Muhammad: The First Visitation

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As an adult, Muhammad was, according to his early follower Ali, “neither excessively tall or extremely short. He was medium height among his friends. His hair was neither curly nor wavy. It was in between….His face was not swollen or meaty-compact. It was fairly round. His mouth was white. He had black and large eyes with long-haired eyelids. His joints (limbs) and shoulder joints were rather big….At walking, he lifted his feet off the ground as if he had been walking in a muddy remainder of water.” Another said: “When he walked, he inclined as if walking over a height.”

According to yet another early Muslim, he “had a broad face with reddish (wide) eyes, and lean heels.” Still another reported that he had “fleshy palms and fleshy feet” and was “of handsome face. I never saw anyone like him after him.”Between his shoulders was the mole that was supposedly a sign that he would be a prophet. One Muslim described this “seal of prophethood” as “resembling a fist…and round about it there were moles as if they were warts.” Later in life, when his hair and beard started to turn grey, he began to dye them with henna, telling his followers: “Verily the best thing with which you can change the colour of hair is al-henna and indigo….Dye your gray hair but do not resemble the Jews and the Christians,” who used black dye. It is not uncommon today for Muslims to dye their beards with henna in imitation of their prophet.

Muhammad would declare himself a prophet of Allah — whom he proclaimed to be the one true god — when he was about forty years old.  At the very beginning, however, he was much less clear than he ultimately became about what was happening to him.

According to an account by Aisha, the young woman who much later would become his favorite wife, Muhammad was chosen as a prophet after devoting himself to long periods of prayer. One night during the month of Ramadan he was rapt in prayer when he had a vision:

The commencement of the (Divine) Revelation to Allah’s Messenger was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams which came true like bright daylight. (And then the love of seclusion was bestowed upon him.) He used to go in seclusion (in the cave of) Hira where he used to worship (Allah alone) continuously for many (days and) nights…till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira.

Muhammad could not at first identify the source of the dreams or “the Truth” that descended upon him. It was not until some time later that he came to believe that he was being visited by the angel Gabriel, sent from Allah. Muhammad’s ninth-century biographer Ibn Sa‘d records a Muslim tradition asserting that an angel named Seraphel originally visited Muhammad, and was replaced by Gabriel after three years. He also records the fact that “the learned and those versed in Sirah literature” contradicted this tradition, and maintained that only Gabriel ever appeared to Muhammad. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how anyone would have gotten the idea that another angel was involved with Muhammad if he had been absolutely certain from the first moment that it was Gabriel.

In any case, the angel came to Muhammad and commanded him to read and recite what he read. Muhammad replied, ‘I do not know how to read.’” The spiritual being, however, would brook no objections. He pressed his will upon Muhammad in a terrifying fashion:

(The Prophet added), “The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and again asked me to read, and I replied, ‘I do not know how to read.’ Thereupon he caught me again and pressed me a second time till I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and asked me again to read, but again I replied, ‘I do not know how to read (or, what shall I read?).’ Thereupon he caught me for the third time and pressed me and then released me and said, ‘Read! In the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists). Has created man from a clot. Read! And Your Lord is Most Generous . . . [unto] . . . that which he knew not.’ (V. 96:5)”

This is the famous first revelation of the Qur’an, now found as sura 96:1-5. It began what Muhammad represented as a series of messages from Allah; they would continue off and on for the next twenty-three years—the rest of Muhammad’s life. His followers committed them to memory and wrote them on whatever was available; after his death they were collected into the Qur’an.