Seda Pie’s Reviews > If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran > Status Update

I asked Akram what it was he most admired about the Prophet. He thought for a moment, and then said quietly, “That he knew his limits.”

Too much of anything is poison. Even love.

“He never forced people to believe anything,”

Something people have forgotten so easily.

Suppose you’re serving guests some water. Do you start with the more important guests? The elders or the kids? Easy, he responded: start from the right, since that’s what the Prophet did.

The Prophet’s first act: to enter the Kaaba and smash the Arab idols in it with his staff.

Nine battles and eight years later, Muhammad rode into Mecca in triumph,

AD 622, on news that the Quraysh were plotting his murder, Muhammad himself joined the other Muslims in what was to become Medina, or “the City,” short for “City of the Prophet.”

Women were no longer to be regarded as chattel, but as human beings with rights to inherit property and to dispose of their own wealth as they saw fit. The rich should give to the poor. All races were equal under God.

Much of the town’s wealth derived from the hajj, the region’s annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba, or the black granite cube housing idols of the various gods worshipped by tribes. The idea of a single omnipotent God overthrew the traditions of tribal gods—and the 360 statues of them kept in the Kaaba.

“Never once,” he said, “did I receive a revelation without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.”

would continue to receive revelations for the next twenty-three years, until his death in AD 632.