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in him. “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” said Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuits, anticipating modern psychology by several centuries, and so it was with Muhammad. His Beduin childhood would play a major role in making him who he was.
    The much-touted purity of desert life was in fact the purity of near-poverty, with no room for indulgence. Once weaned, he’d eat the regular Beduin fare of camel milk along with grains and pulses grown in winter pastures—a sparse diet for a sparse way of life, with an animal slaughtered for meat only for a big celebration or to honor a visiting dignitary. There were no luxuries, not even the sweetness of honey and dates. But if it was a sparse life, it was also a healthy one, spent almost entirely outdoors.
    The high desert steppe was an early education in the power of nature and the art of living with it: how to gauge the right time to move from winter to summer grazing and back again; how to find water where there seemed to be none; how to adjust the long black camel-hair tents to give shade in summer and create warmth on winter nights. Every child did whatever work he or she was capable of. As soon as he could walk, Muhammad was sent out to herd the flocks under the protective wing of one of his foster sisters, Shayma. As older children do with youngsters in large families, she carried him on her adolescent hip when his legs gave out, and kept a watchful eye on him. He in turn watched her, learning how to handle the goats and camels and becoming to all intents and purposes a Beduin boy except that he was always called “the Qurayshi,” the one from the Quraysh tribe.
    The name was a constant reminder that though he was living with Halima’s clan, he was not one of them; he belonged somewhere else, on the other side of the forbiddingly jagged mountain chain aptly called the Hijaz, “the barrier.” Though Mecca was only fifty miles away, it could as well have been a thousand. The Beduin talked of the place with a shudder. All those people hemmed in by walls with no space to roam? Even something as basic as the open horizon blocked by mountains all around? How could anyone live that way? Yet there was an undertone of grudging respect in acknowledgment of their economic reliance on the townspeople—a reliance of which Muhammad himself was a daily reminder.
    By the time he was five, he could handle the animals by himself. He’d wait by a well while the camels drank seemingly endlessly, their humps fattening as the red blood cells in them hydrated; fight sleep as he stood night watch, guarding the flocks against hyenas howling at the scent of prey; listen for the rustle of desert foxes in the brush or the restless anxiety of his charges as a mountain lion prowled silently nearby, its tracks clear in the dust the next morning. He didn’t need to be told that the desert was a lesson in humility, stripping away all pretense and ambition. He knew in his body how large and alive the world was, and how small a human being within it.
    Even the sun-seared desert rock seemed to breathe as it released the accumulated heat of day into the cold night air. The vast canopy of stars moved overhead, each constellation playing out its story, impervious to the boy below. It was a world inhabited by spirits, palpable presences all around. How else explain a solitary tree defying all probability to stand tall in an otherwise barren valley? Or the landmark of a singular stone monolith standing out as though dropped from above by a giant hand? Or the way a spring hidden deep in the cleft of a rock wall suddenly came to life, bubbling as you bent down to drink from it as though it were speaking to you? The spirits of these places, the jinns, were unpredictable, capriciously capable of either good or evil. Either way, they demanded respect. In much the same way as Christians might cross themselves to ward off evil, travelers camping for the night would chant an