Cambridge University Press

The family of the Prophet.

About the year 610, the seeker after religious truth received his first revelations. They came upon him like the breaking of dawn. The first words revealed to him were the opening five lines of sura (chapter) 96: "Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created, created Man of a blood-clot. Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the Pen, taught Man that he knew not." His consciousness of the presence of the divine brought awe, fear, and foreboding.

In the early years the content of these revelations was the vision of a great, just God, Allah, who would on the day of judgment weigh every man's works and consign him to bliss or damnation. The early revelations emphasized the fear of the last judgment, piety and good works, and warnings against neglect of duties and heedlessness of the final day of reckoning. Opposed to the worship of God and fear of the last judgment were presumption, pride in human powers, and attachment to the things of this world. This was the false pride of the Meccans, which led them to the sin of avarice--neglect of almsgiving and the poor. In addition to preaching these ideas, Muhammad instituted ritual prayer. Eschatological piety, ethical nobility, and prayer formed the basis of early Islam.

The revelation in the Quran bore important similarities to Christianity and Judaism. For Muhammad the revelations came from the same source. Christian parallels are evident in the articulation of Muhammad's vision of the last judgment--the prediction that it would come with thunder, trumpets, and earthquakes, that the world would be destroyed and the dead resurrected, that it would be a terrifying moment when, one by one, all men passed before God, the angels interceding only for the good. These details were found in the preaching of itinerant Syrian monks and missionaries at the fairs of Arabia. Ideas similar to Judaism, such as uncompromising monotheism, belief in written revelations, the conception of a prophet sent to a chosen people, and certain specific religious practices are also prominent in the Quran. Yet Muhammad's inspiration and the language in which it was couched were original. He had been vouchsafed a personal knowledge of God's being and will, and must have understood his revelation in the sense of the Arabian monotheists, who believed in a transcendent God but were neither Jews nor Christians.

For three years after the first revelations, Muhammad remained a private person, coming to terms with God's message. He related his experiences to his family and friends, and the force of his inspiration and the compelling language in which it was clothed persuaded them that his visions were indeed divine revelations. A small group of people accepted his ideas and gathered around him to hear and recite the Quran. These were the first converts, and they included his wife Khadija, Abu Bakr and 'Ali, later to be Caliphs (the Prophet's successors as leaders of the Muslims).

After three years the time had come for a public mission. In about 613 Muhammad received the revelation that begins "Rise and warn." He began to preach publicly, a first step toward injecting religious ideas into the actualities of social and political life. Significantly, the first converts were rootless migrants, poor men, members of weak clans, and younger sons of strong clans--those people most dissatisfied with the changing moral and social climate of Mecca, for whom the Prophet's message proved a vital alternative.

Still, apart from his small following, Muhammad's preaching met with almost universal opposition. From the Quran we know that the Quraysh, the traders who dominated Meccan life, belittled Muhammad's revelations. They scoffed at the bizarre notion of a last judgment and resurrection, and asked for miracles as proof of the truth of his message. Muhammad's only response--still the Muslim response--was that the Quran itself, with its unique beauty of language, is a miracle and a sign of revelation. Nonetheless the Quraysh denounced Muhammad as a kahin, a soothsayer, a disreputable sort of magician or madman. Then came insults, harassment of Muhammad and his followers, and an economic boycott that extended to keeping the Muslims from purchasing food in the markets.

This opposition was couched in religious terms, but Muhammad's preaching was in fact an implicit challenge to all the existing institutions of the society--worship of gods and the economic life attached to their shrines, the values of tribal tradition, the authority of the chiefs and the solidarity of the clans from which Muhammad wished to draw his followers. Religion, moral belief, social structure, and economic life formed a system of ideas and institutions inextricably bound up with one another. To attack them at any major point was to attack the whole society root and branch. The revelations of the Quran provided Muhammad with a response to this opposition. He was justified in his preaching because he was sent by God to rescue his people from ignorance and guide them on the path to righteousness. He was a prophet in the long succession of Old and New Testament and Arabian prophets; he was a prophet sent to declare God's will in Arabic. At this stage Muhammad included Christians and Jews, as well as pagans, in his mission. Only later did it become clear that his preaching would establish a new religion alongside Judaism and Christianity.

As Muhammad's mission unfolded it became clear that it involved not only the presentation of the Quranic revelation, but the leadership of the community. Prophecy implied eschatological vision and knowledge of God's will, which in turn entailed right guidance and social leadership. We have a concrete sign that as early as 615 Muhammad had become the leader of a community, and that those who believed in his teachings constituted a group set apart from other Meccans. In that year, a group of his followers departed for Abyssinia. For the sake of religion people were willing to leave their families and clans and take up life together in a foreign land. The bonds of common belief were stronger than the bonds of blood. In this way, the new religion threatened to dissolve the old order of society and create a new one.

The opposition to Muhammad revealed yet another dimension of the relations between religion and society. It exposed the extent to which Muhammad's very survival in Mecca, to say nothing of his preaching, depended on his uncle, Abu Talib, and his clansmen, the Banu Hashim, who protected him because he was their kinsman. With their support, Muhammad could, despite harassment, continue preaching. But from about 615 or 616, he no longer made many converts. He had by then about a hundred followers, but the Meccan boycott had made it clear that to join Muhammad was to invite hardship. The truth of his message and his oratorical, poetical, and personal qualities were no longer as persuasive because the man himself was insulted, hounded, and ostracized. For his mission to succeed, Muhammad would have to be in a more powerful position. People would not be moved by ideas alone, only by ideas propounded with commanding prestige.

In 619, Muhammad resolved to seek support outside Mecca. By then his situation had become precarious. His wife Khadija and his uncle Abu Talib were dead; the support of his clan had diminished. He finally decided to go to al-Ta'if, a nearby oasis, and call on the people there to accept him as Prophet. This venture proved naive. Muhammad was ridiculed and driven out. He also tried to find support among the bedouins, but again met with no success. Now Muhammad understood that to protect himself and his followers, to overcome the resistance of the Quraysh, and to gain a hearing from Arabians beyond the small circles spontaneously attracted to him, some kind of political base was necessary.

At this juncture, the situation of the agricultural oasis of Medina was a godsend. Like Mecca it was inhabited by various clans rather than by a single tribe, but unlike Mecca it was a settlement racked by bitter and even anarchic feuding between the leading tribal groups--the Aws and the Khazraj. Prolonged strife threatened the safety of men in the fields and called into question Medina's very existence. Unlike the bedouins, Medinans had to live as neighbors, and could not move from place to place.

Moreover, like Mecca, Medina was undergoing social changes that rendered the underlying bedouin form of kinship society obsolete. Agricultural rather than pastoral needs governed its economy. Its social life came increasingly to be dictated by spatial proximity rather than by kinship. Also, Medina had a large Jewish population, which may have made the populace as a whole more sympathetic to monotheism.