There are patterns in the immense embroideries of history that may seem to bear a resemblance to one another and yet, on examination, are seen to be stitched with quite different threads. We cannot draw a comparison between the ancient arguments of Muhammad and the rabbis of Medina and those that today separate Jews and Arabs. The underlying animosities are not at all the same. Muhammad had a mystical revelation that he believed marked him as a prophet in the line of Moses and the Hebrew prophets. The Jews acted to defend, as they always have, the authority of their revealed Scriptures. They looked at him with the same caution that the Church today employs toward candidates for canonization, and they turned him down.

Muhammad and the rabbis lived in Byzantine times, when an immense Christian civilization was tearing itself to pieces in religious dissensions that seem to us now to be altogether foolish. The word jihad is Arabic, but holy wars and holy massacres were Byzantine. When Muhammad with vigorous dispute, and later with murder and mayhem, pitted himself against Jews, Christians, and pagan Arabs, he was behaving like a man of his time -- taking strong measures to correct as speedily as possible people's wrong attitudes about God. He did not know any better than the Hebrew prophets or the Christian fathers that Judgment Day was still a good many centuries off.

Of mankind's greatest religious teachers, Muhammad is the closest to us in time. The traditions that record his life, deeds, and conversations were written by scholars with almost modern historical consciences. The events related in this book are based largely on the account of the "traditionist" Ibn Ishaq, whose information came from the sons and grandsons of people who had known Muhammad or his close associates, and he meticulously recorded the names and genealogy of every informant. Although it is obvious that some fabrications have crept into his account and those of the other traditionists, the mortal shape of the Prophet still arises from them more clearly than we can ever discern Moses, Christ, or Gautama Buddha.

Moreover these traditions reveal to us very accurately the life of Arabia in the seventh century after Christ, and it is here we see a parallel between Muhammad's times and our own that is far more significant than any political accident. It is the psychic crack that strikes now and then between generations, a seismic disturbance in time as it sweeps on. We call it the generation gap. Such a withdrawal between a parent generation and its offspring happened in Buddha's day, when boys of the upper middle class chose to leave their comfortable homes to become monks and beggars. "I thought," says Buddha in a very old account of his life, "oppressive is life in a house, a place of dust . . . while yet a boy, a black-haired lad in the prime of youth, in the first stage of my life, while my unwilling mother and father wept with tear-stained faces, I cut off my hair and beard and went forth from a house to a houseless life."

Except for a reversed ceremony with hair and beard, the scene could have happened today.

Christ also left His home abruptly, and He said, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matt. 10:34-35).

The gap struck quite recently, some decades before the Russian revolution, when the children of aristocrats and serfs left their homes to become a horde of radical philosophers, even violent assassins and bomb throwers -- the Nihilists.

Such breaks with tradition herald profound social change, heady to the young but painful to the old, who feel their lives nullified. Once the spasm has passed, the dry historical record takes hardly any notice of it, as if insensible to the emotions once aroused. Yet, whenever we read of a battle fought by Muhammad and his little band of Muslims against overwhelming odds, we may imagine those small forces composed of youths, runaways, facing older men suddenly fainthearted and sorry that they had come to slay their own young. Again and again, the story of Muhammad's life shows us evidence of this profound division, of which he was a reflection as well as a leader. When a Meccan hero spanned the ditch at Medina, and Ali, in his twenties, came from the Muslim ranks to meet him in combat, the older man called out, "Stand away, son of my brother, send forth someone older than you, for I don't want to kill you."

Ali said, "But I want to kill you!" And he did.

Muhammad just as ruthlessly cut his folk away from the primitive past and set them on a path that is still well marked and serviceable for modern times. He was not young when he did this but middle-aged. It is unfair to judge him, as Western scholars have often done, against the values of the later world he helped to create instead of the one in which he grew up. Despite what the rabbis of Medina said, he was an Old Testament figure, whether one sees him as prophet or patriarch.

Perhaps now that we have come so far along the road toward Judgment Day, we can look at Muhammad with simple wonder that such a strange thing can happen. That a man can stand in a cave and talk to God -- and be answered.

Copyright © 1975 by Betty Kelen