��The Keeper of the Keys 39inal Hanifs before converting to Christianity. Waraqa was familiar
enough with the Scriptures to recognize Muhammad’s experience for
what it was.
“He is a prophet of this people,” Waraqa assured his cousin after
hearing her story. “Bid him be of good heart.”
Still Muhammad was unsure, particularly about what he was sup-
posed to do now that he had been called by God. To make matters
worse, when he needed assurance the most, God turned mute. That
first revelatory experience on Mt. Hira was followed by a long period
of silence, so that after a while even Khadija, who never doubted the
truth of Muhammad’s experience, began to question the meaning of
it. “I think that your Lord must have come to hate you,” she confessed
to Muhammad.
Finally, when Muhammad was at his lowest, a second verse was
sent down from heaven in the same painfully violent manner as the
first, this one assuring Muhammad that, whether he liked it or not, he
was now the Messenger of God:
By the grace of your Lord, you are not a madman.
Yours will be an unending reward;
For you are a man of noble character.
Soon, you shall see, and they shall see, who the madman is. (68:1–5)Now Muhammad no longer had any choice but to “arise and
warn.”
THE EARLIEST VERSES that Muhammad revealed to the Meccans
can be divided into two major themes, religious and social—though
the same language was employed for both. First, in stunningly beauti-
ful verse, Muhammad sang of the power and glory of the God who
“cracked open the earth and caused to grow in it corn and grapes and
clover and olives and dates and orchards dense with trees” (80:19).
This was not the same powerful and distant High God with whom
most people in Mecca were already familiar. This was a good God who
deeply loved creation. This God was ar-Rahman, “the most merciful”
(55:1); al-Akram, “the most generous” (96:3). As such, this was a God