| Islamic History
In or about the year 570 the
child who would be named Muhammad and who would become the Prophet of
one of the world's great religions, Islam, was born into a family
belonging to a clan of Quraysh, the ruling tribe of Mecca, a city in the
Hijaz region of northwestern Arabia.
Originally the site of the Ka'bah, a shrine of ancient origins, Mecca
had with the decline of southern Arabia become an important center of
sixth-century trade with such powers as the Sassanians, Byzantines, and
Ethiopians. As a result the city was dominated by powerful merchant
families among whom the men of Quraysh were preeminent.
Muhammad's father, 'Abd Allah ibn'Abd al-Muttalib, died before the boy
was born; his mother, Aminah, died when he was six. The orphan was
consigned to the care of his grandfather, the head of the clan of
Hashim. After the death of his grandfather, Muhammad was raised by his
uncle, Abu Talib. As was customary, Muhammad as a child was sent to live
for a year or two with a Bedouin family. This custom, followed until
recently by noble families of Mecca, Medina, Tayif, and other towns of
the Hijaz, had important implications for Muhammad. In addition to
enduring the hardships of desert life, he acquired a taste for the rich
language so loved by the Arabs, whose speech was their proudest art, and
learned the patience and forbearance of the herdsmen, whose life of
solitude he first shared and then came to understand and appreciate.
About the year 590, Muhammad, then in his twenties, entered the service
of a widow named Khadijah as a merchant actively engaged with trading
caravans to the north. Sometime later Muhammad married Khadijah, by whom
he had two sons - who did not survive - and four daughters.
During this period of his life Muhammad traveled widely. Then, in his
forties he began to retire to meditate in a cave on Mount Hira outside
of Mecca, where the first of the great events of Islam took place. One
day, as he sat in the cave, he heard a voice, later identified as that
of the Angel Gabriel, which ordered him to:
Recite: In the name of thy Lord who created, Created man from a clot of blood.
Three times Muhammad pleaded his inability to do so, but each time the
command was repeated. Finally, Muhammad recited the words of what are
now the first five verses of the 96th surah or chapter of the Quran -
words which proclaim God the Creator of man and the Source of all
knowledge.
At first Muhammad divulged his
experience only to his wife and his immediate circle. But as more
revelations enjoined him to proclaim the oneness of God universally, his
following grew, at first among the poor and the slaves, but later also
among the most prominent men of Mecca. The revelations he received at
this time and those he did so later are all incorporated in the Quran,
the Scripture of Islam.
Photo: The sun rises over Jabal al-Rahmah, the Mount of Mercy, where Muhammad
in his farewell sermon told the assembled Muslims, "I have delivered
God's message to you and left you with a clear command: the Book of God
and the practice of His Prophet. If you hold fast to this you will never
go astray."
Not everyone accepted God's message transmitted through Muhammad. Even
in his own clan there were those who rejected his teachings, and many
merchants actively opposed the message. The opposition, however, merely
served to sharpen Muhammad's sense of mission and his understanding of
exactly how Islam differed from paganism. The belief in the unity of God
was paramount in Islam; from this all else followed. The verses of the
Quran stress God's uniqueness, warn those who deny it of impending
punishment, and proclaim His unbounded compassion to those who submit to
His will. They affirm the Last Judgment, when God, the Judge, will
weigh in the balance the faith and works of each man, rewarding the
faithful and punishing the transgressor. Because the Quran rejected
polytheism and emphasized man's moral responsibility, in powerful
images, it presented a grave challenge to the worldly Meccans.
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