The Life of Muhammad

The career of the Prophet Muhammad, from his birth in the Mecca around 570 to his death in Medina in 632, transformed the religious, political, and cultural map of the Arabian Peninsula and laid the foundations of the Islamic state. Within a generation of his death, the Arab armies had conquered the southern provinces of the Byzantine Empire and overthrown the Sasanian Persian state, and the religion of which he was the Prophet had become a world-historical force. For the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims today, Muhammad remains the supreme human example, the bearer of the final revelation, and the founder of a community whose continuity with his own Meccan and Medinan followers is unbroken.

For non-Muslim historians, the life of Muhammad is also the foundational subject of early Islamic history. The principal sources for his life are the Qur’an itself; the hadith literature, the vast body of reports about the Prophet’s sayings and actions collected by Muslim scholars; the sira (biographical) literature, of which the Life of the Messenger of God by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767), edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 833), is the earliest and most influential; and the maghazi literature, the accounts of his military expeditions. Modern Western scholarship has been able to establish, with reasonable confidence, the broad outlines of his life, even if many specific events remain debated.

Mecca and the Birth of Muhammad

Muhammad was born into the Hashimite clan of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca, the principal trading city of the Hejaz in western Arabia. The traditional date, derived from later Muslim sources, is 570 CE, the so-called Year of the Elephant, named for an Ethiopian or Yemeni military expedition - itself, the tradition holds, thwarted by divine intervention. His father, Abdallah, died before his birth; his mother, Aminah, died when he was about six. He was raised first by his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, and then by his uncle Abu Talib, whose Hashimite branch of the Quraysh held the responsibility of providing water to the pilgrims of the Kaaba but did not have the wealth of the other leading families.

The Quraysh were a merchant aristocracy. By Muhammad’s lifetime they had organized a system of caravans, allied with the Bedouin tribes that protected the routes, and managed a series of seasonal fairs that were also major occasions for poetry recitals and tribal politics. The young Muhammad, according to the traditional sources, worked in the caravan trade and gained a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness (al-amin). Around 595 he married Khadija bint Khuwaylid, a wealthy widow who had hired him to manage her caravans. Khadija was his senior by some years, and the marriage would prove a stable and formative one: their surviving daughters, notably Fatima, would become important figures in the early Islamic community, and the death of Khadija in 619, just before the death of his uncle Abu Talib, would be remembered as one of the great sorrows of the Prophet’s life.

The Revelations

The first revelations came in 610, when Muhammad was about forty. The traditional accounts describe a solitary retreat in the cave of Hira, on a mountain north of Mecca, and an overwhelming experience that left him trembling and breathless. The first words of what would become the Qur’an are the opening verses of Surah 96: “Read in the name of your Lord who created, created man from a clot of blood. Read, for your Lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know.” The experience was at first a terrifying one: Muhammad feared that he had been struck by some kind of madness or demonic possession. Khadija and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian, reassured him that he was the recipient of divine revelation of the kind that had come to Moses and other prophets.

The early Meccan revelations are characterized by a vivid sense of divine power, of the natural world as a sign of God’s creative activity, of the brevity of earthly life, and of the certainty of resurrection and judgment. They condemn the worship of false gods, denounce the cruelty and miserliness of the wealthy, and demand that the believers care for the poor, the orphan, and the slave. The rhythm of the early Qur’an is short, powerful, and rhythmic, designed, the tradition suggests, to be heard and recited.

For three years or so, Muhammad preached privately, gathering a small circle of followers that included Khadija, his cousin Ali, his freedman Zayd ibn Harithah, and his close friend Abu Bakr. Around 613 he began to preach publicly. The response of the Quraysh was hostile. The message of strict monotheism threatened the trade in pilgrimage; the emphasis on resurrection and judgment threatened the customary Arabian self-image; and the criticism of the wealthy landed on the very men whose protection Muhammad had previously enjoyed.

Opposition and the Early Community

The Meccan opposition to Muhammad combined religious, economic, and political motives. The Quraysh leadership, dominated by men such as Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahl, and the Umayyad clan, charged that Muhammad’s preaching of one God threatened the city’s prestige as a sanctuary for many gods; that his claims to revelation were extravagant; and that his social criticism threatened the wealth of the merchant elite. The response, in the early years, was largely rhetorical, but it was accompanied by an organized persecution of the poorer members of the Muslim community. The memory of these years would shape the community’s self-understanding for centuries: the early Muslims were the muhajirun, the emigrants, who would later be venerated for their perseverance under persecution.

A small group of Muslims, perhaps around 100, eventually emigrated to the Christian kingdom of Aksum, in modern Ethiopia, where the Negus granted them protection. The emigration to Ethiopia, dated variously between 615 and 616, would be remembered as the first hijra of the new faith. The first important converts of the early period were Khadija, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali, and a number of women, including the Prophet’s future wives Aisha and Hafsa. The Muslim community in Mecca never grew to more than a few hundred during Muhammad’s lifetime, and most of its members were from the poorer and more marginal strata of Meccan society.

Two events of the late Meccan period would shape the future of the new faith. The first was the loss, in 619, of both Khadija and Abu Talib, the two people who had most consistently protected Muhammad. The year 619 is often remembered as the “Year of Sorrow” (am al-huzn). The second was the encounter with a group of men from the oasis city of Yathrib, who, around 620, accepted Muhammad as a mediator in the city’s tribal disputes. The Yathrib encounter laid the political foundations for the Hijra of 622.

The Hijra

The Hijra, the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, was the political breakthrough of the new faith. It was prompted by the growing persecution of Muslims in Mecca, by the Yathribite offer of protection, and by a plot to assassinate Muhammad. The Prophet’s safe arrival in Yathrib, with the support of his companion Abu Bakr, is one of the most vividly narrated events in the early Islamic sources.

Yathrib, the city that would become Medina (“the city”), lay some 320 kilometers north of Mecca, in an agricultural oasis of palm groves and grain fields. Its population was divided among the Aws and Khazraj, two Arab tribes whose feuding had destabilized the city, and three Jewish tribes - the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qurayza - who lived in the oasis but did not have political dominance. The Yathribites who invited Muhammad did so in the hope that his prestige as a prophet and his authority as a mediator would resolve their internal disputes. They offered him a role that was, in effect, a new kind of political office: not a king, but the umpire of a new confederation, with authority over both Arab and Jewish members of the community.

The Constitution of Medina, preserved in the early biographical sources, lays out the new political order. Its main provisions include: the binding of all Muslims, regardless of tribe, into a single umma; the obligation of mutual consultation and mutual defense; the recognition of the Jewish tribes as members of the political community, while reserving religious leadership to Muhammad; and a system for the resolution of disputes. The Constitution is a remarkable document, both for its recognition of religious pluralism and for its creation of a new kind of political community in which tribal affiliation was, in principle, subordinated to religious belonging.

Muhammad in Medina

The decade from 622 to 632, the Medinan period, is the period during which the institutions of the Islamic state were created. The mosque was built; the rules of ritual prayer, fasting, and almsgiving were revealed; the zakat (alms) system was organized; and the rules of war and peace, of marriage and inheritance, of criminal and civil law, were gradually elaborated.

The Medinan period was also the period of the great battles of early Islam. The Battle of Badr in 624, in which a small Muslim force defeated a much larger Qurayshite army, was remembered as the first decisive victory of the new faith, and the Qur’an itself refers to it in stirring passages. The Battle of Uhud in 625 was a setback: the Muslims were defeated and Muhammad himself was wounded. The Battle of the Trench (627), in which a Qurayshite siege of Medina was broken by the digging of a defensive trench, marked the failure of the Meccan attempt to destroy the new community. The relations of the Muslim community with the Jewish tribes of Medina deteriorated during this period: the Banu Qaynuqa were expelled in 624/5, the Banu Nadir in 626, and the Banu Qurayza, after the Battle of the Trench, were charged with collaboration with the Meccans and subjected to a controversial punishment whose details remain disputed.

The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah (628) was a turning point. It was a truce of ten years, signed with the Quraysh, that gave the Muslim community international recognition and the right to perform pilgrimage. The conquest of Mecca in 630, the following year, was the result of the breakdown of the treaty by Meccan allies and a relatively bloodless Muslim march on the city. The Prophet entered Mecca in the same year as the pilgrimage, pardoned most of the Quraysh leadership, and proceeded to remove the idols from the Kaaba. By the time of his death in 632, most of the Arabian Peninsula had been brought under his political and religious authority.

The Prophet’s Death and Succession

Muhammad died in Medina on 8 June 632. His death was a crisis for the community, not least because he had left no clear instruction about his successor. The Muslims of Medina met and, in the famous assembly of Saqifa, selected Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law and one of his earliest and most trusted companions, as his successor (khalifa, caliph). The selection was contested by some of the partisans of Ali, who held that the succession should have gone to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. The dispute would eventually become the foundational political division of Islam, the one that would later harden into the Sunni and Shia branches.

Abu Bakr’s brief caliphate (632-634) preserved the unity of the new state, completed the suppression of tribal revolts in the so-called Riddah wars, and began the great Arab conquests. The succession of Umar (634-644) consolidated the conquests and shaped the institutions of the state. Uthman (644-656) presided over the further expansion of the caliphate and the standardization of the Qur’an, but was assassinated by mutinous soldiers. Ali (656-661) was recognized as caliph but was unable to stabilize the community, which had been thrown into civil war by his accession. The four Rightly Guided Caliphs (Rashidun) would later be remembered by Sunnis as the model of pious and legitimate rule.

The Prophet as a Historical Figure

For historians of religion, the life of Muhammad is a study in the formation of a new religious tradition. The revelations of the Qur’an, the practice of the Prophet, the decisions of his Medinan government, and the community’s response to crises became the foundational material for the elaboration of Islamic theology, law, ethics, and ritual. The biographical tradition, beginning with Ibn Ishaq and continuing through the great medieval hadith and sira collections, is itself a major branch of Islamic scholarship, and the figure of the Prophet is at the center of the entire religious tradition. For more on the period that followed the Prophet’s death, see the The Arab Conquests and The Umayyad Caliphate.