20 DESTINY DISRUPTED
more thunderous and terrifying. At home, he told Khadija what had hap-
pened, and she assured him that he was perfectly sane, that his visitor had
really been an angel, and that he was being called into service by God. "I
believe in you," she said, thus becoming Mohammed's first follower, the
first Muslim.
At first, Mohammed preached only to his intimate friends and close
relatives. For a time, he experienced no further revelations, and it de-
pressed him: he felt like a failure. But then the revelations began to come
again. Gradually, he went public with the message, until he was telling
people all around Mecca, "There is only one God. Submit to His will, or
you will be condemned to hell"-and he specified what submitting to the
will of God entailed: giving up debauchery, drunkenness, cruelty, and
tyranny; attending to the plight of the weak and the meek; helping the
poor; sacrificing for justice; and serving the greater good.
Among the many temples in Mecca was a cube-shaped structure with a
much-revered cornerstone, a polished black stone that had fallen out of the
sky a long time ago-a meteor, perhaps. This temple was called the Ka'ba,
and tribal tales said that Abraham himself had built it, with the help of his
son Ishmael. Mohammed considered himself a descendant of Abraham
and knew all about Abraham's uncompromising monotheism. Indeed,
Mohammed didn't think he was preaching something new; he believed he
was renewing what Abraham (and countless other prophets) had said, so
he zeroed in on the Ka'ba. This, he said, should be Mecca's only shrine: the
temple of Allah.
AI means "the" in Arabic, and lah, an elision of ilaah, means "god."
Allah, then, simply means "God." This is a core point in Islam: Mo-
hammed wasn't talking about "this god" versus "that god." He wasn't say-
ing, "Believe in a god called Lah because He is the biggest, strongest god,"
nor even that Lah was the "only true god" and all the other ones were fake.
One could entertain a notion like that and still think of God as some par-
ticular being with supernatural powers, maybe a creature who looked like
Zeus, enjoyed immortality, could lift a hundred camels with one hand,
and was the only one of its kind. That would still constitute a belief in one
god. Mohammed was proposing something different and bigger. He was
preaching that there is one God too all-encompassing and universal to be
associated with any particular image, any particular attributes, any finite