Part One Orphan Chapter One If he weren't standing lonely vigil on the mountain, you might say that there was no sign of anything unusual about him. The earliest sources describe him with infuriating vagueness for those of us who need images. "He was neither tall nor short," they say. "Neither dark nor fair." "Neither thin nor stout." But here and there, specific details slip through, and when they do, they are surprising. Surely a man spending night after night in solitary meditation would be a gaunt, ascetic figure, yet far from being pale and wan, he had round, rosy cheeks and a ruddy complexion. He was stockily built, almost barrel-chested, which may partly account for his distinctive gait, always "leaning forward slightly as though he were hurrying toward something." And he must have had a stiff neck, because people would remember that when he turned to look at you, he turned his whole body instead of just his head. The only sense in which he was conventionally handsome was his profile: the swooping hawk nose long considered a sign of nobility in the Middle East. On the surface, you might conclude that he was an average Meccan. At forty years old, the son of a man he had never seen, he had made a far better life for himself than had ever seemed possible. The child born an outsider within his own society had finally won acceptance, and carved out a good life despite the odds against him. He was comfortably off, a happily married business agent with the respect of his peers. If he was not one of the movers and shakers of his prosperous city, that was precisely why people trusted him to represent their interests. They saw him as a man with no axe of his own to grind, a man who would consider an offer or a dispute on its merits and decide accordingly. He had found a secure niche in the world, and had earned every right, in middle age, to sit back and enjoy his rise to respectability. So what was he doing alone up here on one of the mountains that ringed the sleeping city below? Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night? There was a hint, perhaps, in his clothing. By now he could certainly have afforded the elaborate embroidered silks of the wealthy, but his clothing was low-key. His sandals were worn, the leather thongs sun-bleached paler than his skin. His homespun robe would be almost threadbare if it hadn't been so carefully patched, and it was hardly enough to shield him against the night-time cold of the high desert. Yet something about the way he stood on the mountainside made the cold irrelevant. Tilted slightly forward as though leaning into the wind, his stance seemed that of someone who existed at an angle to the earth. Certainly a man could see the world in a different way up here. He could find peace in the silence, with just the soughing of the wind over the rock for company, far from the feuds and gossip of the city with its arguments over money and power. Here, a man was merely a speck in the mountain landscape, his mind free to think and reflect, and then finally to stop thinking, stop reflecting, and submit itself to the vastness. Look closer and you might detect the shadow of loneliness in the corners of his eyes, something lingering there of the outsider he had once been, as though he were haunted by the awareness that at any moment everything he'd worked so long and hard for could be taken away. You might see a hint of that same mix of vulnerability and resoluteness in his mouth, the full lips slightly parted as he whispered into the darkness. And then perhaps you'd ask why contentment was not enough. Did the fact that it had been so hard-earned make him unable to accept it as a given, never to be secure in his right to it? But then what would? What was he searching for? Was it a certain peace within himself, perhaps? Or was it something more--a glimpse, maybe just an intimation, of something larger? One thing is certain: by Muhammad's own account, he was completely unprepared for the enormity of what he would experience on this particular night in the year 610. Excerpted from The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad by Lesley Hazleton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
