Read Online Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online
Authors: Salman Rushdie
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Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough. But he gained much more than that. He learned a world. And in that world one of the world’s great religions was being born.
They were nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall. They were still uneasy in their new urbanized lives, and the changes made many of them unhappy.
A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was changing now. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred.
At the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses, Al-Lat, Al-Manat, and Al-Uzza. Winged goddesses, like exalted birds. Or angels. Each time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city gates, or came back through them, they paused at one of the temples and made an offering. Or, to use modern language: paid a tax. The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the temples and much of their wealth came from these “offerings.” The winged goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city, of the urban civilization that was coming into being.
In the building known as the Cube or Kaaba in the center of town there were idols of hundreds of gods. One of these statues, by no means the most popular, represented a deity called al-Lah, meaning
the god
, just as al-Lat was
the goddess
. Al-Lah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize, he wasn’t a rain god or a wealth god or a war god or a love god, he was just, vaguely, an everything god. It may be that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity. People making offerings to gods usually did so for specific reasons, the health of a child, the future of a business enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. They preferred gods who were experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity. However, al-Lah was about to become more popular than any pagan deity had ever been.
The man who would pluck al-Lah from near obscurity and become his Prophet, transforming him into the equal, or at least equivalent, of the Old Testament God
I Am
and the New Testament’s Three-in-One, was Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family (which had fallen, in his childhood, upon hard times), an orphan living in his uncle’s house. As a teenager he began to journey with that uncle, Abu Talib, on his trading journeys to Syria. On those journeys he almost certainly encountered his first Christians, adherents of the Nestorian sect, and heard their stories, many of which adapted Old and New Testament stories to fit in with local conditions. According to the Nestorians, for example, Jesus Christ was born in an oasis, under a palm tree. Later, in the Qur’an, the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Muhammad the
sura
known as “Maryam,” Mary, in which Jesus is born under a palm tree, in an oasis.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah grew up with a reputation as a skilled merchant and honest man and at the age of twenty-five this brought him a marriage proposal from an older, wealthier woman, Khadijah, and in the next fifteen years he was successful in business and happy in his marriage. However, he was clearly a man with a need for solitude, and for many years he would spend weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mount Hira. When he was forty years old, the Angel Gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him to
They were nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall. They were still uneasy in their new urbanized lives, and the changes made many of them unhappy.
A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was changing now. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred.
At the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses, Al-Lat, Al-Manat, and Al-Uzza. Winged goddesses, like exalted birds. Or angels. Each time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city gates, or came back through them, they paused at one of the temples and made an offering. Or, to use modern language: paid a tax. The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the temples and much of their wealth came from these “offerings.” The winged goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city, of the urban civilization that was coming into being.
In the building known as the Cube or Kaaba in the center of town there were idols of hundreds of gods. One of these statues, by no means the most popular, represented a deity called al-Lah, meaning
the god
, just as al-Lat was
the goddess
. Al-Lah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize, he wasn’t a rain god or a wealth god or a war god or a love god, he was just, vaguely, an everything god. It may be that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity. People making offerings to gods usually did so for specific reasons, the health of a child, the future of a business enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. They preferred gods who were experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity. However, al-Lah was about to become more popular than any pagan deity had ever been.
The man who would pluck al-Lah from near obscurity and become his Prophet, transforming him into the equal, or at least equivalent, of the Old Testament God
I Am
and the New Testament’s Three-in-One, was Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family (which had fallen, in his childhood, upon hard times), an orphan living in his uncle’s house. As a teenager he began to journey with that uncle, Abu Talib, on his trading journeys to Syria. On those journeys he almost certainly encountered his first Christians, adherents of the Nestorian sect, and heard their stories, many of which adapted Old and New Testament stories to fit in with local conditions. According to the Nestorians, for example, Jesus Christ was born in an oasis, under a palm tree. Later, in the Qur’an, the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Muhammad the
sura
known as “Maryam,” Mary, in which Jesus is born under a palm tree, in an oasis.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah grew up with a reputation as a skilled merchant and honest man and at the age of twenty-five this brought him a marriage proposal from an older, wealthier woman, Khadijah, and in the next fifteen years he was successful in business and happy in his marriage. However, he was clearly a man with a need for solitude, and for many years he would spend weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mount Hira. When he was forty years old, the Angel Gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him to
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