Muhammad ( CE8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, military, and political leader, and the founder of Islam. According to Islam, he was the final prophet of God who was divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets in Islam. He is believed by Muslims to be the Seal of the Prophets, and along with the Quran, his teachings and normative examples form the basis for Islamic religious belief.
According to the traditional account, Muhammad was born in Mecca to the aristocratic Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh. He was the son of Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib and Amina bint Wahb. His father, Abdullah, the son of tribal leader Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, died around the time Muhammad was born. His mother Amina died when he was six, leaving Muhammad an orphan. He was raised under the care of his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, and paternal uncle, Abu Talib. In later years, he would periodically seclude himself in a mountain cave named Hira for several nights of prayer. When he was 40, in , Muhammad reported being visited by Gabriel in the cave and receiving his first revelation from God. In 613,Howarth, Stephen. Knights Templar. 1985. p. 199. Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly,Muhammad Mustafa Al-A'zami (2003), The History of The Qur'anic Text: From Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments, pp. 26–27. UK Islamic Academy. . proclaiming that "God is One", that complete "submission" () to God () is the right way of life (), and that he was a prophet and messenger of God, similar to other prophets in Islam.See:
Muhammad's followers were initially few in number, and experienced persecution by Meccan polytheists for 13 years. To escape ongoing persecution, he sent some of his followers to Abyssinia in 615, before he and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina (then known as Yathrib) later in 622. This event, the , marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, also known as the Hijri calendar. In Medina, Muhammad united the tribes under the Constitution of Medina. In December 629, after eight years of intermittent fighting with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca. The conquest went largely uncontested, and Muhammad seized the city with minimal casualties. In 632, a few months after returning from the Farewell Pilgrimage, he fell ill and died. By the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam.
The revelations () that Muhammad reported receiving until his death form the verses () of the Quran, upon which Islam is based, and are regarded by Muslims as the verbatim word of God and his final revelation. Besides the Quran, Muhammad's teachings and practices, found in transmitted reports, known as hadith, and in his biography (), are also upheld and used as sources of Islamic law. Apart from Islam, Muhammad plays a significant role in the Druze faith as one of the seven main prophets, and in the Baháʼí Faith as a Manifestation of God.
Biographical sources
Critical evaluation of sources is of particular importance in uncovering Muhammad's historical existence beyond the myths. Early sources for the life of Muhammad are authors from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AH (8th and 9th centuries CE), whose works constructed main biographical information to the Muslim traditions regarding his life, but the reliability of this information is contentious in academic circles due to the oral gap between the recorded dates of Muhammad's life and the dates when these writings begin to appear in sources. John Burton summarizes the information provided by the multitude of available sources, from a historian's perspective, and states
In judging the content, the only resort of the scholar is to the yardstick of probability, and on this basis, it must be repeated, virtually nothing of use to the historian emerges from the sparse record of the early life of the founder of the latest of the great world religions ... so, however far back in the Muslim tradition one now attempts to reach, one simply cannot recover a scrap of information of real use in constructing the human history of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed.John Burton: Bulletin of the Society of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 53 (1990), p. 328, cited in
Early biographies
The information used in early Islamic historiography emerged as the sporadic products of storytellers (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ) -they were quite prestigious then-They do not seem, however, to have been more prone to fabrications than other scholars of the early period. This deduction stems from the over-whelmingly positive reputation of the quṣṣāṣ in the early period.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004335523_008 without details.Most Islamic history was transmitted orally until after the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate. At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. While the narratives were initially in the form of a kind of heroic epics called magāzī,The earliest sources we have on the life of Muḥammad are the maghāzī, but they are far from being a consistent literary genre because they encompass a mix of different types of texts: lists of martyrs, poetry, Qurʾānic explanations, anecdotes resembling those found in the Bible, and of course accounts of military expeditions.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466739_005 details were added later, edited and transformed into sirah compilations.Raven, Wim (2006). "Sīra and the Qurʾān". Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān. Brill Academic Publishers. pp. 29–49 Western historians describe the purpose of these early biographies as largely to convey a message, (of a hagiographic nature) rather than to strictly and accurately record history.
Important early sources for the life of Muhammad are authors from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AH (overlapping with the 8th and 9th centuries CE), whose works supplied additional biographical information to the Muslim traditions regarding his life. The earliest written (biographies of Muhammad and quotes attributed to him) is Ibn Ishaq's Life of God's Messenger written (150 AH). Although the original work was lost, this survives as extensive excerpts in works by Ibn Hisham and to a lesser extent by al-Tabari. However, Ibn Hisham wrote in the preface to his biography of Muhammad that he omitted matters from Ibn Ishaq's biography that "would distress certain people". Another early historical source is the history of Muhammad's campaigns by al-Waqidi ( AH), and the work of Waqidi's secretary Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi ( AH). Karen Armstrong believes that—thanks to these early biographical efforts—more is known about Muhammad than about the founders of almost all the other major religions.
Hadith
Other important traditional sources include the hadith collections, accounts of verbal and physical teachings and approvals attributed to Muhammad. Hadiths were compiled several generations after his death by Muslims including Muhammad al-Bukhari, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Muhammad ibn Isa at-Tirmidhi, Abd ar-Rahman al-Nasai, Abu Dawood, Ibn Majah, Malik ibn Anas, al-Daraqutni and attributed to Muhammad through a chain of isnad. The hadiths generally present an idealized view of Muhammad.
Hadiths were classified by Islamic scholars according to their reliabilityThe Future of Muslim Civilisation by Ziauddin Sardar, 1979, page 26. based on the reliability of chain of transmission; and different schools of thought relied on different collections. Muslim scholars placed more trust in hadith than in biographical literature because hadiths were generally based on a chain of transmission; the absence of such a chain in biographical literature made it, in their eyes, unverifiable. Hadiths that pass the classical grading and selection processes are labeled as authentic. This labeling is subjective, and their reliability is often determined by sectarian leanings. These sources, distrusted by Quranist scholars,Aisha Y. Musa, The Qur'anists, Florida International University, accessed 22 May 2013.Neal Robinson (2013), Islam: A Concise Introduction, Routledge, , Chapter 7, pp. 85-89 are also viewed with suspicion by Western researchers who believe that they were fabricated in the early centuries of Islam to support certain theological and legal positions. In addition, the meaning of a hadith may have drifted from its original telling to when it was finally written down.
Early Western scholars mistrusted the later narrations and reports, regarding them as fabrications. Caetani considered the attribution of historical reports to Ibn Abbas and Aisha as mostly fictitious, preferring accounts reported without isnad by early historians such as Ibn Ishaq. Although the "dominant paradigm", some have—with caution—regarded them as accurate historical sources. Madelung has rejected the indiscriminate dismissal of everything not included in "early sources", instead judging later narratives in the context of historical compatibility with events and figures.
Quran
The Quran is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe it represents the word of God revealed to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel.Living Religions: An Encyclopaedia of the World's Faiths, Mary Pat Fisher, 1997, p. 338, I. B. Tauris. The Quran is primarily addressed to a single "Messenger of God," identified as Muhammad in a number of verses. In contrast to the hundreds of references to earlier prophets such as Moses and Jesus, it contains comparatively little direct information about Muhammad himself, or his companions. The text also briefly refers to episodes from Muhammad's career, such as the migration of his followers to Yathrib and the Battle of Badr.
Meccan years
Early life
The name Muhammad means "praised" in Arabic and it appears four times in the Quran.Jean-Louis Déclais, Names of the Prophet, Encyclopedia of the Quran. He was also known as "al-Amin" () when he was young; however, historians differ as to whether it was given by people as a reflection of his nature or was simply a given name from his parents, i.e., a masculine form of his mother's name "Amina". Muhammad acquired the of Abu al-Qasim later in his life after the birth of his son Qasim, who died two years afterwards.
It is believed that Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim was born in Mecca around and that his birthday was on a Monday night, the 12th day of the month of Rabi' al-Awwal. He belonged to the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, which was a dominant force in western Arabia. Although he was born into a house belonging to the prominent Abdulmuttalib family of the tribe, it is said that he lacked prosperity during his youth. He is also claimed to have been a descendant of Ishmael, son of Abraham. Islamic tradition states that Muhammad's birth year coincided with the elephant incident named legend, when Abraha, the Aksumite viceroy in the former Himyarite Kingdom, unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Mecca.Marr J. S., Hubbard E., Cathey J. T. 2014: The Year of the Elephant. Retrieved 21 October 2014 (GMT).
Muhammad's father, Abdullah, died almost six months before he was born. Muhammad then stayed with his foster mother, Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb, and her husband until he was two years old. At the age of six, Muhammad lost his biological mother Amina to illness and became an orphan. For the next two years, until he was eight years old, Muhammad was under the guardianship of his paternal grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, until the latter's death. He then came under the care of his uncle, Abu Talib, the new leader of the Banu Hashim. Abu Talib's brothers assisted with Muhammad's learningHamza, the youngest, trained Muhammad in archery, swordsmanship, and martial arts. Another uncle, Abbas, provided Muhammad with a job leading caravans on the northern segment of the route to Syria.