Lesley hazleton the first muslim the story of muhammad

shortest. This may have been decided on as a matter of aesthetics, or it may have been intended to give equal weight to every verse, no matter when it had first come into being. Whatever the reason, the arrangement means that any non-Arabic speaker looking for the mystical underpinnings of the Quran might find it best to start from the end and to read from right to left as though it were in Arabic.

In these first few years, Muhammad never knew when a revelation was about to come. One might follow hard on the heels of another, or there might be weeks or even months between them. But the unpredictability of the timing was itself part of the process. If revelation had come on a regular basis, the words piling up like those of a writer determined to fulfill a daily quota, one might suspect too much neatness for credibility, as though a direct line had been established between human and divine, one that could be dialed into on demand. Instead, the verses themselves taught him how to receive them. “Be not hasty in your recitation before the revelation of it is finished,” he’d be told. Let it come in full, that is, before trying to repeat it. “Be patient,” he was told again and again. It was a kind of ongoing lesson in how to surrender to the process. He was not to fight it nor attempt to hurry it, but allow it to take shape.

In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form—words—to