156 No god but God
of Jesus admonishing him to stop his persecution of the Christians,
Umar was transformed by divine intervention: not because he saw
God, but because he heard God.
It has been said that the medium through which humanity experiences
“the miraculous” can alter dramatically according to time and place.
In the age of Moses, for example, miracle was primarily experienced
through magic. Moses was forced to prove his prophetic credentials
by transforming a rod into a snake or, more spectacularly, by parting
the Red Sea. By the time of Jesus, the experience of miracle had, for
the most part, shifted to the field of medicine, which also included
exorcism. The disciples may have believed Jesus to be the promised
Messiah, but there is little doubt that the rest of Judea saw him as
merely another wandering healer; almost everywhere Jesus went he
was constantly challenged to demonstrate his prophetic identity, not
by performing magical feats, but by healing the sick and the lame.
In Muhammad’s time, the medium through which miracle was
primarily experienced was neither magic nor medicine, but language.
Predominantly oral societies like Muhammad’s often viewed words as
being infused with mystical power. The ancient Greek bard who sang
of Odysseus’ wanderings and the Indian poet who chanted the sacred
verses of the Ramayana were more than mere storytellers; they were
the mouthpieces of the gods. When at the start of each new year the
Native American shaman recounts his tribe’s creation myths, his
words not only recall the past, they fashion the future. Communities
that do not rely on written records tend to believe that the world is
continuously recreated through their myths and rituals. In these soci-
eties, poets and bards are often priests and shamans; and poetry, as the
artful manipulation of the common language, is thought to possess
the divine authority necessary to express fundamental truths.
This was particularly true in pre-Islamic Arabia, where poets had
an extraordinarily elevated status in society. As Michael Sells docu-
ments in Desert Tracings, at the start of each pilgrimage season, ancient
Mecca’s best poets had their verses embroidered in gold on expensive
Egyptian cloth banners and suspended from the Ka‘ba, not because
their odes were of a religious nature (they were most often about the
beauty and majesty of the poet’s camel!), but because they possessed