Free Muhammad by Deepak Chopra

slipped them the smallest piece of silver I had. Why not? God sees every good deed.
    A tiny incident, but it preyed on my mind. Muhammad had wandered away from his wet nurse when her back was turned and headed straight for my gate.
    Under my bed I have many pages of the Bible stashedaway. It’s my habit to pull one out late at night and translate a few passages into Arabic. I also have another ritual that I keep to myself, for good reason. When I am puzzled over a mystery, large or small, I pull a sheet out at random, and whatever my eye falls upon I take to be a message. A few days after the boy appeared, I reached under the mattress and took out the first page my fingers touched. I shut my eyes and pointed to a passage at random, then took it over to the lamp to read:
    Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
    And his name shall be called Emmanuel.
    These were not meaningless words. The man who sold me this particular page was a Christian beggar who followed my caravan many years ago. I threw him some bread, and as he wolfed it down he told me about his savior. He felt blessed, even though he lived in the gutter and fought with stray dogs over garbage.
    The year the beggar sold me this scrap of scripture he had a terrible cough. He knew he wasn’t long for this world. This page from the Bible was precious to him, and the beggar wanted the message of his Messiah carried forward.
    So I knew that the virgin had conceived, and Emmanuel had come. It happened long ago, and the only reason to keep the page was to remind me of how the beggar’s face glowed when he spoke about his savior. Why, then, had my finger landed on this verse?
    Several years passed before a Jew came to Mecca whom I could trust. He plied gold and silver trinkets. His trade was so valuable that he bought his way out of the law that keptJews from entering Mecca. I gave him wine and showed him the passage. The name Emmanuel brought a crooked smile to his face.
    â€œDon’t trust your beggar,” he said. “What kind of a savior would allow someone to live like that?”
    The messiah is yet to come, he said, to kill the enemies of the Jews and save them all. I was too impatient to wait that long, I told him. In Arabia, idols can save you today, if you‘re gullible enough. I pressed the Jew for an explanation that meant something real. More than a bit exasperated, he said that for my understanding “Emmanuel” meant the “king of prophets.”
    Ah, well, that was a different story.
    Arabs put great store in prophets. If God pointed to the word “prophet” when I asked about Muhammad, something must be afoot. In Mecca some of the ignorant call me “the Jew,” but that’s just their crude way of insulting a servant of God. I have no religion. I am hanif, a believer without a faith, like a lone palm tree without an oasis.
    I did not approach Muhammad the whole time he was growing up. That was far too risky. I watched from afar. Old Muttalib, his grandfather, was still alive then. It was a tragedy that he had survived his youngest son, Abdullah, but he found solace in Muhammad. He would take the boy to the inns and prop him on his knee while holding forth. Muttalib had gotten too old for trading. He was half blind and growing weaker by the month. It was a common sight, he and the boy, who kept his eyes on the ground. No one had ever seen a child who wanted to keep to himself so much. But Muhammad was obedient, and when Muttalib wanted to show him off, he would stand up like a man, even in front of half a dozen drunk Quraysh in a dingy, smoky wine house.
    Then a peculiar thing happened. Many years later I was out walking and happened to see a figure crouched in an alley. The light was dim, but I made out Muhammad squatting on his heels. I nodded. He put his fingers to his lips and pointed at something on the ground. A mouse. The creature had been lured out into the open with a few grains of