For the Bedouins living before the era of Muhammad, time did not exist. Or rather, they thought of it as an all-enveloping and all-enfeebling mist, without clear shape or pattern. Only the bright stars overhead pricked the pervasive gloom, helping the nomads to anticipate rain and decide when to take their animals to pasture. To make sense of their lives, the men sang songs, and the songs they sang told of distant earthquakes and battles. It was the sole history that they knew.
The Prophet’s birth, to believe tradition, coincided with one of these battles: the so-called ‘Event of the Elephant’ (occurring in the latter half of the sixth century of the Christian Era), when Mecca fell under the siege of a foreign king’s army with a white elephant at its helm. According to a tale later told in the Koran, God sent a cloud of birds to pelt the attackers with stones until they fled.
Alongside Muhammad’s revelation of a new religion came his revelation of time. Gone now was the idea of life as constituted by a flux of vague, discontinuous and casual moments. Five compulsory prayers – Fajr (at dawn), Dhuhr (after the sun’s zenith), Asr (during late afternoon), Maghrib (at sunset) and Isha (at twilight) – regulated each day. All our days, said the Prophet, are numbered. Each follows the other in meaningful succession.
‘God wraps night around day, and He wraps day around night.’
Seven of them together make a week (beginning on what we call Saturday), the span in which, it was said, God had progressively created the world: the earth on the first day, the hills on the second, the trees on the third, all unpleasant things on the fourth, the light on the fifth, the beasts on the sixth, and Adam, who was the last of creation, about the time of the Asr prayer on the seventh.
Look up at the heavens, Muhammad urged his followers. Each month, he declared, began when the moon appeared ‘like an old shrivelled palm-leaf’. Divinely ordained properties separated the months and made them distinct. During four of the months, it was forbidden to draw a sword. During certain others, believers could set out on pilgrimage. One month, called Ramadan, was set aside for fasting during the hours of daylight. Twelve lunar months composed one year.
Muhammad had been preaching for about a decade when, at the approximate age of fifty, the rulers of Mecca ousted him and his small band of followers from the city. On camels, they travelled north to the oasis town of Yathrib, finding refuge there. The flight, known as hegira, became the founding date of the Islamic calendar; henceforth, every period of time would be precisely accounted.
