Muhammad Series

The Revelation and Ramifications

Muhammad was about forty years old when he began to make a regular spiritual retreat. Each year Muhammad retired with his wife and family to a cave on Mount Hira in the Meccan valley. This was a common practice at the time: Muhammad spent the month in prayer and distributed alms and food to the poor who came to visit him during this period.

In the year 610, Muhammad had an experience that would ultimately change the history of the world. Muhammad was torn from sleep in his mountain cave and felt himself overwhelmed by a devastating divine presence. He found the divinely inspired words of a new scripture pouring from his mouth.

Muhammad would express this experience of the ineffable by saying that he had been visited by an angel, who had appeared beside him in the cave and given him orders to ‘Recite!’ Muhammad found himself speaking the very first words.

Recite in the name of thy Lord who created! [Except in Arabic]

Muhammad came to himself in a state of terror and revulsion. Rushing from the cave, be began to climb to the summit of the mountain to fling himself to his death. But on the mountainside he had another vision of a being. This angel was no pretty, naturalistic being such as sometimes appears in Christian art. In Islam, Gabriel is the Spirit of Truth, the means by which God reveals Himself to man. This was an overwhelming, towering experience of a Presence  from which escape was impossible. In Christianity it has been described as the mysterium terribile et fascinans and in Judaism it has been called kaddosh, ‘holiness’, the terrifying otherness of God.

The Koran: New Literary Form

The Word of God had been spoken for the first time in Arabia. God had finally revealed Himself to the Arabs in their own language. The holy book would be called the Koran: the Recitation. Muhammad claimed for twenty-three years he received direct messages from God, The Koran did not descend from heaven all at once, like the Torah or the Law, which was revealed to Moses. As each new message was revealed to Muhammad, he recited it aloud, the Muslim learned it by heart and those who could wrote it down. Muhammad is often called the ummi prophet, the unlettered prophet, and his illiteracy stresses the miraculous nature of his inspiration.

Muhammad had discovered an entirely new literary form, which some people were ready for but which other found shocking and disturbing. It was so new and so powerful in its effect that its very existence seemed a miracle, beyond the reach of normal human attainment believing that divine inspiration alone could account for this extraordinary language. Muhammad as a poet and prophet, and the Koran as text and theophany, is one of the most striking instances of the kinship of the religious and the artistic experience.

The extraordinary beauty of the recited Arabic touched something deeply buried and resonated with the unconscious longings and aspirations of those who heard it. Arabic is a language that is especially difficult to translate. The most beautiful lines of Shakespeare frequently sound banal in another language because little of the poetry can be conveyed in a foreign idiom.

He brought the Koran to light, verse by verse, sura by sura, and recited it to the people. It was able to break through their prejudices, anxieties and ideological objections to an imaginative, spiritual and social solution that nobody had thought of before but which answered their deepest longings and aspirations.

Muhammad never had any idea that he was founding a new world religion. Muhammad had broken through to a new level of consciousness, where he could recognize what had gone wrong in his society, and was little by little providing the Arabs with their own special solution.