Perhaps it could only have happened when he was forty, given the auspiciousness of that number throughout the Middle East. For the Beduin, for instance, it is a healing number — one that saves life. A common cure-all is called al-arabin, the forty, a blend of herbs in olive oil and clarified butter. Traditional healers say it takes forty days for a broken bone to mend. And a man cannot be attacked within forty paces of him home or tent, or that of anyone who gives gives him shelter.
Forty, that is gives a new lease to life, and this is how the number consistently appears in the sacred books that came out of the Middle East. The duration of the great flood waited out in Noah’s ark, the years of Israelite wandering in the desert after the exodus, the nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness — all forty, the number signifying a time of struggle in preparation for a new beginning. For anyone fortunate to live that long, forty years marked the fullness of time: the time to step into one’s destiny.
And so in the month of Ramadan in the year of 610, as he had in the past few years, Muhammad sought the solitude of retreat up on Mount Hira. Here, everything human was stripped away and he could be a part of the prolonged silence. As he climbed the familiar path, following tracks made by mountain goats, Mecca receded beneath him. He knew the mountain well by now, and by dusk he was standing in his usual place.
He leaned forward as though into the wind, though there was barely a hint of breeze as the last birds darted for home. As the darkness thickened, so too did the silence — the kind of absolute silence that rings in the ears, a high, perfect tone that comes from everywhere and nowhere. A vibration more than a sound, really, as though the whole landscape is sentient. The rock itself seems to be alive as it releases the accumulated warmth of daytime into the night. Then, as the stars begin their slow revolution overhead, their comes that sense of being a human all alone and yet inexorably part of something larger, a sense of life and existence far older and deeper than the superficial ambitions and everyday cruelties of human affairs.
Was this meditation or was it vigil? Did Muhammad stand in simple gratitude for the ordinary human happiness that had been granted him against all expectation, or was there a certain watchfulness about him, as though he were waiting for something about to happen? We only know that if it was peace he was seeking, what he experienced that night would be anything but.
What actually happened on Mount Hira?
We have what appear to be Muhammad’s own words, but they come relayed through others, at several removes, with each narrator struggling to translate the ineffable into terms they could understand.
One account is credited to Aisha, the youngest and the most outspoken of the wives:
He said: 'When the angel came to me, I had been standing, but I fell to my knees and crawled away, my shoulders trembling... I thought of hurling myself down from a mountain crag, but he appeared to me as I was thinking this and said, 'Muhammad, I am Gabriel and you are the messenger of God.' Then he said, 'Recite!' I said, 'What shall I recite?' He took me and pressed me tightly three times until I was nearly stifled and thought that I should die, and then he said, 'Recite in the name of thy Lord who created man from a clot of blood, that thy Lord is the most munificent, who teaches by the word, teaches man what he knew not.'
The narrative continues in words credited to one of Muhammad’s future followers, ibn-Zubayr, who again quotes him directly:
I recited it, and the angel desisted and departed. I woke up, and it was as though these words had been engraved on my heart. There was none of God's creation more hateful to me than a poet or a madman; I could not bear to look at either of them, yet I thought, 'I must either be a poet or a madman. But if so, Quraysh will never say this of me. I shall take myself to a mountain cliff, hurl myself down from it, and find respite in death.' But when I came near the top of the mountain I heard a voice from the heaven saying, 'Muhammad, you are the messenger of God.' I raised my head to see who was speaking and there Gabriel was in the form of a man with feet astride the horizon. I stood looking at him and this distracted me from what I had intended, and I could go neither forward nor back. I turned my face away from him to all points of the horizon, but wherever I looked I saw him in exactly the same form.'
How to understand what Muhammad experienced in Mount Hira? Something that is literally metaphysical — beyond the physical — is by definition beyond rational explanation. Yet while the attempt to reconstruct mystical experience may well be absurd, one can at least be a fool for trying rather than a different kind of fool for not trying.
The most practical way to pursue the question may be the one that at first glance might seem the least practical of all: by making the leap into poetry.
The essence of religious experience is at heart poetic. Ritual and dogma are merely the framework of organised religion — its girders, as it were; they do not touch on religious experience itself, which is the experience of mystery, of the indescribably enigmatic.
Start, then, with the idea of inspiration: literally the act of breathing in, or being breathed into. The Arabic word for both “breath” and “spirit” is ruh, close kin to the Hebrew ruach. The idea of having a spirit breathed into you is thus built into the language, as it is in the second verse of Genesis, where “the breath of God,” ruach elohim, “lay upon the waters.” But while this may sound wonderful in principle, consider that a human being is not water. Imagine being breathed into — inspired — with such force that your body can hardly bear it. It feels like every cell of your body is overtaken by it, and you are entirely at its mercy. Even as it gives you life, it seems to be squashing the life out of you, suffocating you under its enormous weight until it’s useless to even think of fighting against it.
This was what Muhammad felt on Mount Hira. He was left cowering on the ground, depleted. Covered in sweat, yet shivering, he was inhabited by those words that were his and yet not his, the words he had repeated out loud into the thin, pure air of the mountain, into the emptiness and the darkness.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 