When God Answers
THE STARTLING ADVENT of the Quran’s revelation, in about 613 c.e., announcing the prophethood of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, in Makkah, immediately set off an unremitting tide of anxiety and spiritual awakening among his people, the Quraysh, which sparked a profound and virtually illimitable obsession with questioning the traditional Arabian way of life. Nearly everything about the emergent experience was strange to “authentic” Arabness. No Arab (since hazy antiquity) had professed himself a prophet. No culturally paradigmatic Book—and
expressly one so clearly Arabic and arrestingly eloquent as the Quran—had ever appeared in the decisively defining tongue of this still nomadic-minded people, whose community (ummah) had come to be objectively identified in the human setting of Arabia by its complete scriptural
illiteracy (al-umiyyûn). No heavenly revelation, in any form, had reclaimed provincial Arab purpose in the larger world since Ishmael, alayhe salam, and his father, Abraham, alayhe
salam, raised the Ka‘bah in ancient millennia. And no Arab heart had conceived of a belief, an idea, even a chimera, that would have remotely moved the individual—any individual—to the center of human existence, independent of familial connection or tribal association, let alone envisaged
a religion that would declare all of humanity—irrespective of language, lineage, or affluence—a single family under one, sole, unseen God, without likeness, to whom every individual human being was immediately and ultimately responsible. Here, of course, is the new call’s single-most “novel” assertion in the ancient Arabian milieu: That their provincial idols—like every other graphic, iconic, or mental commingling of God or His divinity with His creation, whether of physical or metaphysical human manufacture—must go. The new faith’s by-word, Lâ ilâha illa-Allâh, there is no god but the God—as the compatriots of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, directly and correctly apprehended—spelled the end of the legitimacy of Arabian life, and of
every inference that fed into the fountainhead of their particularized tribal ethos or that flowed from it. More significantly (though this could not have been fathomed by the Quraysh in those early years)
it permanently introduced into the world’s belief matrix a dynamic of “denialin-perpetuity” of the right of man to fashion ethnocentric isms and self-verifying idols in the name of the progression of the species (whatever the category of human estimation by which this claim would be legitimized) in order to lend them the force of missionary religion. In the terminology of the Quran, man is vicegerent, not sovereign, over the earth, acting on the authority of an imperial God. Thus the Quran not only challenged the nature, bases, and assumptions of the old values regime that the Arabs felt and knew but roused them to conceptions, eventualities, and possibilities they could never have imagined. So inveterate had the particularized mythos seeding their
worldview become, and so intuitive their tribal impulse that, quite literally, most of their leading political figures and controlling cultural alliances could not accede to, therefore, would not believe in, something so “radically” unifying, universalizing, and, in its way, leveling as the invitation to the culture of spiritual, social, and moral “oneness” (tawhîd) that the Prophet, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, was now openly issuing in the households and fairgrounds of Makkah. Few of the Quraysh accepted the validity of their clansman’s elevation to the status of God’s Messenger or the veracity of his divine communication, the Quran. Motivated by a highly self-interested mercantile oligarchy
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