Daniel: The story of nearly every prophet begins with divine certainty and a clear mission. But what if one of the most influential figures in history began his journey not with clarity, but with sheer terror—convinced he hadn't been touched by God, but had simply gone mad? Sophia: Wow, that’s a completely different starting point. It flips the script entirely. Instead of a chosen one filled with purpose, you have a man filled with fear. That’s a much more relatable human experience. Daniel: It’s the gripping, human-centered question at the heart of The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad by Lesley Hazleton. Sophia: And Hazleton is the perfect person to ask it. She wasn't a theologian or a cleric; she was a British-American psychologist and journalist, an agnostic who spent over a decade reporting from Jerusalem. She came to this story with an investigator's eye, not a believer's. Daniel: Exactly. That perspective is what makes the book so compelling and, for some, controversial. She’s not writing scripture; she’s writing a psychological biography. And her argument is that to understand the prophet, you first have to understand the man. A man who was, from his very first breath, an outsider.

Sophia: Okay, so what does being an 'outsider' even mean in 6th-century Mecca? I picture a bustling city of traders and tribes. How do you become an outsider there? Daniel: Well, in that society, your entire identity—your protection, your status, your wealth—was tied to your clan and, most importantly, to your father. And Muhammad was born a posthumous orphan. His father, Abdullah, died before he was even born. Sophia: That’s tragic, but was it really that uncommon? I imagine infant and adult mortality rates were high. Daniel: They were, but the circumstances around it were extraordinary and speak volumes about the culture. Hazleton tells this incredible story about Muhammad's grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib. He was the leader of the Hashim clan and had rediscovered the sacred Zamzam well, which gave him a profitable monopoly on water for pilgrims. To celebrate his good fortune and secure his power, he made a vow to his god, Hubal: if he were blessed with ten sons who survived to adulthood, he would sacrifice one of them. Sophia: Hold on. He vowed to sacrifice one of his own sons? That is some high-stakes, Old Testament-level stuff. Daniel: It was. And sure enough, he had ten sons. So he went to the Kaaba, the sacred cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca, to let the oracle decide which son it would be. He used divination arrows, and the arrow pointed to his youngest and most beloved son, Abdullah—Muhammad's future father. Sophia: No way. His favorite one. What did he do? Daniel: He was a man of his word. He took Abdullah to the sacrificial stone, knife in hand, ready to fulfill his vow. It was only because his other sons and their mothers physically intervened, weeping and pleading, that he hesitated. They convinced him to consult a kahina, a priestess or seer, in a distant town. Sophia: A last-ditch effort to find a loophole. I’m on the edge of my seat. Daniel: The kahina offered an alternative. They could offer camels as a substitute. They would cast the arrows again: one for Abdullah, one for ten camels. If Abdullah’s name came up, they’d add another ten camels and try again. They kept casting, and Abdullah’s name kept coming up. Ten camels, twenty, thirty… all the way up to one hundred. Finally, at one hundred camels, the arrow for the animals was chosen. Sophia: One hundred camels! That must have been an astronomical price. Daniel: A fortune. But it saved Abdullah's life. He was married off to a woman named Amina shortly after. But then, on his very first trade caravan as a married man, he fell ill and died. Amina was left pregnant, with Muhammad. Sophia: So Muhammad enters the world already marked by this incredible story of near-death and loss. He’s literally the son who shouldn't have been, whose father was bought back from a god only to be taken away anyway. Daniel: Precisely. And it gets tougher. In Mecca, the city air was considered unhealthy for infants, so it was custom for wealthy families to send their babies to be fostered by Beduin tribes in the desert. It was like a health and character boot camp. But because Muhammad was an orphan, with no father to pay the fee, no one wanted him. He was seen as a bad investment. Sophia: That’s heartbreaking. He’s a newborn and already being rejected. Daniel: Finally, a poor Beduin woman named Halima, who had arrived late and found no other babies, reluctantly took him. And for the next few years, Muhammad lived the harsh, spartan life of the desert. He learned self-reliance, the importance of honor, and a deep connection to the vast, silent landscape. It was a world away from the cutthroat commerce and political maneuvering of Mecca. Sophia: So he’s an outsider in two ways: socially an orphan in Mecca, and culturally a Beduin in spirit. He’s part of the city, but not really of it. Daniel: Exactly. And this outsider's lens is crucial. He could see the injustices of Meccan society—the greed, the neglect of the poor, the mistreatment of orphans—because he was never fully a part of the elite system that benefited from it. His greatest disadvantage, his orphanhood, became his greatest perceptive strength. He was the one person who could see the system for what it was.

Sophia: Okay, so he grows up with this unique perspective. He becomes a successful trader, marries a wealthy widow, Khadija, who proposes to him—another unconventional move. He earns a reputation for integrity. There's that famous story of him resolving the dispute over placing the Black Stone back in the Kaaba, a solution so elegant it satisfied all the warring clans. He's clearly a respected figure. But how does he make the leap from 'trustworthy guy' to prophet? Daniel: That’s the central mystery, and Hazleton dives right into it. As Muhammad entered his late thirties, he started taking solitary retreats, a practice called tahannut. He’d go to a cave on Mount Hira, a mountain overlooking Mecca, and just… be. He’d meditate in the silence, away from the noise of the city. Sophia: He’s seeking something. A kind of spiritual clarity. Daniel: Yes. And then, one night during Ramadan in the year 610, when he was forty years old, it happened. But it wasn't a gentle whisper or a beatific vision. According to the accounts, it was a terrifying, violent encounter. An immense presence—later identified as the angel Gabriel—appeared and commanded him, "Recite!" Sophia: Recite what? He was illiterate. Daniel: That’s what he said! "I cannot recite." The being then seized him and pressed him so hard he felt he was being suffocated. This happened three times, each time with more force, until finally the words poured out of him—the first verses of what would become the Quran. Sophia: This is where Hazleton's psychological lens really comes in, isn't it? She doesn't portray this as a simple, glorious moment of enlightenment. Daniel: Not at all. His reaction wasn't joy or awe. It was pure terror. He scrambled down the mountain, his heart pounding, convinced he was a "kahin-possessed poet" or had simply gone mad. He gets home to his wife Khadija, trembling, and just cries out, "Cover me, cover me." Sophia: Wow. That detail, "Cover me," is so incredibly human. It's the reaction of a traumatized person seeking basic comfort, not a prophet receiving a divine call. Daniel: And Khadija’s response is everything. She doesn't dismiss him. She holds him, listens, and then becomes the first person to believe. She says, "By him in whose hand is my soul, I hope that you may be the prophet of this people." Her faith becomes the anchor for his own wavering sanity. Sophia: I read that this is a part of the book some readers find both compelling and frustrating. The speculative dive into his psychology is powerful, but it's, by definition, an interpretation. Daniel: It is. But Hazleton argues it's a psychologically plausible one, grounded in the earliest accounts. And what happens next is even more staggering. After that intense, world-shattering experience… there was nothing. Sophia: What do you mean, nothing? Daniel: Two years of absolute silence. No more voice, no more presence, no more revelations. Muhammad was plunged into a profound depression, what mystics would later call a 'dark night of the soul.' He felt abandoned by whatever had touched him. He wandered the mountains, tormented by doubt. Was it real? Did he imagine it? Was he forsaken? Sophia: A two-year period of doubt. That’s an eternity. It completely reframes the story. It suggests that faith isn't a gift that's just handed to you, fully formed. It has to be forged in the fire of uncertainty. Daniel: That's Hazleton's core argument. She says doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it's an essential component. Doubt is what keeps religion from becoming fanatically inhuman. It’s the annealing fire. And it was only after those two years of struggle that the revelations returned, this time with a message of reassurance: "By the morning light and the dark of night, your Lord has not forsaken you, Muhammad, nor does he abhor you."

Sophia: So after this intense personal crucible, he finally has his footing. He has the support of his wife, and the revelations are coming again. But how does this intensely private experience become a public movement? Daniel: Very slowly, and with great difficulty. He's instructed to begin with his own clan, the Hashim. He invites about forty of his kinsmen to a meal and, after they've eaten, he stands up to recite the verses. Sophia: How does that go over? I can't imagine it was an easy pitch. "So, thanks for coming to dinner. By the way, all your gods are false and I'm God's messenger." Daniel: It was a disaster. The men were initially captivated by the sheer beauty of the language, the rhyming prose called saj. But then his own uncle, Abu-Lahab, a man whose name literally means "Father of Flame," stood up and shouted that Muhammad had bewitched them all. The party broke up in confusion and alarm. Sophia: Ouch. Rejected by his own family. That had to sting. Daniel: It was the first taste of the immense resistance he would face. Because his message wasn't just spiritual. It was a direct assault on the entire socio-economic structure of Mecca. The early verses of the Quran are a stinging critique of the city's values: the hoarding of wealth, the neglect of the poor, the arrogance of the powerful, the practice of female infanticide. Sophia: So his message is a direct attack on the very system that created orphans like him and exploited the vulnerable. It's born directly from his outsider's experience! Daniel: Absolutely. The Meccan oligarchy's power was built on two things: commerce and the pilgrimage to the Kaaba, which housed 360 different tribal idols. They had successfully merged piety and profit. Muhammad’s message of one, single, invisible God threatened to bankrupt them. Sophia: So they saw him not just as a heretic, but as a threat to their entire business model. Daniel: A mortal threat. And the only thing that kept him safe was the fierce, old-world tribal loyalty of another uncle, Abu-Talib. He was the head of the Hashim clan after Abd al-Muttalib died. The other clan leaders came to him repeatedly, demanding he silence his nephew. They even offered to trade him a handsome young man from another clan in exchange for Muhammad, so they could kill him. Sophia: That's chilling. And what did Abu-Talib do? Daniel: He refused. He told the Meccan elite, "Come what may, by God, you shall never meet with anything to distress you so long as I live." What's fascinating is that Abu-Talib never converted to Islam. He couldn't bring himself to abandon the faith of his ancestors. But his loyalty to his nephew, to his kin, was absolute. He protected Muhammad with his life, creating this fragile shield that allowed the new faith to survive its infancy. Sophia: It's amazing how contingent it all is. Without Khadija's belief, without Abu-Talib's protection, the story could have ended right there. The book mentions he only had a few dozen followers after the first year. It wasn't an overnight success. Daniel: Not at all. It was a slow, dangerous grind. The first followers were mostly the young, the disenfranchised, women, and slaves—the very people the Meccan system ignored. It was a revolution that started from the margins, led by a reluctant prophet who had spent his whole life on the outside, looking in.

Sophia: When you lay it all out like that, the story is so much more complex and fragile than the monolithic version we often hear. It’s not a story of destiny fulfilled, but of a man grappling with forces he barely understands. Daniel: That’s the power of Hazleton's approach. What she shows us is that this revolution wasn't inevitable. It was born from contingency: the vulnerability of an orphan, the terror of a mystic, and the fierce loyalty of a few key people. The message wasn't just a new set of spiritual beliefs; it was a radical social and economic critique of a society that had become, in his eyes, corrupt and soulless. Sophia: It really makes you reconsider the nature of faith and leadership. He wasn't a polished CEO with a five-point plan. He was a reluctant, doubt-filled man who was pushed into a role he never asked for, fueled by a conviction that society had to be more just. Daniel: And that conviction came from his own life, his own pain. He wasn't theorizing about the plight of the orphan; he was the orphan. He wasn't imagining the arrogance of the wealthy; he had been on the receiving end of their condescension his whole life. Sophia: It makes you wonder about the nature of faith itself. Hazleton argues that doubt isn't the opposite of faith, it's an essential part of it. It's what keeps it human. It leaves you asking: what are the 'unquestionable' things in our own lives that might need a dose of healthy doubt? Daniel: It's a powerful question. This humanizing portrait of a figure so often seen as larger-than-life is incredibly thought-provoking. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Does this perspective change how you see the story? Let us know. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.