Muhammad

Muhammad founded a religion and a state in twenty-three years, and both outlived him by fourteen centuries. He was born in Mecca about 570 into the Hashim clan of the Quraysh, orphaned young, raised by a grandfather and then an uncle, and worked as a merchant on the Syrian caravan routes. He married Khadija, a widow who had employed him and who was the first to believe him. The revelations began about 610 in a cave outside Mecca and continued for the rest of his life, and their content was uncompromising in a city whose economy rested on pilgrimage to a shrine of many gods: one God, no images, judgement, and obligations to orphans, widows and the poor that the merchant families had no wish to hear. The early community was persecuted and some of it took refuge in Ethiopia. The move to Medina in 622, the hijra, is where the Islamic calendar begins, and it is the point at which the movement became a polity — he was invited as an arbitrator between feuding tribes and became the head of a community with a written constitution covering Muslims, Jews and pagans. The wars with Mecca followed: Badr in 624, Uhud in 625, the siege of Medina in 627, and a negotiated entry into Mecca in 630 with a general amnesty. He died in 632 having unified most of the Arabian peninsula. He left no instruction about the succession, which is the origin of the division between Sunni and Shia. The revelations were collected into the Quran under the third caliph within about twenty years of his death, and the accounts of his sayings and conduct became a second body of authority. Muslims do not depict him, which is why his biography has no portrait tradition of any kind.

• Lived: 570 CE – 632 CE
• Nationality: Arab
• Roles: religious_leader, leader

Related

• The Medieval World
• The Hijra — Muhammad Establishes Islam as a Political Force