The Keeper of the Keys 37passed along the way would say, “Peace unto thee, O Apostle of
Allah.” When this happened, Muhammad “would turn to his right
and left and look behind him and he would see naught but trees and
stones.” These aural and visual hallucinations continued right up to
the moment in which he was called by God at Mt. Hira.
Obviously, no one but the prophet can describe the experience of
revelation, but it is neither irrational nor heretical to consider the
attainment of prophetic consciousness to be a slowly evolving process.
Did Jesus require the heavens to part and a dove to descend upon his
head to affirm his messianic character, or had he understood for some
time that he was being singled out by God for a divine mission? Did
enlightenment suddenly burst like a flash of light upon Siddhartha
while he sat under the Bodhi tree, as the event has so often been
described, or was his enlightenment the result of a steadily developing
conviction of the illusion of reality? Perhaps the Revelation came to
Muhammad “like the break of dawn,” as some traditions claim, or
maybe he gradually became aware of his prophetic consciousness
through ineffable supernatural experiences. It is impossible to know.
What seems certain, however, is that Muhammad, like all the
prophets before him, wanted nothing to do with God’s calling. So
despondent was he about the experience that his first thought was to
kill himself.
As far as Muhammad understood, only the Kahin, whom he
despised as reprehensible charlatans (“I could not even look at them,”
he once exclaimed), received messages from the heavens. If his experi-
ence at Mt. Hira meant that he was himself becoming a Kahin, and
that his colleagues in Mecca were now going to regard him as such,
then he would rather be dead.
“Never shall Quraysh say this of me!” Muhammad swore. “I will
go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I may kill
myself and gain rest.”
Muhammad was right to worry about being compared to a Kahin.
What is impossible to discern in any translation of those first few
verses of the Revelation is their exquisite poetic quality. That initial
recitation, and those that immediately followed, were delivered in
rhyming couplets which were very much like the ecstatic utterances of
the Kahin. This would not have been unusual; after all, the Arabs were