The years that followed the rebuilding of the Kaaba taught the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, day upon day, two lessons in the same school: what his people worshipped, and what they did to one another; and the two lessons, the sources insist, were one distress. This event records the double anguish of those years, from 605 to 609, when his heart, as al-Mubarakpuri writes in the sentence that stands at the center of this account, was restless about the moral evils and idolatry that were rampant among his people. The order of the words is not accidental: the idols and the injustices of Makkah were not two diseases but one, a single corruption of the heart that showed itself as false worship in the sanctuary and as cruelty in the street; and the man who refused the first was being prepared, in the anguish of the second, for the mission that would heal both. What that mission later received in revelation, this page sees in preparation: the Book that descended upon him would define the message of every messenger in one double command, worship Allah and avoid the taghut; and the taghut of Makkah had two faces, the stone that was bowed to and the strong hand that took what the weak could not defend.
The first face must be described as the sources describe it, for the corruption was public, organized, and ancient. The idols of the Hijaz had not gathered by accident; al-Mubarakpuri, setting out the religious condition of the Arabs, records the tradition that the entry of idolatry came through Amr ibn Luhay, a chief of Khuzaah renowned in his day for righteousness and charity, who journeyed to Syria, saw the people there worshipping idols, approved the practice, and brought back with him the idol Hubal, which he set in the midst of the Kaaba and summoned the people to worship. From that beginning, paganism spread over Makkah and thence over the Hijaz, the people of Makkah being the custodians of the Sacred House; a great many idols bearing different names were introduced, every tribe and every house had its own, and the Sacred House itself was overcrowded with them, until, at the conquest of Makkah in the eighth year of the Hijrah, the number of the idols that stood around the Kaaba was counted at three hundred and sixty, and the Prophet ﷺ broke them and had them removed. Al-Lat stood at Taif, al-Uzza in the valley of Nakhlah, Manat at al-Mushallal near Qadid on the Red Sea; and the worship of all of them was hedged about with customs that reached into every ordinary decision of an Arab's life.
The reader who would feel what the Prophet ﷺ felt must look past the stones to the system they enforced, for idolatry in Makkah was not a private devotion but a public administration of life. Al-Mubarakpuri records its instruments. The casting of the azlam, the divining arrows, was consulted in the serious matters of existence, travel and marriage and the like, and only the arrow decided; and in cases of doubt concerning lineage the Arabs resorted to the idol Hubal himself, with a gift of a hundred camels for the arrow caster, and the arrow, not the truth, settled whether a child belonged to the tribe. Portions of food and cattle were consecrated to the idols, and the portions assigned to Allah could be transferred, by convenient pretense, to the idols, though the portion of the idols was never transferred back; the Bahirah and the Saibah and the Wasilah and the Hami were animals dedicated to the idols and spared from every useful work, institutions which the Quran itself would later name as inventions upon Allah. The road from the sanctuary to the market ran straight: a people whose deities spoke by arrows and accepted the transfer of shares would hardly be scandalized by a merchant whose scales spoke with two voices; and a city that could dedicate a camel to a stone could also, the believing reader will note with sorrow, dedicate its daughters to the grave.
One testimony from those very years carries the whole absurdity of the system, and it comes, by the mercy of the sources, from a man who laid the stones of the Kaaba with his own hands. Al-Saib ibn Abd Allah, whose account Ibn Kathir transmits from the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, relates: I had a stone I had sculpted, that I worshipped besides Allah; I used to bring clotted milk that was unfit for myself and pour it over it; then a dog would come and lick it off, and raise its hind leg and urinate upon it. The builder of the House of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) feeding his own carving with milk he would not drink, and the dog that drank it anointing the idol in return: this was the theology of the age, seen without disguise by the eye of a workman; and the future Prophet ﷺ, who carried stones upon the same walls and had held the idols in abhorrence from boyhood, stood in the same scaffolding and saw the same thing without the veil of custom. It was not the philosopher's doubt that grew in him through those years, the sources indicate, but the lover's grief: the Creator worshiped by His creatures in the forms of their own carving, and the poor taught to feed with their best what their own dogs dishonored.
The second face of the corruption was the condition of the weak, and al-Mubarakpuri's survey of the society of the jahiliyyah lets the reader see it with the eyes of the era. There were strata in which prostitution and indecency were rampant and in full operation; Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) transmitted the famous account of the four kinds of union known in the age before Islam, three of which the Quran's law would abolish, and the report stands in the collections of the Sunnah; the female slaves, in the same survey, constituted what the author calls the greatest calamity of that society; and the obscenity of adultery prevailed among almost all classes, save of the few whose self-dignity restrained them. The marriage contract rested wholly in the hands of the woman's guardian, whose word about her marital status could never be questioned; divorce was, to a very great extent, in the absolute power of the husband; and above all these particular griefs stood the practice that the Quran would never cease to recall: the burial of infant daughters alive, which some families practiced from an illusory fear of poverty and shame. Life in Arabia, the same survey records, presented a gloomy picture of contrasts: some parents cherished their children to idolatry of affection, others dug the grave for a daughter at her birth; and the child, in the one case as in the other, was the property of the strong.
The reader must also reckon with the economy of that distress, for the Prophet ﷺ kept no ledger of it, but he lived inside its arithmetic every day. The cities of the Arabs lived by trade, and trade lived by the truce of the sacred months; in all other seasons the caravan moved under the protection of alliances whose currency was vengeance. Vengeance was indeed a whole institution: the age believed, as al-Mubarakpuri records, that the soul of the murdered man would fly in the wilderness and never rest until revenge was taken, and the motto of the clans ran: support your brother, whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed. Tribal pride, the same survey states, was one of the strongest passions of the Arab, and avarice for leadership and a keen sense of emulation often resulted in bitter tribal warfare despite descent from a common ancestor; the long feuds of Aws and Khazraj, of Abs and Dhubyan, of Bakr and Taghlib, stood in every memory as the standing proof, and the sacrilegious war, which the Prophet ﷺ had witnessed as a boy of fourteen in this chronology's earlier pages, had shown the Makkans themselves what a violated sacred month could cost. Within the towns, the strong lent and the weak borrowed, and the lending was at usury; the gains of prostitution and usury and injustice were so ordinary a part of Arabian wealth that the vow of the rebuild, when Quraysh resolved to admit none of them into the building of the House, was remembered as an exceptional scruple; the wine that graced every generous table was a boast of the poets; and gambling was accounted a branch of liberality, its proceeds given to the poor. The Book that came at the end of this stretch would weigh the whole economy in two verses: sin greater than benefit; woe to those who give short measure.
The measure of the man is what he did within this distress, for the sources show conduct as well as grief. He did not organize a reform party, for none was possible where the wrong was the law; he did not preach in the assemblies, for the word was not yet given him to preach; and, as al-Mubarakpuri states with precision, he was as yet helpless, because no definite course, or specific approach, had been available for him to follow and rectify the ill practices around him. What he did was to live the whole of the alternative in miniature. He kept the ties of kin, helped the poor and the needy, entertained the guest, and endured hardship in the path of truth, in the words of Khadijah's testimony that this chronology has already set down; in the pact of chivalry of his youth, whose story the reader has already met, he had joined in the defense of the wronged stranger against the wrongdoer; his scales in the market of Makkah had never known two weights; and his abhorrence of the idols was so settled that he could not tolerate the mere swearing of an oath by al-Lat and al-Uzza. Al-Mubarakpuri names the secret of this constancy: Allah's providence detached him from every abominable and evil practice, intervening even when he attempted, in the weakness of youth, some amusement of his people, as the reports of the protected years have shown. The anguish of the years 605 to 609 was therefore not the anguish of an observer but the anguish of a garrison: a man occupied by the enemy's system on every side and holding, by the preserving hand of Allah, one entire life as the demonstration of another way.
Nor should the reader suppose that the distress was his alone, or that Makkah was uniquely sunk; the sources, with the justice of the scholars, keep the balance. Al-Mubarakpuri's survey insists that the pre-Islamic Arabs had also a large bulk of virtues: hospitality so excessive that half their poetry celebrated it, the keeping of covenant at any cost, a keen sense of honor and a repudiation of injustice, firmness of will, forbearance, and the pure and simple bedouin life that nurtured truthfulness and detachment from intrigue; and he concludes that such ethics, coupled with Arabia's favorable position, lay behind the selection of the Arabs to carry the message to mankind. The anguish of the Prophet ﷺ in the years of this event was therefore not the loathing of a reformer for a people beyond repair; it was the grief of the best-hearted of the Arabs for the waste of the best of the Arabs, the hospitality that poured wine, the honor that avenged instead of protecting, the generosity that gambled and the mercy that buried. He knew the gold of his people, for he had been raised upon it in the desert of Banu Sad; what his heart could not bear was the dross around it; and the Book that came to him would purify exactly in that spirit, confirming what the Arabs had of virtue and tearing from it what the idols had fastened.
The word helpless must be weighed honestly, for it is the most prophetic word in the whole passage. The distress of those years was not despair; it was travail. The pattern of the prophets before him, which the Quran would later set before him for his comfort, is the pattern of the man who feels the corruption of his people with a love that cannot heal it, until heaven itself intervenes: Nuh (peace be upon him) building the ark through centuries of mockery; Ibrahim (peace be upon him) standing alone against the idols of his father's city; Musa (peace be upon him) fleeing the tyranny he could not correct. The restlessness of the Prophet's ﷺ heart in those five years was the travail of a revelation being carried to term: the concern over idolatry would become, at the descent of the Book, the doctrine of the divine unity; the concern over the oppression of the weak would become the rights of the orphan and the widow, the prohibition of usury, the law of inheritance for daughters, and the abolition of the burying of infant girls alive; the two faces of the taghut would be struck at one stroke, for the Quran commands the worship of Allah and the avoiding of the taghut together, in one breath, as the two halves of one deliverance. The heart that ached in Makkah from 605 to 609 was not wasting its pain; it was drawing the map of the cure.
Two boundaries must be drawn around this account, in honesty to the sources and to the arrangement of this chronology. The first concerns the idols themselves: the deeper reflection of the Prophet ﷺ upon the nothingness of the idols, the story of his heart's search among the ways of the hunafa, the seekers of the true Faith of Quraysh, and the movement of his spirit toward the religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) are recorded in the events that follow this one, where the sources treat of his theological reflection, and this page, which treats of the ethical anguish, defers to them. The second concerns the outcome: the retreats to the cave of Hira, in which the anguish of the city was carried into the solitude of the mountain, are the subject of their own events in this chronology, and the reader is directed there for the months of tahannuth, the worship of the cave, and the approach of the first revelation. What this page holds is the middle of the story: the five years in which the corruption was seen, and felt, and weighed, and answered with a life, before it was answered with the Word.
The believer who reads these years aright will find in them a mirror and a charge. The mirror: the Prophet's ﷺ anguish was the exact measure of his love, and no soul is sent to heal a people it has learned to despise; the distress of those silent years, walking among idols he would not salute and wrongs he could not yet right, was itself a form of worship, the heart's protest made in the presence of Allah, Who hears what the sealed lips contain. And the charge: the corruption of the age was not one evil but a pair, the false worship that dishonored heaven and the social cruelty that ground the earth, and no reformation that takes only one of the pair is the reformation he ﷺ was given to bring. The verses that would descend upon him would bind the altar and the marketplace in a single law, woe to the defrauders in the very Book that declares Allah alone worthy of worship; and every generation of his Ummah that has suffered the taghut of stone and the taghut of the strong hand together has found in these years of his silence the precedent of its patience, and in his distress the proof that to feel the wound is already to have begun, by the mercy of Allah, to carry the cure.