Lecture 2

II. THE LIFE OF THE PROPHET, THE SPREAD OF ISLAM

Life of the Prophet:

A man called Muhammad b. Abdallah was born around 570 A.D. in a town called Mecca in the Arabian peninsula. At the time of his birth, his father `Abdallah was already deceased; Muhammad's mother Amina brought him up with the help of her extended family.  Traditional accounts describe Muhammad as a humble, honest, and upright man in his youth, given to quiet reflection.  In recognition of these traits, he is said to have been given the title al-Amin -- which means “the trustworthy one.”  Sometimes the young Muhammad would retire to a cave in the surrounding mountains of Mecca to meditate on the social and moral ills around him and contemplate ways of counteracting them.   Traditional accounts describe a society in decline in this period; there was much tribal warfare which led to many widows and orphans who were often left to fend for themselves.  There appears to have been a breakdown in the basic social structure; those who were well off tended to care very little for the poor, the weak, and the disenfranchised; thoughtful people like Muhammad were concerned about their condition and the social neglect from which they suffered.

Muhammad, however, was not a total recluse, he was also a merchant and went on trading trips, for example, to Damascus, Syria.  On one of these trips, tradition tells us, he met a Christian monk called Bahira, who foretold that one day he would be chosen by the one God, the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, to be His prophet and to perfect His religion.  When Muhammad was about twenty-five, he married a twice-widowed 40 year old woman, called Khadija, on whose behalf he had carried on some business.  Due to the new both financial and emotional security in his life, Muhammad could now dedicate his time more fully to reflection and meditation in his cave at Mt. Hira.  One day, when he was about forty years old, around 610 of the common era, Muhammad heard a voice address him in his solitary cave:

"Recite, in the name of your Lord who created-
Created man from a blood-clot 
Recite, for your Lord is bountiful
Who taught by the Pen
Taught man what he knew not."

These verses, verses 1-5 from the chapter entitled Chapter of the Pen, is considered to be the first revelation to Muhammad; even though it is the 96th sura.  You may wonder why the first revelation is chapter 96 rather than the first chapter of the Qur’an. The Qur’an consists of  14 units or chapters; each chapter  in Arabic is called a sura.  The suras are arranged according to length and not according to chronology, that is, according to the date of revelation, with the longest suras coming at the beginning and progressively getting shorter.  The chapter of the Pen, as you can see, is quite short and therefore placed towards the end of the text.  In general, the longer suras were revealed during the Prophet’s Medinan phase, and the shorter suras during his Meccan phase; that is, before the hijra or emigration to Medina in 622 CE.  This is an oversimplification because scholars have determined that some of the longer Medinan suras may have Meccan verses inserted in them; we can tell because of the subject matter that they deal with or sometimes on account of the style.  But I think for your purposes at this stage, we need not be unduly concerned with the exact dating of the chapters or specific verses.  The Qur'anic revelations had begun; they would continue for another roughly twenty-two years until the Prophet's death in 632.

At first Muhammad preached quietly, mostly among family members.  The first person to accept Islam, as is universally recognized, was Khadija, the Prophet's wife.  After Khadija, close companions of the Prophet like `Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, Abu Bakr, Umar, `Uthman, Zayd b. Haritha, the Prophet's freed bondsman, and close members of his family, like his daughters, accepted Islam.

Then he received a divine injunction, roughly around 613, commanding him to start preaching publicly.  A list of these early conversions, after Muhammad started to preach publicly, have been preserved for us containing about fifty names.  It is interesting to look at the kind of people who were first drawn to Islam.  Firstly, there were a number of young men from the most influential families of the most influential clans.  Secondly, there were men from other families and clans, still mostly young, and from weaker clans and families.  The majority of these converts were under thirty when they became Muslims.  Thirdly, there were a number of men who were outside the "clan system" (see Bates/Rassam for an explanation of the clan system).  Some of these converts were non-Arabs, of Byzantine, Persian, or Abyssinian origin.  The most famous examples of these various ethnic groups were Salman al-Farisi, and as his last name suggests, he was Persian; Suhayb, who was Byzantine, and Bilal, the famous muezzin of Islam, from Abyssinia/Ethiopia.  In addition to these outsiders, the non-Arabs, there were also a number of Arabs from outside Mecca attached to clans as "clients" or confederates as they were called; in Arabic mawali.   

As Islam began to increase in numbers, the powerful tribe of Quraysh, to which Muhammad himself belonged, began to grow alarmed at the prospect of losing their enormous power in Mecca at this time.  If you remember, I had mentioned earlier, that the members of the Quraysh tribe, which included close relatives of the Prophet, had control over the Ka`ba with its religious and cultic significance, and also wielded enormous economic and political power.  The Quraysh therefore began to persecute some of the converts, particularly those who were from poorer and weaker clans.  The Qur’an mentions by name one of Muhammad’s uncles Abu Lahab and his wife (Chapter 91), who used to persecute the Prophet. Things became very grave, when Muhammad gave some of his followers permission to emigrate to Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia), whose ruler was Christian and, therefore, would be expected to sympathize with Muslims, who recognized Jesus as a prophet sent by God, rather than with the polytheist Meccans.  

In 615 CE, the Quraysh instituted an economic boycott against the Banu Hashim, the clan of Muhammad, refusing to trade or have any social dealings with them.  The boycott, however, was unsuccessful and unpopular even among those Meccans who had not accepted Islam, especially since many of them were related to the Banu Hashim.  But even after the lifting of the boycott, it was clear that the growing community of Muslims could not co-exist with the hostile Meccans; the situation in fact was growing desperate for the Prophet and his band of followers in Mecca.  In 620, a glimmer of hope dawned for the Muslims; during the annual pilgrimage season in the summer, Muhammad came into contact with six men from the neighboring city of Yathrib. These men expressed an interest in Islam and invited the Prophet, along with his followers, to settle in their midst.  Now, I am of necessity skipping over a lot of details here and just giving you the bare bones of this history.  There were actually lengthy negotiations between the Prophet and the Medinans, but finally, two years later, in the year 622, the Prophet received a divine commandment to emigrate to Yathrib, which, upon his arrival, was renamed Madinat al-nabi, Medina for short.  This emigration, called hijra, in Arabic marks the beginning of a brand new epoch in history, the Islamic era, denoted by A.H.

622 A.D. = 1. A.H.  An event of momentous importance in Islamic chronology; as I mentioned in our first class, this date marks the divide between the Jahiliyya (the Age of Ignorance) and the Islamic era.  

The Medinans proved to be far more receptive to Islam than the Meccans, and the Prophet set about building a specifically Muslim community, in Arabic, umma, here.   He drew up a charter for this community which is referred to in English as the Constitution of Medina, which laid the groundwork for social and ethical relationships among the Muslims in Medina.  The rights of minorities were also protected; Medina had a sizeable Jewish population; the Prophet of Islam promised to protect the rights of the Jews to live according to their laws, in return for their cooperation and alliance against the Meccans.   

One very important system of forging fraternal bonds between Meccan and Medinan Muslims was instituted by Muhammad at this point.  He paired a Medinan Helper (sing. Nasir, pl. Ansar) with a Meccan emigrant (muhajir) and established brotherly ties between them, underscoring the new fraternal spirit based on religious allegiance rather than allegiance to the tribe.

The Meccans continued to be hostile to the new religion in their midst; three major battles were consequently fought between the Muslims and pagan Meccans.  They are the Battles of Badr (624), Uhud (626), and Khandaq (628).  In the first battle, of Badr, a small band of Muslims won a spectacular victory over the larger Meccan army; the Muslims, understandably, took this to be a sign of divine favor, which greatly helped the cause of the Muslim community.  The Meccans swore revenge; in the Battle of Uhud two years later, the Muslims, because of disunity in their ranks, suffered initial reverses/setbacks and then routed the enemy but with great loss of lives.  The final great battle, the Battle of Khandaq (in English, Battle of the Trench) or the Siege of Medina, as it also has been called, was a massive Meccan military build-up against the Muslims in Medina, with the Meccans laying siege to the city.  In response to the threat, the Muslims dug a trench around Medina and the Meccans could not cross it.  Eventually, the Meccans retreated and the Muslims won a decisive military victory.  

After this defeat, the Meccans signed a peace agreement with the Muslims in 628 called the Treaty of Hudaybiyya.  The terms of this treaty called for the abandonment of hostilities for ten years on both sides.  The treaty was broken in 629 when two tribes, one an ally of the Meccans and the other an ally of the Muslims, got involved in a dispute, at which point the tribe allied with the Meccans attacked the other tribe in a secret ambush.  The tribe allied with the Muslims appealed to Muhammad for help; the Prophet gathered together an army of about 10,000 men and camped outside Mecca.  The Meccans were too demoralized to fight; instead, a leading member of Muhammad’s own clan, the Banu Hashim, (Abu Sufyan) sued for peace and agreed to surrender Mecca to Muhammad.  Muhammad in return promised a general pardon for all those inside Mecca who did not offer resistance to the Muslims.  On ca. January 11th, 630, the Prophet entered Mecca in peace and triumph; very little resistance offered by the residents of Mecca who wished to take advantage of the amnesty offered by Muhammad.  The Ka`ba and private houses were cleansed of idols; the leading men and women of the powerful Meccan clans now publicly accepted Islam.  The Islamic age had fully/truly begun.

About a billion of today's inhabitants of the world are Muslim; there are about 6 million Muslims in the United States today.

HOW MUSLIMS VIEW THE PROPHET:

1) Qur'anic view, view in the sira: A messenger of God, Rasul Allah, whose primary function was to convey the divine message contained in the Qur’an to humankind.  From the Islamic point of view, there were four messengers of God, Moses with the Torah, David with the Psalms (zabur), Jesus with the gospel (Injil), and Muhammad with the Qur’an.  The Qur’an makes no distinction between them in terms of moral excellence; they were equally pious men, chosen above all men by God to deliver his message to humankind.

2) No imputation of divinity; insistence on his mortality and on his humanness in the Qur’an: Lack of attribution of miracles, although in later generations, pious Muslims would come to attribute to him certain miraculous deeds, as we see in the biography of Muhammad compiled by Martin Lings.  In general, Muhammad’s deliverance of the divine message in the form of the Qur’an is considered to be his true and great miracle.  Here is a man, according to Muslim tradition, who was illiterate, who became the bearer of the divine message composed in incomparable and exquisite Arabic; this could be nothing short of a miracle.  This is something we will talk about further when we discuss the Qur’an.