Love and Holy Books, Part I
Read! In the Name of your Lord, Who all created,
Created Man from blood, coagulated,
Read! And your Lord is the Most Exalted,
Who tutored by the pen;
What Man knew not, We helped him ken.
---
the first five chronological verses of the Qur’an, Surah Al-Alaq [1]
God makes easy the road to Paradise for those who make easy the road to knowledge.
---
saying of the Prophet Muhammad, recorded in Sahih Muslim
Ten miles outside of Tarim, 633 CE
There were nine beautiful sights a traveler should see in Arabia, said the ancient poems of the Mu'allaqat, and the coming of spring in the well-watered valleys and wadis of Hadhramaut was the most breathtaking of them all. The land was transformed into a garden where fragrant blooms, rich fields of wheat, tall date palms, ruby-red pomegranates, and frankincense bushes grew so thickly, it almost seemed like another world from the surrounding plateau. Many merchants made a healthy profit by purchasing the fruits and grains of the farmers here and selling them in the towns to the north, but two of the riders in the caravan heading to Madinah under the light of the full moon carried no sacks of millet, no crates of olibanum, and no pomegranates with them. The cargo carried by these two travelers was a strange one: scrolls of parchment, dried palm leaves, carefully folded vellum, papyrus-like reed sheets. On these, in a hundred different handwritings, in dialects hailing from Yemen all the way to Bahrain, is written the message that the illiterate shepherd Muhammad received in the Cave of Hira from the angel Gabriel. These scholars amongst traders, Tawadrosa bint Maksant and her husband Zaid ibn Thabit, were bringing the Word of God home with them to Madinah.
Although their long journey was almost at its end, to Tawadrosa, the cool night breeze and the slow swaying of her camel as it headed for the Prophet’s City felt almost like the night she'd begun her own days of wandering. She called herself Theodora, daughter of Maxentius the epidecaon, back then, when she was still a restless young woman. Raised in the old and grand city of Alexandria, she spent her days reading scripture and philosophy alike. A student of languages and the Old Testament in particular, her mother was pleased with how intelligent and well-read her daughter was, but Theodora wasn't content with a life of passive worship. She longed to be a part of the great movements of the past: to have been with the Israelites as Moses lead them out of bondage or to have heard Jesus preach the Gospel with the disciples. The thought that the days of prophecy were over and God would no longer speak to his creation was one that filled her with a hard-to-explain sadness. Her parents were concerned by the change in her demeanor, but could do nothing to alleviate Theodora’s melancholy.
Her mood only broke when she overheard chatter between her family's servants about the trading caravans from the barbarian desert towns to the East that had arrived the other day. One of the servants, a Christian Arab who bought olibanum from them, said that they had spoken of a new prophet who had begun to preach among them. Theodora went to the servant who met the Madani caravan and asked him to take her to their camp. She spent the whole night speaking to the foreign traders in her halting Arabic; they were a poor-looking group, with small weatherbeaten tents and patched garments, but they spoke eloquently about their Prophet and his mission to restore the teachings of the old prophets. The more she listened, the more Theodora was convinced that this was the moment she had been waiting for: a chance to learn from a messenger in the flesh. When the caravan made ready to leave for Arabia, she gathered some of her belongings, a camel from her family’s herd, and a pouch of gold coins. Theodora put on a hooded cloak and rode to the Muslim trader's camp as they were about to set off from the city and asked to join them. Pleased to hear that she wished to meet the Prophet Muhammad, they accepted her into the traveling party. When Theodora rode into Madinah, she was decidedly disappointed; compared to Alexandria, the Radiant City was just a rude collection of mud-brick buildings with palm-thatch roofs. Already beginning to feel like she had made a big mistake, she settled into the first row of worshippers
[2] in the Prophet's Masjid and waited to hear the man himself speak. When Muhammad stood on his rough-hewn minbar and began to address the crowd, speaking in his calm and soft tone that still somehow carried across the room, Theodora sat enraptured. Her Arabic was imperfect, but she could understand his words enough to follow along, and what words they were! He spoke of the compassion of God and the compassion that the faithful should embody to the people around them. After the prayer, she walked up to the Messenger and said her shahadah to the jubilant cries of “Allahu Akbar!” from the congregated Ummah. In another few weeks, Theodora was again dissatisfied; she was happy to be in Madinah now that she had met the Prophet, but she was bored doing merchant work in the markets. She wanted to be challenged intellectually, not stuck in a tent selling wares. She voiced her concerns to the Prophet Muhammad, who smiled and told her to call upon a young man named Zaid ibn Thabit.
Zaid had always been small and short for his age. In fact, Zaid shouldn't have even been alive. As a dangerously underweight one year old, he got sick during one of the plagues that swept Makkah every few decades. His mother Ramla, the only adult in his family after his father died in tribal warfare, was told that her son had no chance of surviving and that she should prepare for the funeral. Ramla angrily sent away the healers, telling them that they had underestimated her son’s strength, and soon little Zaid proved her right. “He weakened, he thinned, but by Al-Laat, he lived!” she crowed proudly, words that would come to define Zaid ibn Thabit’s life. People were constantly underestimating him since then, and Zaid was making them look like fools just as consistently. When the refugee Ummah was staring obliteration in the face just prior to the Battle of Badr, an eleven year old Zaid wielding his father's sword tried to enlist in the Muslim army. The Prophet sent him back, kindly telling him that the battlefield was no place for boys. Zaid was so angry that he couldn't fight that he stabbed the sword into the ground and challenged the soldiers gearing up for war to a fistfight. Zaid ibn Haritha, then a strapping warrior in his twenties, took the sword from ground and consoled his younger namesake. The older Zaid promised the boy that he'd wield ibn Thabit’s sword for him in the battle to bring honor to their family. Zaid ibn Haritha brought back his sword for him from Badr and handed it back to Zaid ibn Thabit. "Now it has history", he said to the awestruck boy, who took it home and cherished it ever since. Zaid ibn Thabit did eventually get his chance to win glory in battle
[3], but by then he had already taken to sharpening his mental skills instead of his martial ones. When he had been rejected for the army a second time during the battle of Uhud, Muhammad sat with the angry youth. The Messenger told Zaid that there were other ways to serve his community than on the battlefield, roles that the Ummah needed even more than another soldier. Calling him “the most able mind in Madinah”, Muhammad urgend Zaid to expand his own horizons and thus expand the horizons of Islam as a whole. Since that day, Zaid inhaled every book he could get his hands on. When he ran out of books in Arabic to read, he learned Hebrew and studied with the Jewish tribes of Khaybar. Then he learned Greek, then Syriac, then Coptic, then Persian...by his early twenties, Zaid was a scholar to rival any other in the Peninsula. He became the chief scribe to the illiterate Prophet Muhammad, noting down his sayings for later perusal by the Companions, reading letters and parchments for him, and writing responses back in his name.
Zaid was quite content with this simple arrangement, working as a scribe and spending the rest of his time hunting down new reading material; at least he
was until Theodora showed up at the door of his small house adjacent to the Masjid. The pretty young Coptic lady introduced herself and said that the Prophet had suggested that she work with him. Zaid was apprehensive at first, shy as he was, but he found himself opening up to Theodora almost in spite of himself. He quickly discovered she was conversant in as many languages he was, knew about philosophies that seemed tantalizingly new to him, and was a brilliant debater. For her part, Theodora never thought she’d meet any Arab in this backwater of the world as educated as Zaid was. He could give lectures on Tertullian or the Desert Fathers, recite achingly beautiful ancient Arabic poetry about the lonely dunes and windswept massifs of the high desert, or talk about the intricacies of Jewish scripture. For two whole weeks, they spent almost every waking moment with each other, either arguing some obscure point of theology or sharing a joke in some foreign tongue. When they finally announced that they were getting married to the Ummah, three months after Theodora first arrived in Madinah, Ayesha was reported to have said, “I wish I knew why it took them so long.” The couple was surprised that the consensus opinion in the Radiant City seemed to be "it's about time" (alas, it seems some unwritten rule of life that the two lovers themselves are the very last people to see how deeply their beloved reciprocates their feelings), but were more than happy to join in the festivities the Ummah conducted in their honor. The Prophet Muhammad himself filled in for Theodora's mahram during the ceremony and Zaid's mother Ramla, who had converted to Islam with her son, acted as his guardian. Happily married, Zaid and Theodora showed no intention of settling into the usual Madani domestic lifestyle. Childless
[4], their household consisted of the two of them in a small house absolutely filled with bound manuscripts, loose parchments and scrolls. Zaid showed no interest in obtaining another wife like many othe Companions did; when Talha ibn Ubaidallah ribbed him for being a hen-pecked husband, he just smiled and said "God has been good enough to grant me a wife who is the equivalent of four women in one. Everyday I spend as her husband is a day that I thank my Lord for his blessings on me. Why then, brother, should I seek out other women?" Together, Theodora, daughter of Maxentius, and Zaid, son of Thabit, worked as a husband-and-wife tag team of scholars, continuing their scribe work for the Prophet but also becoming the city’s major sources of secular or non-Islamic knowledge. They were both bright people independently, but together they operated like some gestalt mind of 7th century brilliance. It was only natural that they would be part of the shura council that was formed to discuss the preservation of the Qur’an that Caliph Abu Bakr convened following the Ridda Wars.
Worried about large numbers of people who had memorized the Qur’an that died fighting the apostate rebels, the Ummah pushed Abu Bakr to make some sort of move to ensure the continuation of the God’s Word. Most of the councilors agreed that the solution lied in getting more people to memorize the Qur'an, with plans ranging from financial incentives for the families of hufadh to removing all secular parts of the education that Zaid ibn Thabit's weekday classes for Madinah's children provided to focus solely on Qur'an memorization (unsurprisingly, Zaid flatly rejected this proposal.) Umar offhandedly suggested making one big manuscript of the Qur’an, so that any lettered person could read it. The suggestion was immediately criticized by Amr ibn Al As, who noted that any written version of the Qur’an would have to be ordered by surah in the same way that the Lawh-al-Mahfuz
[5] was ordered, and since only the chronological order of surahs was known, the idea of having a book was a non-starter. Zaid ibn Thabit cleared his throat and responded that both him and his wife actually did know the proper ordering of the surahs. The whole council turned around to stare at the pair, who looked back at them calmly, as if they hadn't just revealed earth-shattering news. Theodora explained that every Ramadan, the Prophet Muhammad used to go over the order of the Qur’an as it should be with both her and Zaid, updating the list every year with the new revelations. The last Ramadan that the Prophet had celebrated with his Ummah, scarcely two years ago, he had gone over the list with them twice. They were completely certain of their list’s accuracy, she finished primly, and they could compile a written Qur'an within the year. The old Banu Makhzum chieftain Ibn Masud almost roared from his seat, yelling as he demanded to know why the two of them waited so long to tell everyone. Theodora smiled slightly at him as she responded: well, no one had ever asked them.
[1] This is from Fazoullah Nikayin’s translation of the Qur’an, which tries to emphasize the Qur’an’s nature as a work of poetry. I don't usually shill for books, but I strongly recommend that any non-Arabic speaker who wants to understand more of the rhythm and tone of the Qur’an should get a copy of this book. For people entirely new to the Qur’an, I used to suggest reading Muhammad Asad's more literal translation first, but nowadays, I think reading the Poetic Translation first drives home the
feel of the text, which I think is more important that the minutae of translation.
[2] She is actually sitting in the front row, not just some “front row" of the women's area. The gender separation of mosques is alien to early Islam; almost every early source that even sees this issue as something worthy of note makes it clear that women were praying alongside men. Other early sources indirectly imply this as well; I mean, Hafsah and Ayesha were leading Friday prayers, for the Prophet’s sake! The latter-day rationalization for gender exclusion, that men simply couldn't be around women without it being indecent, also wasn't a Rashidun-era sentiment at all; many women spent time alone with men. In fact, breaking this very taboo is what the Companions considered the "moral of the story" from Ayesha's necklace incident.
The Umayyad dynasty is the earliest date found by Professor Esposito for any evidence of the introduction of gender segregation into mosques, not counting very weak hadith that were probably fabrications from the Abbasid-era. This isn't the time yet to discuss the shifting of Rashidun-era egalitarian Islam into the heavily stratified Islam of the late Bani Umayya and beyond, but I find it very interesting to note that things like the mixed gender prayer hall in Germany which recently drew such polarized headlines are actually in some ways a return to the state of affairs 1400 years ago. Any of my lovely readers who wants to learn more about this topic should look into the feminist Islamic scholar Amina Wadud and her work or shoot me a PM sometime.
[3] This is a great story, but I stuck it in the footnotes so it wouldn't derail the post. So, Zaid ibn Thabit is fifteen when the Prophet finally thinks he's old enough to fight with the Muslim army. The battle he was joining was the Battle of the Trench: where all the people who wanted Muhammad's head on a spike from across Arabia formed a Super League of Islamophobia that was only stopped by Salman the Persian’s idea to dig a gigantic ditch around the city. The Makkan cavalry was stopped and the Muslim archers just filled any Makkan soldier who felt like trying to cross the ditch with arrows. The Makkans and co. are stumped, until someone remembers Abu Dhujanah. Now, Abu Dhujanah is a mercenary, famous for being a great swordsman and even more famous for doing trick jumps with his horse to please crowds. The Makkans hire Abu Dhujanah to jump over the trench and kill Muhammad, hoping that the death of the Prophet would break the morale of the Madanis. Abu Dhujanah actually manages to make it to the other side with a heroic leap of his horse….only to be immediately impaled in the throat by Zaid, who stuck out his spear at the onrushing horseman in reflexive fear. Teenage Zaid sorta accidentally killed the Evel Knievel of 7th Century Arabia.
[4] None of the contemporary sources comment on why the couple had no children, but Az-Zamakshari speculates that Zaid had what we would probably diagnose today as immune infertility. Although they were otherwise healthy men, infertility seemed to crop up in a few boys every generation in Zaid's family. This was a point of some sadness for Zaid, who loved children, but lead to his long and distinguished career in teaching when Theodora suggested that he could help the children learn their letters.
[5] The Lawh-al-Mahfouz (often translated as the Preserved Tablet) is what Muslims call the the great book in which God wrote at the beginning of time, detailing the fate of everything that was ever to come. In the Muslim version of the "Genesis" story, so to speak, the first thing God creates is not light, but the pen. God then creates the Tablets and commands the Pen to write upon them everything that would come to be. It is also said to contain all the knowledge of the heavens and the earth, and perfectly preserved versions of the Scrolls of Abraham, the Testament of Moses, the Psalms of David, the Gospels of Jesus, and the Qur’an of Muhammad.
Afternotes
Remember when I said the update about the compilation of the Qur’an was gonna be a short one? Yeah, it looks I lied. It's got two parts now.
In the first part, you got introduced to our heroes, Zaid and Theodora. Just a quick note on historical sources, I was pretty shocked to see that I couldn't find a single source translated into English on her. There's a solid few in Arabic, both contemporary like Abu Hurairah’s account of her and later but reliable like Az-Zamakshari’s detailed biography of her in his book on the female companions of Muhammad. It's downright criminal that Theodora doesn't get the recognition she deserves (probably because as a member of the rationalist Mu’tazila school, all of Az-Zamakshari’s fantastic work was suppressed by the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school), not only because she was a Companion who played a key role in the compilation of the Qur’an, but also because I think that her and Zaid ibn Thabit’s love story is really cute.
In OTL, Zaid is one of the few male Companions who remains monogamous. Though the reasons for this aren’t clear, we do know that they were quite devoted to each other, to the point that the other Companions often referred to them as a single unit. This love story ends tragically however. During the chaos of the Fitna, Theodora (who was an outspoken partisan of Ali’s faction, while Zaid was more neutral) gets assassinated by a member of Banu Umayya while giving a public lecture in a masjid. Although historians think that it was unlikely that Mu’awiya himself called in the hit on Theodora, Zaid clearly thought Mu’awiya was responsible for her death. Mu’awiya made many attempts to get in Zaid's good graces; as the lead compiler of the Qur’an, Zaid had an immense amount of respect from the Ummah which would help his government's legitimacy. Zaid was having none of that; when Mu’awiya once asked what he could do to repair their relationship, Zaid coldly told him that he could ask God to resurrect his wife. Both Zaid and Theodora were ardent believers in the process of shura and in his waning years, Zaid often said that he was glad his beloved Theodora died before she could see the perversion of the Majlis into a powerless rubber-stamp body. He does teach many students during his later years, becoming the primary Islamic influence for the Abbasid-era Mu’tazila rationalist school (which is probably why Az-Zamakshari wrote so much about Theodora) before dying.
I'm a flatly unashamed sentimentalist and I don't think I'm giving away too much (that couldn't already be guessed at by the direction of the TL so far) by saying that I'm gonna give these two a happier ending than the heartbreak of OTL.
but for a self-educated medieval youth in Arabia, he was shockingly cosmopolitan. Like you say, though, there's significant gaps in his knowledge that Salman or Bilal could fill. An Aramaic Qur'an or even a Ge'ez Qur'an this early would be incredible.
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