MUHAMMAD. — Founder of Islam, born in Mecca in an unspecified year between 570 and 580 AD, into the notable but no longer wealthy or powerful Qurayshite family of the Banū Hāshim. His father, ‘Abd Allāh, died during a journey to Medina before the birth of his son; his mother, Āminah bint Wahb, died when the child was ten years old. The young Muhammad (for this is the name that must be considered his original and true one, not widely used but already known in pre-Islamic Arabic onomastics) was then entrusted to the care of his paternal grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, and, after his death, to his uncle Abū Ṭālib. Though these relatives showed him affectionate care, he experienced the sorrowful childhood of an orphan, which one of the oldest Qur’anic sūras (93:6-8) briefly recalls in an act of thanksgiving to the Lord. As for this childhood, as well as his adolescence and youth up to the mature age of his vocation, Arab biographical tradition claims to know many things, which modern criticism either rejects outright or strongly doubts: such as the journeys he allegedly made early on to Syria with his uncle, and later on behalf of his wife Khadījah, and the repeated encounters with Christian hermits (Bahīrā, Nestorius), who are said to have intuited and foretold the future mission of the young camel-driver; or the role of peacemaker he is said to have played in settling civic disputes. In reality, of Muhammad’s life prior to his vocation, which is dated to around 610-12 AD, the only certain facts are his marriage at a young age to the wealthy and older widow Khadījah, his first and, until her death, his only faithful companion and first convert to the new faith. As for the rest, possible kernels of truth are transfigured by legend.
The gradual emergence in Muhammad’s thoughtful and excitable mind of that complex of aspirations, impressions, and convictions which blossomed into his religious preaching remains a mystery on which only conjectures can shed partial light. Like other religious figures in Arabia, both before and contemporary with him—whom Muslim tradition designates by the name ḥanīf—he must have felt a growing dissatisfaction with the crude polytheism prevalent in his city and land, and a need to rise to a deeper and purer conception of the deity. This need was undoubtedly nurtured, in him as in his precursors, by contacts with the two great monotheistic religions already widely represented in his time in pagan Arabia; and it is well to note from the outset that Muhammad did not at first intend to introduce something entirely new and different, but rather an adaptation, a “national,” Arabic edition of the monotheistic conception they upheld. Accompanied by visions and hallucinations, by a veritable physiological travail whose precise realism is preserved in tradition, the new message incubating within him finally burst forth with irresistible force and undeniable sincerity: at the command of the divine messenger (later specified as Gabriel), the forty-year-old reformer began to preach the original and fundamental concepts of his creed.
These, as is well known (v. ISLAM), are the proclamation of a single God, absolute Lord of creation (already prefigured, moreover, in the name Allāh and in the vague supremacy He enjoyed in the pagan pantheon among the Arabs of Muhammad’s time); the affirmation and demonstration of His omnipotent creative and punitive power; the announcement of the final judgment against a terrifying eschatological backdrop; and the exhortation to men to prepare for this *redde rationem* through blind surrender (*islām*) to the divine will, prayer, piety, and resistance to sinful passions.
This original preaching, documented by the oldest sūras of the Qur’ān with their agitated, hammering style and the great apocalyptic scenes of violent light and shadow, after an initial period of curiosity that was not unfriendly, encountered the resolute opposition of the majority of the Meccans. Loyalty to ancestral beliefs and traditions, which Muhammad branded as impious polytheism; distrust of the obscure innovator, barely protected by the tribal solidarity of his closest family group; fear of compromising the existing socio-economic structure of the Meccan “merchant republic,” centered on caravan trade and the annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Ka‘bah, and the related privileges and profits of the dominant aristocracy (this last, socio-economic motive of the conflict is undeniable, however exaggerated by some)—all these factors combined to harden the dominant class of Mecca against Muhammad’s word and activity. His first followers, by contrast, were, alongside his wife, his cousin ‘Alī, and other close relatives, among the humblest elements of the population—slaves and foreigners (from whom the prophet derived much of his fragmentary knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, especially heterodox forms)—as well as the poor and small traders. The trials endured by this nascent community, gathered around Muhammad, were, it seems, greatly magnified and embellished by tradition, yet no less real. More than a bloody persecution, it amounted to social boycott, mockery, harassment, and moral pressure, with only sporadic cases of violence.
For nearly a decade, the prophet struggled tenaciously against this opposition, which even forced him at one point to temporarily migrate some of his followers to Abyssinia (a great honor for Ethiopian Islam); and this struggle, like every other phase of his life after his vocation, is reflected in the Qur’anic revelations of the period, filled with passionate polemic against his incredulous fellow citizens, who “stop their ears” to his calls and scoff at his promises and threats of otherworldly life and judgment, of eternal reward and punishment meted out by the inflexible Judge. After alternating successes and defections, hopes and discouragements, Muhammad’s situation in Mecca around 620 seemed desperate; an attempt to win over the nearby town of Ṭā’if had failed, when instead unexpected support came from elements of the other major city of the Ḥijāz, Yathrib (the future Medina), which opened the way to his future. Two successive pacts concluded by Muhammad with Medinese at al-‘Aqabah near Mecca secured him first moral and religious, then active, defensive, and even offensive support from that flourishing urban community, which likely saw in him a mediator of its long-standing internal disputes. The second pact of al-‘Aqabah, with its “oath of war,” dates to June or July 622, on the threshold of what would become the first year of the hijrah: this migration, with the prophet’s furtive departure from Mecca and his arrival in Medina (an episode naturally embroidered with many legendary details by tradition), took place in the following September, and from that moment Muhammad’s work enters the full light of history. From then on, the chronology is securely fixed, framing events sometimes known in minute detail: the prophet of Arabia ceases to be an obscure visionary and, without ever losing his fundamental religious inspiration, becomes at once a shepherd of peoples, a political and military leader, a social legislator, and a diplomat of remarkable skill.
The Medinese community, besides the two tribes of the Aws and the Hazraj, who until then had been pagan and who did not immediately embrace Islam in their majority (and these would become the ansar or “helpers,” the “auxiliaries” among the companions of Muḥammad, alongside the muhājirūn or “emigrants” from Mecca), included a strong Jewish element, more precisely Arab Jews. On these Jews, mindful of his original sources of information on revealed religions, of which he considered himself the integrator and transplanting agent in Arabia, Muḥammad counted as willing and natural followers. Great was his disappointment when he saw them reject his faith no less than his Meccan fellow citizens, and refuse to acknowledge him as the last and definitive prophet (“the seal of the prophets”), foretold, as he believed, by their very Scriptures. From this disappointment, after various conciliatory attempts, arose the definitive conception of Islam, which did not repudiate its alleged coincidence or, better, development from previous monotheistic revelations, successively granted by God to different peoples through a series of prophets, but declared all of them superseded and abrogated by this final “Arab” revelation of Muḥammad, which Jews and Christians, having corrupted their own “Scriptures,” were wrong to fail to recognize. The abandonment of Jerusalem as the direction of prayer, and its replacement by Mecca—where the Kaʿbah, profaned by pagan worship, is declared the holy foundation of Abraham, the common ancestor of Jews and Arabs and the precursor of Muḥammad in the worship of the one God—is the symbol of this evolution and rupture of Islam from its Judeo-Christian antecedents. With this conversion, the Prophet reaffirmed the specifically Arab character of his mission, while avoiding any nationalist exclusivism and thus, more or less consciously, opening the way for his faith to achieve universality.
The early years of Muḥammad’s residence in Medina were spent organizing the young community that acknowledged him as its leader, and in uniting Meccans and Medinese by replacing tribal bonds with the religious ties of the new faith (of which the “Constitution” of the first year of the hijrah remains a memorable document, fixing the relations and duties of the citizens of the new theocratic state). Soon, however, domestic policy was joined by foreign concerns, namely his relations with his repudiated Meccan homeland. It was not that Mecca took the initiative in hostile acts against the apostate; rather, it was the logic of the military expansion of nascent Islam that drove Muḥammad against his fellow citizens. An attempted raid on a Meccan caravan led Muḥammad and the Medinese to their first armed clash at Badr (March 624), where a force sent from Mecca to protect the caravan was routed and put to flight. The insignificant skirmish had immense moral value for Muḥammad and his followers, and consolidated his position within Medina itself, where the believers were opposed by the ambiguous “hypocrites” or waiters (munāfiqūn), and by the openly hostile and scornful Jewish tribes. The first of these, the Banū Qaynuqāʿ, were summarily expelled by Muḥammad after the victory at Badr. The second and third, the Banū al-Naḍīr and the Banū Qurayẓah, were likewise liquidated, the latter with a massacre in the following three years that represented the Meccan Quraysh’s greatest effort to crush the threat from Medina. In the third year of the hijrah (March 625), the Meccans took their revenge for Badr, defeating Muḥammad at the battle of Uhud, but failed to exploit their success; and when in 627 they attempted a full-scale siege of the Prophet’s city, a rudimentary defensive trench (hence the name “War of the Trench”) prepared by Muḥammad on the advice of a foreign slave sufficed to hold off the enemy, ignorant of siegecraft, and forced them to withdraw without achieving anything. In Medina, under circumstances of cruelty and hypocrisy, the aforementioned massacre of the Banū Qurayẓah followed, accused of defeatism and collusion with the enemy; and in that bloodbath, which remains the greatest stain on the moral character of the Prophet, all remaining opposition from Jews and “waiters” to his absolute rule in Medina was drowned. This rule, moreover, was not exercised in the forms of Oriental absolutism, but with certain appearances that might be called democratic, and above all with the Prophet’s towering prestige, which increasingly invoked revelation to legitimize political decisions, legal and social norms, and even personal matters and private incidents in his life (the episode of ʿĀʾishah, his favored wife, and of Zaynab). The original demonic inspiration had long since cooled into a routine administration of relations with the supernatural, into a shrewd policy of compromise and capillary penetration that steadily extended the sphere of action of the political and religious leader of Medina over much of central Arabia.
A test of this came when, in the year 6 of the hijrah, Muḥammad set out at the head of his companions toward Mecca, ostensibly to perform the pious visit (‘umrah) to the sanctuary of the Kaʿbah, to which we have seen how high a place he had assigned in his religious construction. The Meccans, deeply stirred, barred his way at al-Ḥudaybiyah; and there, after laborious negotiations, a compromise was reached (March 628) that at first aroused profound disappointment and resentment among the companions, but in fact proved a triumph for Muḥammad’s diplomatic genius. He renounced for that year the fulfillment of his purpose and withdrew with the understanding that the ‘umrah would be peacefully carried out by him and his companions the following year, as indeed happened; an armistice and ten-year truce were also established between Mecca and Medina. It was the first official recognition of his position as head of state, if not of prophet, which he obtained from his ancestral homeland, and it was accompanied and followed by the ever more numerous adhesion of Bedouin tribes, who saw in him the star now dominating the political firmament of Arabia. Even in Mecca itself, moreover, the party of uncompromising resistance was crumbling day by day, with the defection to Muḥammad of some of the Republic’s most prominent figures (Khālid ibn al-Walīd, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, Abū Sufyān), many of whom would play a distinguished role in the peace and war of the Muslim state. And when, less than two years after al-Ḥudaybiyah, the Prophet denounced the truce on a pretext and marched this time with arms against his native city, it opened its gates to him almost without resistance. In January 630 (8 AH), Muḥammad entered as a triumphant and uncontested arbiter the city from which he had fled as a fugitive less than eight years before; he conciliated the hearts of his fellow citizens with an almost general amnesty; and he purified the Kaʿbah of its host of idols, reconsecrating it to the primitive worship of Abraham, to the Islamic Allāh of whom he, Muḥammad, was the chosen apostle in Arabia.
For a moment the Medinese companions feared that the Prophet might abandon them for his recovered native city, but they were soon reassured. Having broken the last resistance of the pagan Bedouin tribes at Ḥunayn a few months after the entry into Mecca, Muḥammad returned to his political capital of Medina, now become the center to which all Arabia looked. There he received the embassies of tribes that successively submitted to him; from there he launched the final military expeditions, among which, even in the summer of 629, that against the Byzantine frontier in Transjordan, which ended in a serious setback at Muʾtah, but was important as a symptom and omen of broader designs. From Medina, in 631, he issued the definitive norms (Sūrah 9, al-Barāʾah) that excluded from
Now entirely Islamized the idolaters, and in March 632 he solemnly undertook it, for the first and last time, himself. It was the “Pilgrimage of Farewell”; his mission was accomplished, paganism had been driven out of the Hijāz, the new faith had taken firm root, and a generation of ardent companions and sons of companions received from his weary hands the torch that would soon race with wondrous speed of conquest through the Near East and North Africa. Did MOHAMMED desire, hope for this spread of Islam beyond his homeland? Would he himself have promoted it had life lasted? The Qur’ān contains no trace of an express mission for Islam outside Arabia, no conscious universalism; yet the abomination of paganism, and the final, clear repudiation of Judaism and Christianity—declared adulterated and superseded faiths (the latter moreover branded as polytheistic for its doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity)—inevitably drove Islam beyond the peninsula’s borders, to assert itself as a universal religion, even if this consciousness only vaguely dawned on the Prophet as his career drew to a close.
Returning once more to Medina from the “Pilgrimage of Farewell,” MOHAMMED died there after a brief illness on the 13th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in the year 11 (8 June 632), without having designated any successor as head of the Muslim state he had founded (the prophetic prerogative, of course, expired with him). He left no surviving son; his blood continued only through his daughter FĀṬIMAH, who had married ʿALĪ and thus became the ancestress of the “People of the House” (Ahl al-Bayt), on whom Shiʿite legitimism is based. The Prophet’s remains were interred in his own house, over which the venerated Great Mosque of Medina was later built. The Qur’ānic revelations, which had guided his life and were to guide all future Muslim generations, remained for a time entrusted to memory and private collections until ʿUTHMĀN effected their official compilation.
It is difficult to render an equitable judgment on this figure, whose stature, by virtue of what he accomplished, towers among the greatest in human history. To our Christian and modern sensibility, his intellectual and moral weaknesses, his failings and miseries stand out first. Despite the transfiguration his historical image has undergone through the centuries in the piety and veneration of his followers—making him a model of life, a thaumaturge, even an emanation of divine light—the absolute historicity of his actions is so minutely and, on the whole, faithfully documented that doubts about his intellectual poverty, the roughness and elasticity of his morality, and the subordination of means to ends cannot be sustained. Certain episodes in his public and private life remain indelible shadows, not only in the light of Christian conscience but even by the standards of ancient ethics. On the other hand, these all-too-evident negatives cannot make us forget the absolute sincerity of his initial inspiration, the strenuous struggle he waged at first against every material interest for a religious and moral ideal superior to that of his environment, his capacity for reconsideration and self-correction (sympathetically attested in more than one instance by the Qur’ān and tradition), and his predominant amiability and humanity. There was certainly something else in him, too, that eludes us yet must be posited to explain the devotion unto life and death that bound to him men sometimes greater and more gifted than himself, such as ABŪ BAKR and ʿUMAR: an irrational charm, such as emanates only from exceptional personalities, beyond the calculable balance of their virtues and defects. As a leader of men, a manipulator of situations, a simplifier and solver of problems, a contriver of compromises, MOHAMMED was unsurpassed; yet the imprint he left upon history is too profound to allow us to see in him merely a lucky, practiced opportunist.
MOHAMMED AND CHRISTIANITY. — The knowledge the Arab Prophet had of Christianity, which was diffused in certain parts of Arabia but in superficial and heretical forms, was vague and confused. Excluding any direct familiarity with the Gospels, his sources of information must be considered oral narratives and catechesis (some have even thought of an influence from Nestorian preaching and homiletics, traces of which the Qur’ān is said to preserve), reflecting, more than the canonical Gospels, the vast apocryphal literature that flourished in the first three centuries of the common era: above all the Protevangelium Iacobi, the Evangelium infantiae, etc. It is in these apocrypha that we must seek the sources of the Qur’ānic Christology, framed within MOHAMMED’s general conception of prophecy.
His rigid monotheism led him from the outset to exclude most decisively the divinity and divine sonship of Jesus (the two elements are inseparable, and a recent attempt to distinguish them in Qur’ānic polemic appears desperate), as well as any Trinitarian doctrine. The Allah of Islamic faith “begets not, nor is begotten,” thus undermining a fundamental pillar of Christian faith. Yet Jesus (ʿĪsā in the Arabic-Qur’ānic form), though not the Son of God, is a noble and thaumaturgic prophet, the last in the series that began with Adam and ended, after Jesus, with MOHAMMED. He was born miraculously, without human intervention, of the Virgin Mary; he spoke from the cradle, attesting his supernatural origin and mission; he performed miracles such as giving life to clay birds, healing the sick, and raising the dead (in post-Qur’ānic Muslim tradition Jesus is preeminently the Healer); at the Apostles’ request he miraculously brought down a table spread with food from heaven; threatened by the Jews, he was spared the crucifixion—through a divine deception his enemies fastened another man, resembling him, to the cross—while he was taken up into heaven. Such are the outlines of his earthly life. As for doctrine, it reduces to vague affirmations of piety and submission to the Creator, the task of “confirming the Torah” among the Jews by softening and expanding certain precepts, and general exhortations to virtue and the fear of God. If the biography of Jesus is impoverished and altered, the specific content of the Christian message is either denied (divine sonship) or evaporated (ethics and eschatology).
Similar confusion and uncertainty surround the Qur’anic data on Mary, called the daughter of ‘Imrān (thus confusing her with the sister of Moses and Aaron), raised by Zechariah and miraculously nourished by God, given in marriage to Joseph after a contest with various suitors, announced and made a mother by the Spirit of God, but neither herself a divinity (in polemic against the Colliridian heresy) nor a third person of the Christian Trinity, as Muhammad seems to have conceived her. Fundamental in this regard is the Qur’anic passage 5:116: “God said: ‘O Jesus, son of Maryam, did you say to the people, “Take me and my mother as two divinities besides the one God”?’ He answered: ‘Glory to You! It would not be right for me to say what is not true for me. I preached to them only what You commanded me, namely: worship God, my and your God.’”