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 (see Chapter l
) 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.
