“But how could that be?” Huyayy responded with the rhetorical flourish that now filled me with rage. “You claim that your Qur’an and our Torah come from the same God. Surely they could not contradict each other if that were so.”

I looked at the Messenger and saw him struggling for an answer. He was accustomed to defending his claim to prophecy from the pagan Arabs who rejected his words as mere poetic fables. But no one had ever dissected the stories of the Qur’an to show that they differed from the Book of the Jews-whose God the Messenger claimed had sent him. I suddenly realized that Huyayy’s gambit was a grave threat not only to the Prophet’s credibility but to the entire basis of our faith.

The Prophet’s teachings had taken the ancient gods away from us, and we could not go back to them any more than an adult can revert to being an infant. But now, in one fell swoop, Huyayy had threatened to take away also the One God for whom we had suffered for so many years. He was like a thief who steals everything a man owns and then returns one night to take his life as well. If the Messenger was not who he claimed to be, we were worse off than the pagan Arabs who still believed in something, even if it was nothing more than a dream wrapped around rocks and carved pieces of wood.

Without Allah, we had nothing but despair and emptiness. Huyayy wanted to take away the very meaning of our lives.

And then I saw the Prophet go terribly still. His body began to shake violently as the familiar tremors set in. I jumped to my feet as he fell to the ground, convulsing wildly. Sweat poured down his face and neck. I pushed the men around him aside and threw my cloak over him as he shivered violently.

“Stay back!” I shouted with all my authority as Mother of the Believers, and the crowd that threatened to surround him and cut off the precious flow of air obeyed. Through the corner of my eye, I could see Huyayy shaking his head in amusement, as if he had just seen a monkey perform a clever trick.

The Messenger’s tremors calmed and then stopped altogether. His eyes opened and I saw peace and tranquillity on his face. Muhammad rose to his feet slowly, and there were murmurs of relief from his followers. He turned to face Huyayy, the confusion gone and confidence shining from his handsome features.

“Behold what God has revealed to me,” he said, and then recited new verses of the Qur’an with flowing harmony.

There is among them a section who distort the Book with their tongues

You would think it is a part of the Book, but it is not part of the Book

And they say, “That is from God,” but it is not from God.

It is they who tell a lie against God, and well they know it.

Huyayy looked at him with raised eyebrows, as if demanding an explanation of these strange words.

“What nonsense is this?” he said, but I heard the first hint of uncertainty in his voice.

“God has revealed to me a great secret that your forefathers have hidden from mankind for centuries,” the Prophet said, his voice raised for all to hear. “The words you claim to be revealed to Moses in the Torah have been changed. Your priests and rabbis have corrupted the Book, distorting the true teachings of the prophets. That is why He has sent the holy Qur’an now, to bring mankind out of darkness and into the light.”

There was a moment of utter silence, like the stillness of night before the break of dawn. And then the Masjid erupted in pandemonium as Muslims excitedly repeated his words and debated their meaning.

I saw the looks of distrust vanish, and the confusion was replaced by cries of subhan-Allah-Glory be to God.

Huyayy was flummoxed. In this one stroke, the Messenger had taken away his entire argument, and indeed had flipped it on its head. Suddenly the subtle differences between the Book of the Jews and the Qur’an were no longer evidence of forgery on Muhammad’s part. Instead they were evidence that the Jews had continued their tradition of rebelling against their prophets and had even altered their own scriptures to suit themselves. Their failures to uphold their own religion had stripped them of their pretentious claim to be God’s Chosen, and Allah had sent his Message to a new people who were not trapped in a web of falsehood. The Messenger’s claim to prophecy was actually strengthened by the distinctions between his faith and that of his predecessors who had corrupted God’s Word.

Huyayy had tried to destroy our religion, but he had given it new life. Islam was no longer an upstart faith forever destined to suck on the teat of another people’s past. It now held itself as a restoration of ancient truth, the original religion of Abraham and Moses that had been corrupted over the centuries. Huyayy had tried to show that Islam was a deviation from Judaism, and the Prophet instead had shown that Judaism was a deviation from Islam. Huyayy’s people would no longer be looked upon by their Arab neighbors as wise sages whom Muslims should defer to but as heretics who had broken their own covenant with God.

I saw his face betray anger as his stratagem fell apart. As the crowd turned to jeer at him, he squared his shoulders and left the Masjid before the rules of hospitality were forgotten.

I looked at the Prophet, who was beaming like a child. The Revelation had freed him from having to show any deference to the Jews and Islam could now spread on the strength of its own authenticity. The shackles of the past were lifted. Instead of being the moon, shining with the reflected light of the People of the Book, Islam was now the sun. It could burn with its own fire and blot out the other stars, the earlier religions that had sought to illuminate men’s hearts.

A FEW WEEKS LATER, the final break from our Jewish brothers came. The Messenger received a Revelation that the believers were no longer to face Jerusalem in their daily prayers. Instead we would kneel toward the Kaaba at Mecca, the House that had been built by Abraham hundreds of years before the Temple of Solomon rose. It was a welcome change, for our hearts had always belonged to the Sanctuary.

The mihrab, the small prayer niche of palm wood that indicated the direction of Jerusalem, was boarded up. A new mihrab facing south was carved. As the Muslims bowed to Mecca for the first time in years, I could feel the collective longing in their souls for the city we had lost.

As I bowed my forehead to the cold earth, a thought flashed through my mind that I knew must be in the breasts of my neighbors. Now that the center of Islam was Mecca, we could not let the pagans hold on to the Sanctuary.

Mecca had so kindly brought war to our doorstep, and perhaps the time had come to return the favor.

9

Umm al-Fadl, the wife of Abbas, bent down to lift a bucket of water from the sacred well of Zamzam. She passed along the wooden casket to Abu Rafi, a freed slave who had been quietly teaching her about Islam. After the defeat of Badr, more and more people in Mecca were interested in learning about this strange faith that could give three hundred men victory over a thousand. Like her husband, who was an uncle to Muhammad, she had been slow to give up on the traditions of her ancestors, but the deaths of Mecca’s ruling elite at Badr had shaken her stubborn respect for the old ways.

As Umm al-Fadl dropped another bucket into the dark waters below, she heard familiar voices approaching. Abu Sufyan, who was now the unchallenged ruler of Mecca, was conversing in an urgent tone with her hated brother-in-law Abu Lahab.

“Our caravans are no longer safe to travel north, even along the coast,” Abu Lahab said grimly. “Muhammad’s forces control the passes and they have vowed to seize any Meccan goods heading for Syria.”