When Was Islam Founded?
Islam is traditionally dated to 610 CE, when Muhammad received his first revelations; the Hijra of 622 marks the founding of the Muslim community.
Islam is traditionally dated to 610 CE, when the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelations in the cave of Hira near Mecca. The event marks the beginning of the Qur’an, the Islamic scripture, and the founding of the faith. The beginning of the Muslim community is dated to 622 CE, the year of the Hijra or migration to Medina, which is the year 1 of the Islamic calendar. By either reckoning, Islam was founded in the early seventh century, in the Hejaz region of western Arabia, in the years between the long Roman-Byzantine and Sasanian Persian wars.
The dating of the founding of Islam is a relatively straightforward matter in the Islamic tradition, but the historical question of what Islam was in its earliest years is a more complicated one. The early Muslim community was small, persecuted, and centered in the Mecca for the first twelve years of its existence. The community only became a major political force with the Hijra of 622 and the consolidation of the Medinan state in the following years. Both dates, 610 and 622, are important in the Islamic tradition, and they mark the beginning of the revelation and the beginning of the community, respectively.
The Year 610: The First Revelations
The traditional date for the beginning of the revelations is 610 CE, traditionally dated to the 27th day of the month of Ramadan in the year. The Prophet Muhammad, then around forty, was in retreat in the cave of Hira on the mountain of Nur, north of Mecca, when, according to the traditional sources, he experienced an overwhelming presence and the words “Read, in the name of your Lord who created” (Qur’an, 96:1). The experience was at first terrifying: Muhammad feared that he had been struck by some kind of madness or demonic possession, and he returned to his wife Khadija in a state of agitation. Khadija and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian who recognized the nature of Muhammad’s experience, reassured him that he was the recipient of divine revelation.
The first revelations, gathered as the early Meccan suras of the Qur’an, are characterized by a vivid sense of divine power, of the natural world as a sign of God’s creative activity, and of the certainty of judgment and resurrection. They condemn the worship of false gods, denounce the cruelty of the wealthy, and demand that the believers care for the poor and the orphan. The Muslim community of the Meccan period was small and persecuted, drawing largely from the poorer and more marginal members of Meccan society. For three years, the Prophet preached privately, gathering a small circle of followers. From about 613, the preaching was public, and the small community was subjected to insults, occasional physical violence, and the partial boycott of the Hashimite clan.
The Year 622: The Hijra and the Founding of the Community
The Hijra, the migration of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to the oasis city of Yathrib, later called Medina, took place in 622. The Muslim calendar takes the Hijra as its year 1, so the year 622 in the Christian calendar is the year 1 in the Islamic calendar. The choice of the Hijra as the starting point of the calendar, made by the caliph Umar in 637, reflects the Islamic tradition’s understanding that the founding of the Muslim community in Medina was a more politically significant event than the beginning of the revelations in Mecca.
The Hijra was prompted by the failure of the Meccans to protect the Muslims, the growth of persecution in Mecca, and the invitation of a group of men from Yathrib to the Prophet to act as arbitrator of their tribal disputes. The Prophet’s safe arrival in Yathrib in September 622 was the political breakthrough of the new faith: in Medina, the Prophet built the first Muslim umma (community), drafted the Constitution of Medina, and began the political and military expansion of Islam. The decade from 622 to 632 was the period of the great battles of early Islam, the elaboration of the legal and ritual practices of the faith, and the consolidation of the community in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Year 630: The Conquest of Mecca
A third date of significance in the early history of Islam is 630, the year of the Muslim conquest of Mecca. By 630, the Prophet had united most of the Arabian Peninsula under the political and religious authority of the new faith, and the conquest of Mecca, with the removal of the idols from the Kaaba, marked the consolidation of Islam as the religion of the Arabs. The Prophet died in 632, leaving the Muslim community united in the Arabian Peninsula but vulnerable to the political struggles that would follow his death.
The Founding of Islam in World History
In the broader context of the history of the Early Middle Ages, the founding of Islam in the early seventh century was one of the most significant events. The Arabian Peninsula, which had been peripheral to the great empires of late antiquity, was now the heartland of a new religion. Within a century of the Prophet’s death, the Arab Muslim armies had conquered the southern provinces of the Byzantine Empire and overthrown the Sasanian Persian state. The political and religious map of the medieval world had been transformed. For the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims today, the founding of Islam in 610 remains a foundational event in human history, and the story of the Prophet’s revelations, the Hijra, and the early community is among the most extensively documented in any religious tradition.