The Prophet Muhammad (2)

Shortly before Muhammad’s birth, the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople, reached the zenith of its power under Justinian. Throughout the Prophet’s lifetime, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia were ravaged by wars between Byzantium and Persian. The Persians captured Damascus in 613, sacked Jerusalem in 614, and briefly took Egypt. Then the tide was reversed, and in 625, seven years before Muhammad died, the Byzantines scored a decisive victory over the Persians at Nineveh. Southern Arabia was a Persian satrapy for a time, but most of these events on the northern fringes of the peninsula had little direct impact on the Prophet. Their importance to him was that they left both Byzantium and Persia exhausted and vulnerable to the advance of the inspired Arabians who were to overwhelm them within a generation. It is often said that Muhammad was the only great religious leader to live in the full light of history, meaning that his life and works known to us in detail, recorded by himself and by contemporaries whose works survive. But it is difficult to distinguish facts about Muhammad from pious tradition passed down as fact. Scholars do not even agree on the year of his birth. Information about the years before he undertook his prophetic mission is almost as scanty as information about the young manhood of Jesus. There are wide variations in accounts of such crucial events as the Battle of Badr and the hijra, and the bias of each narrator influences his accounts. Muslim biographers and hostile commentators have irreconcilable views about Muhammad’s character and motivation and about the nature of his mission. What Muslims believe was divine inspiration and a command from God has been ascribed by some Western writers to epilepsy or fakery or insanity. Dante, in the The Divine Comedy, consigned Muhammad to the ninth circle of the Inferno, with the “sowers of schism and of discord,” as if Muhammad were a renegade Christian. Henry Treece, his story of the Crusades, attributed Muhammad’s revelations to the sun-crazed musings of a semiliterate trader lulled into a trance by the swaying of his camel. Because of the tradition that Muhammad actually fell down, groaning and sweating, as the revelation came upon him, Tor Andrae, a sympathetic biographer, observed, “it has long been thought that Mohammed was an epileptic. Even certain Byzantine writers made this discovery, and for a long time past western writers have edified their readers with this compromising fact about the archenemy of Christianity. Even in recent times some authors have held fast to this idea, influenced by the scientifically superficial and hasty theory, which the medical psychology of the past century has made fashionable for a while, that the inspired state is ‘pathological.’” However, Andrae says there is no evidence that Muhammad was clinically epileptic; even if there were, that would not necessarily undermine his claim to have received divine revelations. This accounts of Muhammad’s life and work is derived from both western and Muslim account, including the Koran, which is the only source of detail about many episodes in the Prophet’s career. Dates and events that are presented as factual are those on which all accounts, Muslim and non-Muslim, agree.


Muhammad’s father was of the Hashem (or Hashim) family, a minor but respected clan within the powerful tribe of the Quraish. Later generations of Hashemites, collateral descendants of the Prophet through the line of his great-grandfather, claimed the status of nobility among Arab families. The Quraish, who dominated Meccan commerce and controlled the lucrative traffic in pilgrimages to the idols enshrined in the Kaaba, later became Muhammad’s most determined opponents and are condemned in the Koran as unbelievers. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, died before Muhammad was born. The Prophet’s mother, Amina, died when the boy was six, and he was entrusted to the care of his grandfather, Abdel Muttalib. The grandfather was a distinguished personage, said to have been a descendant of Ishmael, and was the custodian of the Kaaba. Abdel Muttalib is honored in Muslim tradition as the man who rediscovered and excavated the well of Zamzam, which had been filled during a tribal dispute. Abdel Muttalib died only two years later, and the boy Muhammad was passed on again, this time to an uncle, Abu Talib. The Koran’s stress on justice and charity toward orphans is apparently attributable to these events of Muhammad’s childhood, though of course those who believe that the Koran is entirely and only the eternal revealed word of God would minimize the extent to which its contents were influenced by the personal experience of the man chosen as the conduit for the revelation.