Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’S WAY t 157
but discernible role in at least the town’s business: he married a
local entrepreneur, Khadija, and tradition puts him in charge of
her commercial caravan interests. The Quran, at any rate, is filled
with commercial terms about humankind’s accounts, God’s reckonings,
and painful audits at the End Time.
In the Gospels Jesus occasionally makes what seem to be disparaging
remarks about wealth and the wealthy; the Quran is less
interested in wealth as such than in the attitude it engenders. The
Quran’s earliest preaching to the Meccans was aimed directly at
the arrogance and niggardliness of the wealthy who think that
property is their due and who do not share their gains with the
settlement’s poor and needy. Circumstances were quite different at
Medina, however. Muhammad and his community of believers
came rather quickly to share the prosperity that was so dangerous
to the Meccans, though it was now the Prophet’s responsibility to
say how it should be used (Quran 59:6–10). At Medina the Quran
encourages the Muslim raiders with the promise of “rich spoils”
(48:19), and tradition tells of the immense fortunes in loot acquired
by some of the early Muslims. But those same raiders are
warned not to be overly concerned with booty since God too has
“spoils” in store for the faithful (4:94).
What of Muhammad himself? Muhammad was the exemplar of
all human virtue for the Muslim, and though we are treated to a
broad portrait of the man in the hadith that make up the “custom
of the Prophet,” we do not always know what to make of the
details. Many of the Prophetic reports seem to be fighting a later
war, some praising asceticism, others deploring it; some making
the Prophet parsimonious, others lavish. The Quran granted the
Prophet a large share of the spoils of his increasingly successful
raids (59:6), and it permitted him as many wives as he chose to
have, a “privilege granted to no other believer” (33:50–52). But
for all that, Muhammad does not appear either self-aggrandizing
or particularly concerned with personal wealth, either at Medina,
when he possessed it, or at Mecca, when he did not. The Prophet’s
wives—and their exact number appears somewhat uncertain, perhaps
as many as thirteen—represent a different issue, one dear to
later Christian polemicists who found ample material in the hadith