Muhammad

MUHAMMAD. - Founder of Islam, b. at Mecca in an uncertain year, between 570 and 580 A.D., from the respectable but no longer rich and powerful Qurayshite family of the Banū Hāshim. His father 'Abd Allāh died on a journey to Medina, before his son saw the light; his mother, Aminah bint Wahb, when the child was ten years old. And the little Muḥammad (for such must be considered his true original name, not very widespread but already known to earlier Arabic onomastics) grew up entrusted to the care first of his paternal grandfather 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib, then, upon the latter's death, to his uncle Abū Ṭālib. Although these relatives took affectionate care of him, he thus had the sad childhood of the orphan, which one of the oldest Quranic suras (93, 6-8) fleetingly recalls in an act of thanks to the Lord. Of this childhood, as of his adolescence and youth, up to the mature age of his vocation, the Arabic biographical tradition believes it knows many things, which modern criticism rejects wholesale or strongly calls into doubt: such as the journeys made early on to Syria with his uncle, and then on behalf of his wife Hadiğah, and the repeated encounters with Christian hermits (Bahirâ, Nestorius), who would have intuited and foretold the future mission of the young camel driver; such as the role of pacifying arbiter that he would have had in settling civic disputes. In reality, of M.'s life prior to his vocation, which is fixed around 610-12 A.D., nothing is known for certain except his marriage at a young age to the rich and older widow Hadiğah, his first and, as long as she lived, only faithful companion, and the first adherent of the new faith. On all the rest, possible kernels of truth are transfigured by legend.

The gradual arising in M.'s pensive and excitable spirit of that complex of aspirations, impressions and convictions that issued in his religious preaching remains a mystery upon which only in part can some light be cast by conjecture. Like other religious spirits of Arabia before him or contemporary with him, whom Muslim tradition designated by the name of hanif, he must have experienced a growing dissatisfaction with the crude polydemonism prevailing in his city and his land, and the need to rise to a deeper and purer conception of the divinity. A need undoubtedly fostered, in him as in his precursors, by contacts with the two great monotheistic religions already widely represented in his time in pagan Arabia; with respect to which, it is well to specify at once, M. did not at first think at all of bringing something totally new and different, but rather an adaptation, a national, Arab "edition," of the monotheistic conception upheld by them. Accompanied by visions and hallucinations, by a true physiological travail of which tradition has preserved a precise, realistic memory, the new incubating word at last burst forth in M. with irresistible violence and undoubtable sincerity: at the order of the divine messenger (who only later would be specified as Gabriel), the forty-year-old reformer began to preach the original and fundamental concepts of his creed.

These are, as is known (v. ISLÂM), the proclamation of a single God, absolute lord of creation (already pre-existing, moreover, in the name, Allâh, and in the very function of vague supremacy over the pagan pantheon among the Arabs of M.'s age); the affirmation and demonstration of his creative and punishing omnipotence; the announcement of the supreme judgment, against a fearsome eschatological background; the exhortation to men to prepare for such a redde rationem with blind abandonment (islâm) to the divine will, prayer, piety, resistance to sinful passions.

This original preaching, of which the oldest sûras of the Quran are the document with their agitated and hammering style, and with the great apocalyptic tableaux of violent lights and shadows, clashed, after an initial period of not malevolent curiosity, with the sharp opposition of the Meccan majority. Fidelity to ancestral beliefs and traditions, which M. branded as impious polytheism, distrust toward the obscure innovator, barely protected by the tribal solidarity of his closest family group, fear of compromising the prevailing economic-social structure of the Meccan "mercantile republic," hinged on caravan trade and the annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Ka'bah, and the connected privileges and profits of the dominant aristocracy (this last motive, economic-social, of the conflict is indisputable, although greatly exaggerated by some), all these motives converged to stiffen the ruling class of Mecca against the word and activity of M. His first followers were, by contrast, alongside his wife, his cousin 'Alī and other of his closest relatives, elements from the humblest of the population, slaves and foreigners (those very ones from whom the prophet drew in good part his fragmentary knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, especially heterodox), propertyless persons and small merchants. The trials that this nascent community, gathered around M., had to endure were, it seems, greatly magnified and embellished by tradition, but no less real for that. More than a bloody persecution, it must have been a matter of social boycott, of mockery, vexations and moral pressures, with some sporadic cases of violence.

For nearly a decade, the prophet struggled tenaciously against this opposition, which forced him among other things at a certain point to have part of his faithful temporarily emigrate to Abyssinia (a great title of honor for Ethiopian Islam); and this struggle, like every other phase of his life after the vocation, is reflected in the Quranic revelations of the period, full of impassioned polemic against his unbelieving fellow citizens, who "stopped their ears" to his appeals, and mocked his promises and threats of the life and judgment beyond the grave, of eternal reward and punishment meted out by the inflexible Judge. After alternations of successes and defections, of hopes and discouragements, M.'s situation in Mecca around 620 seemed desperate; an attempt to win over the small town of Tā'if near Mecca had failed, when instead the relations established with elements of the other major city of the Ḥijāz, Yathrib (the future Medina), unexpectedly bore fruit, opening to the prophet the paths of the future. Two successive pacts concluded by M. with Medinans at al-'Aqabah near Mecca assured him the adherence, first moral and religious, then active, defensive and offensive at once, of that flourishing city community, which probably saw in him the reconciler of its age-old internal disputes. The second pact of al-'Aqabah, with its "baj'ah of war," dates from June or July 622, on the threshold of what would later be year 1 of the Hijra: this, with the prophet's furtive abandonment of Mecca and his passage to Medina (an episode on which tradition has naturally embroidered many legendary particulars), took place in the following September, and from that moment M.'s work enters the full light of history. From then on chronology is fixed with certainty, framing events known in their minutest particulars: 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, a diplomat of admirable skill.

The Medinan community, besides the two tribes until then pagan, the Aws and the Khazraj, who immediately embraced Islam in their majority (and these will be the anṣār or "helpers" among M.'s companions, alongside the muhājirūn or Meccan "emigrants"), included a strong Jewish element, or more precisely Judeo-Arabic. On these Jews, mindful of his original sources of information on the revealed religions, of which he considered himself the integrator and transplanter into Arabia, M. counted as on willing and natural followers. And great was his disappointment when he saw them recoil from his faith no less than his Meccan fellow citizens, and deny him recognition as the last and definitive prophet ("seal of the prophets"), foretold, as he believed, by their own Scriptures. And from this disappointment, after vain conciliatory attempts, springs the definitive conception of Islam, which does not disown its asserted coincidence with, or rather development from, the previous monotheistic revelations, successively bestowed by God on different peoples through a series of prophets, but declares them all superseded and abrogated by this last "Arab" revelation of M., which Jews and Christians, alterers of their own "Scriptures," have the audacity not to recognize. Symbol of this evolution and rupture of Islam from its Judeo-Christian precedents is the abandonment of Jerusalem as the direction of prayer, and its replacement with Mecca, where the Ka'bah, profaned by pagan worship, is declared the holy foundation of Abraham, common progenitor of Jews and Arabs and precursor of M. in the adoration of the one God, a Muslim (muslim) before the letter himself. With this conversion the prophet came to reaffirm the specifically Arab character of his mission, while yet shunning all nationalistic exclusivism, and thus opening, more or less consciously, to his faith the paths of universality.

The early period of the Medinan sojourn was spent by M. in organizing the young community that recognized him as its head, in fraternizing Meccans and Medinans, replacing the pagan bonds of tribe with the religious bonds of the new faith (of which a memorable document remains in the "constitution" of the first year of the Hijra, which fixes these relations and duties of the citizens of the new theocratic State). But soon to internal policy were added the cares of foreign policy, that is, of his relations with his repudiated Meccan homeland. Not that it took the initiative of hostile acts toward the fugitive, but it was precisely the logic of the warrior expansion of nascent Islam that drove M. against his fellow citizens. A predatory attempt against a Meccan caravan led M. and the Medinans to the first armed clash of Badr (March 624), where a body of militia hastening from Mecca to defend the caravan was routed and put to flight. The insignificant skirmish had enormous moral value for M. and his followers, and consolidated his position within Medina itself, where against the believers stood the ambiguous "hypocrites" or wait-and-see men (munāfiqūn) and, sullenly hostile and mocking, the Jewish tribes. The first of these latter, the Banū Qaynuqā', was summarily expelled by M., fresh from the victory of Badr. The second and third, the Banū Naḍīr and the Banū Qurayẓah, were likewise liquidated, and the latter with a savage extermination, in the three following years, which represented the maximum effort of the Meccan Quraysh to stifle the danger of Medina. In year 3 of the Hijra (March 625)

the Meccans took their revenge for Badr, defeating M. in the battle of Uḥud, but they did not know how to exploit the success; and when in 627 they even attempted an investment and siege of the prophet's city, a rudimentary defensive trench (whence the name "war of the trench") prepared by M. on the advice of a foreign slave was enough to hold back the enemy, ignorant of siege tactics, and then to make him withdraw without having obtained anything. There followed in Medina, in odious circumstances of cruelty and hypocrisy, the aforementioned extermination of the Banū Qurayẓah accused of defeatism and collusion with the enemy, and in that bloodbath, which is the greatest stain on the prophet's moral figure, every residual opposition of Jews and "wait-and-see men" to his absolute dominion in Medina was drowned. This dominion was exercised, moreover, not in the forms of Oriental absolutism, but with certain appearances that may be called democratic, and above all with the very high prestige of revelation, by now ever more promptly provoked to legitimize political decisions, juridical and social norms, and even personal facts and incidents of the prophet's private life (episodes of 'Ā'ishah, the favorite wife, and of Zaynab); the profound demonic inspiration of the origins had long since cooled into an "ordinary administration" of relations with the supernatural, into a skillful policy of compromises and capillary penetration, which gradually extended the sphere of action of the political and religious leader of Medina over a good part of central Arabia.

There was fresh proof of this when M., in the year 6 of the Hegira, set out at the head of his companions toward Mecca, with the stated intention of performing the lesser visit ('umrah) to the sanctuary of the Ka'bah, to which, as has been seen, he had assigned so high a place in his religious construction. The Meccans, deeply stirred, barred his way at Ḫudajbijjah; and here, after laborious negotiations, a compromise was reached between them and the prophet (March 628) which at first aroused profound disappointment and resentment among the companions, but which in effect proved a triumph for M.'s diplomatic genius. He renounced for that year the carrying out of his purpose, and withdrew with the understanding that the 'umrah would be peacefully performed by him and his companions the following year, as in fact happened; moreover, an armistice and a ten-year truce were sanctioned between Mecca and Medina. This was the first official recognition of his position as head of state, if not as prophet, that he obtained from his old homeland, and it was accompanied and followed by the ever more numerous adhesions of the Bedouin tribes, who saw in him the one now dominating the political firmament of Arabia. In Mecca itself, moreover, the party of resistance to the bitter end was crumbling more and more each day, with the passing over to M. of the most prominent personalities of the Republic (Ḫālid b. al-Walīd, 'Amr b. al-'Aṣ, Abū Sufjān), many of whom would play a distinguished part in the works of peace and war of the Muslim state. And when, less than two years after Ḫudajbijjah, the prophet denounced the truce on a pretext, and this time marched in arms against his native city, the city opened its gates to him almost without resistance. In Jan. 630 (8 of the Hegira), M. entered as triumphant and uncontested arbiter there whence he had departed as a fugitive less than eight years before; he won over the minds of his fellow citizens with an almost general amnesty; he purified the Ka'bah of its crowd of idols, and restored it to the primitive worship of Abraham, to the Islamic Allah of whom he, M., was in Arabia the chosen apostle.

The Medinan companions feared for a moment that the prophet would abandon them for his old recovered homeland, but they were soon reassured. Once the last resistance of the pagan Bedouin tribes was broken in battle at Ḫunājin, a few months after the entry into Mecca, M. returned to his political capital of Medina, which had by now become the center toward which all Arabia looked. There he received the embassies of the tribes that one after another made their act of submission to him; from there he launched the last military expeditions, among them, as early as the summer of 629, the one against the Byzantine frontiers of Transjordan, which ended in a serious setback at Mu'tah, but was important because it was a symptom and presage of vaster designs. From Medina he issued in 631 the definitive norms (sūrah 9, of the Bara'ah) which excluded the idolaters from the now totally Islamized pilgrimage, and in March 632 he himself solemnly undertook it, for the first and last time. It was the "farewell pilgrimage"; his mission was accomplished, paganism was routed in the Ḥiǧāz, the new faith had struck deep roots, and an ardent generation of companions and sons of companions received from his weary hands the torch that would soon run with wondrous rapidity of conquest through anterior Asia and North Africa. Did M. desire, did he wish for this diffusion of islām outside his homeland, would he himself have promoted it had his life lasted? In the Qur'an there is no trace of an express mission of islām outside Arabia, of a conscious universalism; but the abhorrence of paganism, and the clear final repudiation of Judaism and Christianity, declared adulterated and superseded faiths (the latter moreover branded with polytheism for the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity), impelled islām by force of circumstance toward expansion beyond the confines of the peninsula, toward its affirmation as a universal religion, even if this awareness barely vaguely dawned in the prophet at the close of his career.

Having returned once more to Medina from the "farewell pilgrimage," M. died there after a brief illness on the 13th of rabī I of the year 11 (8 June 632), without having designated any successor as head of the Muslim state he had founded (the prophetic prerogative, naturally, was extinguished with him). He left no male child, moreover, and his blood continued only through his daughter Fāṭimah, who was married to 'Alī, and who was therefore the progenitrix of the "people of the House" (Ahl al-bajt) on which the Shī'ite legitimism is based. The prophet's remains were buried in his own house, over which the venerated great mosque of Medina later arose. The Qur'anic revelations, which had guided his life and were to guide that of all Muslim generations to come, remained for some time entrusted to memory and to the private collections of individuals, until the official redaction was made under 'Uṭmān.

It is difficult to form an equitable judgment on this figure, who looms large, for the work accomplished, among the greatest of humanity. To our conscience as Christians and moderns, it may be said, his intellectual and moral weaknesses, his failings, his miseries appear first in the light. Despite the transfiguration his historical image has undergone over the centuries in the piety and veneration of his followers, making of him a model of life, a thaumaturge, and even an emanation of divine light, the absolute historicity of his action is too minutely and on the whole faithfully documented for there to be any possible doubt about his intellectual poverty, the coarseness and elasticity of his morality, the subordination of means to ends. Certain episodes of his public and private life remain as indelible shadows, not only by the standard of a Christian conscience, but also in the light of ancient ethics. On the other hand, these all-too-evident negativities cannot make one forget the absolute sincerity of his initial inspiration, the strenuous struggle he first sustained against all his material interests for a religious and moral ideal superior to that of the environment in which he lived, the capacity to change his mind and correct himself (sympathetically attested in more than one case by the Qur'an and by tradition), the prevailing amiability and humanity. And there was certainly in him something else besides that escapes us, but that must nonetheless be postulated to explain the devotion in life and in death that was shown to him by men sometimes even loftier and more gifted than he, an Abū Bakr, an 'Umar: an irrational fascination, such as emanates only from exceptional personalities, beyond the perceptible balance of their defects and virtues. As a leader of men, a manipulator of situations, a simplifier and resolver of problems, a deviser of compromises, M. was unsurpassable; but the trace left behind by his work is too demanding in the history of humanity for one to see in him no more than a fortunate and skillful heresiarch.

MUHAMMAD AND CHRISTIANITY

The knowledge that the Arab prophet had of Christianity, which was spread in some regions of Arabia but in superficial and heretical forms, was quite vague and confused. Once any direct familiarity of his with the Gospels is ruled out, his sources of information must be considered oral narratives and catecheses (some have also thought of an influence of Nestorian preaching and homiletics, of which the Qur'an would preserve a trace), 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. In these apocrypha are to be sought the sources of Qur'anic Christology, framed within the general conception of prophecy that M. held.

His rigid monotheism led him from the outset to exclude in the most categorical way the divinity and the divine sonship of Jesus (the two elements are inseparable, and a recent attempt to distinguish them in the Qur'anic polemic appears hopeless), as well as every Trinitarian doctrine. The Allah of the Islamic faith "neither begot nor was begotten," and thus a fundamental cornerstone of the Christian faith is undermined. But Jesus ('Isā in the Arabic-Qur'anic form), if not the son of God, is a noble and wonder-working prophet of His, the last in the series of prophets that began with Adam and ended, after Jesus, with M. He was born miraculously, without the work of man, of the Virgin Mary, spoke from the cradle attesting to his origin and supernatural mission, performed prodigies such as giving life to birds fashioned from clay, healing the sick and raising the dead (in post-Qur'anic Muslim tradition Jesus is par excellence the Healer); at the request of the Apostles, he miraculously caused a spread table to descend from heaven; plotted against by the Jews, he was withdrawn from the torment of the cross, to which through divine blinding his enemies attached another man resembling him, and was taken up by God into heaven. Such are the lines of his earthly life. As for doctrine, it is summed up in vague affirmations of piety and submission to the Creator, in the task of "confirming the Pentateuch" among the Jews while broadening and softening some of its precepts, in generic exhortations to virtue and to 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).

A similar confusion and uncertainty as with Jesus is found in the Qur'anic data on Mary, called the daughter of 'Imrān (thus confusing her with Mary the sister of Moses and Aaron), raised by Zechariah and miraculously favored by God, made the spouse of Joseph after a contest with several suitors, Annunciated and Mother through the work of the Spirit of God, but not herself a divinity (in polemic against the Collyridian heresy), nor the third person of the Christian Trinity, as M. seems to have conceived her. Fundamental in this regard is the Qur'anic passage 5, 116: "God said: O Jesus son of Maryam, was it you who said to men: 'Take me and my mother as two divinities in place of the one God?' He answered: 'Glory to You! I could not say what is not true for me. I preached to them nothing other than what you commanded me, namely: worship God, my Lord and yours

'...'". Mariolatry is here at once deformed and rejected.

Toward the Christians of his environment and his time, M.'s attitude was, despite these radical misunderstandings, at first sympathetic and benevolent: many of his first models of pious life, and of his rudimentary informants, must have been Christians, and his own doctrine appeared to him at first as the "Arabic edition," purified of corruptions and errors, of the authentic original monotheism preached by Moses and by Jesus. Once the awareness of the originality of his own mission gradually intensified, the detachment from the two revealed religions deepened and the polemic with their followers sharpened. But toward Christians, it never on the prophet's part reached the bitterness that it had with the Jews, also because against the latter, unlike the former, he never had to clash in his career as against an organized political force. The hostility grew worse when, after M. had passed away, Islam in its conquering expansion came into contact with the Christian world, and it became far more embittered later, in the attempt at Christian counter-offensive of the Crusades. But this is the history of the relations between Islam and Christianity, not between Christianity and M. In the thought and life of the founder of Islam, the message of Jesus reverberated with an uncertain and confused echo, amid equivocations, alterations and tenacious misunderstandings; but not without a pale reflection of that light filtering, through every deformation, into the new religion of Arabia, destined soon to radiate over a great part of the world.

Francesco Gabrieli