��18 No god but God
ing to reach. Because whatever else Muhammad may have been, he
was without question a man of his time, even if one chooses to call that
a “Time of Ignorance.”
MUHAMMAD WA S BORN, according to Muslim tradition, in 570
C.E., the same year that Abraha, the Christian Abyssinian ruler of
Yemen, attacked Mecca with a herd of elephants in an attempt to
destroy the Ka‘ba and make the church at Sana‘ the new religious cen-
ter in the Arabian Peninsula. It is written that when Abraha’s army
drew near the city, the Meccans, frightened at the sight of the massive
elephants the Abyssinians had imported from Africa, retreated to the
mountains, leaving the Ka‘ba defenseless. But just as the Abyssinian
army was about to attack the sanctuary, the sky darkened and a flock of
birds, each carrying a stone in its beak, rained down the wrath of Allah
on the invading army until it had no choice but to retreat back to
Yemen.
In a society with no fixed calendar, “The Year of the Elephant,” as
it came to be known, was not only the most important date in recent
memory, it was the commencement of a new Arab chronology. That is
why the early biographers set Muhammad’s birth in the year 570, so
that it would coincide with another significant date. But 570 is neither
the correct year of Muhammad’s birth nor, for that matter, of the
Abyssinian attack on Mecca; modern scholarship has determined that
momentous event to have taken place around 552 C.E. The fact is that
no one knows now, just as no one knew then, when Muhammad was
born, because birthdays were not necessarily significant dates in pre-
Islamic Arab society. Muhammad himself may not have known in
what year he was born. In any case, nobody would have cared about
Muhammad’s birth date until long after he was recognized as a
prophet, perhaps not even until long after he had died. Only then
would his followers have wanted to establish a year for his birth in
order to institute a firm Islamic chronology. And what more appropri-
ate year could they have chosen than the Year of the Elephant? For
better or worse, the closest our modern historical methods can come
to determining the date of Muhammad’s birth is some time in the last
half of the sixth century C.E.