Muhammad
Muhammad was an Arab religious, military and political leader, as well as the founder of Islam. According to Islam, he was a prophet who was divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. He is believed by Muslims to be the Seal of the Prophets, and along with the Quran, his teachings and normative examples form the basis for Islamic religious belief.
According to the traditional account, Muhammad was born in Mecca to the aristocratic Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh. He was the son of Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib and Amina bint Wahb. His father, Abdullah, the son of tribal leader Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, died around the time Muhammad was born. His mother Amina died when he was six, leaving Muhammad an orphan. He was raised under the care of his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, and paternal uncle, Abu Talib. In later years, he would periodically seclude himself in a mountain cave named Hira for several nights of prayer. When he was 40, in, Muhammad reported being visited by Gabriel in the cave and receiving his first revelation from God. In 613, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that "God is One", that complete "submission" to God is the right way of life, and that he was a prophet and messenger of God, similar to other prophets in Islam.
Muhammad's followers were initially few in number, and experienced persecution by Meccan polytheists for 13 years. To escape ongoing persecution, he sent some of his followers to Abyssinia in 615, before he and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina later in 622. This event, the, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, also known as the Hijri calendar. In Medina, Muhammad united the tribes under the Constitution of Medina. In December 629, after eight years of intermittent fighting with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca. The conquest went largely uncontested, and Muhammad seized the city with minimal casualties. In 632, a few months after returning from the Farewell Pilgrimage, he fell ill and died. By the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam.
The revelations that Muhammad reported receiving until his death form the verses of the Quran, upon which Islam is based, and are regarded by Muslims as the verbatim word of God and his final revelation. Besides the Quran, Muhammad's teachings and practices, found in transmitted reports, known as hadith, and in his biography, are also upheld and used as sources of Islamic law. Apart from Islam, Muhammad has received praise in Sikhism as an inspirational figure, in the Druze faith as one of the seven main prophets, and in the Baháʼí Faith as a Manifestation of God.
Biographical sources
Critical evaluation of sources is of particular importance in uncovering Muhammad's historical existence beyond the myths. Early sources for the life of Muhammad are authors from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AH, whose works constructed main biographical information to the Muslim traditions regarding his life, but the reliability of this information is contentious in academic circles due to the oral gap between the recorded dates of Muhammad's life and the dates when these writings begin to appear in sources. John Burton summarizes the information provided by the multitude of available sources, from a historian's perspective: statesIn judging the content, the only resort of the scholar is to the yardstick of probability, and on this basis, it must be repeated, virtually nothing of use to the historian emerges from the sparse record of the early life of the founder of the latest of the great world religions... so, however far back in the Muslim tradition one now attempts to reach, one simply cannot recover a scrap of information of real use in constructing the human history of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed.
On the other hand, Karen Armstrong believes that —thanks to these early biographical efforts— more is known about Muhammad than almost about the founders of all the other major religions.
Early biographies
Important early sources for the life of Muhammad are authors from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AH, whose works supplied additional biographical information to the Muslim traditions regarding his life. The information used in early Islamic historiography emerged as the sporadic products of storytellers -they were quite prestigious then- without details. At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. While the narratives were initially in the form of a kind of heroic epics called magāzī,The earliest sources we have on the life of Muḥammad are the maghāzī, but they are far from being a consistent literary genre because they encompass a mix of different types of texts: lists of martyrs, poetry, Qurʾānic explanations, anecdotes resembling those found in the Bible, and of course accounts of military expeditions.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466739_005 details were added later, edited and transformed into sirah compilations. Western historians describe the purpose of these early biographies as largely to convey a message, rather than to strictly and accurately record history.The earliest written is Ibn Ishaq's Life of God's Messenger written . Although the original work was lost, this survives as extensive excerpts in works by Ibn Hisham and to a lesser extent by al-Tabari. However, Ibn Hisham wrote in the preface to his biography of Muhammad that he omitted matters from Ibn Ishaq's biography that "would distress certain people". Another early historical source is the history of Muhammad's campaigns by al-Waqidi, and the work of Waqidi's secretary Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi.
Hadith
Other important traditional sources include the hadith collections, accounts of verbal and physical teachings and approvals attributed to Muhammad. Hadiths were compiled several generations after his death by Muslims including Muhammad al-Bukhari, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Muhammad ibn Isa at-Tirmidhi, Abd ar-Rahman al-Nasai, Abu Dawood, Ibn Majah, Malik ibn Anas, al-Daraqutni. The hadiths generally present an idealized view of Muhammad.Muslim scholars placed more trust in hadith than in biographical literature because hadiths were generally based on a chain of transmission ; the absence of such a chain in biographical literature made it, in their eyes, unverifiable. Hadiths were classified by Islamic scholars according to their reliability based on the chain of transmission; and different schools of thought relied on different collections. These sources, distrusted by Quranist scholars, are also viewed with suspicion by Western researchers. Western scholars widely believed that there was widespread fabrication of hadith during the early centuries of Islam to support certain theological and legal positions. In addition, the meaning of a hadith may have drifted from its original telling to when it was finally written down, even if the chain of transmission is authentic.
Although the "dominant paradigm" of Western scholars is to find their reliability questionable, some have - with caution - regarded them as accurate historical sources. Scholars such as Wilferd Madelung, on the other hand, do not reject the hadiths compiled in later periods, but evaluate them in their historical context. In other words, according to him, they contained clues not from the life of Muhammad, but from the mentality of the period in which they were written.
Quran
The Quran is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe it represents the word of God revealed to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. The Quran is primarily addressed to a single "Messenger of God," identified as Muhammad in a number of verses. In contrast to the hundreds of references to earlier prophets such as Moses and Jesus, it contains comparatively little direct information about Muhammad himself, or his companions. The text also briefly refers to episodes from Muhammad's career, such as the migration of his followers to Yathrib and the Battle of Badr.Meccan years
Early life
Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim was born in Mecca, and his birthday is believed to be in the month of Rabi' al-Awwal. He belonged to the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, which was a dominant force in western Arabia. While his clan was one of the more distinguished in the tribe, it seems to have experienced a lack of prosperity during his early years.According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was a, someone who professed monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia. He is also claimed to have been a descendant of Ishmael, son of Abraham.
The name Muhammad means "praiseworthy" in Arabic and it appears four times in the Quran. He was also known as "al-Amin" when he was young; however, historians differ as to whether it was given by people as a reflection of his nature or was simply a given name from his parents, i.e., a masculine form of his mother's name "Amina". Muhammad acquired the of Abu al-Qasim later in his life after the birth of his son Qasim, who died two years afterwards.
Islamic tradition states that Muhammad's birth year coincided with the Year of the Elephant, when Abraha, the Aksumite viceroy in the former Himyarite Kingdom, unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Mecca. Recent studies, however, challenge this notion, as other evidence suggests that the expedition, if it had occurred, would have transpired substantially before Muhammad's birth. Later Muslim scholars presumably linked Abraha's renowned name to the narrative of Muhammad's birth to elucidate the unclear passage about "the men of elephants" in Quran 105:1–5. The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity deems the tale of Abraha's war elephant expedition as a myth.
Muhammad's father, Abdullah, died almost six months before he was born. Muhammad then stayed with his foster mother, Halima bint Abi Dhu'ayb, and her husband until he was two years old. At the age of six, Muhammad lost his biological mother Amina to illness and became an orphan. For the next two years, until he was eight years old, Muhammad was under the guardianship of his paternal grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, until the latter's death. He then came under the care of his uncle, Abu Talib, the new leader of the Banu Hashim. Abu Talib's brothers assisted with Muhammad's learningHamza, the youngest, trained Muhammad in archery, swordsmanship, and martial arts. Another uncle, Abbas, provided Muhammad with a job leading caravans on the northern segment of the route to Syria.
The historical record of Mecca during Muhammad's early life is limited and fragmentary, making it difficult to distinguish between fact and legend. Several Islamic narratives relate that Muhammad, as a child, went on a trading trip to Syria with his uncle Abu Talib and met a monk named Bahira, who is said to have then foretold his prophethood. There are multiple versions of the story with details that contradict each other. All accounts of Bahira and his meeting with Muhammad have been considered fictitious by modern historians as well as by some medieval Muslim scholars such as al-Dhahabi.
Sometime later in his life, Muhammad proposed marriage to his cousin and first love, Fakhitah bint Abi Talib. But likely owing to his poverty, his proposal was rejected by her father, Abu Talib, who chose a more illustrious suitor. When Muhammad was 25, his fortunes turned around; his business reputation caught the attention of his 40-year-old distant relative Khadija, a wealthy businesswoman who had staked out a successful career as a merchant in the caravan trade industry. She asked him to take one of her caravans into Syria, after which she was so impressed by his competence in the expedition that she proposed marriage to him; Muhammad accepted her offer and remained monogamous with her until her death.
File:Mohammed kaaba 1315.jpg|thumb|left|Miniature from Rashid al-Din Hamadani's,, illustrating the story of Muhammad's role in re-setting the Black Stone in 605
In 605, the Quraysh decided to roof the Kaaba, which had previously consisted only of walls. A complete rebuild was needed to accommodate the new weight. Amid concerns about upsetting the deities, a man stepped forth with a pickaxe and exclaimed, "O goddess! Fear not! Our intentions are only for the best." With that, he began demolishing it. The anxious Meccans awaited divine retribution overnight, but his unharmed continuation the next day was seen as a sign of heavenly approval. According to a narrative collected by Ibn Ishaq, when it was time to reattach the Black Stone, a dispute arose over which clan should have the privilege. It was determined that the first person to step into the Kaaba's court would arbitrate. Muhammad took on this role, asking for a cloak. He placed the stone on it, guiding clan representatives to jointly elevate it to its position. He then personally secured it within the wall.