Prophet Muhammad

By Julien Moreau

He was an orphan, a merchant, and — by his followers' account — the unlettered recipient of the word of God. Within a century of his death, the community he founded ruled an empire from Spain to Central Asia. No life in history combined the roles of prophet and statesman so completely, or changed the world so fast.

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE into the Quraysh tribe, the custodians of the Kaaba. His father died before his birth, his mother when he was six; he was raised by his grandfather and then his uncle Abu Talib. As a young man he worked the caravan trade and won a reputation for honesty — al-Amin, the trustworthy — that brought him employment, and then marriage, with the wealthy widow Khadija. He was forty when, retreating to the cave of Hira above Mecca during the month of Ramadan, he experienced the first revelation: the command "Iqra" — Read, recite. What followed over twenty-three years, Muslims believe, was the Qur'an: not his composition but God's speech, delivered through the angel Gabriel.

For a decade he preached in Mecca — one God, the Last Judgment, care for the poor — and for a decade Mecca persecuted him. In 622 he made the Hijra, the migration to Yathrib, soon renamed Medina, the City of the Prophet. That journey is year one of the Islamic calendar, and it marks his transformation: in Medina he was no longer only a preacher but the head of a community, the ummah — drafting the Constitution of Medina binding tribes and faiths into one polity, leading prayers and armies alike. The battles of Badr (624), Uhud (625), and the Trench (627) secured the community's survival; the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah (628) secured its legitimacy; and in 630 he entered Mecca almost without bloodshed, cleansing the Kaaba of its idols. His Farewell Sermon in 632 — proclaiming the equality of all believers, "no Arab over non-Arab" — was his political testament. He died in Medina that year and was buried in his house.

The Qur'an he left — 114 chapters of unmatched Arabic eloquence — became the constitution of a civilization: its law, its theology, its language's gold standard. Within his lifetime Arabia was united under Islam for the first time; within a generation his successors' armies carried the faith to two continents. Prophet, lawgiver, general, and statesman in a single life: the ummah he founded now numbers two billion.

Impact on civilization

Islam, founded on Muhammad's life and the Qur'an, became the world's second-largest religion — some two billion adherents — and the foundation of a civilization that preserved and extended Greek science, invented algebra and the hospital, and carried trade and learning from Córdoba to Samarkand. The Qur'an fixed classical Arabic as a sacred and literary language across three continents for fourteen centuries. Islamic law, derived from his example and sayings, ordered the daily life of societies from West Africa to Indonesia. The ummah — the transnational community of believers he created at Medina — remains the largest intentional community in human history, and the Hijra calendar still orders the time of a quarter of humanity. The Five Pillars he established — testimony, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage — gave a quarter of humanity a shared daily rhythm, binding believers from Senegal to Indonesia in the same acts at the same hours. Few founders have so completely fused the spiritual and the political: the mosque and the marketplace, the law court and the battlefield, all traced their authority to the same life.