The messenger and the message

In today's febrile cultural and religious climate, what project could be more fraught than writing a biography of Muhammad? The worldwide protests at The Innocence of Muslims, 14 minutes of trashy provocation posted on YouTube, are a terrible reminder to the would-be biographer that the life story of the prophet of Islam is not material about which one is free to have a "take". Lesley Hazleton's First Muslim is a book written by a white woman of dual American and British citizenship, published in America more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. For many believers it is already an object of suspicion, something to be defended against, in case it should turn out to be yet another insult. To others this book offers a welcome chance to read that life story in a more familiar form than the Islamic sources, a window into the parallel world where it is worth killing and dying to preserve the Prophet's aura of holiness. Bigots looking to confirm their prejudices will find The First Muslim a disappointment: Ms Hazleton approaches her subject with scrupulous respect. She blogs as "the Accidental Theologist", where she describes herself as "a psychologist by training, a Middle East reporter by experience, an agnostic fascinated by the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect". This is a writer who is working to dispel contradictions, not sharpen them.

Where does this leave the reviewer? Embroiled, unfortunately. A few days after I was assigned this book, the Darul Uloom in Deoband, a conservative Islamic seminary, called for me to be barred from speaking at this year's Jaipur Literature Festival. At last year's event I read an excerpt from The Satanic Verses, still banned in India, to protest the death threat that had forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his scheduled appearance. I was one of four authors who gave such readings. Lawyers and festival organisers advised us to leave town (and in my case India). Seven police complaints were brought against us. Since I have, as another Muslim group put it in their own press statement, "hurt the sentiments of the community", some people will find my judgement of this book a priori worthless, or suspect. Reader, beware.

The story of Muhammad is extraordinary. Orphaned in childhood in Mecca, an Arabian trading hub, he rose to be the trusted business agent and later husband of Khadija, a wealthy merchant woman. This respectable citizen took to climbing into the mountains overlooking the town, where he would spend nights in solitary meditation. Eventually he received a revelation, in the form of the voice of the angel Gabriel, who began to dictate the verses of the Koran. As the messenger of this radical new form of monotheism, he disrupted the power structure and eventually led his followers out of Mecca to nearby Medina, where he took full political control and began military operations against the rulers of his birthplace. By the time of his death, Islam had been embraced throughout the Arabian Peninsula and was spreading farther afield.

The First Muslim tells this story with jaunty immediacy. Bardic competitions are "the sixth-century equivalent of poetry slams". The section of the Koran known as the Sura of the Morning has "an almost environmentalist approach to the natural world". Theological ideas and literary tropes are "memes" that can go "viral". In the terms it sets itself, The First Muslim succeeds. It makes its subject vivid and immediate. However, its terms are those of the popular biography, and this creates a tension the book never quite resolves. It is not a scholarly work. Factual material from eighth- and ninth-century histories is mixed with speculation about Muhammad's motives and emotions. A forest of conditionals surrounds such speculation, as Ms Hazleton tries to intuit what Muhammad "must have felt" or "surely would have" done.

Muhammad's transition from humble messenger to political leader forms the substance of the story. The factional struggles, political assassinations, night flights and pitched battles that surround it are reminiscent of the experience of another prophet, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith, as is the role of revelation in exonerating sexual impropriety - in Muhammad's case to allay suspicions of infidelity surrounding his third wife, Aisha. Despite the orthodox Muslim insistence that Muhammad is irreproachable, some of his actions are deeply troubling. Even Ms Hazleton finds it hard to put a positive spin on the mass beheading of up to 900 surrendered men of the Jewish Qurayza tribe, losers in one round of the factional battles for control of Medina.

However accurate her book, Ms Hazleton has to confront the question of the authenticity of religious revelation. Her interpretation of "whatever happened up there on Mount Hira" is to stress Muhammad's "experience" of revelation while sidestepping its objective existence. In various places, she hints that the Koran and the Hadith have a textual history. A fuller examination of these points would have been fascinating, but it would have forced her to embrace the perilous notion that the Koran, instead of being the revealed word of God, might be a text like any other. In evading such material Ms Hazleton hopes to avoid giving offense, she cannot escape the fact that in our time even a well-meaning and fundamentally decent book such as this can never be innocent, because it cannot stand outside our violent recent history.

©2013 The New York Times News Service

THE FIRST MUSLIM
The Story of Muhammad
Lesley Hazleton
Riverhead Books; 320 pages; $27.95