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

heading right on out again. It took time to give and receive hospitality, to create and develop the face-to-face relationships that enabled trade, and to carry out the slow, elaborate ritual of negotiation. You settled in for the duration and made yourself at home, so much so that by the time Muhammad began work on the caravans, Meccan aristocrats owned estates in Egypt, mansions in Damascus, farms in Palestine, and date orchards in Iraq.
    Like all property owners, they were keenly aware of everything that might affect the value of their holdings, especially the see-saw of dominance as the Byzantines and Persians pushed each other’s boundaries of influence first one way, then the other. The geopolitical balance that had held for nearly eight hundred years was in question, and major cities like Damascus, where Byzantine control was becoming increasingly tenuous, were alive with rumor and speculation, conflicting claims and contradictory expectations.
    For Muhammad, there could be no better education than Damascus, one far more expansive than that of any modern schoolchild confined to a computer screen and the four walls of a room. For the first time he realized that no matter how cosmopolitan Mecca might be in its own terms, it was provincial in terms of this greater world to the north. Just as he was simultaneously an insider and an outsider in Mecca, so too his city was itself both inside and outside: relevant by virtue of its central position on the land route north from Yemen and the Indian Ocean, yet separated by that vast expanse of desert from the physical arena of Byzantine–Persian rivalry, in which Mecca played the role of a kind of giant, arid Switzerland unaligned with either side.
    Damascus was an ancient city even then, its history stretching back over fifteen hundred years. It was the most important hub on the western portion of the famed Silk Road, and its streets teemed with people from as far north as the Caspian Sea and as far east as India. Greeks, Persians, Africans, Asians, light skins and dark, melodiously soft languages and harshly guttural ones—all came together here in a fertile intermingling not only of goods but of cultures, and of the religious traditions that framed those cultures.
    Through the lingua franca of Aramaic, spoken throughout the Middle East in different but mutually comprehensible dialects, Muhammad was confronted with a kaleidoscope of sacredness. The stories treasured by those he encountered carried their history and their identity, and they were not shy about telling them. In the courtyards of synagogues and churches, in the markets and the great caravansaries, under the shade trees lining the canals that made Damascus especially enchanting to desert dwellers (the very idea of water in the streets!), these stories were told by soft-spoken elders, by young firebrand preachers, by poets and clerics, dreamers and philosophers. Their audiences sat rapt, nodding and swaying and joining in on the best-known lines as the heroic legends of Christians and Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus— dramas of the human and the divine—played out across the backdrop of history. Everyone sought to explain the world in their own way, all of them full of the passionate conviction that they and only they knew the truth. Yet even among those of the same faith, truth differed.
    The biblical stories told by the Jews of Medina, for instance, were not quite the same as those told by the Jews of Damascus. The Christian stories differed too, often with poignant variations. When Jesus defended the woman accused of adultery, one version had him saying: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” But another, still current in today’s Middle East, had him physically protecting the woman by shielding her with his body and adding two crucial words: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at me.”
    There were famed legends like that of the seven sleepers: seven boys walled up in a cave to die