Muhammad
Muhammad was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six, and his grandfather died two years after that. By the age of eight he had already lost the three people who might have raised him. He grew up an orphan in a house that, despite its prominent name, lacked prosperity. He could not read. And yet by the time he died in 632, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to the religion he founded. How does a fatherless orphan, mocked by his own tribe as weak, become a leader whose words Muslims regard as the verbatim word of God? What happened in a mountain cave when he was forty? And why is so much of his early life, in the words of one historian, impossible to recover beyond the bare fact that he once existed?
John Burton, judging the record from a historian's perspective, reached a blunt conclusion. He wrote that virtually nothing of use to the historian emerges from the sparse record of the early life of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed. The difficulty is an oral gap. The earliest writings about Muhammad's life appear generations after the events they describe.
The earliest written biography is Ibn Ishaq's Life of God's Messenger, composed around the year 767. The original is lost. It survives only as long excerpts inside later works, chiefly by Ibn Hisham and to a lesser extent by al-Tabari. Ibn Hisham admitted in his preface that he had cut material that would distress certain people, so even the surviving version is filtered.
These early accounts grew out of a tradition of storytellers, the qussas, who first shaped Muhammad's life as heroic epics called magazi. Details were added later and edited into the biographies known as sirah. Western historians describe the purpose of these works as largely hagiographic, meant to convey a message rather than to record history strictly. Karen Armstrong argues that, thanks to these early efforts, more is known about Muhammad than about the founders of almost any other major religion.
A separate body of sources is the hadith, accounts of Muhammad's sayings and approvals, compiled several generations after his death by figures including Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Muslim scholars trusted hadith more than biography because each report carried a chain of transmission, the isnad. Western scholars have widely suspected that many hadith were fabricated in Islam's early centuries to support theological and legal positions. Wilferd Madelung takes a middle path, reading them not as windows onto Muhammad's life but onto the mentality of the era that wrote them down.
When he was forty, around the year 610, Muhammad was secluded in the cave of Hira when the angel Gabriel appeared to him. The financial security his wife Khadija provided had given him time to spend alone there. Gabriel showed him a cloth bearing verses and ordered him to read. Muhammad confessed he was illiterate. Gabriel choked him forcefully, nearly suffocating him, and repeated the command. This happened three times before the angel finally recited the words that became the opening of Quran chapter 96.
Muhammad came to his senses terrified. He feared he had been visited by a jinn, and the thought made him no longer want to live. He fled the cave and climbed toward the summit of the mountain, intending to throw himself off. At the top he saw a vast being that filled the horizon and kept staring back at him no matter which way he turned. He later identified this presence as Gabriel, not an ordinary angel but a transcendent figure that resisted the limits of space.
He staggered down the mountain and reached his wife crawling on his hands and knees, shaking and crying out "Cover me!" Khadija wrapped him in a cloak until his fear passed. She had no doubt the revelation was real. Her Christian cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal reassured him too, exclaiming, "Holy! Holy! If you have spoken the truth to me, O Khadijah, there has come to him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime."
Khadija devised her own test. When the being next appeared, she had Muhammad sit on her thigh and then her lap, asking each time whether it was still present. After she removed her clothes with him on her lap, he reported that Gabriel had departed. From this she concluded it was an angel and not a demon, and told him to rejoice. Some historians find the graphic accounts of these episodes probably genuine, precisely because they are unlikely to have been invented by later Muslims eager to idealize him.
Khadija, according to Muslim tradition, was the first person to believe Muhammad was a prophet. She was a wealthy businesswoman, forty years old, who had noticed his reputation when he was twenty-five and proposed marriage to him after he managed one of her caravans into Syria. He remained monogamous with her until her death. After her came his ten-year-old cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, his close friend Abu Bakr, and his adopted son Zayd.
Word of the revelations divided his family along a striking line. The youth and the women generally believed him. Most of the men of the elder generation were staunchly opposed. When Muhammad began preaching publicly around 613, many of his earliest followers came from the lower social ranks: women, freedmen, servants, and slaves. They memorized each new revelation by repeating it after him, and the literate among them wrote it down.
He gave the community its first rituals: the prayer called salat, with postures of complete surrender, and the almsgiving called zakat. The movement was known at this stage as tazakka, meaning purification. When the Quraysh demanded he prove himself by bringing forth springs of water, he refused, arguing that the regular workings of nature were already sufficient proof of God's majesty. Others mocked him, asking why God had given him no treasure.
According to Amr ibn al-As, several Quraysh gathered at the Hijr and complained that they had never faced problems as serious as those Muhammad caused. They said he had derided their culture, scorned their faith, and cursed their gods. When he passed them performing the ritual tawaf, they hurled insults. On his third pass he stopped and warned, "By Him who holds my life in His hand, I bring you slaughter." The next day a man seized him by his cloak, until Abu Bakr intervened, weeping, "Would you kill a man for saying God is my Lord?"
The Quraysh tried bribery before force. They offered Muhammad entry to the merchants' inner circle and an advantageous marriage if he would stop preaching. He refused both. A delegation led by the Makhzum chief the Muslims called Abu Jahl then confronted his uncle and protector Abu Talib, demanding he disown his nephew. Abu Talib first dismissed them as overheated. Pressed harder, he asked Muhammad not to burden him beyond his strength. Muhammad wept and answered that he would not stop even if they placed the sun in his right hand and the moon in his left. Moved, Abu Talib called him back: "Say what you please, for by God I will never give you up."
The Quraysh also tried to expose him as a fraud. They sent Nadr ibn al-Harith and Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt to consult Jewish rabbis in Yathrib, who supplied three test questions: about young men who went forth in the first age, about a traveler who reached both ends of the earth, and about the nature of the spirit. Muhammad promised answers the next day, but fifteen days passed in silence, fueling gossip. When Gabriel finally answered, the Quran told of sleepers in a cave, of the figure Dhu al-Qarnayn, and declared the spirit beyond human comprehension. Neither the rabbis nor the Quraysh converted. After the Battle of Badr, Nadr and Uqba were executed on Muhammad's orders. When Uqba pleaded, "But who will take care of my children, Muhammad?" the answer was a single word: "Hell!"
In 619, two of the people who anchored Muhammad's life died: his wife Khadija, his source of financial and emotional support, and his uncle Abu Talib, his guardian and protector. On his deathbed Abu Talib refused to embrace Islam and held to his polytheism to the end. His other uncle, Abu Lahab, briefly offered protection, then withdrew it after Muhammad said that Abu Talib and Abd al-Muttalib were destined for hell for their unbelief.
Stripped of protection, Muhammad went to the city of Ta'if to seek allies. He was met with scorn. "And if Allah wished to send a prophet," they said, "couldn't He have found a better person than you, a weak and fatherless orphan?" When he asked them to keep his visit secret, they pelted him with stones and injured his limbs. He escaped to the garden of a Meccan chief, Utbah ibn Rabi'ah, where Utbah's Christian slave Addas offered him grapes and, overwhelmed, kissed his head, hands, and feet.
Returning toward Mecca, he found he could not safely enter. Abu Jahl had vowed to bar him as Ta'if had. Muhammad sent word to Akhnas ibn Shariq, a man of his mother's clan, asking for protection. Akhnas declined. So did Suhayl ibn Amir. Only Mut'im ibn 'Adiy, chief of the Banu Nawfal, agreed. Mut'im rode out armed with his sons and nephews to escort him into the city. When Abu Jahl asked whether Mut'im had converted, the answer was, "Granting him protection, of course."
The biographers place the famous night journey, the Isra and Mi'raj, at this low point. Muslims today understand the Isra as Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and the Mi'raj as his ascent from Jerusalem to heaven. Yet the traditions disagree sharply. The Quran does not address the Mi'raj directly, and verse 17:1 speaks only of a servant carried by night from a sacred place of prayer to a most distant place of worship. Some scholars hold the earliest tradition saw that distant site as a celestial twin of the Kaaba, so the journey ran straight from Mecca through the heavens. Ibn Sa'd even recorded the two events as separate and unconnected, on different dates.
Six men of the Banu Khazraj first carried Muhammad's message to Yathrib, the city later called Medina. They had heard local Jews warn that a prophet would come, and they raced to claim him first. Over two seasons more converts pledged loyalty to him at Aqaba near Mecca. In June 622, seventy-five people from Yathrib, including two women, met him secretly there and gave the oath known as the pledge of war.
Then came the Hijrah, the migration whose name means the severing of kinship ties. The departures stretched across three months. Muhammad stayed back to shepherd the reluctant, so that no Muslim was left behind in Mecca. On the night assassins from each clan gathered to kill him, he had his cousin Ali lie in his bed under his green mantle while he slipped out the back. The Quraysh then posted a bounty of one hundred camels for his return, dead or alive. After hiding three days, he reached Medina with Abu Bakr on the 4th of September 622. The migrants were called the Muhajirun, the Medinans who received them the Ansar.
In Medina he bought land and built a structure that served as his home and as a gathering place for prayer. Tree trunks held up the roof. There was no pulpit, only a small stool he stood on to address the congregation. Completed after about seven months in April 623, it became the first mosque, and its northern wall faced the direction of prayer, which at that time was Jerusalem. The poor came there for alms and food. Christians and Jews were welcome to share in its worship.
To call people to prayer, Muhammad first considered a ram's horn like the Jews or a wooden clapper like the Christians. Then a follower dreamed of a man in a green cloak who said the call should be a booming human voice crying "allahu akbar." Muhammad agreed and chose Bilal, a former Abyssinian slave known for his powerful voice. He also bound the city's Arab and Jewish tribes together with the document later called the Constitution of Medina, which guaranteed the Jews freedom of religion and required everyone to defend the oasis if attacked.
On the 11th of February 624, praying in the Masjid al-Qiblatayn, Muhammad received the revelation to turn from Jerusalem and face Mecca. His companions followed his lead, founding the tradition that continues today. War with Mecca had already begun, since the Meccans had seized the property of the emigrants. In March 624 he led about three hundred warriors to ambush a Meccan caravan at Badr. The caravan slipped away, but a Meccan force came to fight.
Outnumbered more than three to one, the Muslims were gripped by fear. Muhammad told them he had dreamed God would send a thousand angels to fight beside them. He stationed his troops at the wells so the Quraysh would have to fight uphill, into the sun, for water. The Muslims won, killing at least forty-five Meccans, including Abu Jahl, while losing fourteen of their own. Seventy prisoners were taken, many later ransomed. The victory dispelled doubt and quieted opposition within Medina.
Not every battle went his way. In 625 at Mount Uhud, Meccan forces under Abu Sufyan turned the tide when some Muslim archers abandoned their posts. Rumors spread that Muhammad was dead. He had only been injured and escaped with loyal men. After the heavy losses there, he received the revelation permitting Muslim men up to four wives, the beginning of polygyny in Islam, since many women had been left without male protectors. In 627 Abu Sufyan returned with ten thousand men. On the advice of Salman the Persian, the Muslims dug a trench wherever Medina lay open to cavalry, a defense unknown in Arabia. The siege began on the 31st of March 627, lasted two weeks, and ended when the coalition gave up and went home.
With each conflict came reckonings with Medina's three main Jewish tribes. The Banu Qaynuqa surrendered after a roughly two-week blockade and were exiled. The Banu Nadir capitulated after Muhammad had their palm groves felled and burned. The harshest came after the Battle of the Trench. Gabriel, the sources say, instructed Muhammad to attack the Banu Qurayza, accused of conspiring with the enemy. After a twenty-five-day siege they surrendered. Muhammad let one of their Aws allies, Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, judge them. Sa'd, dying of an infected wound, ruled that the men be put to death and the women and children enslaved. Between six hundred and nine hundred men were executed. Walid N. Arafat and Barakat Ahmad later disputed the accuracy of this account, while Watt found Arafat's arguments not entirely convincing and Meir J. Kister refuted them.
Early in 628, after dreaming of an unopposed pilgrimage, Muhammad set out for Mecca in pilgrim dress. At Hudaybiyya the Quraysh blocked him, and he insisted he had come to honor the Kaaba, not to fight. When a rumor spread that his envoy Uthman had been killed, he gathered his followers to renew their oaths. The talks produced a treaty: a ten-year truce, a one-sided clause returning Qurayshites who defected to Muhammad but not Muslims who defected to the Quraysh, and permission to make the pilgrimage the following year.
About ten weeks later he turned on Khaybar, a wealthy oasis some seventy-five miles north of Medina, home to Jews including the Banu Nadir he had earlier expelled. Marching by night, his forces surprised the residents as they came out to harvest dates. After more than a month the city fell. Its chief, Kenana ibn al-Rabi, was tortured for the location of the Banu al-Nadir treasure and then beheaded. Muhammad took Kenana's wife, Safiyya bint Huyayy, as a slave and later as a wife. At the feast afterward, a Jewish woman named Zaynab bint al-Harith poisoned the meal. His companion Bishr ate it and died; Muhammad spat his out but suffered from the poison's effects until his death. Asked why, Zaynab said, "If he is truly a prophet, he will know about the poison. If he's merely a king, I'll be rid of him."
The truce broke when a clan of the Banu Bakr, Mecca's allies, raided the Banu Khuza'ah, who were allied with Muhammad. In 630 he marched on Mecca with ten thousand converts and took the city with minimal casualties. He declared an amnesty for past offenses, except for ten people guilty of murder or of having sparked the war, some of whom were later pardoned. He destroyed the statues of the Arabian gods around the Kaaba. According to reports gathered by Ibn Ishaq and al-Azraqi, he personally spared paintings of Mary and Jesus, though other traditions say all images were erased.
After Mecca came the valley of Hunayn, where the Banu Hawazin surprised his force of twelve thousand before the Muslims overpowered them. When the Hawazin later converted, they reminded him that some of their women had nursed him as a baby, and he released their captives. He gave a large share of the Hunayn spoils to new Quraysh converts; Abu Sufyan and his sons Mu'awiya and Yazid received a hundred camels each. The Ansar, who had fought bravely and received almost nothing, were unhappy. One said, "It is not with such gifts that one seeks God's face." In February 631 came the revelation granting idolaters four months of grace. During the pilgrimage season of 632, Muhammad personally led the rites and delivered a sermon. A few months later he fell ill and died, on the 8th of June 632, with most of the Arabian Peninsula by then converted to his religion.
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Common questions
Who was Muhammad and what religion did he found?
Muhammad was an Arab religious, military, and political leader and the founder of Islam, born in Mecca around the year 570 and dead on the 8th of June 632. Muslims regard him as the final prophet of God and the Seal of the Prophets, whose revelations form the Quran.
When and where was Muhammad born?
Muhammad was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. His father died before his birth, his mother died when he was six, and his grandfather died two years later, leaving him an orphan raised by his uncle Abu Talib.
What happened to Muhammad in the cave of Hira?
When Muhammad was about forty, around the year 610, the angel Gabriel appeared to him in the cave of Hira and commanded him to read, choking him three times before reciting the verses that became the opening of Quran chapter 96. Terrified, Muhammad fled to his wife Khadija, who reassured him the revelation was real.
Why did Muhammad migrate from Mecca to Medina?
Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622 to escape persecution by the Quraysh, who had plotted to assassinate him. This migration is called the Hijrah, and he reached Medina with Abu Bakr on the 4th of September 622.
How did Muhammad conquer Mecca?
In 630, Muhammad marched on Mecca with 10,000 Muslim converts after the Quraysh broke the Treaty of Hudaybiyya by aiding the Banu Bakr against his allies the Banu Khuza'ah. He took the city with minimal casualties, declared an amnesty for most past offenses, and destroyed the statues of the Arabian gods around the Kaaba.
Why is Muhammad's early life difficult for historians to reconstruct?
Muhammad's early life is difficult to reconstruct because the earliest written biographies appear generations after his death, creating an oral gap that makes the information contentious. The historian John Burton concluded that virtually nothing of use to the historian survives beyond the bare fact that Muhammad once existed.