MUHAMMED: A Story of the Last Prophet
Deepak Chopra
HarperOne
DEEPAK CHOPRA, a prolific writer of self-help books on health and spiritual matters, most of them bestsellers, has lately turned to writing novels based on the lives of the founders of religion. He has written about Buddha and Jesus; Muhammed is his third.
It was probably the trickiest one to write. Though using material from the Koran itself – and known facts and characters from the prophet’s life, as well as some of the scattered sayings of Muhammed that form the Hadith literature for the Sunni branch of Islam – he was aware how much debate there has been over the centuries about the thoughts and deeds of his subject.
Fictional form has allowed him the licence he would not otherwise have had in a straight biography.
At one point when I was already well into it, I wondered whether the book would have held my interest as a novel had the subject not been such an influential religious figure. The answer is no.
Later the book becomes gripping in its own right, in its descriptions of the battles between the new followers of Islam based in Medina, and the Meccans still clinging to their tribal gods and goddesses, all housed as idol statues in the Kaaba shrine.
But I am grateful to Chopra for so evocatively conveying the flavour of life in Muhammed’s day, and showing the obstacles he faced in restoring a monotheistic faith among the descendants of Abraham who had somehow lost it along the way.
Of course, he did much more. In the revelations and instructions dictated to him by the angel Gabriel over a period of some 20 years and encompassed in the Koran, he produced a blueprint for almost every aspect of life based on submission to Allah.
Every one of the novel’s 17 chapters is in the supposed words of a real person in Muhammed’s life, all touched by him in one way or another.
There is Bashira, the Christian hermit who is mystified by a cloud shading one particular wagon in a caravan from Mecca, discovers it contains the young Muhammed travelling with his uncle Abu Talib, and then remembers the old monk Celestius’s prediction that the sun’s hidden face would identify God’s last prophet.
Halimah, the wet nurse who cared for Muhammed during the first two years of his life, tells of his meeting as a slightly older boy with two spirits in the desert.
She thought they must have been jinns – supernatural invisible creatures. He says they weren’t: “Other beings live in the desert. You should know that.”
His older and first wife Khadijah (she was 40 and he 25 when they married), is attracted by his humility, his self-effacement, his fearlessness and his honesty at a time when, in her words, “an Arab cannot consider himself respectable unless he has skill in lying”.
So he had to be believed by his family when he informed them for the first time of his meeting with the angel in the hillside cave where he had been meditating.
Ordered by the angel to recite, he tried to resist three times and each time the angel threw his arms round him. Muhammed finally escaped and reached the summit of Mount Hira.
His third daughter Ruqayah quotes him saying: “My heart pounded, and my only thought was to throw myself off the mountain.”
But then he finds the angel towering above and all around him, and realises there is no escape from God Himself.
As someone brought up in the Christian tradition and for whom much of Chopra’s fictionalised account was new, I found myself responding to echoes of it in, and significant differences from, other religions.
For instance, Muhammed is quoted as saying: “Whoever has seen me, that same man has seen the truth.” But unlike Jesus, he is referring only to Allah, not himself.
Ali, Muhammed’s young cousin and first convert, asks how to know God. “When you know your own self, you will know God,” he is assured. It is a reply that could have come straight out of Hinduism.
Like the New Testament’s Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, Muslim tradition also has its street woman at a well. Under the guidance of Halimah, Yasmin repents and becomes a convert.
Most extraordinary of all is the story that the monotheistic believer Waraqah told Muhammed about his grand father Muttalib.
Just as Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God, so Muttalib swore an oath to sacrifice one of his sons if he were granted ten.
The name of his favourite, Abdullah, was on the arrowhead he plucked from ten in a quiver.
He was saved from having to cut Abdullah’s throat when a soothsayer suggested he rather pay 100 camels to the priests at the Kaaba in the name of Hubal, the moon god.
Unlike Isaac, Abdullah did not survive. He died mysteriously while returning from a trading trip to Syria, six months before his son Muhammed was born.
It is meaty stuff, and becomes even meatier when the warfare begins. The believers wonder what Muhammed’s attitude is towards killing your enemies in battle. Fatimah, his youngest daughter, reports back that Ali, her husband, heard the prophet quote Allah: “It is permitted to fight.”
Whether that included the right to behead your captives, which happened on at least one occasion, Chopra doesn’t say.
l Scott is a columnist and former editor of the Cape Times