Two Cities

A movement speaks one language when it is hunted and another when it rules. If both languages are preserved as sacred, its heirs inherit two faiths under one name: the faith of the persecuted, which asks only to be left alone, and the faith of the victor, which commands. Which one they follow will depend on which one they are told is final.

The Preacher

For twelve years, in the city of Mecca, a man in his forties walked among his neighbors telling them that their gods were wood and stone and that they would answer for their lives before the one true God.

He had no standing to speak of. He had been an orphan from birth, raised on the charity of an uncle. He had herded sheep and worked the caravans for wages. What position he had came from his wife, a merchant fifteen years his senior who had hired him, married him, and believed in him when he came down from the mountain shaking.

Mecca lived off its shrine, and it did not want to hear that the shrine was full of lies. The leading men mocked him. Boys threw refuse at him in the street. His followers, many of them slaves and paupers, were laid out on the burning sand with rocks on their chests. For three years his whole clan was boycotted and pushed to the edge of starvation.

Listen to how he spoke in those years. The chapters of the Quran that Muslim scholars themselves assign to Mecca are short and urgent. There is one God. You will die and be judged. Feed the orphan and the poor man before that day. To his enemies he had only this to say: You are a warner, not their keeper. Bear what they say with patience, and part from them graciously. One brief chapter, addressed to those who rejected him, closes with a line that could be carved over the door of every parliament: To you your religion, and to me mine.

He had no army, no court, no treasury, and no punishment for unbelief. He was a dissident, and he spoke as dissidents speak.