I said to myself, “Your humble servant [Muhammad] is either a poet or a madman, but Quraysh shall never say this of me. I shall take myself to a mountain crag, hurl myself down from it, kill myself, and find relief that way.”4 In fact, Al-Tabari says that as Muhammad was going to commit suicide, Gabriel stopped him and addressed him as the Prophet of Allah. Khadijah believed his experience was with the divine and sought to calm his fears. She told her aged cousin, Waraqah ibn Nawfal, what had happened,
Page 24