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The History of Mohammad
Less than one hundred
years after Mohammad’s death in 632 the first Muslim historians began to
write about his life. These were Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767), Muhammad ibn
‘Umar al-Waqidi (d. c. 820); Muhammad ibn Sa’d (d. 845); and Abu Jarir
at-Tabari (d. 923). These scholars reconstructed their narrative from oral
traditions and early documents, and through their effort we know more about
Mohammad than we do any other Prophet.
Nevertheless we need to
keep in mind that the stories of Mohammad’s life were written to satisfy
contemporary norms and included miraculous and legendary stories that might
be misinterpreted today. As we have noted with the stories surrounding the
Axial Sages, the Old Testament and the Gospels, such accounts are not to be
taken literally. According to Reza Aslan they “function as prophetic topos:
a conventional literacy theme that can be found in most mythologies. Like
the infancy narratives in the Gospels, these stories are not intended to
relate historical events, but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic
experience. They answer the questions: What does it mean to be a prophet? …
It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of
Muhammad, Jesus or David are true. What is important is what these stories
say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings: that theirs is a holy and
eternal vocation, established by God from the moment of creation.” (No god
but God, The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Reza Aslan.)
Not much is known about
his early childhood, but according to tradition Mohammad was born in Mecca
in 570, the year known as the year of the Elephant, in which Mecca was
miraculously saved (see below). He was a Quraysh from the clan of Hashim.
Many stories surround his childhood and birth, which was announced in a
tale similar to the Christian story of Mary: Mohammad’s mother, a widow
named Amina, one day heard a voice say to her: “You carry in your womb the
lord of this people, and when he is born, say: ‘I place him beneath the
protection of the One, from the evil of every envious person’, then name
him Muhammad.”
The Year of the
Elephant
Tradition tells that
Abraha, the Abyssinian Christian ruler of Yemen, attacked Mecca with a herd
of elephants imported from Africa. Abraha’s goal was to destroy the Ka’ba
and make the Christian church at Sana’ the new religious center of the Arab
world. The terrified Quraysh had never seen an elephant, much less a whole
herd, so they ran to the mountains to escape, leaving the Ka’ba with no
defense. But just as it was about to be attacked, the sky went dark as a
flock of birds, each carrying a stone in its beak, rained down on the
invading army which was forced to retreat.
Mohammad was orphaned
at the age of six when his mother died, and went to live with his
grandfather Abd-Al-Muttalib, who was in charge of providing the water of
the Zam-Zam to pilgrims. But by the
time he was eight years old, his grandfather, too, had died and Mohammad
was taken in by his Uncle Abu Talib and employed in his successful caravan
business, so he was saved from a life of slavery or indebtedness
experienced by so many orphans at the time. In a story that resembles that
of Samuel in the Old Testament and others of that genre, it was on a
trading expedition to Syria, when Mohammad was only nine years old, that a
Christian monk named Bahira recognized him as “the Messenger of the Lord of
the Worlds.”
At twenty-five, when
Mohammad was still unmarried and dependent on his uncle, he met a very
distant cousin, Khadija, a beautiful widow, then probably in her late
thirties. Khadija was unusual for a woman of her time, she was a respected
member of Meccan society and a very successful businesswoman in her own
right. In spite of his tenuous social circumstances, according to Ibn
Hisham, Mohammad had a reputation for “truthfulness, reliability, and
nobility of character,” and Khadija entrusted him to take a caravan of
goods to Syria and sell it. When he returned home with more profits than
she anticipated, she proposed marriage to him and he accepted, thus
acquiring status and entry into Meccan society. Although polygamy was the
norm at the time, Mohammad and Khadija were in a monogamous marriage for twenty-five
years until her death. They had six children.
As an orphan himself,
Mohammad would have been aware of just how easy it was to fall outside
Mecca’s religio-economic system. With his marriage and his businesses doing
well, he now had access to the prosperous life. He saw firsthand that
although the leading families of the Quraysh believed in the one God, this
belief was not relevant to their lives; they had forgotten that everything
depended upon Him. Now that they
were rich, they adhered to the very worst aspects of murawah and had thrown
away the best: they were arrogant, reckless, niggardly and egotistical;
they had become self-centered, no longer believing in anything but riches
and took no responsibility for people outside their immediate, elite
circle.
Mohammad saw the
decline in traditional values as a threat to the very existence of his
tribe. But he was sure that social reform had to be based on a new
spiritual foundation for it to actually take effect. As a trader, Mohammad
came in frequent contact with Jews and Christians and would have been
familiar with stories from both the Old Testament and the Gospels.
According to the scholar Ikbal Ali Shah, Mohammad made “an exhaustive study
of other religions.” He was aware
that his own people, although they believed in al-Lah, lacked a sacred book
of their own. “The people of the
Book” had codified Laws that were both religious and social, governing
their behavior from dawn to dusk. His own people had no such thing and
because of this their lives were in chaos, many were suffering and
destitute, and the whole tribe was in danger of extinction.
Before the revelations,
he had no idea that his destiny would be to implement these vital changes.
He was from a minor clan, the Hashim, and scholars point out that, in
common with other prophets before him, he initially wanted nothing to do
with what was happening to him and was extremely upset, so much so that
without Khadija’s intervention “Mohammad might have gone through with his
plan to end it all, and history would have turned out quite differently.”
(Reza Aslan)
He was prone to
spending long hours in retirement in meditation. He would provide himself
with simple food and water, and then head directly for the hills and
ravines in the neighborhood of Mecca, particularly to the cave named Hira
in the Mount An-Nur two miles away from the city, a place also visited by
the hanifs. According to the historian Tabari, there he would perform
devotions and distribute alms to the poor who visited him.
God’s words were spoken
directly to Mohammad just as they had been to the Old Testament Prophets
before him. Because it is the language of sacred texts, Hebrew was often
considered sacred. In post-biblical times, it was referred to as lashon
ha-kodesh, the holy language. And like biblical Hebrew, the Arabic of the
Qur’an (Recitation) is also considered sacred because it is the language
through which Mohammad received God’s revelations. Both were addressed to a
predominately oral society. They were meant to be read aloud, recited, and
their sounds are an essential part of their sense.
Both Hebrew and Arabic
have multiple resonances of words that have the same trilateral root which
affect the listener on multiple levels. The English language can only
provide a sense of this on a far, far simpler level, in certain phrases
such as: “looking through the pane” where the pane of glass also can bring
up the idea of physical or emotional pain.
One day, when he was
about forty years old, Mohammad was alone in the cave when suddenly a man
in a white dress appeared to him. Mohammad himself described what happened:
“Then he took me and
squeezed me vehemently and then let me go and repeated the order ‘Recite.’
‘I cannot recite' said I, and once again he squeezed me and let me go till
I was exhausted. Then he said, ‘Recite.' I said, ‘I cannot recite.’ He
squeezed me for a third time and then let me go and said:
‘Recite in the name of
your lord who created –
From an embryo created
the human.
Recite your lord is
all-giving
Who taught by the pen
Taught the human what
he did not know before
The human being is a
tyrant
He thinks his
possessions make him secure
To your lord is the
return of everything’ Qur’an:
96:1-8
Mohammad was terrified
and unable to understand what had happened to him. Had he gone mad or
become one of the Kahins, the ecstatic poets whom he despised? What had
happened? He staggered down the
mountain and sought Khadija, crying “Wrap me up! Wrap me up!” Khadija
covered him in a cloak and held him and when he was calmer, questioned him.
He told her what he had experienced and that he feared he had gone mad, but
Khadija had no doubt that his revelation was authentic, “This cannot be my
dear, God would not treat you thus. You are known to be truthful and a
bearer of the burdens of others. You give to the poor, you feed guests, you
work against injustice.”
(The Life of Muhammad,
I. Ishaq, translated by A. Guillaume pg.106)
But Mohammad was
inconsolable, so Khadija went to the only person she could think might be
able to verify the nature of what had happened, her cousin Waraqa. Waraqa
had been one of the founding four Hanifs but was currently a practicing
Christian. He was familiar with the Scriptures and recognized Mohammad’s
experience for what it was. “If this be true, Khadija, there has come to
him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the
Prophet of this people.” (Mohammad: A Prophet of our Time, Karen Armstrong)
Some scholars doubt
that Mohammad would have been the successful businessman he was, had he
been unable to read and write the correspondence and documentation relating
to his own business. He may have been able to read both Arabic and the
Aramaic in common use by the Jewish community at the time. They suggest
that the epithet the Qur’an uses for Mohammad: “an-nabi al-ummi”
traditionally meaning “the unlettered Prophet,” might instead mean “The
Prophet for the unlettered,” in other words, for the people without a holy
book. “We did not give [the Arabs]
any previous books to study, nor sent them any previous Warners before
you.” (The Qur’an 34:44).
Nevertheless, the
revelations that Mohammad received were in words remote from his world: he
was not known to have composed any poetry and had no special rhetorical
gifts. From the first revelation, the Surahs (chapters) of the Qur’an would
deal with matters of belief, law, politics, ritual, spirituality and
personal conduct, cosmology, and economics in what Karen Armstrong
describes as an “entirely new literary form.” The Qur’an itself states, “If
you are in doubt of what We have revealed to Our messenger, then produce
one chapter like it. Call upon all your helpers, besides God, if you are
truthful.” (The Qur’an 2.23) No one was able to do this.
Illuminated manuscript:
the first surah of the Koran
The first audiences of
the Qur’an were not unsophisticated linguists; these people were passionate
about composing both poetry and prose; they excelled in oratory, diction
and eloquence. The Arabic language was their pride and joy and they vied
with each other in their ability to be fluent and eloquent speakers at
competitive events for poetry and oration. Their stories told of their
adventures and their valor in warfare, of their amorous exploits and
extolled the virtues of their women. Like the ancient Greeks and other oral
societies of old, they committed thousands of tales and poems to memory
which were passed down by oral tradition from generation to generation.
Their pride in their mastery of the Arabic language knew no bounds: they
referred to all non-Arabs as “Ajums” (people suffering from a speech
impediment.)
After the first
revelation there was a gap of two years in which Mohammad received no
revelations, and he quite naturally would have doubted the veracity of the
first one. After all, he was not from a distinguished clan, not a miracle
worker, and not an impressive figure in the eyes of the Quraysh; what was
he doing receiving the word of God? Was his arrogance even worse than their
own?
Then a second vision
occurred, this time revealing that those who experience the care of God
have a duty to others “… one who asks for help – do not turn him away;”
(The Qur’an 93.10) and Mohammad was clearly instructed to proclaim God’s
message to the Quraysh: “And the grace of your lord – proclaim!” (The
Qur’an 93.11) Thus Mohammad became a Messenger whose duty it was to remind
his people of what they had forgotten in both religious and social
terms.
The prophet received
revelations for 23 years until his death in 632.
The Messenger
Mohammad never thought
nor claimed to be inventing a new religion. He never sought power nor took
advantage of his situation or status:
“I am nothing but a warner and a herald of
glad tidings unto people who will believe.” (The Qur’an 7:188)
“There shall be no coercion in matters of
faith.” (The Qur’an 2.256),
and again,
“But if they turn away
from thee, O Prophet, remember that thy only duty is a clear delivery of
the message entrusted to thee.” (The Qur’an 16.82)
From the second
revelation until his death he maintained a singleness of purpose as a
Messenger of God to convey and carry out His wishes. He was tasked to
restore the original monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham and other prophets
whose messages had become misinterpreted or corrupted over time. His
revelations confirmed that the God of the “People of the Book” was the one
and only Allah, God of all humanity, and that people should honor Him and
only Him in life and deed. The Qur’an says (42.13): “[God] has established for you the same
religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus.”
As Reza Aslan notes, it
is not surprising that: “There are striking similarities between the
Christian and Qur’anic description of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment,
and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.” But he points out
that “These similarities do not contradict the Muslim belief that the
Qur’an was divinely revealed, but they do indicate that the Quaranic vision
of the Last Days may have been revealed to the pagan Arabs through a set of
symbols and metaphors with which they were already familiar, thanks in some
part to the wide spread of Christianity in the region.” (No god but God,
The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Reza Aslan.)
Just as the first
followers of Jesus did not consider themselves members of a new religion,
neither did the initial “believers” close to Mohammad. The group included former pagans, Jews
and Christians: monotheists who saw themselves as people trying to live in
accordance with God’s rules and law. According to Fred Donner: “Mohammed
built a movement of devout spiritualists from many faiths who shared a few
core beliefs: God was one, the end of the world was near, and the truly
religious had to live exemplary lives rather than merely pay lip service to
God’s laws. It was almost a century after Mohammed founded his “community
of believers” and launched the great Islamic conquest that his followers
started to define their beliefs as a distinct religious faith.” (Muhammad
and the Believers, Fred Donner.)
Mohammad was a gentle
and contemplative man, he had no real status within the Quraysh and was not
of the stature that the Arab world would expect for a Prophet. As Karen
Armstrong and others have noted, he was not a violent man but faced a
violent, barbaric, corrupt, greedy and contemptuous world that he
understood would destroy itself unless it changed. “Muhammad literally
sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia. He realized that
Arabia was at a turning point and that the old way of thinking would no longer
suffice, so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an
entirely new solution.”
Those close to Mohammad
were the first to believe in his revelations. Ali, who was taken in by
Mohammad when his father, Abu Talib, was in financial distress, was the
first; then Zayd, who remained at his side, although he had been a Syrian
slave until he was given his freedom by Mohammad; the merchant Abu Bakr was
the third to join the believers. He had a reputation for kindness and
honesty and once he joined Mohammad others who knew him did the same.
The Messenger’s
immediate goal was to bring the message of Allah to his own tribe, and many
of the revelations were extremely difficult for the Quraysh to adopt. Not
only had they to reject all their idols but their conduct had to change
entirely. For example, submission to Allah included that a believer should
pray five times a day and: “Touch your head to the earth!” (The Qur’an 96),
not exactly a posture that the arrogant Quraysh would find easy to accept!
The Hijra
Then in 619 CE,
described by early biographers as Mohammad’s “year of sadness,” both his
wife Khadija, the closest and most intimate companion of his life, and Abu
Talib, his protector and the chief of the Hashim clan, died. He was not only devastated but found
himself in an extremely precarious situation. According to Reza Aslan “The
results were immediate. Muhammad was openly abused on the streets of Mecca.
He could no longer preach or pray in public. When he tried to do so, one
person poured dirt over his head, and another threw a sheep’s uterus at
him.”
After his first
revelation, Khadija’s elderly cousin Waraqa had warned Mohammad that his
task would not be easy and that the Quraysh would eventually expel him from
Mecca. Mohammad had been dismayed at hearing this then, but almost seven
years later, it looked inevitable. His message was dividing the families of
Mecca, appealing above all to the young. The Believers were in essence
removing themselves from the traditions of the tribe. Because Mohammad and
his followers were seen to be undermining the rituals and values upon which
the Quraysh religious and economic foundation depended, a devastating
boycott was put upon the whole tribe of Hashim to try to starve the
Believers out of Mecca.
The first 4 verses of
Al-Alaq of the Koran
He and his followers
now had to take steps unheard of in the Arab world: they had to leave their
city, their tribe, their clan, family ties and possessions and go off into
the desert. The Hijra, as the migration from Mecca to an area called
Yathrib (later Medina) is known, took place at night and was a clandestine
operation. Sons and daughters left their family homes for a week-long
journey through the barren wilderness. The old man Waraqa’s warning had
proved correct.
Upon arrival Mohammad
allowed his camel to select a place for the first masjid (place for
prostration in prayer to Allah, which would later become a mosque) so as
not to give any preference to anyone’s choice. This small group of about 70
Believers became the first of a new kind of community (Ummah), one whose
establishment was commemorated many years later by a uniquely Muslim
calendar. That year, 622 AD, became known as the year 1 AH (After Hijra)
and at that time the oasis of Yathrib then became celebrated as Medinat
an-Nabi, “The City of the Prophet” – Medina.
“Unlike Jesus or the
Buddha, who seem to have been purely spiritual leaders with no temporal
responsibilities whatever, Mohammad found himself now head of state,”
author Karen Armstrong points out. “Having transferred the Muslim families
from Mecca to Medina, he now had to make sure they could survive there.”
Establishing the community in Yadith was not going to be easy and Mohammad
and his Believers were pushed into conflict with the Quraysh, when
desperation forced some believers to send out a ghazu raid to disrupt and
loot Quraysh caravans. Unfortunately, this occured during the sacred month,
so it galvanized the Quraysh and resulted in the Battle of Badr in 624 CE.
A thousand Quraysh, some on horseback, met the smaller Muslim group, but
the latter although poorly equipped, were highly motivated and won.
The Prophet's Mosque in
Medina
Prisoners of War
The Prophet instructed
that Prisoners of War should be treated as if they were family members. He
favored freedom after restitution. Those who could not pay monetary
restitution were asked to teach ten individuals to read and write.
According to Cherif
Bassiouni of DePaul University (Chicago, IL) this is the first time in
recorded history that POWs were treated humanely as a policy.
The Quraysh attacked at
the Battle of Uhud two years later. This resulted in approximately seventy
of the 700 believers killed and those taken prisoner by the Quraysh were
tortured and mutilated. In the fifth year after the Hijra a third major
confrontation occurred, The Battle of Khandq (The Trench). This time the
believers took the advice of a Persian and dug a trench along the side of
the city most vulnerable to attack. The episode resulted in a victory for
the Muslims without a battle actually being fought. The Quraysh, who had
never encountered such a situation in battle, were unable to cross it and
eventually turned back, defeated.
The community of
Believers expanded rapidly since anyone from any culture, race or tribe
could join the Ummah by simply declaring: “There is no god but God, and
Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” As head of the Ummah, Muhammad undertook the
protection of every member. Here there were no class distinctions; the
value of one man was not higher than another’s. Mohammad urged against the
traditional tribal Law of Retribution towards forgiveness: “The retribution
for an injury is an equal injury, but those who forgive the injury and make
reconciliation will be rewarded by God” (The Qur’an 42:40).
Usury was forbidden and
taxes were replaced by a tithe called Zakat whereby everyone gave according
to his means to provide care for the less fortunate: “True piety does not
consist in turning your faces towards the East or the West – but truly
pious is he who believes in God, and the Last Day; and the angels, and
revelation, and the prophets; and spends his substance – however much he
himself may cherish it - upon his kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and
the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from
bondage; and is constant in prayer, and renders the purifying dues; and
[the truly pious are] they who keep their promises whenever they promise,
and are patient in misfortune and hardship and in time of peril: it is they
that have proved themselves true, and it is they, they who are conscious of
God.” (The Qur’an 2:177)
Women’s rights and
privileges were foremost in Mohammad’s struggle for social and economic
egalitarianism. Here are some of the areas addressed:
The Qur’an (in 33.35)
emphasizes the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God in all but physical
strength, which men should use to provide for women. Mohammad said: “Women
are the twin-halves of men.”
He changed the laws of
inheritance so that women could inherit and maintain their own wealth and
their husband’s in the event of his death.
Women could now keep
their marriage dowries as their own personal property, even if they became
divorced.
For the first time he
gave women the right to divorce their husbands if they feared cruelty or
ill-treatment. (4:128).
For the first time he
limited the number of wives a man could have. He accepted that men should
be able to have up to four wives, with one proviso: “only if you can treat
them all equally” (The Qur’an 4:3).
He did not allow women
to have more than one husband. The scholar Reza Aslan describes this step
as one that was necessary to ensure the survival of the community at
Yathrib, which, after war with the Quraysh, resulted in hundreds of widows
and orphans who needed to be provided for and protected.
The tradition of women
wearing a veil was borrowed from the upper classes of Iranian and Syrian
women and used by Mohammad’s wives as an identifier and for their
protection. Though modesty was required of all believers, during the
Prophet’s lifetime only his wives wore a veil (Hijab).
As Leila Ahmed and
others have observed, nowhere in the Qur’an is the term Hijab applied to
any other women.
By the year 630 AD
Mohammad had become the powerful leader of an expanding community and was
able to lead 10,000 Believers back to Mecca for the Hajj, a pilgrimage that
remains a cornerstone of the spiritual life of Muslims. There the same
people who had tried to murder him now offered him the keys to the Ka’ba
unconditionally and without a fight. From that time on he was generally
accepted by the faithful as the true, final Prophet of God and continued to
lead his community both spiritually and in earthly matters until his death
in 632.
The Community of
Believers
Just as the first
followers of Jesus did not think of themselves as part of a new religion,
the original community around Mohammad did not either, but rather one akin
to the Hanifs – they sought the pure form of monotheism and called
themselves the “Believers” (mu’minum). Allah was the God of the Jews and
the Christians. According to Prof. Donner, the Qur’an uses mu’minum to
describe the early community around Mohammad far more frequently than it
does the term Muslim. “A number of Qur’anic passages make it clear that the
word mu’min and muslim, although evidently related and sometimes applied to
one and the same person, cannot be synonyms. For example, Q 49:14 states,
‘The Bedouins say: ’We Believe’ (aman-na). Say [to them]: ‘You do not
Believe; but rather say, ‘we submit’ (aslam-na), for Belief has not yet
entered your hearts.’” (Muhammad and the Believers) Here belief seems to
mean something more advanced than “submission” (islam) which was perhaps a
first step in the journey.
These Believers
differentiated themselves from polytheism in all its forms. The one belief
that there is only one God was crucial. Thus Christians who believed in the
Trinity would be excluded: “Those who say that God is the third of three,
disbelieve; there is no god but the one God …” (Q 5:73). Hence, for
example, Christians from communities who had originally fled persecution in
Byzantium for refusing to believe in the Trinity were certainly welcome,
and we know that Jews were, too. Christians who followed the Gospels, Jews
who obeyed the laws of the Torah and converts from paganism who obeyed the
injunctions of the Qur’an would all be included.
This ecumenical
community was perhaps easier to achieve since the majority in the community
would have been illiterate, and most likely only the most basic ideas were
held between them. “It is fair to assume that most of the early Believers
probably knew only the most basic and general religious ideas we today can
find articulated in some detail in the Qur’an. That God was one, that the
Last Day was a fearful reality to come (and perhaps to come soon), that one
should live righteously and with much prayer, and that Muhammad was the man
who, as God’s apostle or prophet, was guiding them in these beliefs.”
(Muhammad and the Believers, Fred M. Donner).
There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his
messenger.
The Islamic creed (Shahadah), written in Arabic.
The
Shahadah is the Muslim declaration of belief in
the
oneness of God and acceptance of Mohammad
as God’s prophet. The Sunni declaration reads:
There
is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his
messenger.
Foremost the community
strove to live a pious life. They saw this life as a preparation in a sense
for the Last Day or Day of Judgment; it should be lived in obedience to
God’s word as now laid out in the revelations of Mohammad. They believed
that throughout man’s history God has from time to time revealed his
intentions to a series of messengers or prophets of whom Mohammad was the
last. Their steps towards inner purity included prayer, charity, fasting and
pilgrimage. Distractions from the path of piety could include even family:
“wealth and sons are the ornaments of the nearer life; but enduring works
of righteousness are better before your Lord…” (Q 18:46), a passage that is
somewhat reminiscent of a saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas. In
another passage the Qur’an appears to contradict it: “O you who Believe, do
not forbid the good things that God has allowed you,” (Q 5:87) but the
passage goes on to say: “nor go to extremes, for God does not love those
who go to extremes.” Their piety was to be always with them as a source of
balance and harmony, part of their everyday life. They were to be: “In the
world, not of the world.”
After the Prophet’s
Death
In the last years of
his life Mohammad solidified his military and political situation. Following the conquest of Mecca in 630 he
no longer needed to make alliances with pagan communities in order for the
community of Believers to survive and grow. Now tribes wanted to become
allies, and could do so once they declared their belief in the one true and
only God and contributed taxes as a token of their commitment. So the
community grew in size and complexity, spreading from western Arabia as far
as Yemen in the South, to the East and throughout much of northern Arabia
as well.
The history of the
collection and codification of the text of the Qur’an is confusing and
contradictory. According to traditional scholars such as the late Sirdar
Ikbal Ali Shah, Selections from the Koran, Mohammad related his revelations
verbatim to Zayd or an available scribe. “The order in which the verses
were to stand was arranged by the Prophet Mohamed himself, so that at the
time of his demise the entire Koran was in complete written form.” The
verses were memorized by the believers and collected into a single volume
about six months after his death. Other sources suggest that the
recitations were stored in the chest of the companions, and parts of it
were written on the leathery sheets, white stones, palm’s sheets and ostrich
bones.
Others disagree, and
their researches indicate that Mohammad’s revelations were not gathered
into the single source we know today as the Qur’an until after his death.
One historical tradition holds that the prophet dictated some revelations
to Zayd bin Thaabit and other scribes, while others were remembered and
repeated by his closest followers who learned them by heart. Shortly after
the Prophet died in 632, Arab tribes revolted against the State of Medina.
After the bloody Battle of Yamamah in which a large number of those who had
committed the Qur’an to memory perished, recording became a more urgent
task. The Caliph Abu Bakr assigned the task to Zaid, who, it is said,
collected the revelations “from pieces of papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves,
shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather and wooden boards,
as well as from the hearts of men.”
It is possible that the
documentation of Mohammad’s revelations may not at the time have been seen
as the most important activity, because for them, as for many early
monotheistic communities, time was running out: the Day of Judgment was
approaching, so spreading the crucial tenet of salvation, “there is no God
but God,” may well have been seen as their primary concern and duty. Within
ten years of their Prophet’s death the Believers had spread their idea of
monotheism to Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Egypt, moving over the next three
decades into parts of Europe, North Africa and Central Asia.
The still prevalent
idea of Islam being a religion of violence dates from the Middle Ages when
the conflict between the West and East and invasions such as the Crusades
produced vicious polemics against Islam.
Archaeological evidence
challenges the view that Islam’s expansion was primarily by the sword: many
churches, some still standing today, were built in lands whose occupation
by Islamic activists pre-date their construction. Scholars point out that
if Islam’s goal was to eradicate all other existing faiths in favor of
forced submission to their own, these places of worship would have been
destroyed. On the contrary, the evidence shows that in assuming control of
towns and villages a peaceful approach of integration was the preferred
method by which the Believers’ message was spread. Communities were adjured
to live sufficiently righteous lives and accept the “oneness of God” and to
pay taxes to the Umma. Known to the
Believers as the “people of the book” adherents to other monotheisms were
allowed to maintain their own faith without fear of persecution.
By the time of the
third Caliph Uthman (644 - 656) differences in reading the Qur’an in the
many dialects of the Arabic language became troublesome, and he was urged
to “save the Muslim ummah before they differ about the Qur’an.” Uthman
asked a team of companions led by Zayd to collect and compare all available
copies and oral versions of the revelations and to prepare a single,
unified text. Copies were sent to the main provinces and people were told
to burn earlier versions in order to eliminate variations or differences,
though many, including key people, refused to do so.
The new young Believers
and people in these new communities had no memory of the Prophet himself,
so piety became routine and less personal and guidelines needed to be
standardized and written down. Eventually about seventy-five to one hundred
years after the Prophet’s death the community members started to identify
themselves as a different religion. They became Muslims.
During the next few
centuries, while Islam solidified as a religious and political entity, a
vast body of exegetical and historical literature evolved to explain the
Koran and the rise of Islam, the most important elements of which are
sunna, or the body of Islamic social and legal custom; sira, or biographies
of the Prophet; tafsir, or Koranic commentary and explication and the
hadith, or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad.
To decide which of the
sayings and deeds were authentic hundreds of thousands of sayings and
stories ascribed to the Prophet were gathered together. Scholars such as
Imam Bokari, Ibn Rustam and Asim Ibn Ali spent decades investigating and
testing texts for accuracy. Bokari reviewed over 600,000 entries, of which
he selected as incontestably correct only 5,000. Those that were deemed by
these scholars as authentic were collected and called Hadiths or
Traditions. Like The Gospel of Thomas, some of the sayings of the Prophet
give us insight into the man and his teaching. Here are some examples from
an authoritative collection by Baghawi of Herat in modern Afghanistan, from
his Mishkat Al-Masabih:
“Speak to everyone in accordance with his degree
of understanding.”
“I order you to assist any oppressed person,
whether he is a Moslem or not.”
“Do you think you love your Creator? Love your fellow-creature
first.”
“Those who are crooked, and those who are
stingy, and those who like to recount their favors upon others cannot enter
Paradise.”
"He is not a perfect believer, who goes to
bed full and knows that his neighbor is hungry.”
“By the One who holds my soul in His hand, a man
does not believe until he loves for his neighbor or brother what he loves
for himself.”
“You ask me to curse unbelievers. But I was not
sent to curse.”
“My back has been broken by ‘pious’ men.”
“Desire not the world, and God will love you.
Desire not what others have, and they will love you.”
“Do not ask for authority, for if you are given
it as a result of asking you will be left to deal with it yourself; but if
you are given it without asking, you will be helped in undertaking it.”
“Treat this world as I do, like a wayfarer; like
a horseman who stops in the shade of a tree for a time, and then moves on.”
“Trust in God – but tie your camel first.”
“Die before your death.”
“The ink of the learned is holier than the blood
of the martyr.”
“Unto every one of you
have We appointed a different law and way of life. And if God had so
willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but He
willed it otherwise in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed
unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works! Unto God you all
must return and then He will make you truly understand all that on which
you were wont to differ (Qu’ran 5:48).”
Knowledge
The Prophet said:
“There will be a time when knowledge is absent.”
Ziad son of Labid said:
“How could knowledge become absent, when we repeat the Koran, and teach it
to our children, and they will teach it to their children, until the day of
requital?”
The Messenger answered:
“You amaze me, Ziad, for I thought that you were the chief of the learned
of Medina. Do the Jews and the Christians not read the Torah and the
Gospels without understanding anything of their real meaning?”
(Caravan of Dreams by
Sayed Idries Shah).
Pasted From :
http://www.humanjourney.us/Mohammad3.html
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