Free The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad by Lesley Hazleton Page A

figure on the well-traveled trade routes was to be lengthy and hard-earned. He had much to learn, and a whole world to learn it from.
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    s a glance at the extent of foreign news coverage in The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times still demonstrates, successful traders need information. Meccan merchants had to be politically and culturally well informed, with up-to-date information on what was happening both en route and at their destination. And they needed to be very skilled at diplomacy.
    It began with the need to assure safe conduct across the territories of numerous tribes and tribal confederations. Such assurances had to be negotiated and paid for in a desert form of a toll, or basically, protection money. Permission was requested to use local springs or wells, arrangements made to buy provisions en route, gifts offered to the sheikhs and chieftains who could award such permission and make such arrangements. And all this entailed not only a widespread network of contacts but detailed knowledge of tribal politics: who had the authority to guarantee protection, who was in ascendance and whose power was fading, who was newly in alliance with whom, which alliance had recently fallen apart over issues of grazing or water rights. The caravan leaders needed to know whose word they could rely on, especially when a man’s word truly was his bond. Agreements were signed not in writing but with hands clasped, forearm against forearm, constituting a solemn pledge on which rested the most important thing to any man of the time: his reputation. But some reputations were justified and others less so, and the difference could be that between life and death.
    Once the caravan was under the formal protection of the local chieftain or sheikh, the merchants were guests in his territory, to be protected as though they were in his tent or his palace. Any attack on them by rogue elements like a raiding party from a rival tribe would be dealt with as though the sheikh himself had been attacked. He would assign guides to accompany the caravan through his territory, and these men could read the desert as you would a book. The seemingly endless expanse of stark rock, scrub steppe, and sharp-edged lava fields was neither empty nor monotonous to their experienced eyes, but as full of signs and recognizable landmarks as any city neighborhood today.
    They needed no maps: the land was in their heads. They knew exactly which well held the freshest water in which season, and where to find winter pools—the depressions that collected runoff from winter rains and held it for a few weeks at a time. Much as sailboats tack with the prevailing wind, they led the caravans on routes that angled from one watering spot to the next, sometimes within a day’s ride of each other, more often two or three. Usually they’d arrive at an encampment of nomads by an underground spring, or a few scraggly trees and a rough stone hut marking the presence of a brackish well. But occasionally there’d be the luxury of one of the oases strung like beads widely spaced on a chain necklace: permanent settlements like Medina, Khaybar, Tayma, and Tabuk on the northbound route from Mecca, where spring-fed date plantations stretched for miles, long ribbons of green hidden in deep valleys.
    The arduousness of these month-long treks was more than compensated for by their profitability. By Muhammad’s time, Meccan merchants had expanded their business through an area larger than Europe, reaching north and south in large sweeping arcs encompassing Syria and Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Ethiopia. And wherever they went, they were not strangers. They put down roots in the lands and cities they traded with, for to be a trader at that time was to be a traveler, and to be a traveler was to be a sojourner.
    They did not travel eight hundred miles to do a kind of sixthcentury version of a pilot’s touch-and-go at Damascus airport. There was no dropping in, shaking hands on a deal, and