Chapter Two: Muhammad and Islam, c. 570-632

In 610 CE, an event would occur that would alter the trajectory of world history.

That year, a successful Arab merchant named Muhammad (c. 570-632) claimed to have been visited by the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic) while meditating in a cave. According to Muhammad, Gabriel commanded him to “recite!” Terrified, he pleaded that he could not. Again, the angel made his demand:

Recite in the name of your Lord who created, Created man from a clot. Recite and your Lord is the most Generous, Who taught by the pen, Taught man that which he knew not (Qurʾan 96: 1–5).

This time, as Muhammad later claimed, words poured from his mouth like a torrent. To Muslims, this was a pivotal moment, the point at which Muhammad became God’s final messenger, or the Seal of the Prophets.

Thus began both the religion of Islam and its holy book, the Qurʾan, which means, literally, “recitation.” Over the next twenty-three years, Muhammad would reveal the rest of the Qurʾan, which he claimed originated with God, or, in Arabic, Allah, and which he declared was God’s final revelation to humanity. He called the religion Islam, or submission to the will of God, and referred to his followers as Muslims, or those who surrender to God. It was a modest beginning for an ardently monotheistic faith—one that would soon reshape the political, social, cultural, and economic map not just of the Middle East but of the entire globe.

The Pre-Islamic Middle East

Before we get to Muhammad and the religion he established, we must first explore the world in which Islam emerged. All social movements are products of the times and circumstances in which they arise. In innumerable ways, they reflect the values, social hierarchies, and beliefs of the cultures from which they emerge. They also respond to and echo the frictions and challenges of their era and succeed most often when they can offer answers to those problems. The Islamic movement was no different. The culture, mentalities, and beliefs of the Arab people shaped the new religion even as Islam borrowed heavily from other monotheistic faiths, particularly Judaism and Christianity. Above all, the new religion that Muhammad espoused reflected the evolving socioeconomic circumstances of late-sixth and early-seventh century Arabia, and it drew strength from its ability to offer solutions to the rise in inequality that those changes produced.

The Arab People

Nearly the entire population of the Arabian peninsula at the time of Muhammad’s birth was Arab. A Semitic people, the Arabs were well acclimated to the harsh climate of the region in part because they had, around 3,000 BCE, domesticated an animal ideally suited to that arid landscape: the camel. Capable of surviving for long periods of time without water, camels permitted the Arabs to travel between oases and to cross otherwise-inhospitable regions of the peninsula. Later, Arab merchants would carry out extensive trade using vast fleets of camels that could efficiently transport large quantities of goods.

Even in the time of Muhammad most Arabs lived a nomadic existence. Called bedouin, the nomadic Arabs followed a pattern common to most pastoral cultures. That is, they did not have complex, impersonal political systems of the type common among sedentary societies; instead, they organized themselves along less-formal, tribal political and social arrangements in which familial ties defined identity and group membership. In this system, the authority of elders and the threat of ostracism were generally all that were needed to maintain order. Likewise, the bedouin had a comparatively simple economic system typical of tribal societies. Similar to that of many other nomadic cultures, it mixed hunting and gathering, herding animals, and slash-and- burn agriculture.

As was also often the case in other tribal societies, bedouin engaged in near- constant intertribal warfare. This form of conflict was very different from the territorial, trade, and resource-oriented fighting characteristic of both the sedentary empires of Late Antiquity and the states of the modern era. Rather than trying to conquer land or wipe out rivals, though they occasionally fought such wars, the bedouin instead typically engaged in low-intensity intertribal raids, or ghazu. They stole herd animals, fought and killed men from rival tribes in small engagements, captured women and children, and extracted tribute from the comparatively wealthy Arabs that lived in towns. These low- intensity raids served several important purposes. On a material level, they provided a way to increase both the size of the tribe and its wealth. More importantly, the ghazu constituted a regulated system of violence that channeled the energy and discord of the tribes’ young men outward in a way that ensured domestic tranquility while also giving those warriors a sanctioned opportunity to gain the status and social recognition needed to become respected and influential members of their tribe.

Living in a tribal system, the bedouin neither had, nor needed, a formal, written legal system. Instead, they abided by a social code called muruwah that governed behavior and public morality. The muruwah code emphasized those values that were essential to the survival and prosperity of the tribe: bravery, preservation of honor, loyalty, care for the poor, hospitality, and protection of the weak. Valor, honor, and fealty are obviously critical in an environment in which ghazu are the norm—after all, group survival depended on such beliefs—but why did the muruwah code place so much stress on values such as generosity and concern for the group’s most vulnerable members? It did so because the survival of both the tribe and its elite depended on unity and on every member contributing to the good of the collective. Only by caring for the weakest members of the tribe could the powerful ensure that those on the lowest rungs would help them during times of crisis.

Not all Arabs were bedouin. A significant minority lived in towns and cities, particularly in the Hijaz, the part of Arabia that lies along the Red Sea coast. Given the region’s scant rainfall, it receives less than 8 inches of rain annually, such settlements could only exist at the numerous oases that dotted the area. Taking advantage of the regular supply of water that the oases provided, towns like Taif, Yathrib, Mecca, and Badr sustained themselves by growing dates and cereal crops.

They did not focus exclusively on agriculture, however. Instead, over time, some of these settlements became centers of long-distance commerce. They transshipped goods from north to south and used the profits they earned to buy Damascus swords, wine, and, especially, Syrian wheat. Both the agriculturalists and trade-oriented Arabs had a symbiotic relationship with the region’s bedouin. While the two groups often clashed, they nonetheless engaged in important trade relationships in which the settled Arabs exchanged agricultural goods for the bedouins’ animal skins, meat, and livestock. These settled Arabs also retained close ties with those bedouin tribes to whom they were related.

Muslims have long regarded the period before Muhammad as al-Jahiliyya, or the Age of Ignorance, a time during which the Arab people had lost their faith in the one God and had become polytheists. As the scholar of religion Reza Aslan argues, however, this interpretation fails to capture adequately either the rich diversity of pre- Islamic Arab religious beliefs or their syncretic nature, meaning their inclusion of elements from a variety of faiths. Most Arabs of this period were polytheists. They acknowledged the existence of 360 tribal gods that they believed oversaw the day-to-day functioning of the material world. Beyond the tribal deities there existed a supreme God, Allah, who had created the universe. The Arabs conceived of Allah as a remote deity that did not answer to supplication; instead, people prayed to one of the lesser gods for intercession if they needed help.

Pre-Islamic Arab religious beliefs went well beyond polytheism, however. Some, particularly in Yemen, had converted to Christianity over the prior few centuries, and Christian theology permeated the beliefs of nearly all Arabs. The Arabian peninsula likewise had a significant number of Jewish communities composed of both Jewish immigrants and Arab converts. Christian and Jewish theology profoundly influenced the religious views of the Hijaz. Regardless of affiliation, for example, nearly all Arabs believed that they descended from Abraham, the patriarch of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, through Ismael, the product of Abraham’s union with his wife Sarah’s handmaiden, Hagar. Indeed, by the sixth century, most town Arabs had come to believe that Allah was the same as the God that Christians and Jews worshipped.

Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca had long stood as the dominant religious center in Arabia. Located about halfway up the Hijaz along the trade routes stretching from Yemen in the south to the Byzantine Empire in the north, the city owed its rise to prominence to its possession of Arabia’s principle religious shrine: The Kaʿba. Believed to have been erected by Adam, rebuilt by Noah after the Flood, and later restored by Abraham and Ismael, the Kaʿba was a small, roofless masonry structure that housed a black, meteorite rock believed to represent the distant creator God.

The Kaʿba was already an important shrine when, in the late-fourth century, the Quraysh tribe that dominated Mecca persuaded the bedouin to house the idols representing the region’s 360 tribal gods in it. The success of this initiative dramatically raised the stature and economic position of the town. Thereafter the tribes of Arabia visited the Kaʿba each winter during an annual pilgrimage known as the hajj. The pilgrims frequented inns, food stalls, gambling dens, and brothels and, in the process, made many Quraysh rich. The trade that accompanied the annual pilgrimage was even more lucrative. Thanks to the presence of the Kaʿba, the entire town had become sacred ground in which violence and intertribal conflict was haram, or forbidden. Trade could thus occur in Mecca even between members of hostile tribes, with the result that the city became a vast marketplace during the hajj. The Quraysh profited handsomely from this commerce. Not only did it generate substantial revenue through a modest tax that the Quraysh imposed on the sale of all goods during the pilgrimage, but, more importantly, it lent Mecca a newfound economic significance that gradually pulled the region’s trade routes to it.

The Byzantine and Persian Empires

While the Arabs dominated the Arabian peninsula at the time of Muhammad’s birth, the rest of the Middle East fell under the rule of two of the greatest states of Late Antiquity: the Byzantine and Persian Empires. From their capital of Constantinople, Byzantine emperors ruled portions of Italy, the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, including grain-rich Egypt. Based in the city of Ctesiphon near modern-day Baghdad, the Persian Sassanid Dynasty controlled the Iranian plateau and the rich, grain-producing region of Mesopotamia. Both of these states were well established. Cyrus the Great (c. 600-530 BCE) had founded the Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE, and the Sassanid Dynasty had ruled it since 224 CE. Heir to the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire was a continuation of the state that Caesar Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) had created in the first century BCE out of the already very-old Roman Republic.

Religion played an important role in both states. Most people who lived in the Persian Empire were adherents of its state religion: Zoroastrianism. Dating to the sixth- century BCE, Zoroastrianism was a monotheistic faith similar in many ways to Christianity that held that the god of light, Ahura Mazda, was locked in an eternal struggle with an evil deity named Ahriman. The Sassanid Empire was not uniformly Zoroastrian, however; instead, it also possessed a number of sizeable religious minorities, particularly in Mesopotamia. That region had a large Jewish community that dated to the Babylonian Captivity as well as a significant population of Christians. Persian shahs were well aware of both their empire’s religious diversity and the challenges that confessional unrest could pose to their rule. Accordingly, though the dynasty had officially adopted Zoroastrianism as its state religion in the early third century, it pursued a policy of toleration toward other faiths designed to avoid internal dissent.

Meanwhile, by the sixth century, Christianity had become the overwhelmingly dominant religion in the Byzantine Empire. Initially an underground movement, it had grown slowly but steadily in the Roman world between the death of Christ and the end of the third century. Following the Emperor Constantine’s (r. 306-337) declaration of religious toleration in the early fourth century, however, Christianity exploded in popularity. Indeed, by the end of the fourth century, it had become the official religion of the empire.

Even as Christianity was rapidly gaining converts and winning the support of the state, it was also experiencing significant internal conflict. Theological in nature, the debates centered on Christ’s essence and the concept of the Trinity. First articulated in the third century by the orthodox theologian Tertullian (c. 155-220), the Trinity holds that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are simultaneously both distinct entities and a single, unified deity, and that Jesus contained both divine and human elements.

Many Christians did not agree with Tertullian’s orthodox position. Some, called Monophysites, argued that a being could not be composed of two essences, and concluded that Jesus was wholly divine in nature. Monophysitism won few supporters in the empire outside of the Middle East, but its adherents constituted a majority of the population in Egypt, where they were called Copts, and in Syria, where they were known as Jacobites. The Monophysites soon found themselves in a difficult position. Both the Church and the Roman state placed great value on conformity of belief and sought to suppress theological positions that challenged orthodoxy; accordingly, under the direction of the emperor Marcian (r. 450-458), the Church reaffirmed the orthodox view that Christ had two natures and declared Monophysitism to be a heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. As a result, from the mid-fifth to the early-seventh centuries, the Jacobites and Copts endured periodic persecution at the hands of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities.

Neither empire exerted direct control over the nearby Arabian peninsula. Given its sheer size, fractious tribal population, and challenging geography, conquering the region generated little interest among either Byzantine emperors or Sassanid shahs. Instead, both states sought to ensure the security of their Arabian border by entering into mutually beneficial relationships with Arab client tribes. For example, Constantinople provided the leaders of the largely Christian, though Monophysite, Ghassanid tribe with titles and an annual subsidy of gold; in exchange, the Ghassanids prevented other tribes from raiding the empire from Arabia. Ctesiphon enjoyed a similar arrangement with the predominantly Zoroastrian Lakhmid tribe along its frontier with the peninsula.

The client tribes played an important part in the frequent wars between the Persian and Byzantine Empires. Relations between the empires had been poor since they had acquired a common border in the first century BCE. Thereafter, the Roman Empire and its Byzantine successor had waged a series of on-again, off-again wars with successive Persian dynasties for control of northern Mesopotamia. During some periods such as the third century CE, the Persians held the upper hand; at other points, Roman or Byzantine armies dominated the frontier. At no time, however, was one side able to decisively defeat the other or to substantially alter the border between the two empires.

Trade in Arabia

In fact, the biggest consequence of the fighting between Rome and Persia related not to territory but instead to commerce. As a result of the Roman upper class’s near-insatiable demand for Chinese silk and Indian spices, merchants from the empire imported vast quantities of expensive luxury goods from the east. Caravan merchants brought products originating in China west via the overland Silk Road network of trade routes that crisscrossed central Asia, while maritime traders carried spices and other luxuries from India by ship across the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf. In both cases, the goods then moved through Persian territory along the Euphrates River before crossing the frontier into Roman Syria. In times of peace, this arrangement functioned reasonably well for the Romans and their Byzantine successors. During periods of conflict, however, Sassanid shahs could impose high taxes that merchants would then pass on to consumers; as a result, the trade in luxury goods through Persia meant that Rome would, in effect, be footing part of the cost of the Sassanids’ wars against them.

Roman and then Byzantine emperors found this state of affairs intolerable and actively sought during times of conflict to foster alternate trade routes that lay outside the purview of Persian tax collectors. That strategy involved two components. In the north, imperial officials worked to move Silk Road trade with China from the Sassanid Empire to a new terminus on the Roman-controlled Crimean Peninsula. In the south, they induced merchants coming by ship from India to abandon the traditional route through the Persian Gulf in favor of a new one in which they traveled up the Red Sea to Roman ports in Egypt or Palestine.

Due to seasonal shifts in regional winds not every ship could enter the Red Sea if they arrived in the wrong part of the year. When this occurred, many offloaded their cargos at the port of Aden in southern Yemen. From there, massive camel caravans carried goods northward to trading centers in the Hijaz and thence into the empire. Imperial encouragement of the southern route thus had enormous consequences for the Arabs of the region. Thanks to it, trade from India to the Roman Empire via the Arabian peninsula surged from the first century CE until the late-fourth century CE, enmeshing the Arabs in one of the globe’s great long-distance trade networks and creating an economic boom in the Hijaz.

Economic Contraction and Recovery

The good times came to an abrupt end in the late fourth century, however. In 384, the Roman Emperor Theodosius negotiated a peace agreement with the new Persian Shah, Shapur III (r. 383-388). While such treaties between Rome and Persia were typically fleeting, this one proved durable. Benefitting from the presence of a common, existential threat in the form of the powerful Hunnic Empire, the peace between the two rivals would, save for a brief border skirmish from 421-422, hold until the early-sixth century.

The treaty may have focused on diplomatic goals, but it nonetheless had a far-reaching impact on long-distance trade patterns. Shorter and thus significantly cheaper, the older route via the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates River to Rome gradually reasserted itself as the peace took hold. As a consequence, by the mid-fifth century merchants bringing goods between India and Rome had largely abandoned the overland route up the west side of the Arabian peninsula in favor of the more direct one through the Persia Empire.

This change had a disastrous impact on the Hijaz. Bereft of much of the trade that had nurtured it, the region entered a long depression in the fifth and early-sixth centuries during which its economy degenerated from a long-distance, cash-based, market-based system into a much poorer subsistence- and barter-oriented one. Many who had previously been involved in the caravan trade were consequently compelled to abandon their occupations in favor of farming or nomadism, with the result that the region’s towns shrank significantly. Mecca was a rare exception to this trend. It too suffered from the economic depression, but, thanks to the Kaʿba and the revenue the hajj produced, the city managed to weather the hard times in a way that its commercial rivals could not.

The economy of the Hijaz languished until events to the north finally delivered the region from its malaise in the sixth century. Salvation came as a result of renewed conflict in the Middle East. Beginning in the 520s, the Persian and Byzantine Empires slipped back into their old pattern of near-constant hostility. Between 526 and 591, they fought a series of wars for control of territory in northern Mesopotamia and for dominance of border states like Armenia. The renewal of conflict soon prompted Constantinople to resume the old Roman practice of encouraging the diversion of trade from Persia so as to avoid the stiff, 25 percent tax that the shah’s government had started levying on goods bound for the Byzantine Empire. However, this effort proved more complicated than it had been in the past. In the early 570s, Ctesiphon had seized Yemen and with it control of the entrance to the Red Sea. As a result, ships could no longer travel directly from India to the Byzantine Empire without paying Persian levies.

These conditions soon led to the recovery of the Hijazi economy. Ctesiphon’s control of Yemen proved key here. With trade via the Red Sea now subject to Persian tariffs, merchants searched for an alternate, tax-free route along which they could take goods from the Arabian Sea to the Byzantine Empire. They found it in the Hijaz. Thanks to a loophole that permitted neutral cities to import cargoes from Persia and then reexport them to the Byzantine Empire without having to pay the tariff, merchants could avoid Persian taxes by sending their goods north via the old overland routes across western Arabia. Very soon, large quantities of spices and other goods from India were traveling once again by ship across the Arabian Sea to Aden and then by camel caravan northward through the Hijaz to Byzantine Syria. Unsurprisingly, this sudden revival of the long-distance trade in luxury goods produced a rapid economic recovery in the region. In a matter of just a few decades, cities were repopulated, markets restored, and old commercial relationships renewed.

No part of the Hijaz benefited from the return of trade more than Mecca. The revitalization of long-distance trade soon flooded it with money and opportunity while the recovery of the other cities and towns in the Hijaz produced an attendant revival of the lucrative hajj. As a result, the booming city rapidly reemerged as the dominant economic nexus in the region.

The prosperity that Mecca enjoyed in the sixth and early-seventh centuries was not shared equally by all its residents, however. While some leading members of the Quraysh tribe grew fabulously rich, many of the city’s residents experienced no benefit whatsoever from the revival of trade. Paradoxically, in fact, those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder appeared to be in a worse position than they had been before the revival of commerce. Indeed, many were so destitute that they had little choice but to borrow money from the rich at usurious interest rates; when they inevitably proved unable to meet their obligations, their creditors forced them into debt slavery.

The Beginnings of Islam

It was into this rapidly evolving world that Muhammad was born in the late-sixth century. While later in life he personally enjoyed the fruits of the economic revival that the Hijaz was experiencing, he was appalled by the inequality that had accompanied the city’s reemergence as an important commercial center and alarmed by its leading families’ repudiation of traditional Arab values. Indeed, the apparent abandonment of the ethic of generosity in favor of greed in late sixth-century Mecca would powerfully shape both his thinking and his religious message.

Muhammad

Most scholars today agree that Muhammad’s difficult early life also profoundly influenced his religious views. Born sometime around 570 CE, he never met his father, Abdallah, who died shortly before he was born, and he lost his mother when he was just six-years old. Fortunately for Muhammad, strong family connections spared him from the grinding poverty that was typically the fate of orphans in sixth-century Arabia.

Instead, he enjoyed a secure life—first with his paternal grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib (c. 497-579), and then, when he too passed away, with his uncle Abu Talib (c 535-619), who was the head of the Hashemite clan. This latter connection would prove critical for Muhammad. Aware of his nephew’s preternatural wisdom and keen intelligence, Abu Talib arranged for the young man to help operate the clan’s long-distance caravans. Muhammad excelled at the task. Bright and charismatic, he proved from an early age to be a capable manager and a shrewd negotiator.

His success eventually brought him to the attention of a wealthy woman named Khadija bint Khuwaylid (c. 555-619). Khadija was a remarkable person who had overcome the patriarchal customs of pre-Islamic Arabia and the deaths of three husbands to become Mecca’s most prosperous merchant. Aware of the youthful Muhammad’s honesty and business acumen, she hired him around 595 to lead a caravan from Mecca to Damascus. Returning with twice the profits she had anticipated, he more than met her expectations. Taken with the young man, Khadija followed Muhammad’s success by suggesting marriage. Though her proposal was unusual—she was fifteen years older than Muhammad—he accepted. The two thereafter enjoyed a strong, loving relationship, and prospered under Muhammad’s deft handling of the family business. Thus, by his late twenties, Muhammad had risen to a position of comfort, and respect. Indeed, he held such a high reputation as a capable, forthright, and honest man, that he was frequently called upon to mediate commercial and social disputes in Mecca.

While Muhammad may have found personal success, he was increasingly troubled by the changes that Mecca was experiencing at that time. Recalling his experience as an orphan, he could not help but to contrast the more-and-more sumptuous lifestyle of Mecca’s leading families with the increasingly hard circumstances of the city’s many impoverished orphans and widows and to wonder how poverty could have increased during a period of economic growth. After pondering the issue for some time, he concluded that the rise in inequality and the rapid growth of the economy were related; that is, the wealth pouring into the city was leading its people to abandon the muruwah code’s emphasis on generosity and protection of the weak in favor of selfishness and greed. How else could he explain how some lived in opulence while others suffered in poverty, or, like many orphans, endured malnourishment?

Muhammad was very perceptive. He had correctly discerned that the economic changes that accompanied the revival of commerce in the Hijaz had grievously weakened the bonds that had before tied clans together. Gone were the older ethics of egalitarianism and group cohesion embodied in the muruwah code—values that had ensured not only that the tribe survived but also that the strong cared for the weak. In their place, the merchants of Mecca instead lived by the values of individualism and avarice. As a result, the city had become a profoundly unequal place, one starkly divided between a tiny number of rich families and a growing mass of impoverished ones.

Even after he began to preach publicly, the elite clans of the Quraysh tribe largely ignored Muhammad. They did not care for his calls for egalitarianism or demands for social justice; after all, leading clans like Banu Makhzum and Banu Umayya had grown wealthy under the prevailing economic system and any effort to achieve social justice and egalitarianism would inevitably come at their expense. Given the tiny size of Muhammad’s following and its marginal impact on Meccan society, however, they concluded that he could be safely ignored.

By the mid 610s, however, changes in Muhammad’s message and his growing success at gaining followers led his opponents to take a dimmer view of the nascent Muslim movement. Two issues in particular raised their hackles. First, starting in 613, Muhammad began to argue more explicitly that there existed only one God and that the 360 idols that the Arabs worshipped in the Kaʿba were mere pieces of wood or stone representative of nothing. The leaders of the dominant clans in Mecca viewed this claim as a serious threat to their future prosperity. Were the Arab people to accept his message, they would no longer come to Mecca for the annual hajj or take part in the accompanying trade that was so essential to the city’s ongoing economic well-being. Second, Muhammad was winning more-and-more converts to his faith.

Charismatic and well respected, he had an appealing message and was steadily increasing the size of the Muslim community. His success in gaining followers would not in itself have posed a huge problem; however, the conversions were dividing families between ardent Muslims and bitter opponents of Islam and thus causing clan ties to fray dangerously. Thus, to the Quraysh elite, Muhammad was a serious threat to both their continued prosperity and the stability of the community, one, they increasingly concluded, that they would need to eliminate.

For the time being, however, critics of Islam could not move directly against Muhammad. The issue was his family connections. Though the head of the Hashemite clan, Abu Talib, never himself became a Muslim, he did extend formal clan protection to Muhammad. Accordingly, were his opponents to kill Muhammad, they would initiate a blood feud that would likely go on for years and that would, in the process, surely disrupt the trade on which their status and wealth rested. Muhammad’s enemies consequently refrained from attacking him directly and instead responded to his challenge by imposing an economic boycott on the Muslims and by targeting those among his following who did not enjoy the backing of the Hashemite clan or who were of low social rank. Enslaved Muslims confronted the greatest pressure. Many, such as the Ethiopian slave Bilal (580-640), endured torture and at least one, a woman named Sumayya (c. 550-615), was killed. For some there was no choice but to leave and in two separate waves they made their way to Abyssinia (in modern Ethiopia) to seek asylum.

Circumstances dramatically worsened for Muhammad and the Muslim community in 619, a year so grim that Muslims refer to it as the Year of Sorrow. Two deaths were responsible for their change of fortune. First, the death of Abu Talib resulted in Muhammad’s uncle Abu Lahab (c. 549-624) becoming the head of the Hashemite clan. A bitter opponent of Islam, Abu Lahab promptly removed the protection that his brother had heretofore granted to Muhammad and the Muslims, thus leaving them exposed and vulnerable. Next, just a few months later, Khadija passed away. Her death robbed Muhammad of his emotional lodestone and denied him the critical advice that she had long provided. Khadijah had also provided crucial financial support and social standing which she used to defend Muhammad and the early Muslim community. Her passing and the death of Abu Talib depressed Muhammad, and, more importantly, put him and his followers in an increasingly tenuous position. Indeed, it soon became clear that he and his fellow Muslims faced not just steadily rising persecution but, far worse, the outright destruction of their movement.

The Hijra

After three hard years of growing persecution at the hands of Mecca’s leading families, the Muslims finally found deliverance in 622. Their salvation came as a result of a growing conflict in the Hijazi town of Yathrib. A sprawling date-farming community located about 211 miles north of Mecca, Yathrib was home to five tribes: two polytheistic-Arab ones and three ethnically Arab but religiously Jewish tribes. For several years, the two polytheistic tribes, the Khazraj and the Aws, had been locked in a destructive feud that had gradually intensified to the point that, by 621, it had become a serious threat to the stability of the settlement. Desperate to keep the peace, the tribal leaders of the town met and agreed to seek outside mediation that could end the conflict before it destroyed their community. They quickly settled on Muhammad. With a reputation for wisdom and integrity, he seemed like the ideal person to resolve the intertribal vendetta. The assembled leaders consequently sent a delegation to Mecca to ask him to come to Yathrib and arbitrate the feud. In exchange, they offered to let the Muslims relocate to their town. It was doubtless a bittersweet proposal for Muhammad. Though he was surely loath to leave the city of his birth, he saw no other way to ensure the survival of his struggling community. Accordingly, he agreed to the terms of the delegation’s proposal.

Relocating would prove to be challenging, however. As Muhammad well knew, the Arab commitment to familial and clan bonds meant that his opponents would bitterly resist any attempt by their Muslim relatives to leave Mecca. The Muslims would thus have to make the move in a way that would not arouse suspicion. To do so, Muhammad arranged for the Muslims to gradually relocate in small, discreet groups of three or four over several months rather than en masse. To further allay suspicion, he himself planned to remain in Mecca until nearly all of his followers had slipped out of the city. It was a wise and ultimately successful strategy. Over several months, nearly the entire Muslim community quietly moved to Yathrib. Eventually, the only believers who remained in Mecca were Ali, Abu Bakr, and Muhammad himself.

This approach was a risky one. Without the protection of his followers, Muhammad would be dangerously exposed in Mecca and thus vulnerable to his enemies. He was right to fear for his safety. The leading families had in fact devised a plan in which they would take advantage of his growing isolation and lack of protection to kill him in his sleep. Fortunately for Muhammad, he caught wind of the plot before it went into effect. To counter it, he arranged for Ali to distract his enemies by pretending to be him—Ali went so far as to sleep in his bed—while he and Abu Bakr sneaked out of Mecca. The scheme worked. Ali drew the attention of Muhammad’s pursuers long enough for Abu Bakr and Muhammad to slip out of the city to safety. Later, after Muhammad had reached Yathrib, Ali quietly left Mecca and rejoined him and the other Muslims there.

Called the hijra, the migration to Yathrib—which was thereafter known as Medina an-Nabi, or the “city of the prophet” (today it is just known as Medina), proved vital to the growth and success of Islam. Indeed, Muhammad and his companions saw it as so pivotal that they devised a new, Muslim calendar in which 622 CE became year one. This interpretation of the hijra’s significance was not mere hyperbole. Indeed, in two critical ways, the move to Medina constituted the central event in Islam’s development. First, it saved the fledgling religion from destruction at the hands of its enemies. Had the Muslims remained in Mecca, their movement would have almost certainly collapsed in the face of the leading clans’ increasingly staunch opposition. Second, and perhaps more important, the hijra marked the full repudiation of pre-Islamic Arabia’s clan- and tribe-based social system. In its place, the Muslims established a new and far-broader form of identity, the umma, or community of believers, defined not by ties of kinship but instead by a shared set of religious beliefs. The move to Yathrib thus constituted a sea change in how its members saw themselves and made Muhammad the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology. While the Muslims constituted a narrowly religious movement while they were in Mecca, they transformed into a broader, religious-and-political community in Medina. Muhammad confirmed this change when he issued the Constitution of Medina shortly after he arrived. At its most basic level, the pact established the political and social foundations of his new community. It defined the relationship between the Muhajirun (immigrants), the Muslims who accompanied Muhammad from Mecca, and the Ansar or “helpers,” those Medinans who had converted to Islam, and it put an end once and for all to the feud between the Aws and the Khazraj. It also established Muhammad as the leader of Medina and outlined the basic laws that would govern the umma. On a more fundamental level, it also refined the nature of Islam and set expectations about how its adherents were to live. In particular, it made clear that the religion’s main focus was not on the salvation of the individual, though that was important, but instead on the construction of a community along the lines that God had revealed to Muhammad.

The religion evolved rapidly in Medina. Beyond the changes he effected through the Constitution of Medina, Muhammad also established the basic structure of Islamic worship and articulated a number of new Qur’anic verses. Stressing the core elements of his message—the unity of God, the value of community, and the importance of social justice, these revelations included a broad array of legal rulings aimed at creating a revolutionary new society based on equity and the worship of the one God. These new laws included improvements in the legal status of women, the institution of a tax on wealth, the zakat, designed to provide charity for the poor, and the prohibition of usury, or the lending of money at interest. Muhammad also had the first mosque constructed so that the Muslims could pray as a single, unified community in imitation of the unity of God.

The community that Muhammad established in Medina would loom large in the imagination of subsequent generations of Muslims. Put simply, it would thereafter constitute in the eyes of the faithful the model of the ideal Islamic polity. Whereas Muhammad had simply been a religious leader in Mecca, now he was additionally a shaykh (the political leader), a military leader, a judge, and a major force in the development of law. Indeed, as we shall see, when Muslims later confronted serious problems or when they believed that Islam had lost its way, they frequently concluded that the community of believers could best respond by eschewing new social practices and innovations in favor of a return to the ethics, values, and laws of the early umma as it existed in Medina under Muhammad’s leadership, this includes Muslim leaders throughout history expressing their authority across the same five categories that Muhammad did.

War With Mecca

That future generations of Muslims would idealize the early community of believers in Medina did nothing to help the Muhajirun address the significant challenges that they faced in the present. They found life in their new home challenging to say the least. Though welcomed by a large portion of the Medinans—most of the town’s polytheistic Arabs converted to Islam shortly after Muhammad’s arrival—the Meccans nonetheless confronted a great deal of both overt and latent hostility in their adopted home. Many of the Ansar, particularly the leaders who had been compelled to cede political power, nursed deep grudges against Muhammad and the Meccan immigrants. The Jewish tribes also resented his political dominance of Medina and mocked him for what they saw as his poor understanding of the Abrahamic faith. More immediately, the Muhajirun faced the fundamental problem of securing food and other necessities. They had moved from a city with a trade-based economy to a farming settlement that revolved around date-palm cultivation. Lacking agricultural skills, they had no means of sustaining themselves in Medina and could hardly expect to survive on the charity of the Ansar. Muhammad thus found himself caught in a predicament even at this moment of genuine success. That is, while he had succeeded in establishing himself as the head of the umma, he simultaneously had to find some way to sustain the Muhajirun, and fast, or he would risk seeing his fledgling community quickly fall apart.

Desperation soon led him to a solution. Aware that his community of merchants and shopkeepers were in no position to provide for themselves through farming, Muhammad began leading military raids (ghazu) against Quraysh-owned caravans travelling between Mecca and Syria. These attacks proved to be enormously successful right from the start. The Muslim raiders were able to seize more than enough goods from the Meccans to sustain the umma and thus ensured that the community of believers would survive during what proved to be its most trying period in Medina.

One of these raids led to an early pivotal battle between the Muslims and the Meccans. Hearing that a major caravan was making its way from Syria to Mecca, Muhammad gathered a small force of 313 followers to intercept it near the site of Badr as it made its way past Medina. Due to its own intelligence gathering, Meccan leadership knew Muhammad was on the way and so gathered its own force to protect the caravan and punish Muhammad for his earlier successes. Though the Meccan army outnumbered Muhammad’s force, there were approximately 1000 Meccans, Muhammad was able to secure a decisive victory with minimal casualties on the Muslim side, while killing or capturing many prominent Quraysh leaders. The triumph over such long odds seemed to demonstrate that Muhammad was a capable military leader and that the umma was a rising force in the region; perhaps more importantly, it also suggested that Muhammad enjoyed divine support and that he truly was God’s messenger. As a consequence, the victory at Badr allowed him to strengthen his hold over Medina and led a growing number of bedouin tribes to join him over the following months.

Despite this triumph, the next few years proved to be difficult ones for the umma. In 625, an army of 3,000 Meccan soldiers avenged the defeat at Badr by routing Muhammad’s 1,000-strong force at the Battle of Uhud. It was a significant setback. The Muslims suffered substantial casualties, and only the Meccan army’s failure to exploit its advantage permitted the survivors to escape. Muhammad was even able to use this loss to his advantage. Prior to the battle, the Meccan leadership had declared that the goal of their attack was the death of Muhammad. Though his forces had lost, Muhammad had survived, showing to other regional tribes that Mecca was not as all-powerful as they portrayed themselves to be. Despite the defeat at Uhud, Muhammad and his troops continued to harass Meccan soldiers and to raid Quraysh caravans as they headed to and from Syria.

Increasingly frustrated with Muslim attacks, the Quraysh decided that the time had come to destroy the umma once and for all. Accordingly, in 627, they raised an army of 10,000 soldiers composed of both Meccan troops and the city’s bedouin allies and set out to crush the Muslims. Muhammad’s force had grown in size over the preceding two years, but it had no hope of defeating the vast Meccan host in open battle. Only by finding some way to offset the Meccans’ huge numerical advantage could Muhammad possibly spare the umma from certain destruction. Once more, he rose to the challenge. To even the odds, he ordered the Muslims to dig a deep trench around Medina that would prevent the Meccan cavalry from being able to attack the town. The tactic worked brilliantly. Though the Quraysh enjoyed the support of the Qurayza, one of Medina’s Jewish tribes, they could not find a way to force their way across the trench, and they eventually had to abandon the siege in disarray.

In two ways, the victory in what came to be known as the Battle of the Trench marked a critical turning point for Muhammad and the umma. First, the triumph allowed him to solidify his control of Medina. On the advice of one of the Ansar leaders, he imposed the standard seventh- century Arab penalty for treason on the Qurayza tribe immediately following the battle; that is, he ordered his followers to execute the men of the tribe and to sell the women and children into slavery. Thereafter, he no longer faced any organized resistance to his rule in Medina. Second, his victory over the huge Meccan army dramatically elevated his standing as a successful military leader throughout the region and seemed to suggest to a growing number of Arabs that he enjoyed God’s favor just as he claimed. In response, many bedouin tribes converted to Islam and joined Muhammad’s cause, thereby swelling both the size of the umma and the number of fighters in his now- substantial military. By the end of 628, he had the most powerful military force in the Hijaz, one so strong that he was now in a position to seize control of Mecca.

However, Muhammad was not interested in taking Mecca by force. Afterall, many of the Muhajirun had family in the city. Instead, he hoped to bring it under his control peacefully. To do so, he devised a complicated plan that began when he announced that he intended to lead 1,000 Muslims on a pilgrimage to the Kaʿba in 628. On the surface, it seemed like a foolhardy proposal. As pilgrims, he and his followers would be traveling to Mecca unarmed and would thus be vulnerable to attack. In fact, it was a shrewd move that caught his Quraysh enemies in a bind. As both Muhammad and Mecca’s frustrated leaders grasped, attacking the Muslims during the hajj would not only imperil the Quraysh tribe’s status as the guardians of the Kaʿba but would also cost it what little support it still retained in the Hijaz.

Muhammad’s gambit worked. As he had foreseen, the Quraysh did not attack the Muslims. Instead, desperate to impose some conditions on Muhammad in order to avoid further embarrassment and the defection of yet more of the city’s bedouin allies to his side, they sent a delegation to negotiate with him at a place just outside Mecca called Hudaybiyyah. There, the Quraysh representatives proposed a peace treaty that called for an end to the war between Mecca and Medina and for the Muslims to return immediately to their homes; in exchange, Muhammad and his followers could return the following year to take part in the hajj.

Many of his followers blanched at accepting what they viewed as a one-sided deal. After all, the umma was the rising power while the Quraysh were in eclipse. Intent on taking Mecca peacefully, Muhammad nonetheless agreed to the terms of the proposal. His decision proved to be a wise one. When he and his followers returned in 629 for the hajj, their faith and discipline greatly impressed the people of the city. As a result, the opposition to him began to melt away.

Muhammad Victorious

That opposition disappeared completely the following year. Using a Quraysh attack on a client tribe as a pretext, Muhammad advanced on Mecca at the head of an army of 10,000 soldiers. His troops faced no organized opposition. Instead, the people of the city watched passively as the Muslims occupied Mecca, cleansed the Ka’ba of the polytheistic idols, and brought the city under Muhammad’s control.

Three factors explain the Quraysh tribes’ failure to resist Muhammad. First, by 630, the balance of forces in the Hijaz had swung so heavily toward the Muslims that further opposition was futile. Second, Muhammad had made an important concession to the tribe’s commercial interests. Aware of the economic significance of the traditional polytheistic pilgrimage, he replaced it with a new, Islamic hajj that required all Muslims to visit Mecca at least once in their lives. He thus ensured that the Quraysh would continue to profit from the arrival of pilgrims and from the trade in which they engaged. Finally, Muhammad made clear that he did not come to Mecca seeking vengeance against those who had persecuted the Muslims over the prior two decades. Instead, save for a few cases involving diehard enemies of Islam, he treated his old persecutors with startling mildness. This approach proved doubly effective. Not only did it discourage the Meccans from resisting his army when it marched on the city, but it also led many of his former tormentors, including the head of Banu Umayya, Abu Sufyan, (c. 565-c. 653), to convert to Islam.

Having defeated the most powerful tribe in the Hijaz, Muhammad was now well positioned to extend his writ to all of Arabia. Over the next two years, he directed a series of triumphal military campaigns that saw his forces subdue the town of Taif and quell the few other remaining centers of organized opposition to Islam. These victories further cemented his standing among the Arabs. Understood by many to be a sign of divine favor, his continued success spurred most of the bedouin tribes that remained outside his control to accept both his suzerainty and, with some important exceptions, his religion. By 632, as a result, Muhammad had secured control over most of the Arabian peninsula. The consequences of this achievement were enormous. He had not merely joined the Arabs together into a single, socio-religious community, a significant accomplishment in its own right, but had, in the process, also replaced the tribal conflict that had characterized the region for centuries with a new era of intertribal peace This was a signal achievement and one, as we shall see in the next chapter, which would have enormous consequences.

However, Muhammad was unable to enjoy the fruits of his victory. Soon after returning to Medina from the hajj in 632, he fell ill and retired to the home of one of his wives, ʿAʾisha (c. 603-678). Abu Bakr, the man who had helped Muhammad escape to Medina during the hijra in 622, replaced the prophet as the prayer leader in the mosque on what he hoped would be a temporary basis. Muhammad did not recover, however. To the despair of the umma, he instead grew steadily sicker for several weeks before finally passing away. The Muslims thus faced the challenge of determining how to proceed without their leader, a prospect rendered all the more daunting by virtue of the fact that Muhammad had failed to leave instructions indicating who should replace him or even how the community should choose a successor.

A Brief Overview of Islam

Before continuing with the political sotry of Islam, it is important that we take time to understand the characteristics, tenets, and values of the religion that Muhammad bequeathed to the Arab people In broadest terms, as we have seen, early Islam stressed three overarching themes: monotheism, social justice, and community. Coupled with the practical necessities related to the administration of a growing state, after all, Muhammad was both a political leader and a religious figure, these three central beliefs would inform all aspects of the faith.

Muhammad the Reformer

To be clear, Muhammad never claimed to be creating a new religion. On the contrary, he maintained that he was only seeking to purify and renew an older faith that had lost its way. This was evident in his description of the relationship between Islam and the other two Abrahamic religions: Judaism and Christianity. According to Muhammad, God had long ago revealed the Abrahamic religion to humanity through a succession of prophets including Moses and Jesus. For reasons of self-interest, however, spiritual and secular leaders had perverted God’s revelation at different points in the past by incorporating into it innovations such as the Trinity. As such, he maintained, Christianity and Judaism were theologically corrupted offshoots of the older, monotheistic religion. Meanwhile, some groups that had once followed the Abrahamic faith, including the Arabs, had subsequently become estranged from it and had abandoned it in favor of a return to polytheism. However, God had not forsaken those whom priests had led astray or who had taken up the false idols of polytheism. Instead, to bring humanity back into the light of the true religion, He had chosen Muhammad to serve as His final messenger and had tasked him with bringing His divine plan to humanity for the last time, thereby restoring and purifying the one true monotheistic faith.

The Qurʾan

That perfect plan was outlined in Islam’s holy book: the Qurʾan. According to Muhammad, God revealed the Qurʾan to him through the Angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years. He maintained that it was the literal Word of God, an earthly copy of the eternal and uncreated Heavenly Qurʾan. It also marked the culmination of God’s revelation. That is, God had previously shown humanity elements of His message through the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels; the Qurʾan, however, was the final, perfect, and most important revelation. Slightly shorter than the New Testament, it consists of one-hundred-and-fourteen sura, or chapters, arranged in order from longest to shortest. Individual suras were copied down or memorized while Muhammad was alive. However, a canonical, written version of the Qurʾan was only created during the reign of Uthman, the third caliph.

Monotheism, Community, and Social Justice

The Qurʾan outlines a religion that is stridently monotheistic. Islam then and now emphasizes tawhid, a concept that denotes the oneness and unity of God and that proclaims forthrightly that He has no partners. Indeed, the Qurʾan explicitly rejects both polytheism and the Christian concept of the Trinity: “Say, ‘He is God, the One. God, the Absolute. He begets not, nor was He begotten. And there is none comparable to Him’” (Qurʾan 112). The Qurʾan also characterizes God as an eternal and all-powerful being who is actively managing the universe, and it describes Him as loving and as al- Rahman, or merciful. God’s benevolence was not absolute, however. Like Christianity, Islam holds that there will be a final reckoning during which all humans will be judged for their actions on earth. Those who had submitted to the divine will would spend an eternity in the blissful Garden of Paradise; those who had refused to accept Him or who had failed to abide by His law would instead burn in a fiery hell.

The emphasis on monotheism and the unity of God permeated Muhammad’s thinking and had enormous consequences for Islam. Perhaps most obviously, it shaped his conception of how the community of believers should be structured. Just as God was unified, so would be the umma. To ensure that it was, he preached that humans were to live in a certain type of society and that they were to adhere to a set of laws that explicitly called on them to engage in some actions and to refrain from others. God required not just that individual adherents abide by these standards, moreover, but the umma act collectively to ensure that the entire community behaved according to His moral code. As the Qurʾan states: “You are the best community evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong” (Qurʾan 3:110). In other words, individual salvation was important, but, from the very start, the religion that Muhammad outlined was explicitly communal in nature.

Much of the communitarian aspects of Islam were aimed at achieving social justice. As earlier noted, Muhammad was deeply disturbed by the Meccans’ rejection of the muruwah code and its requirement that the rich and powerful care for the poor and weak. As we have seen, he was particularly troubled by the growing insecurity and difficult circumstances that confronted widows and orphans in a society that was based on kin relations. Absent strong family connections, such people were all-but-inevitably destined to a life of grinding poverty and, in many cases, enslavement. Accordingly, the Qurʾan imposed a variety of socioeconomic requirements on the umma designed to ensure that it redistributed wealth to impoverished people and that it protected the weak. It outright banned usury, false contracts, and bribery, and it explicitly required the just treatment of widows and orphans. More broadly, it made plain that those who accumulated wealth had an obligation to share some of their good fortune with the poor.

Women

Muhammad paid particular attention to improving the position of women in Arab society. The life of women in pre-Islamic Arabia was difficult. Effectively chattel owned either by their husbands or fathers, they enjoyed neither legal protections nor the right of divorce and were utterly dependent on male relatives for their well-being. Married women did not even control the money or goods that their parents provided as a dowry; on the contrary, that wealth became the property of their husbands. With few exceptions, the case of Khadijah being one, they also had no legal claim to inherit either their husband’s estate or the dowry they brought into the marriage. If a widowed woman was young, one of her relations would likely marry her in order to acquire the deceased’s property including the dowry; if she was deemed too old, however, the widow and her dowry would instead become the property of her husband’s clan, and she would be dependent upon it for her survival. Thus, widows, of whom there were many in the harsh environment of pre-Islamic Arabia, were often left destitute and unprotected.

Muhammad dramatically changed this situation. The Qurʾan included specific language granting women the right to end marriages, even as it placed new limits on divorce for men and restricted the number of wives that they could have. It also gave women the right to inherit property and, importantly, granted them control over their dowry—thus permitting them to take it with them in the event of divorce. These reforms markedly improved the legal position of women in Arabia. Thereafter, widowed women were far less likely to be without some means of material support and those who had abusive husbands could end their marriages without losing their dowries. We must keep the extent of Muhammad’s reforms in this area in perspective, of course. He did not grant women equivalent legal status to men, and the changes he effected failed to emancipate them fully. They continued to inherit only a portion of their husbands’ wealth, for example, and their divorce rights were significantly more restricted than those that men enjoyed. Still, in comparison to the legal standing of women in other contemporary societies, Muhammad’s reforms were nothing short of revolutionary.

Indeed, women in much of Christian Europe would not win equivalently robust divorce and dowry rights until the nineteenth century.

Two topics regarding women that receive a great deal of attention in the contemporary West merit further discussion: veiling and polygamy. The Qurʾan explicitly endorsed the practice of polygamy, stipulating that a man could have as many as four wives. “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, Two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only [marry] one” (Qurʾan, 3:4). As this passage suggests, one should not interpret formal Muslim validation of polygamy as a blanket affirmation of the practice. Instead, it is best understood as a limited endorsement that reflected the culture and circumstances in which the umma found itself in the 620s.

Indeed, two political realities proved paramount in leading Muhammad to endorse polygamy. First, at that time, powerful men—particularly tribal leaders— demonstrated their authority and success by having multiple wives. It was a practice that frequently put women in a tenuous situation. If a man could not maintain all of his wives, he might sell one or more into slavery or prostitution. Focused as he was on social justice, Muhammad found the tribal chiefs’ practice of demonstrating status through multiple marriages off putting and viewed the sale of wives as outright repugnant. However, he also understood that he was not in a position to oppose polygamy lest he alienate the tribal chiefs on whose support the success of his war with Mecca depended. Accordingly, he bent to prevailing custom and formally sanctioned the practice of political leaders taking multiple wives. He himself married a number of women as part of a successful effort to bind certain key tribal leaders to him through political marriages. At the same time, however, he discouraged polygamy by limiting men to no more than four wives and by permitting them to take multiple spouses only if they could afford to do so—thereby making clear that he was not offering a blanket endorsement of the practice.

Second, Muhammad’s approval of polygamy reflected his larger message of social justice and the peculiar needs of the early umma. While successful, the war with Mecca had produced substantial casualties among his male followers and had thus resulted in a surge in the number of widows and orphans among the believers.

This situation posed a serious challenge for Muhammad. How could the still tiny and impoverished umma ensure the well-being of the many women and children who had lost their husbands or fathers in the conflict? Polygamy provided the answer. Muslim men who were already married would take additional wives from among the women who had lost their husbands in the fighting, thus ensuring that they and their children enjoyed material support. Indeed, it was only after the disastrous Battle of Uhud, an engagement in which many Muslim men had died, that Muhammad shared Verse 3:4 with the community of believers (presented above) and thus encouraged polygamy. Muhammad himself set an example for this practice when he married the widow Sawdah, who was past the customary age for marriage and thus otherwise unlikely to get remarried, to ensure that she and her children were adequately cared for.

In contrast to polygamy, the practice of veiling was not the product of Islamic teaching. The Qurʾan did mandate that women dress chastely, declaring: “that they should . . . guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof,” and it explicitly called for Muhammad’s wives to seclude and veil themselves (Qurʾan 24:31). However, it also exhorts men to dress modestly (24:30). At no point does the Qur’an stipulate that other Muslim women must cover their heads, however, and it most certainly did not include any passages requiring that they be attired in clothing such as the burqa. Instead, as most scholars now agree, veiling was an upper-class Persian and Byzantine custom that Muslim women only adopted several generations after Muhammad had died. Indeed, the very variety of veiling in the Muslim world today, the niqab in Saudi Arabia, the hijab in Egypt, the burqa in Afghanistan, indicates that the practice reflects local cultural values rather than a common, Qur’anic, obligation. For example, among the Tuareg of Morocco, veiling can even be found among men who believe that showing their mouth or nose to strangers or those of higher status is considered shameful

As the institutionalization of veiling as a Muslim custom in the century after Muhammad suggests, the revolutionary changes to gender relations that he effected did not endure. What happened? Basically, the patriarchy reasserted itself. During the immediate generations following Muhammad, longstanding notions that God had predestined men to run society and had assigned women to a subordinate position led people to reinterpret Muhammad’s views. As we shall see in Chapter Four, men were able to gradually chip away at the prophet’s reforms and eventually succeeded in reinstating many patriarchal pre-Islamic customs in the decades after his death. As a result, within just a few generations, women would lose nearly all of the rights that they had gained in the initial years after the founding of the umma.

Jihad

The demands of the early umma that helped spur Muhammad to accept polygamy shaped Islam in other important ways as well. As previously noted, Muhammad was both a religious prophet and a political leader who, unlike Jesus or John the Baptist but like Moses, oversaw a political community and was thus tasked with making the difficult and often morally ambiguous decisions that are incumbent on secular rulers.

He did so under particularly trying circumstance. As we have seen, for a brief but critical period, the community he led confronted an existential challenge from the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. As a consequence Muhammad frequently took actions and articulated values based on the umma’s immediate needs; for example, his execution of the Jewish men of the Qurayza tribe after the Battle of the Trench reflected his belief that he needed to eliminate a dangerous fifth column in order to ensure his movement’s survival.

The practical needs of the early umma likewise shaped the idea of jihad, or, more properly as we shall see later in the chapter, lesser jihad. This lesser jihad, or warfare waged in defense of the faith, was very much a product of the umma’s perilous circumstances in the 620s, and it reflected Muhammad’s need both to justify the war with Mecca and to establish a set of rules regulating how his soldiers would wage that conflict. In other words, jihad emerged as a Muslim version of the Christian doctrine of Just War that St. Augustine (354-430) had articulated in the fifth century. Like Augustine’s, Muhammad’s notion of just war required armies to refrain from attacking noncombatants and demanded that any conflict be defensive in nature. Indeed, the Qurʾan explicitly holds that “[p]ermission to fight is only given to those who have been oppressed” (Qurʾan 22:39).

Just as later religious scholars would roll back the reforms Muhammad had obtained for women, so would they distort jihad to justify aggressive military action. This change began shortly after Mohammed died. In the early 630s, Muslim leaders and religious scholars reinterpreted the concept of jihad to legitimize the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire and the Byzantine provinces of Syria and Egypt. Later, they divided the world into the Dar al-Islam, or the House of Peace, and the Dar al-Harb, or the House of War, and called on Muslim leaders to fight for the purpose of extending the territory of Dar al-Islam. Jihad waned when the Arab Empire stopped acquiring new territory not long thereafter, but, as we shall see, would reemerge in the twelfth century in response to the Crusades. It thereafter again faded in popularity until the Ottoman government revived the concept by declaring jihad against the Allied powers during the First World War in a bid to create unrest in the Muslim parts of the British, French, and Russian empires. Today, despite the condemnation of most Muslim religious scholars, jihadi groups adhere to a reinterpreted conception of jihad that makes it an individual rather than a collective action and that disregards the explicit prohibition that Muhammad had placed on attacking noncombatants.

The Five Pillars of Islam

Islam is a religion of belief, of course, but its main focus is on proper action rather than on observance of dogma. As such, Islam eschews Christianity’s emphasis on adherence to a particular doctrine and rejects theological inquiry as zannah, or idle speculation; instead, like Judaism, it stresses correct practice through the acceptance of a set of straightforward duties, rituals, and laws that define and exemplify what it means to be a Muslim. By far the most important of these obligations are the Five Pillars of Islam. These expressions of faith date to Muhammad’s time in Medina, and they constitute the core rituals of Islam. Unsurprisingly, these duties reflect the prophet’s emphasis on monotheism, community, and social justice.

The first pillar is shahada, or the profession of faith. It calls for a genuine expression of belief in the monotheistic God through the pronouncement of the statement: “There is no Gob but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”( ashadu ʾan la ʾilāha ʾilla Allah, wa ʾashadu ʾanna Muḥammadan rasulu Allah). In many western translations, the word God is often differentiated, with the first being translated as God and the second being kept as Allah. This is an attempt to differentiate the God of Islam from the other Abrahamic traditions, however it is done erroneously as in Islam they are one and the same. Indeed, Arab Christians when praying to God also use the word Allah. The declaration of this seemingly simple statement achieves two critical aims. First, in expressing it, Muslims profess their adherence to the religion of Islam and their belief in God. Indeed, genuinely stating the shahada is all that one must do to become a Muslim. It affirms one’s belief in tawhid, which emphasizes not merely the monotheistic concept of God’s oneness and unity, but also His singular and indescribable nature and His indivisibility. Second, it addresses the nature of the Prophet of Islam. Muhammad is not divine, he was simply the vessel that delivered the message. While he is to be honored within Islam, he is not to be worshipped.

The second pillar of Islam, salat, or worship, calls on Muslims to pray five times per day. Fajr is performed at dawn, zuhr is a noon prayer, asr is performed in the afternoon, maghrib is the sunset prayer, and isha’a is the evening prayer. They must do so while facing Mecca, the location of the Ka’ba, and only after they have ritually cleansed themselves. Salat also stipulates that Muslims pray collectively at a mosque at midday on Fridays. This pillar reflects two of the main themes in Muhammad’s teachings. First, the prayer at the heart of it stresses the idea of tawhid and thus reinforces Muhammad’s message of strict monotheism and God’s unity. Second, the call for collective public prayers on Fridays makes clear Islam’s focus on community rather than on individual salvation. Originally, men and women worshipped together in the mosque in Medina, albeit in gender-segregated sections. Not long after the death of Muhammad, however, political and religious leaders took a dim view of mixed-sex prayer out of fear that the presence of women would distract the men and they consequently discouraged women from taking part in public prayers.

The third pillar of Islam, the zakat, is an annual alms tax assessed to support the poor in the community. It began as a voluntary contribution in Mecca and became mandatory after Muhammad and his followers relocated to Medina—likely, as we have seen, because the war with the Quraysh had produced a large number of widows and orphans and thus a need for some mechanism by which they could be supported. Traditionally, local rulers assessed the zakat on each Muslim’s net worth at a rate of 2.5 percent. Expected of all believers and collected by the state, the tax helps reinforce the ideas of community and mutual obligation, and, importantly, embodies both Islam’s communal nature and its emphasis on social justice. Don’t confuse the zakat with tithing in Catholicism. Whereas in Catholicism the monies were collected centrally and then distributed across Catholic territories to where the Papacy felth they were needed, the zakat is supposed to stay local and help the community in which it was collected.

Sawm, or fasting, is the fourth pillar of Islam. Sawm primarily occurs during Ramadan, the month in which Muhammad claimed that the Qurʾan was first revealed to him, though there are also other recommended fasting times throughout the year and has clear roots in the Jewish practice of fasting. From dawn until dusk during Ramadan, Muslims refrain from activities like sexual relations, smoking, eating, and drinking; exceptions are made for children, pregnant women, nursing mothers, the sick, the elderly and others who are physically vulnerable. It is a festive time in Muslim-majority countries. Ramadan includes nightly celebrations and communal meals capped by the Eid al-fitr: a three-day holiday at the end of the month featuring feasts and family gatherings. The purpose of Sawm is for Muslims to affirm their belief in tawhid, build communal bonds, and renew their commitment to social justice by experiencing the privation of the poor.

The fifth and final pillar of Islam is hajj, or pilgrimage. The major hajj, that to Mecca, is a requirement that all adult Muslims are expected to undertake at least once in their lifetime if they are able. Though the hajj was comparatively modest as recently as the 1940s, it is today one of the largest gatherings of people on earth. It takes place during the month of Dhu al-Hijjah and first occurred in the late 620s. During the hajj, pilgrims in Mecca take part in a series of rituals including the tawaf, in which they circumnavigate the Kaʿba in a counterclockwise direction, and the sa’ay, the ritual running between two hills in imitation of Hagar’s desperate search for water for her infant son, Ismail. A collective activity, the hajj once again promotes Islam’s emphasis on community. Less obviously, its rituals are also designed to focus the pilgrims on tawhid. Communalism and monotheism were surely in the front of Muhammad’s mind when he made the hajj a religious obligation, but, as previously noted, practical considerations likely also played a role in his decision. Put simply, requiring his followers to undertake an Islamic version of the hajj would offset the revenue the Quraysh stood to lose because of the demise of the older, polytheistic pilgrimage, and was thus a small price to pay to persuade them to abandon their resistance to his movement.

Though not a formal requirement of the religion, another ideal, greater jihad, is so important that many people frequently, if inaccurately, refer to it as the sixth pillar of Islam. Jihad literally translates as “struggle,” and greater jihad, in contrast to lesser jihad’s articulation of the Muslim doctrine of just war, refers to the ongoing struggle that individual believers wage within themselves to remain focused on God in the face of the temptations of the material world. Islam holds that devotion to success, money, luxuries, ego, or power distracts believers from centering their lives on God and His desires, and thus separates them from the divine. Only by ceaselessly waging greater jihad within themselves could they remain attentive to the goodness of God and thus honor their commitment to Him.

As noted earlier, Muhammad also imposed a number of other restrictions on the umma related directly or indirectly to the themes of monotheism, community, and social justice. Holding that the one God is the God of Abraham, Muhammad required Muslims to observe the cultural practices by which the patriarch and his descendants had lived. Accordingly, he barred the consumption of pork and required the circumcision of Muslim men. Other restrictions were related to Islam’s focus on social justice. Muhammad banned usury, false contracts, bribery, alcohol, gambling, and men wearing silk clothing or gold jewelry as part of his effort to create a more equitable society. Enforcement of all of these restrictions ultimately fell to the umma rather than to individuals or families, thus reflecting Islam’s communal rather than individual focus. As we shall see in Chapter Four, Muslim jurists would later formalize and expand these restrictions when they codified shariʿa law in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The Historical Debate: The Revisionist School

So far, this chapter has outlined the conventional understanding of Muhammad and the emergence of Islam. That is, the preceding account broadly reflects both the traditional Islamic narrative articulated by Muslim historians in the ninth century and the views of most modern-day scholars who focus on this period. This perspective is not universally held, however. Instead, in recent decades, a number of historians and religious scholars have developed alternative interpretations of the emergence of Islam that challenge key parts of the dominant narrative.

Some scholars focus on the question of Muhammad’s intention. They dispute the idea that he cast himself as the final prophet whom God had chosen to strip away accretions to the pure faith of Abraham and thus to restore the true monotheistic religion. Instead, they contend that his early conception of his mission was far-more limited in scope. For example, Karen Armstrong in Islam: A Short History argues that Muhammad initially viewed himself merely as the prophet that God had selected to bring His message to the Arab people just as He had tapped Moses and Jesus to spread the monotheistic faith to other cultures. She argues that it was only after members of the Jewish tribes in Medina mocked Muhammad’s understanding of the Torah that he declared that God had sent him to bring his message to all humanity as the final prophet—a shift he made manifest in 624 by changing the qiblah, the direction that Muslims faced while praying, from Jerusalem to Mecca.

Historians in the revisionist school go substantially further. These scholars draw attention to the fact that the extant sources on the life of Muhammad and the early umma are deeply problematic. In particular, they note that the best evidence available on Muhammad is a biography written by Ibn Ishaq (c. 704-767) more than a century after the prophet had died, and they argue that the gap between the era in which writers like Ibn Ishaq lived and the time of the early community of believers is simply so vast that such sources cannot be treated as reliable accounts. Revisionist scholars also

contend that authors like Ibn Ishaq very likely shaped their interpretations to serve contemporary political interests, and that their works thus reflect the values and beliefs of the eighth century rather than those of the early umma. Those historians consequently view the Arabic sources with a skeptical eye and generally favor seventh- century, non-Muslim accounts that touch upon events in the Arabian peninsula over later Islamic narratives.

Interpretations based on those accounts dramatically contradict the traditional narrative. For example, the historian Patricia Crone finds the idea that Mecca was a bustling commercial nexus implausible because non-Muslim seventh-century sources, otherwise-well versed on the affairs of the Hijaz, made no mention of it whatsoever. Indeed, she concludes that Muhammad lived not in Mecca, but instead in northern Arabia close to the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, John Wansbrough agrees with the traditional narrative that the Qurʾan dates to the early-seventh century but also maintains that eighth-and-ninth century Muslims thoroughly altered it through accretion and revision. Revisionist scholars who examine archaeological findings have gone even farther and argue that the material evidence casts doubt about even the most fundamental elements of the standard narrative. For instance, the archaeologist Yehuda Nevo notes that the earliest confirmed archaeological reference to Muhammad, coins bearing his name, date only to the late-seventh century. As a result, he concludes that the traditional story of Islam’s emergence was a construct of the eighth and ninth centuries and suggests that Muhammad was at best a minor figure whom Muslim writers only later recast as a prophet to serve sectarian ends.

The revisionist school of Islamic studies has certainly altered understandings of Islam’s emergence, but most scholars continue to accept at least the broad outlines of the traditional narrative. They typically acknowledge the limits inherent in later sources such as Ibn Ishaq’s biography but also argue that they can draw valid inferences from such accounts through the careful use of historical methods and criticism. They likewise maintain that non-Arab sources accord with the overall contours of the conventional understanding of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, at least in the broadest sense, and thus confirm the traditional narrative.

Conclusion

Muhammad had enjoyed astonishing success in the last twenty-two years of his life. Since beginning his religious mission, he had won the support of a core group of followers, relocated his community to Medina, conquered Mecca, purged the Kaʿba of polytheism, and secured control of the entire Arabian peninsula. Given the long odds that he faced during much of that period, it is little wonder that many Arabs concluded from his success that he enjoyed divine favor.

The religious movement that he had started continued to grow rapidly after his death, moreover. Indeed, neither his passing nor his failure to name a successor slowed Islam’s growth to any degree. Instead, as we shall see in the next chapter, the community he had led would follow his death by initiating one of the greatest campaigns of conquest in history, in the process establishing a huge and enormously successful empire and institutionalizing and spreading the religion of Islam.