36 No god but God
chant like Muhammad would have been unable to read and write the
receipts of his own business. Obviously he was neither a scribe nor a
scholar, and he in no way had the verbal prowess of a poet. But he
must have been able to read and write basic Arabic—names, dates,
goods, services—and, considering that many of his customers were
Jews, he may even have had rudimentary skills in Aramaic.
The traditions also disagree about how old Muhammad was when
the Revelation first came to him: some chroniclers say forty, others
claim he was forty-three. Although there is no way to know defini-
tively, Lawrence Conrad notes that it was a common belief among the
ancient Arabs that “a man only reaches the peak of his physical and
intellectual powers when he becomes forty years old.” The Quran
confirms this belief by equating manhood with the realization of the
fortieth year of life (46:15). In other words, the ancient biographers
may have been guessing when they attempted to calculate Muham-
mad’s age at Mt. Hira, just as they were probably guessing when they
figured the year of his birth.
Likewise, there is a great deal of confusion over the precise date of
that first revelatory experience. It is cited as having occurred either on
the fourteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or twenty-fourth day of the
month of Ramadan. There is even some debate within the earliest
community over exactly what the first recitation was: some chroni-
clers claim that God’s first command to Muhammad was neither
“recite” nor “read,” but rather “arise and warn!”
Perhaps the reason the traditions are so vague and conflicting is
that there was no single momentous revelatory event that initiated
Muhammad’s prophethood, but rather a series of smaller, indescrib-
able supernatural experiences that climaxed in a final, violent encounter
with the Divine. Aisha, who would become the Prophet’s closest and
most beloved companion, claimed that the first signs of prophethood
occurred long before the experience at Mt. Hira. These signs came in
the form of visions that assailed Muhammad in his dreams, and which
were so disturbing that they made him increasingly seek solitude. “He
liked nothing better than to be alone,” Aisha recalled.
Muhammad’s disturbing visions seem to have been accompanied
by aural perceptions. Ibn Hisham records that when the Prophet set
off to be alone in the “glens of Mecca,” the stones and trees that he