The First Muslim

Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should

unquestionable role as the messenger of God

He did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air

Against all expectation, it seems, early loss can be a stimulus to achievement. As one researcher puts it, the awareness of vulnerability can have a paradoxical strengthening effect: “The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood,” and eventually develops into “a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world.”

be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned

Even if he had no words for it as yet, he must have sensed that he would have to prove himself again and again, always wondering on what terms he existed, and by whose grace.

. He knew in his body how large and alive the world was, and how small a human being within it.

Muhammad’s is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes

and though he is told again and again in the Quran to say “I am just one of you”—just a man—

they obscure more than they reveal, and he becomes more a symbol than a human being