THE HIJRA 19proached the age of forty, he began to suffer what we might now call a
midlife crisis. He grew troubled about the meaning of life. Looking
around, he saw a society bursting with wealth, and yet amid all the
bustling prosperity, he saw widows eking out a bare living on charity and
orphans scrambling for enough to eat. How could this be?
He developed a habit of retreating periodically to a cave in the moun-
tains to meditate. There, one day, he had a momentous experience, the
exact nature of which remains mysterious, since various accounts survive,
possibly reflecting various descriptions by Mohammed himself. Tradition
has settled on calling the experience a visitation from the angel Gabriel. In
one account, Mohammed spoke of "a silken cloth on which was some
writing" brought to him while he was asleep.^1 In the main, however, it was
apparently an oral and personal interaction, which started when Mo-
hammed, meditating in the utter darkness of the cave, sensed an over-
whelming and terrifying presence: someone else was in the cave with him.
Suddenly he felt himself gripped from behind so hard he could not
breathe. Then came a voice, not so much heard as felt throughout his
being, commanding him to "recite!"
Mohammed managed to gasp out that he could not recite.
The command came again: "Recite!"
Again Mohammed protested that he could not recite, did not know
what to recite, but the angel-the voice-the impulse-blazed once more:
"Recite!" Thereupon Mohammed felt words of terrible grandeur forming
in his heart and the recitation began:
Recite in the name of your Lord Who created,
Created humans from a drop of blood.
Recite!
And your Lord is most Bountiful
He who taught humans by the pen,
taught humans that which they knew not.Mohammed came down from the mountain sick with fear, thinking he
might have been possessed by a jinn, an evil spirit. Outside, he felt a pres-
ence filling the world to every horizon. According to some accounts, he
saw a light with something like a human shape within it, which was only