Lesley hazleton the first muslim the story of muhammad

even decades later, hailed as the hero of his people, he’d rarely be seen to laugh. He was Quraysh, and Hashim within the Quraysh, but his existence did not appear to count. In a society where you were defined by who had sired you, he seemed fated to be haunted by his father’s absence. 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.

This was what it meant to be an orphan: the ordinary childhood freedom of being without care would never be his. He would never have that blithe ability to take things for granted. Yet this was precisely the key to the man he would become. 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 be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers.

Psychologists have pointed to the remarkably long list of “high- achievement” figures orphaned young. They include Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, William the Conqueror, Cardinal Richelieu, the metaphysical poet John Donne, Lord Byron, Isaac Newton, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name just a few, and possibly also Jesus,