Muhammad, in full Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim, (born c. 570, Mecca, Arabia [now in Saudi Arabia]—died June 8, 632, Medina), the founder of Islam and the proclaimer of the Qurʾān. Muhammad is historically stated to had been born in 570 in Mecca and to have died in 632 in Medina, in which he had been pressured to emigrate to together with his adherents in 622.
The Qurʾān yields little concrete biographical information about the Islamic Prophet: it addresses an individual “messenger of God,” whom a number of verses name Muhammad (e.G., three:one hundred forty four), and speaks of a pilgrimage sanctuary that is related to the “valley of Mecca” and the Kaʿbah (e.G., 2:124–129, 5:ninety seven, 48:24–25). Certain verses anticipate that Muhammad and his fans live at a settlement known as al-madīnah (“the city”) or Yathrib (e.G., 33:thirteen, 60) after having formerly been ousted by their unbelieving foes, presumably from the Meccan sanctuary (e.G., 2:191). Other passages mention navy encounters among Muhammad’s followers and the unbelievers. These are every now and then connected with location-names, inclusive of the passing reference to a victory at an area known as Badr at 3:123. However, the textual content presents no dates for any of the historic occasions it alludes to, and almost none of the Qurʾānic messenger’s contemporaries are cited by way of name (a rare exception is at 33:37). Hence, although one accepts that the Qurʾānic corpus authentically documents the preaching of Muhammad, taken via itself it in reality does now not provide enough records for even a concise biographical sketch.
Most of the biographical facts that the Islamic culture preserves approximately Muhammad for that reason takes place out of doors the Qurʾān, in the so-known as sīrah (Arabic: “biography”) literature. Arguably the single most essential paintings inside the style is Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq’s (died 767–768) Kitāb al-maghāzī (“Book of [the Prophet’s] Military Expeditions”). However, this paintings is extant most effective in later reworkings and abridgements, of which the excellent recognised is ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām’s (died 833–834) Sīrat Muḥammad rasūl Allāh (“Life of Muhammad, the Messenger of God”). Ibn Isḥāq’s authentic book changed into not his personal composition however as a substitute a compilation of self sustaining reviews about specific occasions that occurred during the existence of Muhammad and also previous to it, which Ibn Isḥāq organized into what he deemed to be their accurate chronological order and to which he introduced his very own feedback. Each such report is normally introduced through a list of names tracing it through diverse intermediaries back to its closing source, which in many instances is an eyewitness—as an instance, the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾishah. Variants of the fabric compiled through Ibn Isḥāq, as well as similarly cloth approximately activities in Muhammad’s life, are preserved in works through other authors, inclusive of Abd al-Razzāq (died 827), al-Wāqidī (died 823), Ibn Saʿd (died 845), and al-Ṭabarī (died 923).
The fact that such biographical narratives about Muhammad are encountered best in texts courting from the eighth or ninth century or even later is certain to raise the hassle of ways assured one may be inside the sīrah literature’s declare to relay accurate ancient data. This isn't to indicate that there was necessarily an detail of planned fabrication at paintings, at the least at the level of a compiler like Ibn Isḥāq, who become clearly no longer inventing memories from scratch. Nonetheless, a few accretion of popular legend around a determine as seminal as Muhammad might be absolutely anticipated. At least to historians who're reluctant to confess reports of divine intervention, the trouble is strengthened by the mind-blowing factors of a number of the fabric included in Ibn Isḥāq’s paintings. Moreover, some of the narratives in query are patently adaptations of biblical motifs designed to present Muhammad as same or advanced to earlier prophetic figures including Moses and Jesus. For example, before Muhammad’s emigration to Medina he is stated to have obtained an oath of allegiance by twelve inhabitants of the metropolis, an obvious parallel to the Twelve Apostles, and during the digging of a defensive trench round Medina Muhammad is stated to have miraculously sated all of the workers from a handful of dates, recalling Jesus’ feeding of the multitude. Finally, it is especially viable that some reports about activities in Muhammad’s existence emerged no longer from ancient reminiscence but from exegetical speculation about the historic context of precise verses of the Qurʾān.
All things taken into consideration, there may be no compelling motive to signify that the fundamental scaffolding of the traditional Islamic account of Muhammad’s lifestyles is unhistorical. At the same time, the nature of the assets isn't always including to inspire confidence that we possess traditionally sure know-how approximately the Prophet’s existence this is as targeted as many earlier scholars tended to assume. Especially the standard chronological framework for Muhammad’s life appears to were worked out with the aid of later transmitters and collectors which includes Ibn Isḥāq, instead of being traceable to the earliest layer of Islamic traditions approximately Muhammad. Thus, statements of the type that on March 21 of the yr 625, Meccan forces entered the oasis of Medina are inherently complicated. The following segment will however provide a concise digest mainly of Ibn Isḥāq’s version of the lifestyles of the Prophet. This digest does now not aim to split historical fact from later legend. For example, in contrast to many in advance Western accounts, no try might be made to remove supernatural elements from the narrative inside the interest of transforming it into an account that appears doable with the aid of modern-day historiographical requirements.
Biography according to the Islamic tradition
Muhammad is born as a member of the tribe of Quraysh and the clan of Hāshim. His fatherland of Mecca homes an historical and famous pilgrimage sanctuary, the Kaʿbah. Although founded by way of Abraham, worship there has over time turn out to be ruled by polytheism and idolatry. Muhammad’s conception is preceded through a dramatic disaster: his grandfather ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib narrowly fails to enforce a vow to sacrifice his favorite son and Muhammad’s destiny father, ʿAbd Allāh, an apparent adaptation of the biblical tale of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). Muhammad himself is born in 570, the same 12 months in which the South Arabian king Abraha tries to triumph over Mecca and is thwarted via a divine intervention later alluded to in sūrah one zero five of the Qurʾān. Muhammad’s father passes away before his start, leaving him within the care of his paternal grandfather, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib. At the age of six Muhammad additionally loses his mom Āminah, and at 8 he loses his grandfather. Thereupon obligation for Muhammad is assumed with the aid of the new head of the extended family of Hāshim, his uncle Abū Ṭālib. While accompanying his uncle on a trading journey to Syria, Muhammad is recognized as a destiny prophet by using a Christian monk.
At the age of 25, Muhammad is hired by way of a wealthy girl, Khadījah, to supervise the transportation of her products to Syria. He so impresses her that she offers marriage. Khadījah is stated to had been approximately forty, however she bears Muhammad as a minimum two sons, who die young, and four daughters. The high-quality known of the latter is Fāṭimah, the future spouse of Muhammad’s cousin ʿAlī, whom Shiʿi Muslims regard as Muhammad’s divinely ordained successor. Until Khadījah’s demise a few 3 years before Muhammad’s emigration (hijrah) to Medina in 622, Muhammad takes no other spouse, despite the fact that polygamy is commonplace.
About 619, each Khadījah and Muhammad’s uncle Abū Ṭālib die, and some other uncle, Abū Lahab, succeeds to the leadership of the clan of Hāshim. Abū Lahab withdraws the clan’s protection from Muhammad, that means that the latter can now be attacked with out worry of retribution and is therefore now not safe at Mecca. After failing to win protection in the nearby metropolis of Al-Ṭāʾif, Muhammad secures a pledge of safety from a representative number of the population of the oasis city of Yathrib, also called Medina (from its Qurʾānic appellation al-madīnah, “the city”). This promise enables Muhammad and his followers to leave Mecca for Medina, which, in contrast to Mecca, is partly inhabited through Jewish tribes. Together with Abū Bakr, the future first caliph, Muhammad is the last to leave. It is handiest due to the fact he's warned by using Gabriel that he narrowly escapes an assassination plot through the Quraysh.
At Medina, Muhammad has a residence built that concurrently serves as a prayer venue for his followers. He also drafts a covenant that joins collectively “the Believers and Submitters [or Muslims] of Quraysh and of Yathrib” as well as a number of Medina’s Jewish tribes right into a network (ummah) recognizing Muhammad because the “Messenger of God.” However, relations with the Jews of Medina progressively get worse. Eighteen months after the emigration, a revelation bids the Muslims to pray within the route of the Meccan Kaʿbah, as opposed to to keep facing in the direction of Jerusalem as is Jewish practice. At about the equal time, the Medinan Muslims begin raiding Meccan caravans. When, throughout one of these raids, they're surprised via a Meccan alleviation pressure at Badr in 624, the Muslims, aided with the aid of angels, score a surprising victory. In response, the Meccans try and capture Medina, as soon as in 625 within the Battle of Uḥud and once more in 627 within the so-referred to as Battle of the Trench; both attempts to dislodge Muhammad are in the long run unsuccessful. After every of the three essential navy encounters with the Meccans, Muhammad and his followers control to oust every other of the three fundamental Jewish tribes of Medina. In the case of the last Jewish tribe to be displaced, the Qurayẓah, all grownup adult males are completed, and the girls and youngsters are enslaved.
In 628 Muhammad makes the formidable move of setting out to carry out the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Meccans are determined to save you the Muslims from coming into the city, and Muhammad halts at Al-Ḥudaybiyyah, on the threshold of the sacred territory of Mecca. A treaty is concluded between the 2 events: hostilities are to give up, and the Muslims are given permission to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in 629. Two months later Muhammad leads his forces in opposition to the Jewish oasis of Khaybar, north of Medina. After a siege, it submits, but the Jews are allowed to stay on condition of sending 1/2 in their date harvest to Medina. The following yr, Muhammad and his fans perform the pilgrimage as stipulated by way of the treaty of Al-Ḥudaybiyyah. Subsequently, however, an attack through Meccan allies upon allies of Muhammad ends in the latter’s denunciation of the treaty with the Meccans. In 630 he marches a full-size military on Mecca. The town submits, and Muhammad announces an amnesty.
After his go back to Medina, Muhammad receives deputations from diverse Arabian tribes who claim their allegiance to the Muslim polity. Still in 630, Muhammad embarks on a campaign to the Syrian border and reaches Tabūk, where he secures the submission of various cities. Muhammad for my part leads the pilgrimage to Mecca in 632, the so-known as Farewell Pilgrimage, the precedent for all future Muslim pilgrimages. He dies in June 632 in Medina. Since no arrangement for his succession has been made, his loss of life provokes a chief dispute over the future management of the network he has founded.
Status in the Qurʾān and in post-Qurʾānic Islam of Muhammad
Unsurprisingly, the parent of Muhammad performs a seminal position in Islamic notion and exercise. In sure respects, his submit-Qurʾānic standing markedly surpasses the manner wherein he's offered in scripture. For example, the Qurʾān emphasizes that Muhammad, like in advance messengers of God, is a mere mortal (e.G., 14:11, 17:ninety three), whereas Sufi thinkers of a speculative bent, together with Sahl al-Tustarī (died 896), describe him as the incarnation of a preexistent being of natural light, the “Muhammadan mild” (al-nūr al-Muḥammadī). The Qurʾān also enjoins Muhammad to invite God for forgiveness of his sins (40:fifty five, forty seven:19, forty eight:2), and one passage (eighty:1–10) bluntly reproaches him for disregarding a blind man who “got here to you eagerly / and in fear [of God]” and preferring to attend to someone who haughtily “deemed himself to be self-sufficient.” In evaluation to such scriptural statements, in later centuries there emerged the doctrine that Muhammad and other prophets were free of sin (although there was disagreement as to whether or not they could dedicate minor and accidental infractions) and the perception that Muhammad exemplified “the suitable individual” (al-insān al-kāmil).
Another contrast among Qurʾānic and publish-Qurʾānic photographs of Muhammad issues the difficulty of miracles. The Qurʾān cites Muhammad’s opponents as demanding that he display his prophetic credentials by means of various astounding achievements, which include being observed with the aid of an angel (e.G., eleven:12, 43:fifty three). In reaction, Muhammad is instructed to deny any pretense to “own the treasures of God,” to “have know-how of the unseen,” or to be an angel (6:50) and is defined as an insignificant “warner” (e.G., eleven:2). Thus, the Qurʾān patently does not gift Muhammad as a miracle worker. The later culture, but, regularly depicts him as having possessed exceptional expertise of usually inaccessible topics—often said to were mediated through the angel Gabriel—and as having executed sundry supernatural feats. Thus, the enigmatic connection with a splitting of the Moon in Qurʾān fifty four:1 is interpreted to intend a confirmatory miracle that Muhammad executed in reaction to a assignment via the Meccan pagans. As a remember of fact, classical Islamic theologians routinely adduced Muhammad’s miracles as one of the arguments establishing that he become a real prophet.
In other respects, however, there may be widespread and essential continuity among the Qurʾānic and submit-Qurʾānic visions of Muhammad. Certain elements of the Qurʾān, commonly dated to the Medinan duration of Muhammad’s life, ascribe a far extra elevated reputation to him than do earlier layers of scripture. Thus, the Qurʾān needs “notion in God and His Messenger” (emphasis added; e.G., forty nine:15), and one verse (nine:128) ascribes to Muhammad two attributes—kindness and mercy—that the Qurʾān otherwise reserves for God. Furthermore, “God and His Messenger” need to no longer be insulted (e.G., 9:sixty one, 33:fifty seven), a demand that foreshadows the view of medieval Islamic jurists that insulting the Prophet is a punishable offense (despite the fact that the Qurʾān does no longer call for that such insults be avenged by humans).
Of specific importance are the frequent scriptural commands to obey “God and His Messenger” as well as the unequivocal assertion that to obey Muhammad is to obey God (4:eighty). One Qurʾānic verse even describes Muhammad as an “exemplar” (uswah) to the believers (33:21). Such pronouncements form an crucial impetus for the later view that the “custom” (sunnah) of Muhammad holds normative importance for all Muslims and that during operating out God’s commandments Islamic students are to depend upon Prophetic precedent to supplement and interpret the extraordinarily restricted quantity of rules contained within the Qurʾān. Al-Shāfiʿī (died 820) influentially insisted that the Prophetic sunnah was to be accessed by way of recourse to a selected corpus of texts—namely, greater-scriptural reports approximately the utterances and moves of Muhammad, the so-referred to as Prophetic ḥadīth. The task of determining which of the multitude of such traditions may be deemed to be actual already exercised premodern Islamic students and caused a complicated philological weighing of the cloth, even though modern-day Western scholarship takes a instead less positive view of the feasibility of organising the Prophetic starting place of precise ḥadīth reviews. Sunni Islam recognises six quasi-canonical collections of real ḥadīth, of which the most well-known are those via al-Bukhārī (died 870) and Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (died 875).
Even past the strictly prison purport of Muhammad’s example, the imitation of the Prophet has functioned as an critical car of ethical and non secular boom for lots Muslims across the centuries. Thus, pious Muslims through the ages have endeavoured to observe Prophetic precedent even in such reputedly mundane topics as using a toothpick or now not trimming one’s beard. The presence of Muhammad in famous Islamic piety is likewise anchored in festive commemorations of his birth (mawlid) on the 12th or 17th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal (the 0.33 month of the Islamic calendar), during which the maximum famous panegyric on the Prophet, the so-called Mantle Poem via al-Būṣīrī (died 1295), is historically recited in many Islamic countries. Other fairs related to Muhammad are the commemoration of his Night Journey to Jerusalem and resulting ascent to heaven, celebrated on the 27th day of Rajab (the 7th month of the Islamic calendar), and his receipt of the first Qurʾānic revelation closer to the give up of the fasting month of Ramaḍān. Muhammad’s presence additionally extends to eschatology, for he is believed to have the strength to intercede with God on behalf of the participants of his network on the Day of Judgment.
The confrontation of the Islamic global with modern Western imperialism, technological know-how, and historiography from the early 19th century onward has led to manifold re-readings and re-imaginings of Muhammad’s biography in scholarship, literature, and even film. A specially influential twentieth-century biography of Muhammad is Ḥayāt Muḥammad (1935; “The Life of Muhammad”) by using the Egyptian creator Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (died 1956). Haykal emphasizes the rationality of Muhammad’s teaching and of the Qurʾān and aims to clear the conventional Islamic resources at the Prophet’s biography of what he perceives to be superstitious components. Muhammad stays an excellent individual, even though the beliefs represented by using him are strongly modernized. A much extra bold literary model of Muhammad’s biography than Haykal’s is Awlād Ḥāratinā (1959; Children of the Alley) by way of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (died 2006), an city allegory of the records of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Common motifs in modern and cutting-edge writings about Muhammad by means of authors from the Islamic international are the Prophet’s political and social imaginative and prescient, issues of gender, the nature of the revelations acquired by him, and his mindset closer to the use of violence. Problems of historical authenticity and reliability in addition to the covert ideological tendencies underlying early Islamic assets are treated, as an instance, by means of the Moroccan sociologist and feminist Fatema Mernissi (died 2015) and within the Tunisian historian Hichem Djait’s (born 1935) works at the biography of Muhammad.
Western perceptions
In putting comparison to the same old Muslim view of the Prophet as a great embodiment of distinctive feature and piety, medieval Christian polemicists like the Dominican monk Riccoldo da Montecroce (died 1320) condemned Muhammad as a planned imposter and a downright diabolical figure. Stock motifs in such polemics have been Muhammad’s recourse to violence, the quantity of his better halves, and the alleged indebtedness of his religious message to a Christian heretic. This mind-set changed best inside the 18th century, whilst various Western pupils—for example, the Dutch theologian and Orientalist Adriaan Reland (died 1718)—started calling for a extra impartial assessment of Muhammad. The gradual shift is illustrated via the British Orientalist George Sale’s (died 1736) translation of the Qurʾān into English (1734): even though its declared objective is polemical and the Qurʾān is brushed off as “so take place a forgery,” Sale as a minimum leaves it open whether Muhammad’s preaching sprang from real spiritual “enthusiasm” or “best a layout to elevate himself to the ideally suited authorities of his us of a.”
To name Muhammad an fanatic turned into to imply that he were definitely satisfied of the fact of his message and of his own prophetic calling, instead of having intentionally ensnared the Arabs in fake doctrines to be able to satisfy his longing for electricity. Throughout the 18th and early nineteenth centuries, the idea of Muhammad’s subjective truthfulness and sincerity increasingly more unfold. A mainly emphatic rejection of the erstwhile fundamental view that Muhammad practiced aware deception is located in Thomas Carlyle’s (died 1881) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841): for the reason that a “greater variety of God’s creatures accept as true with in Mahomet’s word at this hour than in any other phrase some thing,” Carlyle wrote, it'd be wrong to dismiss Muhammad’s preaching as a “miserable piece of non secular legerdemain.”
The valorization of the Islamic Prophet become intimately tied up with the beginnings of contemporary Western scholarship on Muhammad and the Qurʾān. According to Abraham Geiger (died 1874), whose Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1833; “What did Muhammad Borrow from Judaism?”) constitutes the ancestral monograph of present day Western Qurʾānic research, Muhammad was a
"genuine enthusiast, who was himself convinced of his divine mission…. He so fully worked himself into this idea in thought, in feeling and in action, that every event seemed to him a divine inspiration".
Similar ideas had been expressed with the aid of the German pupil Theodor Nöldeke (died 1930), writer of the seminal Geschichte des Qorâns (1860; The History of the Qurʾān). Thus, the reconceptualization of Muhammad from a devious heretic to a honest enthusiast paved the manner for a novel scholarly interest in Muhammad as a major historic protagonist and in the Qurʾān as an essential record of human non secular experience. This is so even if older Orientalist scholarship is by no means with out some residues of conventional Christian polemics.
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