MAOMETTO. — Founder of Islām, born at Mecca in an uncertain year, between A.D. 570 and 580, into the distinguished, though no longer wealthy and powerful, Quraysh family of the Banū Hāšim. His father, 'Abd Allāh, died while travelling to Medina, before his son saw the light of day; his mother, Aminah bint Wahb, died when the child was ten years old. And the little Muḥammad (for this must be regarded as his true original name, not very widespread but already known in earlier Arabic onomastics) grew up first entrusted to the care of his paternal grandfather, 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib, and then, after the latter’s death, to that of his uncle Abū Ṭālib. Although these relatives lovingly cared for him, he thus had the sad childhood of an orphan, which one of the oldest Qur’ānic sūras (93, 6–8) briefly recalls in an act of thanksgiving to the Lord. Of
this childhood, as of his adolescence and youth, down to the mature age of his call, the Arab biographical tradition believes it knows many things, which modern criticism rejects wholesale or greatly doubts: such are the journeys undertaken at an early age to Syria with his uncle, and later on behalf of his wife Hadiğah, and the repeated encounters with Christian hermits (Bahirâ, Nestorius), who are said to have perceived and foretold the future mission of the young camel-driver; such too is the role of conciliating arbiter that he is said to have played in settling civic disputes. In reality, of M.’s life before his call, which is dated to around A.D. 610–12, the only certain fact is his early marriage to the wealthy and older widow Hadiğah, his first and, for as long as she lived, his only faithful companion, as well as the first adherent of the new faith. In all the rest, possible kernels of truth have been transfigured by legend.
The gradual emergence in M.’s thoughtful and excitable spirit of that complex of aspirations, impressions, and convictions which culminated in his religious preaching remains a mystery, on which it is possible to cast only a little conjectural light. Like other religious spirits of Arabia, both before and contemporary with him, whom Muslim tradition designated by the name hanif, he must have experienced a growing dissatisfaction with the crude polydaemonism prevailing in his city and country, and a need to rise to a deeper and purer conception of divinity. This need was undoubtedly nourished, in him as in his precursors, by contact with the two great monotheistic religions already widely represented in pagan Arabia in his time; with regard to which, it is well to make clear from the outset, M. did not at first think of introducing anything wholly new and different, but rather an adaptation, a national, Arab “edition,” of the monotheistic conception they advocated. Accompanied by visions and hallucinations, by a genuine physiological ordeal of which tradition has preserved a precise and realistic memory, the new, incubating message finally burst forth in M. with irresistible force and unquestionable sincerity: at the command of the divine messenger (who only later would be identified as Gabriel), the forty-year-old reformer began to preach the original and fundamental concepts of his creed.
These are, as is well 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 punitive omnipotence; the announcement of the supreme judgment, against a terrifying eschatological background; the exhortation to men to prepare themselves for this redde rationem through blind surrender (islâm) to the divine will, prayer, piety, and resistance to sinful passions.
(from I Promessi Sposi, edited by P. Nardé, Milan 1916, p. 197)
MANZONI, ALESSANDO – Last photograph of A. M. Property of Senator A. Casati – Milan.
All these motives converged to stiffen Mecca’s ruling class against M.’s message and activity. His first followers, by contrast, besides his wife, his cousin ‘Alî, and others among his closest relatives, were drawn from the humblest elements of the population: slaves and foreigners (those very people from whom the prophet derived much of his fragmentary knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, especially in their heterodox forms), the propertyless, 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 were no less real for that. Rather than a bloody persecution, they seem to have involved a social boycott, mockery, harassment, and moral pressure, with a few sporadic cases of violence.
For almost a decade, the prophet fought tenaciously against this opposition, which at one point also compelled him to send part of his followers temporarily to Abyssinia (a great title of honor for Ethiopian Islam); and this struggle, like every other phase of his life after his calling, is reflected in the Qur’anic revelations of the period, filled with passionate polemic against his unbelieving fellow citizens, who «stopped up their ears» to his appeals and mocked his promises and threats of life and judgment in the hereafter, of eternal reward and punishment decreed by the inflexible Judge. After alternating successes and defections, hopes and discouragements, M.’s situation in Mecca around 620 appeared desperate; an attempt to win over the town of Tâ’if, near Mecca, had failed, when the contacts established with elements of the other great Ḥiğāzen city of Jatrib (the future Medina) unexpectedly proved fruitful, opening the paths of the future to the prophet. Two successive pacts concluded by M. with Medinese at al-‘Aqabah, near Mecca, secured him first the moral and religious, and then the active, simultaneously defensive and offensive, adherence of that flourishing urban community, which probably saw in him the reconciler of its longstanding internal disputes. The second pact of al-‘Aqabah, with its «war bay‘ah», dates from June or July 622, on the eve of what would later be year 1 of the Hijra: this, involving the prophet’s secret departure from Mecca and his passage to Medina (an episode on which tradition naturally embroidered many legendary details), took place in the following September, and from that moment M.’s work entered the full light of history. From then on the chronology is securely established, framing events known down to the smallest details: the prophet of Arabia ceased to be an obscure visionary and, without ever losing his fundamental religious inspiration, became 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 formerly pagan tribes of the Aws and the Hazrağ, who immediately embraced Islam for the most part (and these would be the anṣār, or «auxiliaries», among M.’s companions, alongside the muḥāḡirūn, or Meccan «emigrants»), included a substantial Jewish element, more precisely an Arab Judaic element. Of these Jews, mindful of his original sources of information concerning the revealed religions, of which he considered himself the fulfiller and transplanting agent in Arabia, M. expected willing and natural followers. His disappointment was therefore great 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. From this disappointment, after futile attempts at reconciliation, arose the definitive conception of Islam, which does not deny its alleged coincidence with, or rather development from, the preceding monotheistic revelations, successively bestowed by God upon different peoples through a series of prophets, but declares them all superseded and abrogated by this final «Arab» revelation of M., which Jews and Christians, falsifiers of their own «Scriptures», have the audacity not to recognize. The symbol of this evolution and rupture of Islam with its Judaeo-Christian antecedents is the abandonment of Jerusalem as the direction of prayer and its replacement by Mecca, where the Ka‘bah, profaned by pagan worship, is declared to be the holy foundation of Abraham, common progenitor of Jews and Arabs and M.’s precursor in the worship of the one God, himself a Muslim before the term existed. Through this change the prophet reaffirmed the specifically Arab character of his mission, while shunning all nationalistic exclusivism and thus opening, more or less consciously, the paths of universality to his faith.
M. spent the early years of his residence in Medina organizing the young community that recognized him as its leader, fraternizing Meccans and Medinese, and replacing pagan tribal bonds with the religious bonds of the new faith (a memorable document of this is the «constitution» of the first year of the Hijra, which established these relationships and the duties of the citizens of the new theocratic State). Soon, however, foreign policy was added to domestic policy: that is, concern for relations with his rejected Meccan homeland. It was not that the latter initiated hostile acts against the refugee; rather, it was the very logic of the emerging warlike expansion of Islam that drove M. against his fellow citizens. A predatory attempt against a Meccan caravan led M. and the Medinese to their first armed encounter at Badr (March 624), where a force of troops sent from Mecca to defend the caravan was routed and put to flight. The insignificant skirmish had enormous moral significance for M. and his followers, and consolidated his position within Medina itself, where the believers were opposed by the ambiguous «hypocrites», or wait-and-see elements (muḥāḡin), and by the Judaic tribes, sullenly hostile and mocking. The first of the latter, the Banū Qajnuqā’, was summarily expelled by M. after his return from the victory at Badr. The second and third, the Banū Naḏir and the Banū Qurājah, were likewise eliminated during the following three years, the latter through a savage massacre; these years represented the greatest effort of the Meccan Qurājāti to stifle the danger posed by Medina. In year 3 of the Hijra (March 625), the Meccans avenged Badr by defeating M. in the battle of Uḫud, but they failed to exploit their success; and when in 627 they even attempted to invest and besiege the prophet’s city, a rudimentary defensive ditch (whence the name «War of the Ditch»), prepared by M. on the advice of a foreign slave, was enough to hold back the enemy, ignorant of siege tactics, and finally to make him withdraw without achieving anything. There followed in Medina, amid hateful circumstances of cruelty and hypocrisy, the aforementioned extermination of the Banū Qurājah, accused of defeatism and collusion with the enemy; and in that bloodbath, which is the greatest stain upon the prophet’s moral character, every remaining opposition by Jews and «wait-and-see» elements to his absolute rule in Medina was drowned. This rule, moreover, was exercised not in the forms of Oriental absolutism, but with certain appearances that may be called democratic, and above all with the supreme prestige of revelation, which was increasingly and opportunely elicited to legitimize political decisions, legal and social norms, and even personal acts and incidents in the prophet’s private life (the episodes involving ‘A’išah, his favorite wife, and Zajnab); the profound demonic inspiration of the beginning had long since cooled into an «ordinary administration» of relations with the supernatural, into a skilful policy of compromise and thoroughgoing penetration, which gradually extended the sphere of action of Medina’s political and religious leader to a large part of central Arabia.
This was confirmed when M., in the sixth year of the hegira, set out at the head of his companions toward Mecca, with the professed intention of performing the lesser pilgrimage (‘umrah) to the sanctuary of the Ka‘bah, to which, as we have seen, he had assigned so prominent a place in his religious construction. The Meccans, deeply alarmed, barred his way at Ḫudajbijjah; and there, 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 fact proved a triumph for M.’s diplomatic genius. For that year he renounced carrying out his plan and withdrew on the understanding that the ‘umrah would be peacefully performed by him and his companions the following year, as in fact happened; in addition, an armistice and a ten-year truce were concluded between Mecca and Medina. This was the first official recognition of his position as head of a state, if not as a prophet, that he obtained from his ancient homeland; it was accompanied and followed by the increasingly numerous adhesions of the Bedouin tribes, who saw in him the other figure now dominating the political firmament of Arabia. At Mecca itself, moreover, the party of unyielding resistance was daily disintegrating, as the most prominent figures of the Republic passed over to M. (Ḫālid b. al-Walīd, ‘Amr b. al-‘Aṣ, Abū Sufjān), many of whom would play a distinguished part in the peaceful and military works 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, it opened its gates to him almost without resistance. In January 630 (the eighth year of the hegira), M. entered as victor and undisputed arbiter the place from which he had fled less than eight years earlier; he won over the hearts of his fellow citizens with an almost general amnesty; purified the Ka‘bah of its multitude of idols, and restored it to the primitive worship of Abraham, to the Islamic Allah of whom he, M., was the chosen apostle in Arabia.
The Medinan companions feared for a moment that the prophet would abandon them for his recovered ancient homeland, but they were soon reassured. After the last resistance of the pagan Bedouin tribes had been broken in battle at Ḫunājin, a few months after the entry into Mecca, M. returned to his political capital, Medina, which had by then become the center toward which all Arabia looked. There he received the embassies of the tribes that gradually came to submit to him; from there he launched his final military expeditions, including, as early as the summer of 629, the one against the Byzantine frontier of Transjordan, which ended in a serious setback at Mu’tah, but was important as a symptom and portent of more extensive designs. From Medina, in 631, he issued the definitive regulations (sūrah 9, of the Bara’ah) that excluded idolaters from the pilgrimage, by then wholly Islamized, and in March 632 he solemnly undertook it himself, for the first and last time. It was the “farewell pilgrimage”; his mission was accomplished, paganism had been defeated in the Ḥiǧāz, the new faith had struck firm roots, and a fervent generation of companions and sons of companions received from his weary hands the torch that would soon advance with wondrous speed in the conquest of Western Asia and North Africa. Did M. desire and hope for this spread of islām beyond his homeland; would he himself have promoted it had his life lasted? In the Qur’an there is no trace of an explicit mission of islām beyond Arabia, of a conscious universalism; but the abhorrence of paganism, and the final unequivocal repudiation of Judaism and Christianity, declared adulterated and superseded faiths (the latter indeed branded as polytheistic because of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity), necessarily impelled islām to expand beyond the boundaries of the peninsula, to assert itself as a universal religion, even if this awareness only vaguely dawned upon the prophet as his career drew to a close.
Returning 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, expired with him). He left no male child, moreover, and his bloodline continued only through his daughter Fāṭimah, who had married ‘Alī and was therefore the ancestress of the “people of the House” (Ahl al-bajt), upon whom the ā’ita legitimism is based. The prophet’s remains were buried in his own house, over which the revered great mosque of Medina was later built. The Qur’anic revelations, which had guided his life and were to guide that of all Muslim generations, remained for some time entrusted to memory and to private collections, until the official recension was produced under ‘Uṭmān.
An impartial judgment of this figure, who, by virtue of his achievement, ranks among the greatest in human history, is difficult. To our Christian and modern conscience, his intellectual and moral weaknesses, his deviations, and his shortcomings may be said to appear first and foremost. Despite the transfiguration that his historical image has undergone over the centuries in the piety and veneration of his followers, making him a model of life, a wonder-worker, and even an emanation of divine light, the absolute historicity of his activity is documented in such minute detail and, on the whole, with such fidelity that there can be no doubt about his intellectual poverty, the crudeness and elasticity of his morality, and the subordination of means to ends. Some episodes of his public and private life remain as indelible shadows, not only when judged by a Christian conscience but also in the light of ancient ethics. On the other hand, these only too evident negative features cannot make us forget the absolute sincerity of his initial inspiration, the strenuous struggle he first sustained against every material interest of his own for a religious and moral ideal superior to that of the environment in which he lived, his capacity to reconsider and correct himself (sympathetically attested in more than one case by the Qur’an and tradition), and his predominant amiability and humanity. There was certainly something else in him as well, something that eludes us but must nevertheless be postulated to explain the lifelong and death-defying devotion shown to him by men sometimes even greater and more gifted than he, an Abū Bakr, an ‘Umar: an irrational charm, such as emanates only from exceptional personalities, beyond the perceptible balance of their faults and virtues. As a leader of men, manipulator of situations, simplifier and resolver of problems, and deviser of compromises, M. was unsurpassed; but the mark left by his work on human history is too significant for us to see in him anything more than a fortunate and skilful heresiarch.
His rigid monotheism led him at the outset to exclude in the most categorical manner the divinity and divine sonship of Jesus (the two elements are inseparable, and a recent attempt to distinguish them in the Qur’anic polemic appears desperate), as well as every Trinitarian doctrine. The Allah of Islamic faith « did not beget and was not begotten », and thus a fundamental cornerstone of the Christian faith is removed. But Jesus ('Isā in the Arabic-Qur’anic form), if not the son of God, is nevertheless his noble and wonder-working prophet, the last in the series of prophets that began with Adam and ended, after Jesus, with M. He was born miraculously, without human intervention, of the Virgin Mary; from the cradle he spoke, attesting to his supernatural origin and mission; he performed miracles, 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 Apostles’ request, he miraculously caused a laden table to descend from heaven; when the Jews plotted against him, he was spared the punishment of the cross, to which, through divine blinding, his enemies fastened another man resembling him, and was taken up by God into heaven. Such are the outlines of his earthly life. As for his doctrine, it may be summed up in vague affirmations of piety and submission to the Creator, in the task of « confirming the Pentateuch » among the Jews by broadening and softening some of its precepts, and in general exhortations to virtue and the fear of God. While Jesus’ biography is impoverished and altered, the specific content of the Christian message is either denied (divine sonship) or dissipated (ethics and eschatology).
There is a similar confusion and uncertainty in the Qur’anic data concerning Mary, called the daughter of 'Imrān (thus confusing her with Mary, the sister of Moses and Aaron), brought up by Zechariah and made worthy by God through a miracle, betrothed to Joseph after a contest with several suitors, Announced and made Mother through the agency 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 II. Fundamental in this regard is the Qur’anic passage 5:116: « God said: O Jesus son of Mary, was it you who said to men: 'Take me and my mother as two divinities instead of the one God?' He replied: 'Glory be 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 your Lord '...'. Mariolatry is here both deformed and rejected.
Toward the Christians of his milieu and his time, M.’s attitude was, despite these radical misunderstandings, at first sympathetic and benevolent: many of his earliest models of pious life and his rudimentary informants must have been Christians, and his own doctrine initially appeared to him as the «Arab edition», cleansed of corruptions and errors, of the authentic original monotheism preached by Moses and Jesus. As awareness of the originality of his own mission gradually grew, the separation from the two revealed religions deepened, and the polemic with their followers became more acute. Yet, with regard to Christians, it never reached on the prophet’s part the bitterness he displayed toward the Jews, also because, unlike the latter, he never encountered them in the course of his career as an organized political force. Hostility worsened when, after M.’s disappearance, Islam in its conquering expansion came into contact with the Christian world, and became far more embittered much later, during the Christian counteroffensive represented by the Crusades. But this is the history of 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 persistent equivocations, alterations, and misunderstandings; yet not without a pale reflection of that light filtering, through every deformation, into the new religion of Arabia, destined soon to radiate across so much of the world.