the Voice in Cave: Mecca, 610622

Thirteen years, and almost nothing goes right. It opens with a man of about forty coming down a mountain in terror, telling his wife he thinks he is losing his mind. It closes with the same man leaving his city by night, thirteen years later, with a price on his head - having failed to persuade it. Between those two points: a few dozen converts, most of them young, poor, or enslaved. A campaign that ran from mockery to economic boycott to torture. A refugee crossing to Christian Abyssinia. The loss of his wife and his protector within months of each other, and with them the clan protection that was the only thing keeping him alive. A neighbouring town that heard him out for ten days and then drove him out under a hail of stones. And season after season at the pilgrimage fairs, asking visiting tribes for shelter and being refused - while his own uncle walked behind him telling them not to listen. By any measure available at the time, the Meccan years were a failure. Most accounts of this period let the reader's knowledge of what came afterwards bleed backwards, so that every setback reads as a stage and every refusal as a delay. This volume refuses to. In the year 620, on the evidence available in the year 620, there was no reason whatever to expect what happened next. It does not go around the hard material The report of the so-called Satanic Verses receives a full chapter: the objection stated at its strongest before any defence, the transmission record laid out, the traditional Muslim case and the modern scholarly case each given properly, and a judgement reached and marked as a judgement. The Night Journey is treated the same way - what the Quran actually says, what the later narrative added, and the range of interpretation inside the tradition, which is far wider than most readers are told. So is the persecution, where the pattern of who suffered what turns out to be an almost exact function of who had a clan to avenge them. The third of seven volumes on the life of Muhammad, written for readers who are not Muslim. No prior knowledge assumed. Every claim marked by how much weight it will bear. "Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor does he detest you."