No God But God

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors

He called for an end to false contracts and the practice of usury that had made slaves of the poor. He spoke of the rights of the underprivileged and the oppressed, and made the astonishing claim that it was the duty of the rich and powerful to take care of them. "Do not oppress the orphan," the Quran commands, "and do not drive away the beggar" (93:9-10

"He liked nothing better than to be alone,"

Although now a well-respected and relatively affluent merchant, he frequently went on solitary retreats of "self-justification" (the pagan practice of tahannuth mentioned in the previous chapter) in the mountains and glens surrounding the Meccan Valley, and he regularly gave money and food to the poor in a religious charity ritual tied
to the cult of the Ka'ba.

the Arabs had great disdain for the inherited reigns of the Byzantine and Sasanian kings

For example, we can reasonably conclude that Muhammad was a Meccan and an orphan; that he worked for his uncle's caravan from a young age; that this caravan made frequent
trips throughout the region and would have encountered Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish tribes, all of whom were deeply involved in Arab society; and finally, that he must have been familiar with the religion and ideology of Hanifism, which pervaded Mecca and which very likely set the stage for Muhammad's own movement. Indeed, as if to emphasize the connection between Hanifism and Islam, the early Muslim biographers transformed Zayd into a John the Baptist character, attributing to him the expectation of "a prophet from the descendants of Ismail, in particular from the descendants of Abd al-Muttalib."

It should not be surprising, therefore, that Muhammad would have been influenced as a young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia. As unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious society that fed Muhammad's imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately try-
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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."

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the prophet's successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of fashioning their master's words and deeds into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.

It was, the chroniclers say, "one of the hot days of Mecca" when
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Muhammad and his childhood friend Ibn Haritha were returning home from Ta'if, where they had slaughtered and roasted a ewe in sacrifice to one of the idols (most likely Allat). As the two boys made their way through the upper part of the Meccan Valley, they suddenly came upon Zayd, who was either living as a recluse on the high ground above Mecca or was in the midst of a lengthy spiritual retreat. Recognizing him at once, Muhammad and Ibn Haritha greeted the Hanif with "the greeting of the Jahiliyyah" (in 'am sabahari) and sat down to rest next to him.
Muhammad asked, "Why do I see you, O son of Amr, hated by your people?"
"I found them associating divinities with God and I was reluctant to do the same," Zayd replied. "I wanted the religion of Abraham."
Muhammad accepted this explanation without comment and opened his bag of sacrificed meat. "Eat some of this food, O my uncle," he said.
But Zayd reacted with disgust. "Nephew, that is a part of those sacrifices of yours which you offer to your idols, is it not?" Muhammad answered that it was. Zayd became indignant. "I never eat of these sacrifices and I want nothing to do with them," he cried. "I am not one to eat anything slaughtered for a divinity other than God."
So struck was Muhammad by Zayd's rebuke that many years later, when recounting the story, he claimed never again to have "stroked an idol of theirs nor . . . sacrifice [d] to them until God honored me with his Apostleship."
The notion that a young pagan Muhammad could have been scolded for his idolatry by a Hanif flies in the face of traditional Muslim views regarding the Prophet's perpetual monotheistic integrity. It is a common belief in Islam that even before being called by God, Muhammad never took part in the pagan rituals of his community. In his history of the Prophet, al-Tabari states that God kept Muhammad from ever participating in any pagan rituals, lest he be defiled by them. But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary's perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture. Not only does the Quran admit that God found Muhammad "erring" and gave him guidance (93:7), but the ancient traditions clearly show

The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is "What do these stories mean?"