Episode 114: The Life of Muhammad, Part 1: Cobwebs

Episode 114: The Life of Muhammad, Part 1: Cobwebs

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 114: The Life of Muhammad, Part 1: Cobwebs. In this program, we will learn about the life and world of the Prophet Muhammad, from his birth in about 570 CE, up to the Hijra of 622 – or the immigration of the earliest Muslim converts from Mecca to Medina. There are few people in history who have inspired more biographical writings than Muhammad. From the oral traditions that immediately postdated him, to early biographies by ibn Ishaq, ibn Sa’d, al-Waqidi and others, to the hundreds of thousands of short prophetic narratives that began being systematically compiled in the mid-800s, Muhammad’s life, actions, and sayings have been sources of interest to billions over the past millennium and a half. His life story, even in the reserved pages of modern academic biographies, is an epic tale. The Prophet began his life as an orphan, sent to do humdrum work with caravan camels. Through intelligence and steady moral fiber, Muhammad rose to become a respected businessman in the trade organizations of Arabia’s Hijaz region. He worked hard, met thousands of people from all walks of life, and in spite of nearly everyone doubting his prophetic revelations, including himself, he eventually rose to become a leader, a legislator, a general, an adjudicator, a sage, and later, an exemplar of a life well-lived. Of all the quotes about Muhammad set down during antiquity, I will begin this three-part series with a quote about Muhammad from the early biographer al-Waqidi. That quote is, “When the Messenger of God made a deliberate effort toward some end, there was no earnestness that could compare with his.”¹

The next three episodes on the Prophet Muhammad will, all told, add up to perhaps six and a half hours in length. And if this were a multivolume film documentary on Muhammad, and I were the director, I know just what the opening sequence would show. It would not show the Kaaba, nor Mecca. It would not show the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, nor the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It would not show reenactments of the Battle of Uhud, nor the Battle of the Trench, nor, certainly, any actors portraying any other pivotal moments of early Islamic history. The opening shot of my documentary on the Prophet Muhammad would show walls and walls of books, with square meters of spines bearing neat Arabic titles. Because almost everything that we know about Muhammad today comes from later texts. These books include hundreds of thousands of pages of sayings collections and short prophetic narratives, multivolume biographies, studies of the Qur’an that explain when and why the Prophet had this or that revelation, and other writings, too, including, of course, the Qur’an itself. A majority of the works in these bookcases were written and compiled during and after the 800s – in other words, at least two centuries after Muhammad lived. They are not neutral texts, these walls of early medieval books that I would show in my opening shot. They are books written by the faithful, and thus, they often tell miracle stories. They share battle narratives in which valorous minorities triumph against impossible odds, and in which Muhammad and his followers are always the protagonists, and everyone else is deluded. Many reflect Sunni or Shia partisanship, or other sectarian biases. Like all works of ancient history, these books are likely, often, inaccurate, set down with an admixture of poetic license within a larger cultural movement that held the veracity of Islam to be a foregone conclusion.

I would begin my film documentary on Muhammad showing racks and racks of books because, again, what we know about him comes from later texts. Whether accurate, or inaccurate, the central biographical materials that we now possess on Muhammad, again largely from the early Medieval period, are our best bet for learning about who he was, and what he did.

His story is a challenging one to tell. Sunnis and Shias understand some parts of it a bit differently. Other subdivisions within Islam do, too. Muhammad was an active, vigorous person, and a military as well as a religious leader, in a Late Antique society where norms governing violence, sex, property, and slavery were different than our own today. Many devout Muslims believe in ‘Ismah, or prophetic infallibility – the notion that Muhammad could do no wrong, and did no wrong. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are those who, for various reasons, have studied the Prophet’s life with irreverence, calling attention to things that he did that are out of accordance with the way that we do things today. Others still have taken an academic revisionist attitude toward early Islamic history, arguing that all of those vast cases of books I mentioned – those texts written largely during and after the 800s about the events of the 600s – are largely fiction, and that Islam’s real origin is quite different than the traditional one that’s been told. Over the next six hours, we will explore some different approaches to the life of Muhammad. In the main, though, rather than offering you modern revisionism, or a Sunni or Shia or other approach, I will try my best to simply tell you about how most Muslims and others have heard the Prophet’s story for the past 1,200 years. Notwithstanding the doctrinal disputes within Islam; notwithstanding iconoclastic and academic approaches to the religion, the acres and acres of pages written about Muhammad during the early medieval period are the best place to start if we want to understand the singular life of the Prophet of Islam. [music]

Cobwebs

Let’s begin our story for today in the middle of things, in the summer of 622 CE. Muhammad is about 52 years old. It is June. The Muslims of Mecca, at this point just called mu’uminin, or “believers,” are fleeing the city due to persecutions against them, and they’re immigrating northward to the oasis town of Yathrib, where they hope to find a peaceful place to live. Cousins, nephews, nieces, sons, daughters, parents, uncles and aunts are parting ways, and Islam, though it doesn’t have that name yet, is cutting through the ancient social fabric of tribe and kin. Homes and property are being left behind. The situation up north in Yathrib, where the first Muslims are fleeing due to persecution against them, is uncertain. And the Prophet Muhammad, and his close friend and companion Abu Bakr, are fugitives.

A reward has been issued for their capture. But rather than going north, to join the other religious refugees on the road to the oasis town of Yathrib, Muhammad and Abu Bakr began their immigration by going south, and into hiding. As the country all around Mecca swarms with patrols, the Prophet and his companion shelter in a cave. People are looking for them. Goaded by the promise of great rewards, Meccan patrols trawl south as well as north, into the rocky hinterlands seldom tread by townspeople. The patrols get closer and closer to Muhammad’s hiding place. It’s stirring and strange to imagine the pair there in the dark among the cool rocks – two titans of history, the Prophet of Islam and the first Caliph Abu Bakr, trying to stay quiet while a posse hunts them down. But then a miracle happens. Spiders appear at the mouth of the cave. And diligently, the spiders weave webs over the entire cave entrance, so that the passageway appears to have been abandoned for a long time, and perhaps never used at all. When a bounty hunter discovers the cave entrance, he observes that it’s been closed up by spiders’ silk, and the bounty hunter concludes that no one is there. And then, the patrols move on, and Muhammad and Abu Bakr, for the moment, at least, are safe.

This is a well-known story in Islamic history. The aforementioned historian al-Waqidi, around two centuries later, set down a version of it.² So, too, did the great Islamic scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal.³ In hindsight, though, ibn Hanbal, though he preserved the story for posterity, considered the spider story’s sources da-eef, or unreliable, as did the twelfth century scholar and polymath Uthman al-Jazari.⁴ And in the early historian al-Waqidi, it’s actually not Muhammad hiding in the cave, being fortuitously protected by spider’s silk, but instead, someone else. This tale of the Prophet and future first caliph, safeguarded by a miracle of nature is a great story, though it’s not a particularly controversial one. Perhaps a hardworking arachnologist in western Arabia would attest to its correctness, but as for the rest of us, including devout Muslims steeped in early Islamic history, the anecdote about the spiders might or might not just be a nice miracle story.

Whether or not spiders spun cobwebs over the mouth of a cave south of Mecca in the summer of 622 to protect Muhammad and Abu Bakr from patrols is a question for the ages. I’ve told you this story to underscore the point I made a moment ago. Muhammad’s actual life, about which the Qur’an itself tells us almost nothing, lies behind fourteen centuries of historical cobwebs, busily spun by as many centuries of writers. The millions of words that were written about the Prophet, even by the middle Abbasid period – say, 900 CE – span the gamut between completely accurate on one side, and fan fiction on the other. Muhammad is not the only luminary to have inspired shelves and shelves full of books. There are later apocryphal tales about many prophets, saints, and martyrs. When we revere something, we are inspired to write about it. Stories about Jesus, Adam, Eve, Zarathustra, and Moses were all over the Late Antique world when Muhammad lived. But different religious cultures also have different ways of writing about their luminaries. And from the very beginning, Islam collected and compiled narratives about Muhammad in very distinctive ways.

Let me take a moment, then, to tell you a bit about how we know what we know about Muhammad’s life. If we were kids growing up in a Muslim country, this would all be simplified for us, and we’d be taught, for instance, that Muhammad and Abu Bakr hid in a cave and that spiders protected them, and that was that. But we’re not kids, so let’s get into the history behind prophetic biography for just a moment.

Abbasid Period Biographies and Hadiths: The 800s Writing about the 600s

In Islamic tradition, there are mainly two different sorts of texts about Muhammad’s life and times. There are, first of all, biographies. Biography is a familiar genre to us today. By the year 900, there were numerous biographies of Muhammad – ibn Ishaq and ibn Hisham’s, Al-Waqidi’s, ibn Sa’d’s, and al-Tabari’s, to name the ones that have been the most influential.⁵ I will refer to, and quote these biographers often in this program and the next two, and since I don’t have time to tell you about each prophetic biographer in detail, the most important general thing to know is that the major canonical biographies of Muhammad were written during the century and a half between about 750 and 900. To be especially clear here at the outset of this series, Muhammad lived from about 570-632, and most of the biographies about him were written between 800 and 900.⁶ We have already, in this season of the podcast, explored how early Abbasid literary scholars forged and tampered with Jahili poetry. In much the same fashion, during the 800s, Muhammad’s biographers, succumbing to poetic license, veneration, or misinformation, didn’t always set things down as they actually happened.

However – and this is the first thing you should know about Islamic intellectual history – the chroniclers and anthologists who preserved information about the life of Muhammad did so with a scholarly rigor that was as sophisticated as it was unusual prior to the 800s. Let me explain. When we read the canonical biographies of Muhammad, as modern audiences, one overarching feature of them jumps out at us. This is that Muhammad’s biographers were earnestly trying for historical accuracy. Often, when passing on a common anecdote about the life of the Prophet, his earliest biographers will admit that they really can’t verify the story that’s about to be told. For instance, the biographer ibn Ishaq, prior to a very famous story about Muhammad’s mother, begins the narrative by saying, “It is alleged, in popular stories, and God only knows the truth, that. . .” and then the biographer ibn Ishaq begins the actual story.⁷ These kinds of qualifiers, like – “It is alleged,” or “It is purported,” or even “God knows whether this is true, but” – these qualifiers occur often in the ninth-century biographies. So, too, does something called the isnad, which means “chain of transmitters.” One of Muhammad’s biographers might say, for instance, that Person X said that Person Y stated that Person Z said that Person A said that the Prophet Muhammad met some riders and had a conversation with them. This is, again, something called the isnad. The isnad, or “chain of transmitters” can seem clunky and intrusive to modern readers. But the isnad, during the 800s and before, was an intellectually honest attempt to cite sources that stretched back 200 years, and to mortar together oral history with written history. So that’s a very quick introduction to Muhammad’s earliest biographies, a small group of large books interested in offering as much accurate information as they could with the tools that they had, and we’ll hear plenty from these full biographies soon. Let’s talk about the other major early source texts on Muhammad’s life.

Less familiar than biography, to those of us outside of Islam, at least, is the tradition of the hadith. Hadith means “discourse,” or “talk,” and in Islamic history, the hadiths are short narratives that describe the words, or actions, or even the inactions of the Prophet Muhammad – narratives that began as oral traditions and were later set down in compilations, largely during the 800s. “Hadith” is a mandatory vocabulary word within Islamic studies, so let’s learn the word – hadith, hadith, hadith, h-a-d-i-t-h. You can, again, think of a hadith as a short narrative or anecdote, generally about Muhammad. Let’s hear one: “The Prophet said: ‘He who is deprived of kindness is deprived of goodness.’”⁸ That’s the hadith. It’s a saying. Some hadiths are just like that – a saying attributed to Muhammad, and some are a little longer, a saying embedded within a short contextual narrative. The six main Sunni hadith collections all have at least 4,000 hadiths, with the two longest ones containing more than 7,500. So, hadiths, once again, are short narratives that generally showcase the unique wisdom of most often Muhammad himself on all sorts of subjects. Hadiths are different than full biographies, because hadiths are short and pithy, rather than chronologically organized sequences of incidents.

Hadiths also have isnads, or chains of transmitters, to help legitimize them. Generally each hadith has its own isnad, and even by the 700s, the study of isnads was itself a major discipline in the early Islamic world, with many scholars working out which chains of narration were reliable, and which ones were bogus. By the mid-800s, when what are today still the most influential hadith compilations in Sunni Islam were being written, there were hundreds of thousands of anecdotes out there about Muhammad, like the one about the spider webs at the mouth of the cave – that story came from a hadith. By the mid-800s, so many hadiths were in circulation that their compilers began organizing them into topics in the major hadith collections. The six most highly regarded hadith collections in Sunnism, all written during the 800s, together have more than 30,000 short narratives related to the Prophet and his world.⁹ With manifold biographies written about Muhammad, and tens of thousands of hadiths recording the Prophet’s words and deeds having been completed all before year 900, as you can imagine, the tradition of writing about Muhammad only grew as the centuries continued to pass.

To understand the life of Muhammad as it’s come down to us, you need to know what I’ve just told you about the early biographies, and the hadiths. Behind the cobwebs of time and fourteen centuries of scholarship, there is a remarkable person, but getting to the latter through the former is a daunting task. Meeting Muhammad means looking at walls and walls of bookcases, bookcases which, as you can now understand, are full of dense, granular material that, even by the 700s, was being composed with high scholarly standards and carefully cited sources. Early Muslims who wrote about Muhammad, then, had more in common with the sages who wrote the Babylonian Talmud than they did with the comparatively freewheeling extemporizers who composed the first few centuries of Christian apologetics and exegeses. Early Muslims who wrote about Muhammad expected to be read carefully, and to be accountable to one another, and their work was thus, while far from perfect, collegial and punctilious. So, our proverbial opening shot of all of those bookcases can now fade to black. As formidable as learning about Muhammad is, we have already done some prep work over the past three episodes, and that prep work will help.

In this season of the podcast thus far, we’ve learned about the complex geopolitics of western Arabia in the 500s. The Hijaz region, or central west coast of what’s today Saudi Arabia, was one of the main fulcrums of trade between Europe, Africa, and Asia. When Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570, the Hijaz was at the center of a greater tristate region, with the Byzantine empire to its northwest, the Sasanian empire to its northeast, and Aksum, in modern-day Ethiopia to its southwest, together with an Aksumite client kingdom in what is today Yemen. Closer to home were two Arab client kingdoms – the Ghassanids, rooted in modern day Jordan and Syria, who worked for the Byzantines, and then the Lakhmids, with headquarters in what is today Kufa, Iraq, who worked for the Sasanians. These client kingdoms brought money and opportunities to the Bedouin societies of the Arabian Peninsula. As trade made various Arab consortiums flourish, and mercenary opportunities created a footloose, prosperous class of cavalrymen, as the 500s led to the 600s, Arabic poetry began to capture the diverse lives of its authors. Warriors wrote about war, and outcasts wrote about the lonely road. Sybarites wrote about living the good life, and lackeys wrote panegyrics. The bereaved wrote poems of mourning, and ruthless wordsmiths wrote satire, sometimes on behalf of themselves, and sometimes for a client who wanted to lampoon a rival. Out of this welter of genres arose, in particular, the qasida, a distinctly Arabic poetic form, with a set of formulaic elements, elements that were often used, and often ignored. We’ve talked about the trans-peninsular elements of life in Arabia enough, now, to have a basic understanding of the rhythms and complexities of Muhammad’s general region. And just a moment ago, we learned the fundamentals of Islamic texts about Muhammad – that between about 750 and 900, the most important biographies about him were written, and the most important collections of hadiths were compiled, hadiths again being those short narratives capturing something the Prophet said or did. What I want to do now is to take a moment to talk a bit about Mecca, and Muhammad’s own heritage there. Islam’s holiest city, Mecca was Muhammad’s birthplace, and the town that determined a lot of what happened during his life. [music]

Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael: Mecca and the Old Testament

There are two approaches that we can take to understanding what Mecca was like in the year 570. The first is a traditional Qur’anic and Islamic one. The other approach, often associated with a school called the revisionist school of Islamic studies, is rooted in questioning traditional Islamic texts and narratives about Mecca during Late Antiquity, and taking other evidence into account. We will consider both approaches to Islamic history, including the life of Muhammad, in our present season of podcast episodes. It’s very important to understand and respect Islamic sacred history as this history has been taught for hundreds of years. It’s also important to scrutinize accepted traditions and texts, as we have done with Judaism, Greek and Roman history, and Christianity, and to make use of modern archaeology and philology and other disciplines, to help bolster our understanding of the past. For now, let’s learn about what Islamic sources have traditionally said about Mecca, and why it was such a sacred place, long before Muhammad was born there. What everyone – devout traditionalists and skeptics alike – agrees on is that in 570, Mecca was advantageously located along the Hijaz trade routes, and that in 570, Mecca was already a pilgrimage site. How Mecca became a pilgrimage site takes us to the very beginning of the story of Islam.

Muslims have often called Jews and Christians ahl al-kitab, or “People of the Book.” And in contemporary usage, we often refer to Islam as an Abrahamic religion. The reason for these terms is that Islam is, like Judaism and Christianity, based on sacred texts, and that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, considers the Tanakh’s creation narrative and much of its history to be the word of God revealed to ancient Hebrew prophets, and Jesus, or Isa, to be a revered prophet of God, as well. The question you might have if you’re new to Islam is this. Mecca is almost 800 miles southeast of Jerusalem. How did Muhammad, and the earliest Muslims see themselves connected to the sacred traditions of the ancient and faraway Levant?

Here’s the answer. Let’s begin with the Book of Genesis – to be very clear, I’m talking about the Bible, here, and I’ll let you know when we switch to Islamic tradition. In all of the many different Bibles, in the 21st Chapter of Genesis, the patriarch Abraham’s firstborn son, the son of Abraham and his wife’s Egyptian slave Hagar, was a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael, in the Bible, is surprisingly minor figure, considering his patrilineage. Some time after Ishmael was born, once Abraham conceived his son Isaac with his wife Sarah, Sarah demanded that Hagar and baby Ishmael be removed from her household (Gen 21.10). Abraham was distressed at this demand, but God comforted Abraham, telling him that while Abraham would have a nation of descendants through Isaac, Abraham would also have a nation of descendants through Ishmael. Abraham then gave Hagar some bread and water, and sent Hagar and the baby Ishmael off to fend for themselves. The Bible tells us that Hagar wandered in the wilderness around Beersheba. And in some verses that are very important in Islam, Chapter 21 of the Book of Genesis continues as follows.

When the water in the skin was gone, [Hagar] cast the child [Ishmael] under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as [Hagar] sat opposite [Ishmael], she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the [baby]; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and [Hagar] saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy, and [Ishmael] grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.¹⁰

Those verses from Genesis are some of the most important passages in the Bible to Muslims, and in particular, to many Arab Muslims. Because in Islamic tradition, Paran, mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament as a shelter for the Israelites during their wandering in the desert (Num 10:12), and described as “beyond the Jordan” in the first verse of Deuteronomy – in Islamic tradition, Paran has long been understood as the having been somewhere near Mecca.¹¹ In Islamic and Arabian tribal traditions, then, Ishmael, the older son of Abraham, was the patriarch of a large population of the peninsula’s Arabs – specifically the Adnani Arabs, with roots in western and northern Arabia.

So, let’s set the Old Testament aside, and move fully into Islamic sacred history, now. Mecca has traditionally been understood as being home to three sacred sites that date all the way back to Abraham, or Ibrahim in Islamic tradition. The least well known of these is probably the Maqam Ibrahim, or “station of Abraham,” a stone said to bear the footprint of Abraham. The Maqam Ibrahim sits alongside the Kaaba. The Kaaba, or “cube,” if you happen to have somehow not heard of it, is the very ancient shrine at the center of Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram – the holiest part of the holiest mosque in the holiest city in Islam, a squarish building with sides about 11 meters or 36 feet in length, and about 13 meters of 43 feet tall, having been rebuilt and augmented a bit over the centuries. According to the Qur’an, the Kaaba is so old that it actually predated old Ibrahim himself.¹² As God recounts in Surat al-Hajj in the Qur’an, “We showed [Ibrahim] the site of the [Kaaba], saying. . .‘Purify My House for those who circle around it, those who stand to pray, and those who bow and prostrate themselves. . .Then let the pilgrims perform their acts of cleansing, fulfil their vows, and circle around the Ancient House.”¹³ And while the Kaaba, in Islamic tradition, is older than even the Tabernacle, another site that still exists today in Mecca is just as old. About 20 meters or 66 feet east of the Kaaba is a water source called the Zamzam well. According, once again, to Islamic tradition, the Zamzam well was the well that Hagar and Ishmael, or Ismail in Islamic tradition, discovered in the desert when they were suffering from thirst. A source of fresh water at the heart of Mecca, the Zamzam well also has direct ties to Muhammad and his family. So let’s move, then, from ancient Biblical history, a little closer to the time of Muhammad. As a Late Antique Arab, Muhammad had both a tribe, and a clan within that tribe. The tribe was the Quraysh, and the clan was the Hashemite clan, and it’s time for us to learn a bit about both. [music]

Qusayy and the Quraysh Takeover of Mecca

The Quraysh are the most famous of all of Late Antique Arabia’s tribes. The Quraysh, in a sentence, were both a kin group and a business organization that rose to prominence in Mecca in the 400s CE, profiting from both the pilgrimage traffic in Mecca, and more generally the trade routes up and down the Hijaz. Quraysh is another mandatory vocabulary word for understanding early Islamic history, so let’s memorize that one, too Quraysh tribe: Muhammad’s tribe, the tribe that controlled Mecca after about 400 CE, again Quraysh tribe, Mecca. Muhammad’s great-great-great grandfather Qusayy was the person who consolidated the Quraysh tribe’s control over the important Kaaba shrine in Mecca, and the valley around it. The Quraysh tribe’s history thereafter was tumultuous, with two factions of the tribe nearly going to war with one another just one generation after the Quraysh tribe assumed control over Mecca. The patriarch Qusayy preferred his firstborn son Abd ad-Dar over his more talented and capable younger son, Abd Manaf. The Quraysh tribe split into two separate factions centered on these two sons. The more capable and younger son, Abd Manaf, was Muhammad’s great-great grandfather. The women among Abd Manaf’s supporters mixed a bowl of perfume, and set this bowl beside the Kaaba, and Abd Manaf’s supporters, according to one biographer, “dipped their hands into it and they and their allies took a solemn oath. Then they rubbed their hands on the Ka’ba strengthening the solemnity of the oath. For this reason they were called the Scented Ones.”¹⁴ As nicely as they surely smelled, the supporters of the capable younger son Abd Manaf were bitterly opposed to the supporters of the older son Abd ad-Dar, and these two factions of the Quraysh tribe, very roughly around 500 CE, prepared to leave the region of the Kaaba, where violence was forbidden, to fight it out about who ought to be the Quraysh chief.

Fortunately, a general contingent of Meccans, according to the biographer ibn Sa’ad, intervened, and sued for peace, suggesting a compromise. The compromise was that the supporters of the younger, more capable son Abd Manaf would control taxation in the region related to the Kaaba pilgrims, who needed food and drink during their visits to Mecca, and the supporters of the older son Abd ad-Dar would control the Kaaba itself, along with Mecca’s assembly house.¹⁵ At the center of this tense succession dispute was a man named Hashim, the son of Abd Manaf, again the more capable son of the Quraysh patriarch Qusayy. Hashim was Muhammad’s great grandfather, and the patriarch of the Banu Hashim, or the Hashim clan.

Let’s pause here for just a moment to make a point of clarification about Muhammad’s genealogy, and listen carefully, because this is important. In early Islamic history, there are what we can think of as three tiers of lineage. The first tier is that there were Adnani and Qahtani Arabs. The Adnani Arabs traced and still trace their lineage to the Old Testament patriarch Ishmael or Ismail, and the Qahtani Arabs traced their lineage to a different historical figure. The Qahtani Arabs are those of the south of the peninsula, around Yemen, and the Adnani Arabs are everyone else. Within these two groups were the peninsula’s tribes – tribes whose names we’ve heard from time to time in Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, like the ‘Abs, the Taghlib, and the Kulayb tribes. And within these tribes, there were clans, named after patriarchs within the parent tribe. These tiers of genetic and regional identity – first, Adnani or Qahtani; second, tribe; and third, clan within tribe – would have defined the way that you thought about yourself if you were born in Late Antique Arabia. Were you northern, or southern? What was your tribe? Which clan within that tribe? These were fundamental questions of personal identity in Muhammad’s world.

Muhammad’s tribe, then, were the Quraysh, that consortium that had assumed control over the Meccan pilgrimage economy in the late 400s, and by the early 500s, had become involved with various industries in the city. And within the Quraysh tribe, after Muhammad’s great-grandfather Hashim and his perfumed collaborators emerged from the aforementioned succession dispute as the stewards of Mecca’s pilgrims, the Banu Hashim, or Hashim clan, rose as part of the Quraysh tribe. To be overbearingly clear, then, beneath the greater regional or commercial umbrella of tribe was the genetically tighter unit known as clan. Bedouins might live in tribal regions or ecosystems, but their clans – these were their more immediate relatives. Muhammad, then, was of the Banu Hashim, or Hashemites, or Hashim clan, and the Quraysh tribe. Let’s return to the story of Muhammad’s patriarchs – we’ve already reached Hashim, Muhammad’s great grandfather, so we’re getting close to the Prophet himself.

Hashim’s privilege and duty was to manage the pilgrimage business in Mecca. Muhammad’s great grandfather Hashim standardized two annual caravan journeys, a winter one between Yemen and Mecca, and a summer one between Palestine and Mecca. Great grandpa Hashim traveled widely on business, marrying a woman named Salma, up in the city of Yathrib, eleven days’ ride from Mecca. Yathrib, later called Medina, was where Hashim and Salma’s son was born. Muhammad’s great grandfather Hashim comes across in Muhammad’s biographies as quite a talented and openminded person, but unfortunately, Hashim died young while on a business trip in Gaza. After some fraught negotiations between the departed Hashim’s brother and wife, Hashim’s young son was taken down to Mecca to grow up, as the Hashemite branch of the family was well-known in Mecca, and the boy would doubtless have more advantages in Mecca than if he had stayed up in Yathrib.

Hashim’s young son – and this was Muhammad’s grandfather – at birth, was given quite a different name than the one he’d eventually be known by. As the Medieval biographer ibn Sa’d wrote, Muhammad’s grandfather “had some grey hair on his head at the time of his birth; so he was named Shaybah,” “Shaybah” meaning “strand of gray hair,” or more simply, “old.”¹⁶ Shaybah, whom history would know as Abd al-Muttalib, gray at birth, and energetic, wise, and vigorous throughout his life, was the Prophet’s grandfather. Ibn Ishaq’s biography describes grandpa Abd al-Muttalib as someone so formidable that a king of what is today Yemen descended from his throne so that Abd al-Muttalib was not beneath him. The biographer ibn Ishaq writes that “‘Abdu’l-Muttalib was a most impressive, handsome, and dignified man, and when [the king] saw him he treated him with the greatest respect.”¹⁷ Abd al-Muttalib took on the responsibility that had been his father Hashim’s – grandpa Abd al-Muttalib helped organize the pilgrimage routes from the north and south along the Hijaz, and make sure that Mecca had enough food and water for those who came to the city to honor the Kaaba and trade while there in town.

So, let’s briefly review what we’ve learned so far, because we’re about to put it all together. We learned that Mecca, by the 500s, was already home to the sacred Kaaba, or “cube” shrine, which, along with a nearby well called the Zamzam Well, is understood in Islamic history as dating back to the time of Abraham. We learned that a large population of northern or Adnani Arabs have historically traced their lineage back to Abraham’s oldest son, Ishmael, whose descendants became the various northern and western tribes of Arabia. We learned the story of Muhammad’s patrilineage back to his great-great-great grandfather Qusayy, the patriarch of the Quraysh tribe responsible for exerting the Quraysh’s influence over Mecca back during the 400s. And we learned how by the time Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib came of age in the early- to mid-500s, the Hashemite clan, within the Quraysh tribe, was responsible for coordinating the two major pilgrimages to Mecca, and providing the visitors with food and drink.

To step back from Islamic sources for just a moment and into more general history, it’s difficult to make any conclusions about the actual size of Mecca in the 500s. Mecca was not Arabia’s only pilgrimage site, nor was the Kaaba the only sacred shrine. By the 500s, Arabia was a populous place with a lot of history, a lot of sacred sites, and a lot of inhabitants who revered them, and so we shouldn’t picture Mecca before Islam as the nexus of religion on the peninsula like it is today. Still, Mecca was a pilgrimage site, attractive not only because of the storied Kaaba, but also because Mecca lay roughly halfway between the Nabataean kingdom, home to many desirable Mediterranean goods, and what is today Yemen, home to various goods from Asia, with Red Sea ports reasonably close by. Regarding the pilgrimage and trade traffic there, and the Quraysh’s control of Mecca, modern biographer Lesley Hazelton writes,

It is nothing new that there is a lot of money to be made in religion. The sixth-century Quraysh knew this as well as any modern televangelist. . .[T]he elite of Mecca ran the city as a kind of oligarchy, with power in the hands of the wealthy few. Access was always mediated, and always for a fee.

Selling the special ihram clothing was part of the business of the pilgrimage, as was the provision of water and food for the pilgrims, and the sale of fodder for their camels and donkeys and horses. Which clans controlled which franchises was determined by the Quraysh leadership, who essentially parceled out monopolies. . .Every aspect of the pilgrimage had been carefully calculated down to the last gram of silver or gold or its equivalent in trade.¹⁸

Put simply, then, people have been visiting Mecca for a long, long time, and the Prophet’s clan and tribe were in control of supplying pilgrims and other visitors there just prior to the birth of Islam. If you’ve never heard Muhammad’s life story before, it’s important to understand that the Quraysh tribe, and within it, Muhammad’s Hashemite clan, were the power players in what we might call Mecca’s Pre-Islamic tourism industry. And at some point during his career, Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib made a very important contribution to this tourist industry. This contribution had to do with the Zamzam well – the one that, according to tradition, Hagar found in the wilderness, under the direction of God himself.

Abd al-Muttalib and the Legend of the Ten Camels

The Zamzam well is, again that watering hole just sixty feet east of the Kaaba – a sacred water source still there, and you can buy Zamzam water all over the Islamic world today. In Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib refurbished the Zamzam well – this would have been during the first few decades of the 500s. According to the rather terse description in the early biographer ibn Sa’ad, Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib “continued the feeding of the pilgrims and making provision of drinking water in the cisterns at Makkah. The use of cisterns was discontinued when water could be had from the Zamzam well, and it was [Abd al-Muttalib] who supplied them water from it by redigging [the well]. . .The Zamzam was a spring of Allah, which was shown to [Abd al-Muttalib] in [a] dream several times.”¹⁹ There were other wells nearby, but the Zamzam was within the Kaaba’s sacred enclosure, and purportedly, its waters were the purest and sweetest.²⁰ The biographer Ibn Ishaq tells the story of the Zamzam well’s rediscovery much more extensively, and in his account, Abd al-Muttalib got into a dispute with the Quraysh tribe about some treasure discovered while the well was being dug, and after a wager, it was decided that the treasure be made part of the Kaaba.

At this juncture – established in Mecca, revered for having recovered the Zamzam Well, which was also a profitable water source, Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib had a lot going for him. But unfortunately, in spite of everything good that had happened to him, Abd al-Muttalib only had one son. Abd al-Muttalib vowed – and this is one of those stories about which biographer ibn Ishaq writes “God only knows if it’s true” – Abd al-Muttalib vowed that if he ever had ten sons, he would sacrifice one of them to God. The God in question, by the way, is uncertain. The early biographer ibn Sa’d states that the sacrifice would have been to Allah.²¹ Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari suggest the deity may have been a god called Hubal, whom biographer al-Tabari describes as “the greatest of the idols of [the] Quraysh in Mecca.”²² Anyway, however grandpa Abd al-Muttalib made this vow, the years passed, and Abd al-Muttalib became more and more successful, and he had more and more sons, until eventually, he had a tenth boy. This tenth boy, Abd Allah, was his favorite, and when little Abd Allah, or Abdullah was old enough, old Abd al-Muttalib realized he had to fulfill his vow. Abd al-Muttalib had each of his ten sons make a mark on an arrow, and then he took them into the Kaaba, and grandpa Abd al-Muttalib told his sons about how he’d vowed to kill one of his sons if he ever had ten. Within the Kaaba itself, lots were drawn to see who would be sacrificed, and the already stricken Abd al-Muttalib was further heartbroken to see that it was his youngest, most cherished son, Abdullah, who had drawn the short straw, as we might say in English. And so off Abd al-Muttalib went to sacrifice his tenth and youngest son Abdullah. The grim deed was halted, however, by an assembly that had gathered in the sanctuary around the Kaaba. Old Abd al-Muttalib had many wives, and among them, young Abdullah’s mother, Fatima, was from a powerful clan within the Quraysh, and she did not intend to see her son Abdullah sacrificed. After some tense negotiations, it was decided that grandpa Abd al-Muttalib and young Abdullah would head up to Yathrib, again modern-day Medina, to consult with a wise woman about the sacrifice. The wise woman, after some discussion, learned that to the Quraysh, the price paid for the life of a murder victim was ten camels. And so the wise woman told Abd al-Muttalib what to do.

Abd al-Muttalib returned to Mecca, and he secured ten camels. He used arrows to draw lots between his youngest, most cherished son Abdullah, and the ten camels. The lots were in favor of the camels, meaning (at least according to regional superstition) that the ten camels were not enough to atone for the vow that Abd al-Muttalib was going to break, and that Abd al-Muttalib needed to get ten more camels, and draw lots again. And so once again, the poor tenth grandson Abdullah drew the bad arrow. And so Abd al-Muttalib got ten more camels, and the process repeated itself up until the time that grandpa Abd al-Muttalib finally had a hundred camels prepared to sacrifice, and finally, his youngest son Abdullah drew a favorable arrow, indicating that the god to whom old Abd al-Muttalib had vowed a sacrifice was finally satisfied. The hundred camels were sacrificed to the god. And Meccans who had watched these events unfold were astonished that young Abdullah’s life seemed to have been weighed and judged as worth ten times that of a normal person.

And this episode is an important one for our purposes for a few reasons. First, I’ve already told you that Abd al-Muttalib was the Prophet Muhammad’s grandfather, and so, as you probably guessed, Abd al-Muttalib’s wife Fatima was Muhammad’s grandmother, and young Abdullah, very nearly sacrificed to an ancient Arabian god, was Muhammad’s dad. Second, this history of Muhammad’s patrilineage, while every single word of it might be true, also has some hagiographic and folkloric elements to it. We have a great grandfather who’s a cherished younger son, and a father who is a cherished younger son, a storybook tale of a sacrificial vow that ends up proving the worth of the Prophet Muhammad’s father, and the Prophet’s grandfather uncovering the old wellspring of water that God himself dug for the castaway son of Abraham. Again, it might be history, through and through, and to many it is, but, just like Muhammad’s earliest biographer, who stated “God only knows if it’s true,” Muslims and others, past and present, have explored some of the traditional narratives about Muhammad with the understanding that there are prodigious quantities of them and they’re not all absolutely accurate.

We can take a third lesson away from the story of Abd al-Muttalib’s near sacrifice of Abdullah, as well. We have used the word al-Jahiliya often in recent episodes, and learned that it’s generally understood as describing the time of ignorance before Islam. This episode with poor young Abdullah nearly sacrificed is perhaps a quintessential illustration of what Islam has traditionally thought of when it has thought of al-Jahiliya – a time of human sacrifice, of pagan gods, of oracles, and far too many life and death situations governed by drawing lots, all best left by the wayside. So, let’s move forward, then, and learn about the Prophet Muhammad’s father Abdullah. [music]

Abdullah, Amina, and Muhammad

Old Abd al-Muttalib, with his beloved youngest son Abdullah safe and secure following the sacrifice of 100 camels, decided it was time to marry the young man off. Abd al-Muttalib was 70, and Abdullah was just 25.²³ Abd al-Muttalib had just the woman in mind. Her name was Amina, and she was the daughter of another reputable clan leader within the Quraysh, and so the union would be advantageous to both kin groups. Although other women desired Abdullah, he wed Amina, and the Prophet Muhammad was conceived soon thereafter. There were signs, to both parents, that Amina’s pregnancy was a special one. First, one of Abdullah’s other lovers told him that, prior to consummating his marriage with Amina, “between his eyes there was a blaze like the blaze of a horse,” but that once Amina was pregnant, that blaze was gone.²⁴ As for Amina, she – allegedly, says biographer Ibn Ishaq – heard a voice telling her that she would give birth to a leader and his name would be Muhammad.

The idea of an Arab prophet, according to the early medieval biographies, was out there in certain circles around 570, when Muhammad was born. We discussed the heterodox religious climate of western Arabia in a couple of previous episodes, but let’s take quick moment to review the basics. Modern historians and ninth-century biographers alike agree that a large community of Jews lived north of Mecca, in Yathrib, and that a population of Christians lived in the oasis of Najran down near the border with present-day Yemen. Across the Red Sea, the Axumite kingdom in present-day Ethiopia was Christian, as were their proxies in what is today Saana, Yemen. All over Arabia, there were communities of Jews and Christians, especially Monophysite Christians, who had been fleeing the Byzantine empire, and settling in Arabia and Persia for a century. To turn, more specifically, to early Islamic sources, though, and to focus on Mecca, Mecca, even within the already heterodox Arabian Peninsula, seems to have had a particular degree of religious diversity prior to Islam. In the ancient grounds around the Kaaba, there were allegedly 360 idols, and Meccan households had sacred statues of gods, as well.²⁵ Naturally, with the overall religious diversity of the Arabian Peninsula being what it was, there were Christians and Jews in Mecca, too. The Kaaba was understood by the region’s Christians to be sacred for the some of the same reasons that Muslims still find it sacred today – the area around the Kaaba was the site where Hagar and Ishmael had settled, where later, Abraham himself built the Kaaba, and eventually, where Hagar and Ishmael were buried. Arabian Christians, then, undertook pilgrimages to the Kaaba, and Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Ishaq even reports that there was, during Muhammad’s life, a painting of Jesus and Mary in the Kaaba.²⁶

Within the religiously heterogenous world of Mecca during the 500s, according to Medieval Islamic sources and the Qur’an, there were individuals called Haneefs. Haneefs, in Islamic tradition, are essentially described as proto-Muslims. Early texts depict Haneefs as monotheists who believed in Abrahamic traditions, and who conducted themselves with good morals, but were not Christians or Jews. The Qur’an describes Abraham himself as a Haneef (3.67, 6.79, 16.120), and the word is translated in the Qur’an, perhaps most lengthily, as something like “a man of pure faith, stand[ing] firm and true in. . .devotion to the religion. . .[in] the natural disposition God instilled in mankind” (30:30).²⁷ A relative of old Abd al-Muttalib named Waraqah was a Haneef, and one thing that Haneefs, and Jews, and Christians all expected was the coming of another prophet. Jewish and Christian scriptures all foretold of it, and the Haneefs of Mecca, who were also monotheists, wondered if perhaps a Haneef prophet like themselves would soon come to be – a monotheistic Arab prophet. So let’s remember Haneefs as we move forward. To repeat, in Islamic tradition, the Haneefs of the 500s, when Muhammad was born, were morally upright Arabian, and often Arab monotheists, often versed in Jewish and Christian traditions, though not Jewish or Christian themselves, and dissatisfied with the cluttered polytheism that the Kaaba courtyard symbolized.

So let’s turn back toward the story of Muhammad. Muhammad, who would be the most famous of all Haneefs, had impeccable parentage. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib had rediscovered the Zamzam well, and cornered the market on the water trade for Mecca’s pilgrims. Muhammad’s father Abdullah was Abd al-Muttalib’s favorite son, and would have all the favor of the Hashemite clan behind him. Muhammad’s mother Amina was also wellborn – the daughter of another clan leader. Muhammad, then, was himself the junction of two important clans within the Quraysh tribe. He would have been born into considerable privilege, were it not for two tragedies that befell the Prophet – one of them, before Muhammad was even born. [music]

Young Muhammad’s Time with the Upland Bedouins

Newly married, and with a baby on the way, Muhammad’s father Abdullah headed north, on a business trip. His destination was Gaza, which, at that point, just five years after the death of Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, was firmly under the control of the Byzantine empire. Once Abdullah’s business up in Gaza was completed, and the young man headed back down south. And with much of the return journey already behind him, Abdullah fell ill. The rest of the caravan moved on, but Abdullah remained in Yathrib to recuperate and spend some time with his uncles.²⁸ A month passed. Abdullah’s eldest brother was sent up from Mecca to check on him, but by the time the brother got there, Abdullah had passed away. Muhammad’s father was about 25, and he never had a chance to meet his baby son.

As for Muhammad, when the Prophet was born, he was sent to live in the desert with a Bedouin wet nurse and her family. This practice was common among the elites of Mecca, for several reasons. Aristocratic women could have more babies when wet nurses were hired to take over their nursing duties. Additionally, sixth-century Meccans knew that pathogens were more likely to spread in close quarters, and that the clean air of the desert highlands to the east was a safer place for babies and young children to grow up healthy and strong. And finally, the Quraysh tribe, according to Islamic tradition, had only settled in Mecca three of four generations back, and so they still had a strong sense that the desert was their ancestral home. With freedom to roam, fresh air, hardy food, and the milk of healthy Bedouin women, the desert was a place where the newborns of settled townspeople could grow robust, and moreover, a place where they would learn the pure Arabic speech of the desert, uncluttered with the polyglot cadences of the city.

Muhammad’s Bedouin wet nurse and foster-mother was called Halima, and she and her husband often took in the newborns of townspeople to care for in order to make a bit of extra money. The earliest biographer Ibn Ishaq tells a story about how many Bedouin women came to town one day, looking for babies to nurse and parents to pay them. None of the Bedouin women wanted Muhammad, though, because Muhammad’s father was gone, and there was a higher chance that payment might not work out. The Bedouin wet nurse Halima, however, eventually offered her services to Muhammad’s mother Amina, and when she did, both of her breasts became full of milk, and her donkey’s udders, as well, filled up with milk.²⁹ A different early biography offers a scene of Muhammad’s mother Amina giving the baby Muhammad to his foster mother Halima, and telling Halima about the visions she had while pregnant. Ibn Sa’d writes that the wet nurse Halima:

was pleased [at the stories] and she was overjoyed on what she’d heard [about Muhammad from his mother]. Then [Halima] returned to the place where she was staying; and they put [a] saddle on their [donkey] on which Halima rode and bore the Apostle of Allah, may Allah bless him, before her and [Halima’s own baby son] al-Harith before him. They overtook their comrades in the valley of al-Sirar where their beasts were pasturing.³⁰

A little baby prophet, sandwiched between another baby and a Bedouin mom as a donkey carries all three along – I hope I can say it’s an awfully cute image while still being respectful to everyone.

Muhammad grew to be a healthy two-year-old under the care of his Bedouin wet nurse, and she and her family found that when the little baby from the Hashim clan was around, their livestock produced astounding amounts of milk to drink. Not in a hurry to part company with little Muhammad, then, Halima asked Muhammad’s mother Amina if Muhammad could stay out in the desert with the Bedouins a while longer, and Amina said he could. And then, an unexpected crisis unfolded. One day, after Muhammad and his little foster brother were off toddling in the countryside, his foster brother hurried home and offered the wet nurse Halima harrowing news. Two men, clad all in white, had set Muhammad down on the ground and opened up his chest. The Bedouin parents were, of course, shocked, and when they spoke with little Muhammad, he confirmed that the story was true. In Ibn Ishaq’s biography, Muhammad, still a very young child, tells how, “Two men in white raiment came and threw me down and opened up my belly and searched therein for I knew what not.”³¹ At first glance, the episode sounds horrifying, but it was actually a divine visitation in which two emissaries of God removed Muhammad’s heart, cleansed it, and put it back, freeing the child of the natural sinfulness of humans everywhere. This is a cherished story in Islamic history, and there are multiple versions of it, and we’ll come back to it a bit later in this program.

So, again, the two-year-old Muhammad’s heart was cleansed by two figures in white garments. Muhammad’s foster mother Halima, hearing the story of her foster son’s harrowing encounter, concluded that whatever was going on with the little boy, it was time to tell Muhammad’s mother Amina about what had happened. Amina, hearing the news, unexpectedly, was pleased. She said that Muhammad’s heart being cleansed was a sign of great things to come for the boy, and she announced that she would now care for her own son. And for a time, between ages of two or three and six, little Muhammad flourished in Mecca. He came to know his extended family. He played games with his many cousins. He learned to swim, and how to fly kites.³² But then, tragedy struck again.

Muhammad’s mother Amina, just like Muhammad’s father had six years before, fell ill near Yathrib, and passed away. In spite of this second tragedy, though, for the next two years, Muhammad’s fortunes still seemed secure. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib took Muhammad under his care, giving the youngster special privileges, and envisioning great things for the boy. However, Abd al-Muttalib was old, and just two years into caring for Muhammad, the old man passed away, leaving Muhammad, at about the age of eight, under the care of his uncle, Abu Talib. [music]

Muhammad’s Youth in Mecca and Early Career

Having lost his father, his mother, and his grandfather, Muhammad was at least fortunate enough to have a caring uncle and aunt take him in. However, Abu Talib wasn’t particularly wealthy, and so Muhammad, at just eight or nine, began working as a herder, and taking care of flocks of sheep and goats. The boy also went along on various errands with his uncle, including a journey up to what is today the city of Busra, in the southwest of Syria. Near this town, there lived a monk. The monk’s name was Bahira, and he was a Christian ascetic. Bahira had all sorts of old prophetic books in his hermitage, and these books foretold the imminent arrival of a prophet. One day, Bahira saw young Muhammad’s caravan headed toward where he lived. Bahira, who lived in the sticks and perhaps didn’t have too much going that day, watched the caravan come up from a distance. He noticed that a cloud was following the caravan, and that the cloud stopped when the caravan stopped. As a person who believed that a prophet would soon come to Arabia, the monk Bahira saw the cloud as a sign – maybe, a sign of the prophet about whom he had learned in his sacred texts.

When the caravan arrived, Bahira first chatted with the men of the caravan, looking for any other signs. But it wasn’t until he caught sight of the boy Muhammad that the Christian ascetic decided he might have pinpointed the prophet written of in his sacred texts. Bahira asked Muhammad a few questions, and the little boy, intelligent and courteous, answered them, and when asked, Muhammad showed Bahira his back. Muhammad, it seemed, had some sort of a birthmark on his back that Bahira had heard would mark the prophet who was to come. Bahira told Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib to take the boy back home to Mecca, and to take good care of him. Muhammad, said Bahira, had a great future ahead of him.

There is a curious fast forward from about the age of 10 to 20 in the ancient biographers here. Ibn Ishaq says that following these prophetic omens, Muhammad “grew up to be the finest of his people in manliness, the best in character, most notable in lineage, the best neighbor, the most kind, truthful, reliable. . .so that he was known among his people as ‘The trustworthy.’”³³ In fact, Muhammad was trustworthy enough, as his childhood stretched into his teenage years, and then early twenties, to be relied on as a caravan leader. A Hijaz caravan leader, around the year 590 CE, had to have a lot of different skills. It’s about 770 miles as the crow flies between Mecca and the ports of Gaza, and a lot longer overland, through some especially rough and barren terrain. A caravan leader, then, first of all needed to be physically hardy, and to know the lay of the land – main routes and detours. A caravan leader also had to be familiar with waystations and watering holes and those who staffed them, and the shifting tribal politics that might be relevant to any given journey. He had to carry ready money for passage and protection, and have a good sense of who could be relied on, and who couldn’t. Muhammad seems to have had all of these, together with the intelligence and eloquence evident in later hadiths and prophetic biographies.

For his work as a caravan leader and more generally trading agent, Muhammad made a good living, and he built up a strong reputation. He also, we can guess, got an education. Muhammad would have lived a lot of life between the age of ten and his early twenties, meeting and working with thousands of people from all over the world, traveling from Mecca up north through the tribal territories of Arabia, through Nabataean ruins and past Ghassanid garrisons and into Byzantine lands, hearing all dialects of Arabic, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Coptic, Ge’ez, Latin, and Pahlavi; knowing Arab polytheists, Arab Jews, Greek speaking Jews, Sasanian Zoroastrians, ex-Byzantine Monophysites and other Christians, from Syria, and Ethiopian Jews and Christians, and likely a smattering tradespeople from Sub-Saharan Africa and the port cities of the far off Indian Ocean.

With this rich education, together with the living and reputation that Muhammad had built, around the age of twenty, it seemed like a reasonable time for the future Prophet to find a wife. Muhammad had feelings for his cousin Umm Hani, and Muhammad asked his uncle Abu Talib if he could marry the girl. Abu Talib, however, refused, accepting instead the proposal of another of the girl’s cousins. Muhammad was from the Banu Hashim, a clan which, after the death of Muhammad’s parents and grandfather, had had a downturn in fortunes. A different clan within the Quraysh tribe, the Banu Makhzum, was faring far better, and so Muhammad’s uncle was marrying his daughters off to young men from this other clan. As it turned out, this rejection of Muhammad had important consequences, as it soon led to Muhammad’s marriage with Khadija, one of the most famous marriages in all of history. The story of how Muhammad met Khadija, and their rapprochement, is sparsely narrated in the ancient biographies, but it’s still a very endearing story.

Muhammad and Khadija

Muhammad was about 25.³⁴ Khadija was about 40. Initially, their relationship was a professional one. Khadija was a merchant. Respected and wealthy within the Quraysh tribe and city of Mecca, Khadija was already a widow twice over by the time she began working with Muhammad. She’d heard that the younger man was a solid, trustworthy caravan agent, and so, paying him more than her customary fee, she hired Muhammad to take her goods up to Syria, and to get as much as he could for them. Muhammad undertook the business venture with great success. When he returned with goods for which he’d traded, Muhammad had doubled Khadija’s upfront investment. She told him, in the ibn Ishaq biography, “I like you because of our relationship and your high reputation among your people, your trustworthiness and good character and truthfulness.”³⁵ Ibn Ishaq also tells us that Khadija “at that time was the best born woman in [the] Quraysh, of the greatest dignity and, too, the richest.”³⁶ Khadija proposed to Muhammad. Muhammad went to his uncles, and, recognizing that the orphan had made an excellent match, they arranged for the marriage to take place.

The age gap between the two has long drawn curiosity and various conjectures. The primary texts – ibn Ishaq, and then al-Tabari, who basically paraphrases ibn Ishaq – the primary texts tell the straightforward story of a capable businesswoman finding a man who was equally capable, and happened to be a bit younger, proposing, and being accepted, after which there followed a happy and fruitful marriage. The early biographies also add an inset miracle story. Khadija’s slave accompanied Muhammad in the business venture up north, and saw that Muhammad was being shaded by two angels as he walked, and Khadija’s slave related this auspicious miracle to Khadija, who subsequently discussed the miracle with her Christian cousin.³⁷ But even without these signs of divine prophethood, as a reliable trading agent who could make a financial profit with each venture, Muhammad still would have been an attractive match. The couple were married, and Khadija’s dowry was twenty female camels, and the future Prophet left his uncle’s house to go and live with his wife.

Khadija and Muhammad were soon more than merely spouses. They were business partners, friends, and confidants – a couple who had both been through some jarring losses, but, through natural talents, had endured and been successful. They had a baby boy, but the boy died before his second birthday. And they had four daughters, the youngest, and most famous of whom was Fatima, before having another baby boy, who also died while very young. While Muhammad had no sons who survived to adulthood, he adopted one of his slaves, Zayd, as a son, freeing the younger man in the process. Additionally, Muhammad took in his young cousin, ‘Ali. The timing was fateful. Just as Muhammad brought young ‘Ali into his household, Muhammad and his wife Khadija suffered another tragedy – a third baby boy of theirs did not survive infancy. The immediate household of Muhammad and Khadija, then, as Muhammad grew into his thirties, were their four daughters, their adopted slave, Zayd, and Muhammad’s young cousin, ‘Ali. Another cousin was a frequent guest of the household, and this was Muhammad’s cousin Abu Sufyan, more of a friend than an adoptee.

Muhammad and Khadjia’s house, though none of their sons had survived, was still full of love and frequently saw visits from extended family. From being an orphan, Muhammad had become an important figure in the Quraysh tribe. One of his daughters was married to one of his cousins, and then two more of Muhammad’s daughters were married to two other cousins, cementing alliances between Muhammad’s clan and other Quraysh clans in Mecca. As he advanced into his mid-thirties, his reputation as an honorable, steadfast person, enhanced by his marriage to the respectable widow Khadija, grew and grew.

At some point in Muhammad’s thirties, broadly respected and with a growing family, the future Prophet became involved with a famous project to rebuild and refurbish the Kaaba. The sacred shrine, at that point, had no roof, but as the biographer ibn Ishaq writes, “Now a ship belonging to a Greek merchant had been cast ashore at [Jeddah] and became a total wreck. [The Quraysh] took its timbers and got them ready to roof the Kaaba.”³⁸ The Quraysh tribe hired a Coptic carpenter. When the time came for the reconstruction, the Quraysh saw foreboding omens. A snake, guarding the Kaaba, was attacked and carried off by an eagle, freeing the way for the project. Some stones seemed not to want to be removed, and one foundation in particular, when disturbed, caused an earthquake to rock Mecca, leading the Quraysh to decide to leave some of the original Kaaba intact. Much of the rest of the construction went smoothly enough, up until the time came to once again set the famous Black Stone back into the corner of the building. To do so was a great honor, and all of the Quraysh clans wanted to put the stone back. Several days went by, tensions rose further, and the fate of the Black Stone was undecided, until Muhammad was seen coming back into town. The various Quraysh clans were glad to see him. Muhammad was sharp. Everyone trusted him. He would come up with a plan, everyone reasoned.

And so Muhammad did. He had a cloak brought to him, and then he set the Black Stone in its middle. Then, a representative of each clan took hold of part of the cloak, lifted it, and up the Black Stone rose, with Muhammad himself setting the sacred artifact in its rightful place in the Kaaba’s corner. [music]

Muhammad’s First Revelation

What we have heard so far takes us to Muhammad’s 40th year – from 570 to 610 CE. The early Islamic biographies describe many signs of prophethood evident around Muhammad during his first forty years of life – we’ve heard the story of Muhammad miraculously bringing more milk to Bedouin livestock, Muhammad having his heart washed by angels, and Muhammad having a telltale birthmark, and there are other signs described in the early biographies which I haven’t mentioned. You will notice, however, that up to his fortieth year in the story you’ve heard so far, beyond the peripheral anecdotes about miraculous signs, Muhammad mainly appears as just a person. He’s an appealing person. Having lost both parents, and then a grandfather, Muhammad was taken in by an uncle, and, because this uncle didn’t have a whole lot of money, Muhammad went to work herding animals as a child. From these inauspicious beginnings, due to personal merits and strenuous effort, Muhammad distinguished himself at various echelons of the caravan and trading industries. We shouldn’t exaggerate Muhammad’s early life story as a rags-to-riches tale. When he married Khadija, the biographies tell us, Muhammad had a female slave named Barakah, a slave Muhammad had inherited from his father.³⁹ Muhammad, then, though ill-luck had deprived him of parents, was still fairly wellborn, with some inheritances and a kin network to fall back on. What emerges from the stories told by Muhammad’s earliest biographers is a figure whose idiosyncrasies bring color and vitality to the story of the Prophet. As the modern biographer Lesley Hazleton writes, “To idealize someone is also, in a way, to dehumanize them,” and I think that if we see Muhammad’s first four decades as the story of a hardworking, talented human, doing his best and making it up as he went along, the biographical accounts of what happened next are even more striking, and fascinating.⁴⁰

Because in the year 610, when Muhammad was forty, the most important event of the Middle Ages occurred. As one of Islam’s most famous hadiths records,

The commencement of the (Divine) Revelation to [Muhammad] was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams which came true like bright daylight, and then the love of seclusion was bestowed upon him. He used to go in seclusion into the cave of [Mount] Hira where he used to worship. . .continuously for many nights before returning to. . .his family. He used to take with him the journey food for the stay and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food likewise again till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira.⁴¹

The truth, as it turned out, was Muhammad’s first revelation. And upon having this revelation, especially as the early biographer al-Tabari tells it, what Muhammad felt was fear, incredulity, and doubt. The biographer al-Tabari quotes Muhammad, immediately after the revelation, perhaps standing on the slope of Mount Hira, as saying, “There was no one of God’s creation more hateful than a poet or a madman; I could not bear to look at either of them. I said to myself, ‘[I am] either a poet or a madman, but [the] Quraysh shall never say this of me. I shall take myself to a mountain crag, hurl myself down from it, kill myself, and find relief in that way.”⁴² The stricken Muhammad prepared to do just this, but the angel Gabriel, or Jibreel in Islamic tradition, came to him and told Muhammad that Muhammad was God’s messenger, and though Muhammad tried to look away from Gabriel, everywhere Muhammad looked, Gabriel stood on the horizon.

Khadija, meanwhile, had become worried about her husband, and she sent a few people out to look for him. They found Muhammad, and brought him home. Khadija found her husband distraught. Muhammad told his wife that he thought he might be losing his mind, or just as bad, that he might be a poet. He told Khadija of what he had heard and seen. But soon the family rallied around Muhammad. Khadija had a Christian cousin who knew both the Tanakh and the New Testament. This cousin, understanding what Muhammad had seen, said that Muhammad must indeed be the prophet of Mecca.⁴³ With some reassurances from his family, Muhammad went and circled the Kaaba, and when he returned home, he saw the angel Gabriel again. Though time passed, and Muhammad began to doubt his own sanity once more, he had a second revelation. And for the record, let’s hear the first revelation of Muhammad. This was the one he heard in the cave on Mount Hira, and consists of the first five ayahs or verses of Surat al-Alaq, the 96th Surah of the Qur’an. These verses are:

ٱقْرَأْ بِٱسْمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ
خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ
ٱقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلْأَكْرَمُ
ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلْقَلَمِ
عَلَّمَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ

Or in English, in the Oxford Haleem translation, “Recite in the Name of thy Lord Who created, created man from a blood clot. Recite! Thy lord is most noble. Who taught by the Pen, taught man that which he knew not.”⁴⁴

The word “recite” here is also often translated as “read,” but in any case, the word Qur’an, according to majority opinion, comes from the word qaraa’a, meaning, “to recite,” or “to read,” with the word Qur’an today meaning, at the simplest level, “recitation.”

Muhammad’s worries about his madness were assuaged when he received another revelation. This revelation is captured in some other very early verses of the Qur’an, in which Muhammad was told, “By the pen and that which they inscribe, thou art not, by the blessing of thy lord, possessed. Truly thine shall be a reward unceasing. And truly thou art of an exalted character. Soon thou wilt see and they will see which of you is afflicted [with madness].”⁴⁵ In spite of these divine reassurances, though, more time passed, and Muhammad waited for a more complete revelation.⁴⁶ Muhammad had seen things, and heard luminous, but sparse verses, up until the time he had a longer revelation. This is the Oxford Haleem translation, and it is perhaps the earliest portion of the Qur’an that emphasized that the revelations Muhammad was having needed to be broadcast and shared with others.

By the morning brightness, and by the night when it grows still, your lord has not forsaken you [Prophet], nor does He hate you, and the future will be better for you than the past; your Lord is sure to give you [so much] that you will be well pleased. Did He not find you an orphan and shelter you, find you lost and guide you, find you in need and satisfy your need? So do not be harsh with the orphan and do not chide the one who asks for help; talk about the blessings of your Lord.⁴⁷

Muhammad was taught specific prayers and ablutions, and he shared them with his household – first Khadija, and then Muhammad’s young cousin ‘Ali and his adopted son Zayd, and then Muhammad’s dear friend Abu Bakr. These five were the first Muslims, and out of all of them, Abu Bakr, who would later hide in a cave with the Prophet, was the most prominent Meccan among Muhammad’s circle.

After the First Revelation: The Earliest Days of Islam

Abu Bakr was from a different clan than Muhammad, and Abu Bakr was a very influential and successful member of the Quraysh tribe. He became instrumental in the conversion of three members of a powerful clan called the Banu Abd-Shams. The most famous of this trio was a young merchant named ‘Uthman, who would later be Islam’s third Caliph. And just as Islam received its second small group of devotees, Muhammad had more revelations – revelations about upright conduct and cleanliness, and about continuing to recite the verses he’d received so far. As Muhammad’s revelations continued, he recited them to his family and followers, who in turn memorized them, and passed them onto one another.

Some of Muhammad’s cousins also joined the religion, although none of Muhammad’s uncles did. The reluctance of his uncles troubled the Prophet. One of the revelations Muhammad had had was the Qur’anic verse “Warn your nearest kinsfolk and lower your wing tenderly over the believers who follow you” (26:214-15).⁴⁸ Taking the directive seriously, Muhammad invited all of the leading men of the Hashemite clan to dinner – about forty of them, all told. Muhammad’s young cousin ‘Ali later recalled what happened next. There was only a modest amount of food on the table, and a single cup. Yet as the men passed around the food and drink, neither the food nor the beverage showed any sign of diminution.⁴⁹ One of Muhammad’s uncles – a skeptical one – huffed that Muhammad had put a spell on everyone. And so Muhammad repeated the miracle with the same assembly the next day. Only this time, he made clear that he was looking for his kinsfolk to join him. The result was irresolute. Young ‘Ali trumpeted his confidence in Muhammad’s message, causing some of the other Hashemites to chuckle at Abu Talib, ‘Ali’s father and Muhammad’s uncle. Some of Muhammad’s aunts were persuaded, but still, these were very early days, and skepticism toward Muhammad was persistent.

Islam might have continued to spread this way in Mecca – through the magnetism of Muhammad, and the earnest faith of his incipient band of followers. Unfortunately, though, one day, when Muhammad’s companions were out praying in an isolated spot outside of Mecca, they were harassed and ridiculed by some skeptics. Tempers got heated, and a fight began, and one of the Muslims hit one of the skeptics with a camel’s jawbone, wounding him. As the historian al-Tabari observed, at some point in the late 800s, “This was the first blood to be shed in Islam.”⁵⁰ In spite of the unfortunate violence, though, Muhammad’s movement continued to gain momentum. Mecca was a diverse place, and there was certainly room for one more religion there.

At this point in the story, Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib begins to take an increasingly important role. Abu Talib was the guy who took Muhammad in when Muhammad was a little boy. Abu Talib was the father of ‘Ali, Muhammad’s young cousin, whom Muhammad had taken in as a protégé. Uncle Abu Talib was also, at that point, a very prominent member of the Quraysh tribe. Many of the Quraysh were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Muhammad’s new creed. The recent fight didn’t help, but even more so, Muhammad was quite obviously preaching that the polytheistic system then resident in Mecca – the old traditional heterodox religion that had propelled the status quo Kaaba pilgrimage – was false. Muhammad’s theological message threatened the Quraysh tribe in two ways. First, it was impious, and disrespectful to the region’s traditions. Second, it was against the Quraysh’s business interest to have one of their own tribe creating a rival religion – an exclusive monotheism explicitly at odds with the city’s old heterodoxy. The Quraysh had a good thing going with the pilgrimage business in Mecca. They didn’t want Muhammad to change anything. The pilgrimage month was coming up, and the Quraysh needed Mecca to be hospitable and courteous to all of the arrivals. The Quraysh did not need pilgrims arriving in the midst of a sectarian turf war. And so the Quraysh asked Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib to pressure Muhammad to stop promoting Islam in Mecca.

This put poor Abu Talib in a very difficult position. He loved his nephew. Abu Talib also respected the traditions and businesses interests of the Quraysh. He could not turn against his brother’s son. Equally, Abu Talib couldn’t dismiss the sentiments of the greater tribe. Ibn Ishaq, in what may be the oldest biography of Muhammad, records this conversation between Muhammad and his uncle Abu Talib. Abu Talib told Muhammad, “Spare me and yourself. . .Do not put on me a burden greater than I can bear.” And Muhammad replied, “O my uncle, by God, if they put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left on condition that I abandoned this course, until God has made it victorious, or I perish therein, I would not abandon it.” Muhammad then burst into tears, and then rose. He was preparing to leave when his uncle, equally fraught with emotion, said, “Come back my nephew. . .Go and say what you please, for by God I will never give you up on any account.”⁵¹ It’s a beautiful passage, showing frankly how the road of Islam was not an easy one for Muhammad and those who loved him most.

These strains within Muhammad’s family were a microcosm of the greater strains in Mecca itself. The time for the pilgrimage grew closer, and the Quraysh bigwigs planned and plotted. They knew Muhammad was a formidable person, and a tremendous speaker. And so the Quraysh planted messengers on the outskirts of Mecca to tell all arriving pilgrims to be wary of Muhammad, because Muhammad was a sorcerer, and needed to be avoided. Their strategy was a fairly sound one, but it had a couple of flaws. First, as we’ve learned in this program so far, there was already an incipient monotheism in the air in and around Mecca. Christianity and Judaism were well known presences, and so to some Arab tribespeople, Muhammad’s message was sensible and familiar as it was powerful. One of the first Muslim converts was from a band of highwaymen, and these highwaymen, already with monotheistic sentiments, converted, thereafter offering those whom they robbed the option of having all their things returned to them if they accepted Islam.⁵² Another convert was a poet named Tufayl. The poet Tufayl received a warning. Tufayl heard that there was a man in Mecca with an extremely persuasive message. In a scene reminiscent of Odysseus and the sirens in the early biographies, Tufayl stuffed his ears with cotton when he went into the sacred courtyard, where Muhammad was preaching near the Kaaba. Feeling a little silly for having his ears plugged up – after all, Tufayl was a poet himself, and he had plenty of reasoning power, Tufayl unplugged his ears and listened. Hearing Muhammad reciting the verses of the Qur’an, Tufayl found that they made a lot of sense. Not long after, the poet Tufayl converted. A couple of Tufayl’s tribespeople joined him, but only a couple.

Up in Yathrib, again present-day Medina, a little over 200 miles north of Mecca as the crow flies, there was another positive sign for the future of Islam. A unique religious climate existed there. The Arabs of Yathrib lived alongside a devout population of Jews. Sometimes there were tensions between the two groups, and sometimes, the two groups shared cultural traditions with one another. From the Jews of Yathrib, the Arabs there had learned of monotheism, and one Jew in particular, who had recently died, had been proclaiming that a prophet would soon come to the Hijaz. When the news of Muhammad reached Yathrib – the news of an Arab prophet of the single, ascendant God, naturally, both the Jews and the Arabs of the city were very interested, though the Jews were more dubious on account of the fact that they had thought the inbound prophet would be Jewish. Muhammad ended up going up to Yathrib at just this juncture, although his visit only resulted in one conversion, as the Arabs of Yathrib were engaged in a brewing tribal war, and they had little interest in Islam at that particular moment.⁵³ [music]

The Early Meccan Pushback against Islam

We are, historically, in the 610s, within the story of Muhammad’s life. As Muhammad’s little band of companions grew, so, too, did tensions with the Quraysh establishment in Mecca. One of Muhammad’s uncles, a man named Hamzah, came to his defense after one of the Quraysh tribesmen viciously slandered Muhammad. The name of the slanderer was named Abu l-Hakam, who would later be known in Islamic history as Abu Jahl, or “the father of ignorance.” Abu Jahl, though temporarily silenced, would soon play a major role in the greater Quraysh campaign against Muhammad.

Muhammad’s uncle Hamzah was a very well-liked, even tempered, and powerful man within Mecca, and his conversion to Islam made the other Quraysh at once more hesitant to harass Muhammad, and at the same time, aware that Muhammad was becoming an increasingly serious problem for the status quo in Mecca. The Quraysh leaders banded together and they discussed what to do. They decided they’d send a representative to negotiate with Muhammad. The Quraysh offered Muhammad money, and then leadership and even kingship, and finally, if Muhammad wanted, a physician, in case he were indeed suffering from madness. Not deigning to reply to these overtures, Muhammad instead simply recited some of the Qur’an. The envoy of the Quraysh was stunned, and he returned to his compatriots to tell them that they should just leave Muhammad alone.

More time passed. The leaders of the Quraysh, some related to Muhammad, differed in their attitudes toward him. Some found him a person with gravity and great dignity, and others strongly disliked him, but all concurred that his prophesying was very dangerous for the old social order of Mecca. And while the landed and powerful were the likeliest to be opposed to Muhammad, the young, and the unsuccessful, were less so. Muhammad’s converts were a sundry bunch of family members, friends, youths, and the occasional blue blood who shared little other than finding Muhammad’s revelations persuasive. Muhammad’s staunchest enemies, however, had more in common.

The aforementioned Abu Jahl, or “Father of Ignorance” was venomously against Islam. So, too, were the seniormost leaders of a clan called Shams, including their leader Abu Sufyan, his sister Umm Jamil, and his brother-in-law Abu Lahab. This trio shared what Muhammad’s opponents most often shared. They were, first of all, powerful Quraysh aristocrats who needed the Mecca tourism industry to flourish as it had before. Second of all, they were not of Muhammad’s Hashim clan – but instead the Banu Abd-Shams, which turned increasingly against Islam as the movement grew. Third, and more generally, they were conservative tribespeople who saw Muhammad dividing children from allegiance to their parents, and thus fissuring the order that had governed Bedouin Arabia since time immemorial. Khadija’s nephew, for instance, converted, while his father swore antipathy toward Islam.

These familial divisions were happening everywhere in Mecca in the late 610s and early 620s. Although families might vow to part ways peaceably, some of what Muhammad taught was explicitly at odds with traditional Quraysh values. Divisions deepened. The characteristics of zealotry and inflexibility were brought out in various Meccans on both sides of the debate, with the fierce pagan conservatism of Meccans like Abu Lahab roiling up in response to the religious enthusiasm of Islam’s first converts.⁵⁴ Not yet ready for open assault, the Quraysh establishment attempted to expose Muhammad as a fake. They asked the Jewish community of Yathrib for advice, and the rabbis of Yathrib offered the Quraysh three questions to ask Muhammad – if Muhammad answered them correctly, then he might be telling the truth; if he didn’t, he was making it all up. Armed with these new questions, the Quraysh returned to Mecca and posed the stumper questions to the Prophet. Muhammad said nothing. He had no answers. No revelations were coming to him. Fifteen nights passed. The Quraysh were nonplussed. If Muhammad were just making things up, he’d have made something up, wouldn’t he? And finally, Muhammad answered their questions with Qur’anic revelations, offering these revelations to some of the rabbis up in Yathrib, as well.

The resulting answers and revelations were wondrous, but neither the Quraysh leaders, nor the rabbis acknowledged Muhammad as a prophet. And so animosities deepened. The Muslim underlings of Quraysh leaders were slandered, abused, and even tortured. Muhammad’s dear friend and follower Abu Bakr intervened to free two Muslim slaves who were being abused by their owners. Not all lowborn Muslim converts were so lucky. Abu Jahl, or the “father of ignorance” so opposed to Muhammad, incited men of his clan to torture their Muslim servitors and force these subordinates to renounce Islam.

When Muhammad saw his more lowborn followers denigrated and tortured, he was agonized. Muhammad knew that his own relatively high social standing protected him from abuse, but that many of the converts in his small flock were helpless beneath the abuses of their superiors. So Muhammad recommended that whoever needed to should immigrate across the Red Sea to Abyssinia, or the Kingdom of Axum, which Muhamad hoped would be a more tolerant place than Mecca had become in the 610s. Soon, small groups of Muslims began fleeing Mecca for Ethiopia. The Quraysh leaders were furious. Meccan slaves and youths leaving under the influence of Islam were just as upsetting to the social order as the religion expanding throughout the city in the first place. The Quraysh sent envoys to the King of Axum, who we should note, was Christian, and, bringing fine gifts, these Quraysh envoys asked that the Muslim refugees be rounded up and shipped back to Mecca.

The Ethiopian King said he wanted to meet these Muslim religious refugees. He and his Christian countrymen liked the polytheistic Meccan Quraysh as trading partners. But the Quraysh were also idol-worshipping heathens, and if some monotheists had washed up in Africa, the Ethiopian King felt that it was worth talking to them. In a dramatic scene, the Muslim refugees were summoned to the Ethiopian king’s court to tell their story. Their representative was a man named Ja‘far, a relative of the Prophet, who said that over in Mecca, people were blasphemous and worshipped idols. This, of course, was exactly what the Ethiopian king had already thought, so he asked Ja‘far to go on – tell him what this Islam thing was all about. Ja‘far explained that Muslims had a prophet, that this prophet had urged them toward monotheism, and that the Quraysh aristocrats in Mecca were being very mean to the Muslims. The Ethiopian king asked if the Muslims refugees had a revelation of their prophet. Ja‘far had just the thing – five gorgeous verses from the Qur’an that were about the virgin Mary discovering that she was pregnant with Jesus. The King of Ethiopia was not aware that Muslims considered Jesus to be a prophet of the one true God, too. Hearing the verses spoken about the Holy Mother by an Arab stranger in his court brought tears to the African king’s eyes. And the Ethiopian king, turning to the angry Quraysh envoys who were pursuing the Muslim refugees, said, in ibn Ishaq, “Of a truth, this [Qur’an] and what Jesus brought have come from the same niche. You [Quraysh] may go, for by God, I will never give them up. . .and [these Muslims] shall not be betrayed.”⁵⁵ Further prodding on the part of the Quraysh proceeded, but the Quraysh could do nothing to jeopardize the safety of the Muslim refugees in Ethiopia. [music]

The Late 610s: Gains and Losses for the Prophet Muhammad

A contingent of beleaguered Muslims, then, in roughly the late 610s CE, had escaped from Mecca, and this ratcheted up tensions in the city even further. From one of Islam’s most violent adversaries came a very famous conversion. A young man named Umar worshipped Mecca’s traditional gods ardently. Umar had been brought up to revere the gods and goddesses of the Kaaba, and young Umar vowed to kill Muhammad. Umar’s sister and brother-in-law were Muslims, however. The contentious young man went to confront them, and then, after a scuffle, Umar read some verses of the Qur’an. The verses touched him, and Umar converted right there. When the brawny young man came to Muhammad’s house, his sword belt jingling by his side, he was admitted. Rather than attacking the prophet, though, Umar said he’d come to declare his allegiance to Islam, and, hearing the tempestuous young man’s change of heart, Muhammad simply said, “God is most great.”⁵⁶ Umar’s conversion was more consequential than even Muhammad knew at that point, because Umar, two decades later, would become Islam’s second caliph in 634, conquering more territory than anyone had since Alexander of Macedon. Let’s stick with Muhammad’s era for now, though, and again, we’re in the mid-610s.

Just as young Umar had formerly been a staunch pagan, when he joined Islam, he became resolute and unwavering in the new faith, raising a controversy by going and praying in front of the Kaaba. And as Islam continued to spread, the Quraysh tribespeople opposed to it came up with a new plan. They would issue regulations against Muhammad’s clan – the Hashemite clan. The Hashemite clan would not be allowed to buy or sell in Mecca, and no one would intermarry with them, until Muhammad renounced his claims of being a prophet. The Muttalib clan, out of solidarity, joined their close Hashemite kinfolk.

At this juncture as before, Meccan society was a dense wickerwork of hundreds and hundreds of marriages and commercial partnerships, and business and social relationships that ran the gamut between formal and improvised. It was thus difficult, in practice, for Muhammad’s enemies to issue an ostracism toward two entire clans within the city. Women were still members of their native clans after they married, and various neighborhoods bustled with people from all sorts of clans, and so Muhammad and his extended family were able to get by. Still, times were tough, and finances were strained. Muhammad endured more open derision when he went to the Kaaba. The prophet’s friend Abu Bakr, and the formidable new convert Umar were Muslims from different clans, and they helped Islam in any way that they could. And though the ban made life difficult, it also helped spread the notoriety of Islam throughout Arabia. Mecca was a pretty famous place. The ostracism of two of its clans for religious reasons attracted curiosity. And so after a time, a mixture of natural sympathy, kin ties, and simple pragmatism led to the end of the ban. Muhammad’s clan, the Banu Hashim, along with their confederates, the Banu Muttalib, were allowed to have full participation in Meccan society once more.

The news of this reintegration reached the Muslim refugees who had fled to Ethiopia. Optimistic, many of them returned home, but when they arrived, they found that Muslims still had it hard in Mecca. Though some of the Quraysh had sought to blend Islam with the polytheistic traditions of Mecca, Muhammad himself was stringent about monotheism. His words on the subject are recorded in the Qur’an – “I will never worship what you worship, you will never worship what I worship: you have your religion and I have mine.”⁵⁷ And while Muhammad’s own faith was indestructible, and the end of the ban against his clan was auspicious, around the year 619, Muhammad faced some new challenges.

Muhammad was about 50 when both his wife Khadija, and his uncle Abu Talib died. The biographer ibn Ishaq tells of this momentous juncture of the Prophet’s life quite speedily.

Khadija and Abu Talib died in the same year, and with Khadija’s death troubles followed fast on each other’s heels, for she had been a faithful support to him in Islam, and he used to tell her of his troubles. With the death of Abu Talib he lost a strength and stay in his personal life and a defense and protection against his tribe. Abu Talib died some three years before [Muhammad] migrated to Medina, and it was then that [the] Quraysh began to treat [Muhammad] in an offensive way which they would not have dared to follow in his uncle’s lifetime.⁵⁸

And that’s it. Without editorializing much, I think it’s safe to say that losing both his wife of 25 years and an uncle who was as close to a father figure as Muhammad had ever had must have been agonizing to the 50-year-old Prophet, in spite of his growing success and unique social standing. His new followers and friends were there to stay, but Khadija and Abu Talib had known him for ages. In any case, the loss of these two pillars of his life, as we just heard, not only deprived Muhammad of loved ones. Their deaths also encouraged his adversaries to redouble their efforts against him and Islam.

Of all of Muhammad’s followers, at that point, his friend Abu Bakr, the future first Caliph of Islam, had it especially difficult. Once, poor Abu Bakr was mugged and tied up on the road near Mecca. On different occasions, people threw garbage at him. Muhammad suffered the same, and he decided he would go to the neighboring town of Ta’if, then as now about thirty miles east-southeast of Mecca, to look for help. Muhammad found help there, though not from the source he expected.

In Ta’if, there was a shrine to the ancient Arabian goddess al-Lat. When Muhammad asked if the shrine’s caretakers might accept Islam, they derided him and chased him away. He fled and found shelter on a pleasant hill known for its greenery. There, Muhammad had a conversation with a Christian slave from Nineveh, and the slave was so taken with Muhammad that, knowing nothing of Mecca, nor anything about the person to whom he was talking, the Christian slave said that indeed Muhammad was a prophet. This, perhaps, heartened Muhammad at a difficult moment, and the Prophet went on to a valley called Nakhlah. There, Muhammad was reciting Qur’anic verses and a group of seven jinn, or spirits, heard him. The jinn were struck by the power of Muhammad’s words, and they went back to their community of spirits with the news that a Prophet had come to Arabia.

Perhaps heartened by the modest successes of his brief journey, when Muhammad returned to Mecca, he was able to get a petition to a Quraysh clan leader and secure protection for himself. Back in the city, Muhammad made his way to his departed uncle’s house and he stayed the night. Restless, that night Muhammad went out to the Kaaba where he liked to go so often, and he was there long enough that he decided to take a nap along a low wall adjacent to the ancient shrine. And then, something extraordinary happened to the Muhammad. [music]

The Night Journey: Isra’ and Mi’raj

The story I’m about to tell you is historically very important. It is, put briefly, about a visionary journey that Muhammad went on one night in about 621. Traditional Islamic teaching on the subject is that Muhammad took two supernatural journeys the night that he returned to Mecca from Ta’if. The first journey, or the Isra’, was a journey form Mecca to Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The second journey, or the Mi‘raj, was an ascent up into heaven from Temple Mount. The scriptural basis for this two-part story is very brief. Let’s hear it. The Qur’an describes how Muhammad was compelled to “travel by night from the sacred place of worship to the furthest place of worship” (17.1), generally interpreted as a visionary journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.⁵⁹ In a later Surah, the Qur’an describes how Muhammad “saw [the angel Gabriel] by the lote tree beyond which none may pass near the Garden of Restfulness when the tree was covered in nameless [splendor]. . .Muhammad saw some of the greatest signs of his Lord” (53:13-18).⁶⁰ These, especially the second of them, do seem to describe a journey up to heaven with an angelic guide, but to be clear, that’s all that we have on the subject in the actual Qur’an. Later biographers, among them our two main sources for this show, ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari, and later chroniclers of the Hadiths, including al-Bukhari (59.7), Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (1.280), and at-Tirmidhi (46.1) – all of these ninth-century writers contributed to the story of the Prophet’s journey to Jerusalem, and then up to heaven, although they lived centuries after Muhammad.

The story behind Muhammad’s visionary journey to Temple Mount and then up to heaven, then, is scattered through a lot of different texts, so I’m going to follow modern biographer Martin Lings’ example, and patch together some of the most canonical narratives that describe this important journey.

In Muhammad’s vision, the angel Gabriel awakened him, and led him out of the Kaaba courtyard, where a white winged steed awaited the Prophet. Muhammad mounted the creature, and up it went – north along the Hijaz caravan route, over mountains and valleys, past Yathrib, and then past the Khaybar Oasis, until Muhammad and his archangelic companion reached the city of Jerusalem. There, Muhammad saw the earlier prophets – Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and others besides these. The prophets, old and new, prayed at the temple. Muhammad was offered wine and milk in two different cups, and he chose the milk, after which Gabriel commended Muhammad for knowing Islam’s prohibitions before they had even been revealed to him.

And then, incredibly, up Muhammad went from Temple Mount, and into heaven itself. The early ibn Ishaq biography describes Muhammad’s visions there in a way standard to Jewish and Christian revelation literature of Late Antiquity – there is a pagoda-like heaven with multiple layers, and Muhammad describes traveling upward through these layers and seeing Jesus and John the Baptist, and then Enoch, and later Moses, and eventually Abraham. Al-Tabari’s slightly later biography offers a description of Muhammad’s coming into proximity with God. Muhammad saw, at the edge of the highest layer of heaven, a tree covered in fruits, a tree called the lote tree. Then God approached, and as God did, the branches of the lote tree suddenly burst into jewels – pearls, rubies, and chrysolites. God then told Muhammad that fifty daily prayers would be required of all Muslims, and Muhammad, overawed, began to descend, once more seeing Moses toward the top of heaven.

The two prophets then conversed. In a scene of mutual prophetic camaraderie, Moses asked Muhammad what God had required of Muhammad’s people. Muhammad told him. Fifty prayers. Every day. Moses was skeptical. Moses said Muhammad should go back and negotiate with God on the subject. Moses, being quite an experienced prophet, said he had had a really rough time getting the Israelites to do anything on God’s behalf. And so Muhammad took Moses’ advice. Muhammad went back up to speak with God. God agreed to reduce the number of daily prayers. God lowered it to 40. Gratified, Muhammad returned to Moses, who told Muhammad that 40 prayers a day was probably still too many, and so up Muhammad went, and the number was lowered again, and this process repeated a sufficient number of times until finally, God acquiesced to lowering the number of daily prayers to five. With his visit to heaven complete, Muhammad joined the archangel Gabriel once more, and the two returned to the rock atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and thereafter, made their way back to Mecca.

There are two important things we should take away from this narrative, however brief the actual description of the visionary journey is in the Qur’an itself. First, this is the main etiology, or origin story, in Islam of how there came to be five daily prayers. Second, this story of the ascent to heaven is the reason why Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the holiest sites in Islam, next to the Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, where Muhammad is buried. To be clear, we’re nowhere near the end of Muhammad’s life story – he’s still eleven wives, several migrations, a great many Surahs, and numerous battles away from passing on peacefully in his family home in June of 632.

But to bring our story to a close for today, let’s talk about what happened the morning, and the weeks and months after Muhammad’s famous night journey. After his famous journey, Muhammad returned to harsh realities in Mecca. He was mocked by his adversaries for his story of going to Jerusalem and returning after a single night. His friend Abu Bakr built a mosque in front of his house so as to practice Islam there, but steadfast Abu Bakr was harassed by various Quraysh leaders. Muhammad, seeing that life in Mecca was going to be hard, had a revelation. The growing Muslim community needed to leave Mecca, and seek greener land up in Yathrib, where an oasis nourished date palm groves. Muhammad was smart about planning the exodus. He already had some converts up in Yathrib, and the population of Muslims there was growing.

When the time of the annual Mecca pilgrimage arrived, Yathrib’s small Islamic community sent 73 men and two women to meet Muhammad, and to see the Kaaba and the city where Islam had been revealed. From these northern converts, Muhammad had earlier rumors confirmed. Yathrib was in disarray. It could benefit from clear leadership, just as Muhammad’s ancestor had established the Quraysh’s hegemony over in Mecca. Understanding, then, that he would have some traction in Yathrib, and that Mecca had become increasingly hazardous to Muslims, in the year 622, Muhammad and many of his followers left Mecca to immigrate to Yathrib. [music]

The Hijra of 622, and a Review

In case you don’t know, by the way, 622 CE marks the date of the Hijra, Islamic calendars begin with the year 622, and thus, it is, as I record this, Hijri year 1447. Next time, we’ll pick up with the story of Muhammad getting set up in Yathrib, the establishment of his new household as he remarries, and the story of the followers of Islam clashing with various adversaries in Medina and Mecca. I thought that the Hijra of 622 would be a good stopping point for today, though, as newcomers to today’s subjects have probably heard enough ibns, abus, unfamiliar place names, and Islamic terminology for one program. To wrap up this episode, then, let’s quickly review what we’ve learned, and then spend a final moment considering our source texts.

We learned that Muhammad was born 570 in Mecca. His father Abdullah died before he was born, and though his mother Amina survived until he was six, Muhammad spent much of his childhood living with Bedouins, under the care of a wet nurse named Halima. After the death of his mother Amina, Muhammad was briefly under the supervision of his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib. When Muhammad’s grandpa died, he went to live with his uncle Abu Talib. Years passed, and the Prophet became a successful trading agent, capable of managing caravans and their commercial endeavors during journeys from Mecca all the way up to the Byzantine territory of Syria. At 25, he married a 40-year-old widow named Khadija, with whom he had four daughters and two sons, although the little boys did not survive childhood. Muhammad’s fortune and reputation grew, until he turned 40, and in 610, he had his first revelation. He doubted himself and was terrified that he was going mad, but as his revelations continued, and his family and friends supported him, Muhammad built a community of followers in Mecca. Many of the leaders of the Quraysh, the powerful tribe that controlled the city, were opposed to Muhammad, and in spite of their opposition, he persisted, and Islam grew. Though his beloved Khadija died in 619, along with his uncle Abu Talib, who had raised him, Muhammad, as he turned 50, continued to lead the Muslim community of Mecca. With a sense of responsibility for the burgeoning community of Islam both in and beyond Mecca, in the summer of 622, Muhammad made arrangements for a mass emigration to Yathrib, an event that, as we just learned, marks year 1 in the Islamic calendar.

The story that we heard today, chronologically speaking, encompasses most of Muhammad’s life. He is currently, in our narrative, 52 years old, and he passed away at 62, and so in some ways it seems odd to have two more programs devoted to just the last decade of the Prophet’s life, when we’ve covered so much of it thus far. The final 10 years of Muhammad’s life, however, were not only eventful ones, filled with military clashes between the Muslims on one side, and the Quraysh and various others on the other. The final 10 years of Muhammad’s life were also formative ones for other titanic figures within Islam, including his friend Abu Bakr, who would be Islam’s first caliph, his young friend Umar, would be Islam’s second caliph, Muhammad’s friend Uthman, who would be Islam’s third Caliph, and finally, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, who would be Islam’s fourth caliph, the father of Muhammad’s grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and the central figure in Shi’ism alongside Muhammad himself, not to mention the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and his third wife Aisha, other major figures from early Islamic history. In between where we are with the Hijra in 622 CE, and the death of the fourth caliph ‘Ali in 661, Islamic leadership expanded, incredibly, to encompass all of what is today the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and much of Turkey, Egypt, and Libya. Thus, the story of the four caliphs who actually knew Muhammad, traditionally called the Rashidun caliphs in Sunnism, along with the Prophet himself from the years between 622 and 632 is a good one to know in detail, as what happened during the last decade of the Prophet’s life shaped much of the world as we now know it today.

The Life of Muhammad and Related Source Texts

Before we get into the subject of Islam’s expansion and the caliphs who drove it, though, let’s focus on what we learned today. Today’s story was mostly the story of a person, based on texts written many generations after that person lived. Muhammad, in the early biographies, is sometimes a stoic saint, crackling with divine providence. But he is also, often, a human. Before the hagiographical materials that later amassed about him, in the actual Qur’an, there is an emphasis that Muhammad is not a miracle worker, and cannot use supernatural displays to convince anyone of his legitimacy. The Qur’an tells how some of Muhammad’s dissidents remarked, “We will not believe. . .you [Muhammad] until you make a spring gush out of the ground for us. . .or bring God and the angels before us face to face,” and then Muhammad remarks, “Glory be to my Lord! Am I anything but a mortal, a messenger?” (17:90, 92-3) with the answer to this rhetorical question being a tacit no.⁶¹ One of the great appeals of the Prophet’s story, for a thousand and a half years, has partly been that he is an ordinary Meccan, a guy with a job, a man who had some good luck, and some bad luck, whose life was not storybook perfect, and who, when he had his first revelation, was terrified that he might have been losing his mind. Reading the first part of Muhammad’s story in ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari – the part that we read today – in spite of the occasional hagiographic anecdotes, you find yourself rooting for him – for the kid who lost his parents, for the youth who learned the ropes of the caravan trade, for the man who was talented and personable enough to marry up a tier or two, and for the prophet whose new ideology’s success was a longshot in a city with religious traditions hardened by both custom and commercial oligarchy.

It is hard, unless you are deliberately trying to do so, not to be moved by the stories told in Muhammad’s early biographies, and the verses of the Qur’an traditionally associated with them. But traditions, however sacred, should be treated differently from history proper. Since the ninth-century biographers themselves, there has been a careful effort to cordon off fact from fiction. What I want to do now, for just a moment, is to talk a bit more about the historical reliability of our source texts on Muhammad’s life, those big racks of books that formed the first shot in our documentary.

This is a big topic to bring up so soon. We’ve only just met Muhammad. We haven’t looked at the Qur’an or hadiths yet. Though I’ve quoted the ninth-century historians a lot, I haven’t told you much about them. Without a strong background on classical Islamic historiography and hadith studies, together with a helping of early Arabic philology and archaeology, it’s hard to weigh in on the subject of the historical Muhammad without a lot of perilous guesswork. However, if you’ve listened to Literature and History up to this point, you do have a solid enough background in Abrahamic theology up to the seventh century CE. From the roots of the Old Testament in Late Bronze Age Ugaritic texts all the way to the evolution of the Talmud, we have explored how the other two Abrahamic religions evolved, and that background will be helpful to understanding the Islamic historical texts from which Muhammad’s biography comes down to us.

All three of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have different levels of sacred texts and traditions. They have canonical scriptures – the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, respectively. But they also have non-canonical texts that are nonetheless very cherished by their respective believers, then an outer halo of apocryphal writings, and then various narrative traditions born later on, such as pseudepigrapha, and sayings collections, and martyr tales, and hagiographies, or saints’ lives, embellished from the writings that led up to them. As we learned from our season about early Christianity, the smallest mentions and verses from the New Testament launched major narrative traditions that, while nonbiblical, are still important within Christianity. The same sort of thing happened over the first several centuries of Islamic history, with Qur’anic verses inspiring later stories that slowly braided together into the biographies that we now have today about the Prophet Muhammad. The story of Muhammad’s visionary journey to Jerusalem and then up to heaven has a clear basis in the Qur’an. The Qur’an, though, never tells us that baby Muhammad’s presence filled the udders of Bedouin livestock with milk, nor that the little boy had a cloud that followed him, and a telltale birthmark as he made an early trek on the Hijaz caravan trail. These stories may or may not be true, but they do sound quite a bit like Christian narratives about Jesus and the apostles that emerged generations after the first century CE.

A question worth asking, probably sooner rather than later, is, to put it very bluntly, how much of ibn Ishaq and his successors is historically accurate? How much do the early biographies of ibn Ishaq and ibn Hisham, ibn Sa’d, and al-Waqidi, written at the least two centuries after Muhammad’s death, depart from the hard facts of history? And the short answer to this question is that no one knows. Practically speaking, as historians Rizwi Faizer and Andrew Rippin observe, “For many scholars the notion of establishing the historical details of the life of Muhammad on the basis of any. . .early narrative sources is virtually impossible.”⁶²

Some bookcases in a modern Islamic library. It’s easy enough to repeat the inherited dogmas about early Islamic history, or to parrot revisionist theories on early Islamic history. To actually read early works of Islamic history, as we have done in this program, is a somewhat more involved task. Photo by PeaceSeekers.

Academic skepticism toward the biographies and historical works of antiquity is not, of course, something unique to Islamic studies. As we’ve learned in past episodes, in many fields of the study of antiquity, there have been movements against relying on premodern works of history. Latinists today no longer take Livy and Plutarch at face value, just as scholars of patristic history understand that the chronicles of figures like Eusebius and Jerome are wildly selective, just as, since the work of Julius Wellhausen in the late nineteenth century, biblical scholars have been reading the Hebrew of the Tanakh very diligently, and second guessing its historical reliability. In the same fashion, for a long time, scholars within Islamic studies have been exploring some of the mysteries and inconsistencies of Islam’s early historical texts. Thus, when the school often called the Revisionist school of Islamic studies started being applied to the great mass of ninth century writings about Muhammad, the question asked was generally how much of the biographies and the hadiths were historically accurate, and how much of them were devout hagiography. Somewhere between the extreme position that every facet of early Islamic biography is correct, and on the opposite side, the other position, that all of it is hagiographic fiction – somewhere between these two extremes is the truth.

To give you a counterpoint to the much of the story that we’ve heard today, the popular English historian and podcaster Tom Holland, in a 2012 book entitled In the Shadow of the Sword, adopted the revisionist approach of western scholars like Patricia Crone and John Wansbrough. The book, which several of you have asked me about, is fine. It brought some academic approaches to Islam that began in the 1970s into popular circulation. I’ve read it, too. Holland’s basic thesis, aside from a couple of more fringe theories, is that a lot of legerdemain went on atop the desks of Islam’s early chroniclers, and that a lot of hadiths and biographies of Muhammad contain a lot of fiction. The book is a decent piece of popular history with a surprisingly shrill tenor of disdain toward traditional Islamic historiography. Every ancient culture, after all, wrote fiction about its origins, and in the lost history of every human religion there are rugs lumpy with the amount of dust that’s been swept under them. We know this well, because Islam is not our first Abrahamic rodeo in Literature and History.

We’ll come back to the revisionist approaches to Islamic history in later episodes. If I told an Introduction to Shakespeare class, during the first lecture, that there was some evidence that Shakespeare collaborated with other writers on some of his plays, then for some reason, a cadre of contrarians would only take away that tangy morsel of information, forgetting everything else I said about Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies, and so on. In much the same way, if we begin Islamic history with revisionist approaches like Holland’s, I am afraid a similar faction of listeners will march forth armed with academically rickety postulations, disregarding the other, sturdier 99% of the story. Revisionism is great, and it’s important, and it also sells books. But it’s also, like candy and soda, only a very small part of a well-balanced intellectual diet, the majority of which ought to be large helpings of the grains, fruits and vegetables of primary texts. We cannot revision things, after all, unless we vision them in the first place. And in this episode, we’ve undertaken the considerable labor of studying the first 52 years of Muhammad’s life, as it’s been recorded in dozens of texts that have been studied for over a thousand years, and I think that’s plenty for one show.[music]

Moving on to the Momentous 620s

You may think, here at the end of this first program on the life of Muhammad, that we haven’t gone too far into Islam yet. But even in this initial episode on Muhammad, you may have learned more than you think you have. The word Sunnism, as in Sunni Islam, today practiced by 85-90% of all Muslims – the word Sunnism comes from the word Sunnah, which means, “habit,” or “way.” Sunnis revere the Qur’an, of course, but they also study and venerate the habits and ways of Muhammad himself, as taught in the biographical materials set down very early on in Islamic history. Thus, what we’ve been doing in this program – studying the life of the Prophet from traditional texts – what he did, what he said, and what he thought about things – is an enormous part of Islam in the world today. Studying the life of the Prophet has been the enterprise of tens of thousands of Islamic scholars, ever since the 600s, scholars whose serious, critical, collegial mindset has been underestimated and downplayed a bit too often in western scholarship.⁶³

So, this long episode takes us through Islamic sacred history from Abraham and Ishmael all the way down to the hijra of 622. In the next program, we’re going to cover just eight extremely eventful years of Muhammad’s life – the years that stretch from 622 to 630. In these years, the population of Muslims who emigrated to Yathrib grew and grew. Beginning with small raids and skirmishes of self-defense, Muhammad and his followers began forging their way forward with war as well as revelation. We will learn more about Muhammad, his later wives, and the future caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. And as events quicken in the life of Muhammad, we’ll also get a sense of things in the larger Arabian world during these eventful years in the Hijaz.

As I just noted, Muslims have always studied Muhammad’s as a life well lived. After the Hijra of 622, as Muhammad became an increasingly prominent leader in Yathrib or Medina, he took on more and more responsibilities, becoming, among other things, a community leader, a lawmaker, a diplomat, and a general. Muhammad’s time as a leader of Medina has been of special interest to Islamic posterity. In Islamic law, when the Qur’an doesn’t provide a clear answer about how society ought to be governed, one can often find a hadith, or scores of hadiths, or biographical anecdotes to help clear things up. What Muhammad said about X, Y, or Z, in other words, has been a persistent question in Islamic history, and between 622 and 630, considering the number of proverbial hats that he wore, Muhammad said and did a great many things.

There’s a quiz on this program in your podcast app – a little longer than most, because in my opinion there are a lot of facts and vocabulary words we covered in this episode that are worth reviewing if you have a moment to do so. For you Patreon supporters, there’s some bonus content available along with this week’s release. For everyone, a short special announcement. I have consulted with Muslim and ex-Muslim family and friends who know my work on whether or not comedy songs would be a good idea in a sequence of programs on Muhammad and the Qur’an. All of them said, approximately, “No, don’t do that, Doug. We like you. Some believers wouldn’t mind. But stay classy. It’s overall not a good idea.” Thus, my middling comedic stylings, by the unanimous recommendation of the panel, will pass over the Prophet, peace be upon him, and the Qur’an in respectful silence. I do plan to resume them afterward. If you want a little more Literature and History music, I recently finished putting every single song from this podcast up on YouTube, and there’s also a dedicated “Songs” page on the website now with links to every song from every show.

So, next time, as the earliest Muslims, following the Hijra of 622, slowly get set up in what is today Medina, we’ll learn a lot of foundational Islamic history – how the first Islamic constitution was created, and what it says; how the first mosque was established, and the call to prayer; how Muhammad remarried, and became a grandfather, and how the Quraysh oligarchy, year after year in the 620s, tried, and failed, to suppress Islam and enforce the old heterodox hegemony. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.



References

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