who among you will be my companion and my vizir?” A long silence of doubt and amazement followed this extraordinary allocution; it was broken at last by the impetuous Ali, then in the fourteenth year of his age. “O prophet!” he cried, “I am the man: whosoever rises against thee, I will dash out his teeth, tear out his eyes, break his legs, rip up his belly. O prophet! I will be thy vizir over them.” This response on the part of one so young, and the fierce threats which it contained, excited the merriment of the assembly, which was increased when Mohammed fervently embraced his young cousin, and declared most seriously that he accepted his offer. Abu Taleb, the father of Ali, was ironically exhorted to respect the superior dignity of his son, and to take care not to provoke his potent wrath. The prince of Mecca took the matter in a more serious light: he advised his nephew to relinquish his design, which he characterised as impious. “Spare your remonstrances,” replied the son of Abdallah; “were you to place the sun on my right hand and the moon on my left, you should not divert me from my course.”
Braving the ridicule and the anger of the Hashemites, as well as the more determined and malignant hostility of the family Ommiyah and the other branches of the Koreish, Mohammed preached his doctrine henceforward publicly, with unflinching courage and untiring zeal, but for a long time with rather indifferent success, at least so far as his native city was concerned.
Mecca was the sacred city of Arabia,—the seat of the great national temple. The annual pilgrimage of the devout Arabians to the shrines of the Kaaba, brought wealth to the coffers of the inhabitants of the favored city; and it was but natural, therefore, that the tribe of Koreish, who held the lucrative office of custodians of the sacred temple, should behold with indignation and dismay the attempt made by one from among themselves to subvert a religion so profitable to their interests. No wonder, then, that when Mohammed, some time after the banquet of the Hashemites, ventured to proclaim his pretended mission before a general assembly of the Koreish, he was received with a perfect storm of disapprobation, and ignominiously pelted with mud and stones.
But the prophet of Islam was not the sort of man to be readily diverted from his fixed purpose. The indifferent success of his first public attempt rather increased his zeal than otherwise: in private converse and in public discourse, he incessantly urged the belief and worship of a sole Deity. He addressed impassioned orations to the citizens and pilgrims gathered within the holy precincts of the Kaaba, and the loudest clamor of his most violent antagonists did not always succeed in silencing his potent voice; and, indeed, after a time he had the satisfaction of beholding the gradual but steady increase of his little congregation of Unitarians. But the hostility of the Koreish assumed now a more decided and more dangerous character; and, had it not been for the powerful protection of Abu Taleb, who, though an uncompromising enemy to the attempted innovation of his nephew, continued to bestow on the son of Abdallah the affection of a parent, Mohammed would most probably have fallen a sacrifice to the rage of his enemies. But even the weight and influence of the Prince of Mecca could not always fully secure the safety of the apostle of the new creed, and Mohammed was repeatedly compelled to withdraw himself to various places of strength in the town and country. The more timid of his disciples were forced to seek in Ethiopia an asylum from the violence of religious faction. The conversion of his uncle Hamza, gave the new faith, most opportunely, a powerful support in the family of Hashem; a perhaps still more important acquisition was made in the person of the fierce and inflexible Omar, the Paul of Islam. On the other hand, the branch of Ommiyah, and the rest of the tribe of Koreish, resolved to put the children of Hashem under a species of religious and civil interdict of the most stringent nature, till they should consent to deliver the person of Mohammed to the justice of the insulted gods. A decree was passed to this effect, and was suspended in the Kaaba before the eyes of the nation; the prophet and his most faithful followers were besieged, and subjected to the greatest hardships. A hollow truce had scarcely restored the appearance of concord, when the death of Abu Taleb (621) left the prophet abandoned to the power of his enemies, and compelled him to seek a refuge in Tayef, whither he proceeded, attended by his faithful Zeid. His somewhat incautious attempts to propagate his creed in that land of grapes excited against him the indignation of the inhabitants, who pelted him with stones and drove him back to Mecca, where he was permitted to dwell yet a little while under the protection of an influential citizen. Three days after the death of Abu Taleb, an equally severe loss had befallen Mohammed—that of Cadijah, by which the ties which bound him to his native city were greatly loosened.
It is in this period that we may place the miraculous night of Mohammed’s ascension to heaven. Hitherto, Mohammed had been modestly content to place an intermediary between the Deity and himself. Probably reflecting, however, that the Jewish creed asserted direct and personal converse between Jehovah and Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, and that he, the greatest and last of the prophets, and whose doctrine was to supersede all others, could not well afford to stand inferior in this respect to his predecessors, and anxiously desirous, moreover, to gain over the Jews, whom he wished to believe him the promised Messiah—he put forth one of the wildest flights of fancy that ever issued even from an Oriental brain:—A mysterious animal, the Borak (the cherub of Islam), with human face, the ears of an elephant, the neck of a camel, the body of a horse, the tail of a mule, and the hoofs of a bullock, conveyed him at the dead of night from the temple of Mecca to that of Jerusalem, Gabriel and legions of angels attended him. From the temple of Jerusalem he was carried to the rock upon which Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac, and thence on the wings of Gabriel successively to the seven heavens, where he exchanged civilities with the patriarchs, the prophets, and the angels. He saw the heavenly Lotos tree, with the four springs under it, flowing with water, honey, milk, and wine. Of the three former he tasted; the last he left untouched, in obedience to his own precepts.[25] He saw, also, the heavenly tabernacle, pitched in a straight line above the Kaaba, and hidden by a golden veil. The angels sang, “There is only one God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God.” The same resounded from behind the veil, and the voice of the Lord was heard saying, “My servants speak the words of truth; Mohammed is indeed the most beloved of my prophets and apostles, the most pious of my servants, the most perfect of created beings.” Beyond this part, Mohammed alone was permitted to proceed; he passed through seventy thousand veils of light and darkness, each of them a thousand years thick, and with a space of a thousand years intervening between every two of them. At last he reached the green barrier of green light with emerald lustre; he passed the veil of the Divine unity, and approached within two bow-shots of the throne of the Almighty, where he prostrated himself and adored. The hand of the Lord touched his shoulder, which made a sensation of cold come over him that pierced him to the heart. God commanded him now to impose upon his disciples the daily obligation of fifty prayers; which Mohammed would appear to have looked upon as an intolerable burthen, since he pleaded hard for an alleviation of it.[26] By his supplications he succeeded to reduce it, step by step, at last to the number of five, viz., one prayer at daybreak, one at noon, one in the afternoon, one in the evening, and one at the first watch of the night; but from these five obligatory prayers there was to be no dispensation of business or pleasure, of time or place. In this most important conversation, the Lord enjoined or sanctioned, also, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the bestowal of a certain percentage of the property or revenue of a believer for the relief of the indigent and unfortunate, and the thirty days fast during the month of Ramadan. Then was given to Mohammed, with one drop from the throne, all wisdom, science, and knowledge of the ages past and the time to come; and the angelic choirs recited the two articles of belief, “There is only one God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God.” Mohammed was then finally dismissed; he again descended to Jerusalem, remounted the Borak, and returned to Mecca, having thus performed in the tenth part of a night the journey of many thousand years. Verily, in this precious tale we do not know which to admire most,—whether the audacity of the impostor who could concoct, or the gross credulity of the people who could believe it! Indeed, many endeavours have been made by some of the more rational of the Mohammedan doctors to deny that the prophet of Islam ever ventured to palm off this extravagant story upon his followers; and it has been attempted to make it appear that the narration of it relates to a mere dream or vision. These apologists overlook, however, the important fact that this pretended vision was put forward with all the authority of a divine revelation. Mohammed himself encouraged as much as in him lay the belief in the actual occurrence of the fact; which, with the Sonnites, indeed, is an article of faith, the pious Al Jannabi, among others, declaring that to deny this nocturnal journey of the prophet is to disbelieve the Koran.
Abu Sophian, the chief of the branch of Ommiyah, and the mortal foe of the line of Hashem, had succeeded to the principality of the republic of Mecca. This man resolved to bring the long-pending contest between the Koreish and the self-appointed apostle of the new creed to a speedy and decisive issue. He convened an assembly of the Koreishites and their allies, in which the death of Mohammed was resolved. To baffle the vengeance of the Hashemites, it was agreed that the guilt of his blood should be divided among the several tribes. A spy (duly converted afterwards into an angel by the crafty prophet) revealed the odious plot to Mohammed, who resolved on flight as the only means of escape from the malice of his enemies. In the night of the 13th September, 622,[27] Mohammed, accompanied by his friend Abu Bekr, escaped silently from his house, whilst the assassins, who were watching at the door, were deceived by the figure of Ali, who, covered with the green vestment of the apostle, reposed on the bed, securing thus, at the risk of his own life, the safe retreat of his illustrious and beloved cousin. When the deception practised upon them was at length revealed, the Koreishites dismissed the heroic youth unharmed.
Mohammed and the companion of his flight took refuge first in the cave of Thor, about three miles from Mecca. Three days they remained concealed there, receiving every evening from the son and daughter of Abu Bekr a supply of food, and intelligence of the movements of their enemies. The Koreish explored every hiding-place in the neighbourhood of the city, with the exception of the cave in which the fugitives were hidden, and which the pious Moslem doctors would have us believe was protected from their scrutiny by the providential deceit of a spider’s web and a pigeon’s nest. When the first rigor of the pursuit had somewhat abated, the fugitives left the protection of their cave, and mounted their camels to pursue their flight to Yathreb, called afterwards Medina, or Medina al Nabi (i.e. city of the prophet). On the road, they were overtaken by the emissaries of the Koreish, who were, however, diverted from their murderous purpose by the eloquent appeals of the prophet: indeed it is stated by the Arabian historians that one of his pursuers passed over to him with seventy followers, and attended him to Medina.
The city of Yathreb was inhabited chiefly by the tribes of the Charegites and the Awsites, and by two colonies of Jews, of a sacerdotal race, and who had introduced among their Arab fellow-citizens a taste for science and religion, which had gained Medina the name of the City of the Book. Now whether it might be that, owing to this circumstance, the preaching of Mohammed had made a deeper impression upon the pilgrims and merchants from Medina than upon his own fellow-citizens in Mecca; or that the Yathrebites, who were envious of the flourishing commerce of the latter city, would gladly avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by the bigoted zeal of the Koreish to attract to their own city the exiled disciples of Mohammed, and in fine perhaps that illustrious man himself—certain it is that at an early period of Mohammed’s mission, some of the noblest citizens of Medina, in a pilgrimage to the Kaaba, had been converted by his preaching, and had upon their return home diffused among their fellow-citizens the belief of God and his prophet. The Charegites and Awsites had hitherto lived in perpetual feud, interrupted only by temporary truces, which were broken on the slightest provocation. By the exhortations of these missionaries, the two tribes were henceforth united in faith and love. Ten Charegites and two Awsites were despatched to Mecca, where they held a secret and nocturnal interview with Mohammed on a hill in the suburbs; they protested for themselves and in the name of their wives, their children, and their absent brethren, an inviolable attachment to the person and doctrine of the prophet. At a later period, shortly before Mohammed’s forced departure from Mecca, seventy-three men and two women of Medina came to Mecca, and held a solemn conference with Mohammed, his kinsmen, and his disciples, on the same spot where the interview with the first embassy had taken place. They promised the prophet in the name of their city that should he be compelled to leave Mecca, they would receive him as their prince, and would place their lives and fortunes at his service for the defence and propagation of the new faith preached by him. Mohammed on his part promised never to abandon his new allies, even though the Koreish should repent and should recall him; he declared their blood to be as his blood, their ruin as his ruin, their friends as his friends, their foes as his foes; should they fall in his service, Paradise was to be their reward. A solemn league and covenant was made there and then between the two parties; this was ratified by the people of Medina, who, with the exception of the Jews, unanimously embraced the profession of Islam.
It was accordingly to Medina that the exiled prophet directed his steps. After a rapid though perilous journey along the sea-coast, he reached Medina sixteen days after his flight from Mecca. He was received with acclamations of loyalty and devotion; his disciples who at various times had fled from Mecca, gathered round his person. To eradicate the seeds of jealousy that might spring up between the Moslems of his native city, and his new allies of Medina, he judiciously established a holy brotherhood between his principal followers, coupling always a Mohagerian, or fugitive of Mecca, with an Ansar, or auxiliary of Medina. It so falling out that Ali found himself without a peer, the prophet declared himself the companion and brother of the noble youth.