Muhammad founded the Islamic movement that has spread from his native Arabia to almost every part of the world. His central aim was to establish monotheism in place of the prevailing polytheism of his time and to teach a total allegiance to the commands of the one God. The Muslim profession of faith announces that ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God’. The word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’ and Muslims are ‘those who submit’. The Islamic scriptures, the Koran, are held by Muslims to be the infallible word of God.
What is known of Muhammad’s circumstances is largely derived from a life of the Prophet written by Ibn Ishaq in the eighth century CE.1 He was born into the Quraysh tribe around 570 CE near Mecca, a town long established as a sanctuary and place of pilgrimage. Mecca had been founded by monotheists but by the time of Muhammad’s birth it had become predominantly pagan and polytheist. The Prophet’s early life was not a settled one. As an infant he was cared for by foster parents who were poorly off. He was then returned to his mother who died when he was 6. After two years in his grandfather’s charge he was sent to an uncle, Abu Talib, with whom he stayed for the rest of his formative years. While still a young man he became the commercial agent for a rich widow, Khadija, who in due course married him. He did not emerge as the Prophet until his middle years but accounts of his life relate that all the signs were there from his birth: a heavenly light seen by his mother around her infant son’s head, the blessing of a Christian monk, his own tendency towards solitude and long hours of reflection.
Muhammad’s calling came to him at around the age of 40 while he was engaged in an annual religious practice. It was the custom to spend one month of each year on Mount Hira, often with one’s family, in order to bestow goods and food on the visiting poor. One night while on the mountain Muhammad dreamed that he was visited by the angel Gabriel who taught him the words that are now part of the ninety-sixth chapter of the Koran: ‘Recite, in the name of your Lord, the Creator, who created man from clots of blood . . . ’. Over the next decade or so, further revelations of the scriptures were transmitted from God to Muhammad by means of the dream figure of Gabriel. Muhammad also dreamed of a visit to Jerusalem to meet Abraham, Moses and Jesus. These incidents determined him to begin his mission to preach monotheism, first within his family and tribal group and then to the people and pilgrims at Mecca. It seems he was at first deeply puzzled by his dreams but his confidence in his mission gradually increased; in particular when it was confirmed that the description of Jerusalem he derived from his dream – for it seems he had never actually been to that city – was an accurate one. Emboldened by this and by the steady sequence of revelatory dreams, he began to teach to a wider circle. Thus from tentative beginnings there developed Islam, a movement and form of life of immense influence and power.
The remarkable success that eventually attended Muhammad’s mission is appreciated only through an understanding of conditions prevailing in Arabia and its environs at the time. That vast country is largely desert and in the sixth century its peoples were mostly nomadic, tribal and in frequent conflict with each other. The absence of a central controlling power that might have mobilized and united a formidable fighting force meant that Arabia presented little threat, other than that of an occasional marauding frontier raid, to adjacent territories. Even its traditional polytheism was beginning to feel the effects of the monotheistic influences of Jews and Christians. It has been pointed out that this picture of a large but disorganized country is one that might well have led a shrewd observer at the time to predict that Arabia would probably soon fall prey to external or invading powers and that if monotheism came to dominate there then it would do so in a Christian or Jewish form. The events which actually ensued were utterly different from any such well-reasoned conjecture.2
The ground for Muhammad’s work was probably prepared by his great-grandfather, Hashim, who, using Mecca as a base, established the Quraysh community as influential merchants by organizing two caravan journeys a year and by gaining protection for his merchants in the territories of the Roman empire and, in due course, in Persia, the Yemen and Ethiopia. Hashim maintained the family tradition of caring for the pilgrims who visited Mecca and did not attempt to interfere with its pagan rites. Muhammad was therefore heir to an extensive and secure trading system and a tradition of liberal toleration within his own community. When his mission developed and he began to speak out against polytheism, tensions began to manifest themselves. Schisms and regroupings occurred in the tribes as some members aligned themselves with the new monotheism and others clung to polytheism. Those who dissented from their tribal leadership were vulnerable to attack from their own group and were also insecure in their relationships with other groups. Muhammad himself was protected by the Quraysh but he arranged to send a group of his supporters, for their safety, to Ethiopia, where he was already held in considerable esteem. He then sought to strengthen his following by means of itinerant preaching, but with little success until he met six members of the Khazraj tribe in the oasis city of Yathrib. The agreement he reached with these men was a momentous one: they would protect him completely, even in the face of aggression from his own Quraysh people. Muhammad’s Meccan disciples then emigrated to Yathrib while he remained to await God’s command to follow them. His own emigration, known as the hijrah, took place in 622 CE, about twelve or fifteen years after his first dream encounter with the angel Gabriel. The hijrah marks the first year of the Muslim era and the starting point of the Muslim calendar.
The Prophet lived at Yathrib for the remaining ten years of his life. During that time he completed his compilation of the Koran. The angel Gabriel continued to appear in dreams revealing details of rituals of prayer and fasting, cleansing, alms-giving, worship and pilgrimage. One year after the hijrah had taken place it was ordained that Muslims, when praying, should turn towards Mecca instead of towards Jerusalem. Seven years later Mecca was regained. It was then purged of its polytheism and made wholly Islamic.
After the hijrah, Yathrib became known as Medina. Muhammad’s followers there were called the ansar, the helpers, and those who went with him from Mecca were called the muhajirun, the emigrants. Muhammad’s mission now took an overtly militant and political turn. A document was drawn up to establish his followers as a community. It commanded them to refer any disputes between them to Muhammad and thereby to God. Rules of conduct and especially those for the conduct of warfare were laid down and so began the conquest of southern Arabia. By the time of Muhammad’s death, in 632 CE, the eleventh year of the hijrah, Muslim domination was reaching out towards the Roman empire in the north. Its spread was resisted by Arabian Jews and to some extent by Christians, but with little effect on what had become an engulfing tide.
In the eighth century Islam spread into Central Asia, Sind and Spain. In the eleventh century it began to be transmitted by Turks into southern Russia, India and Asia Minor. It was taken to the Niger basin and in the fourteenth century became dominant in the Balkans and spread into China. It largely disappeared from Spain in the fifteenth century and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries its influence in the Balkans has dwindled. It now flourishes in many parts of Africa and in certain regions of North and South America and, in the 1990s, has begun to reaffirm itself in Albania.
Muhammad saw himself simply as the recipient and channel for the transmission of the Islamic scriptures, but he occupies a special place in the series of monotheistic prophets recognized by Islam for he was taken to be the last in a succession of ‘warners’ among whom were Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. It is in the context of the belief that the world had a life of only six or seven thousand years that this position was accorded him. By his lifetime the world was thought to have already endured for five or six thousand of its allotted years. The revelation of the Koran to Muhammad was therefore seen as the culmination of a sequence of such revelations, following on from the imparting of the Pentateuch to Moses and the Gospel to Jesus. The Muslim belief is that Muhammad was the last messenger of God before the end of the world.
The writings that constitute the Koran were put together in an authoritative version, shortly after Muhammad’s death, during the reign of the third caliph, Uthman (644–656 CE). A few very minor changes were subsequently made in the tenth century. The Koran has 114 chapters, or suras, that were arranged so that the suras with many verses precede those with fewer verses.3 All the suras were assigned in their headings either to Mecca or Medina. Quotations and recitings of the Koran are always introduced by the phrase ‘God has said’, thus emphasizing Muhammad’s role as the transmitter rather than author of the scriptures. The structure of the content of the Koran reflects the genesis and development of Islam. Broadly speaking, its earlier sections are concerned with God’s majesty and power, its later ones with juridical matters and directives for conduct within the community. Its dominant theme is the uniting of believers in a total obedience to a God whose word is unchallengeable. The absolute acceptance of its doctrine is reinforced by the Islamic practice of committing the Koran to memory. Learning and reciting it means that its precepts inhabit the believer’s mind and heart, shaping and predisposing every thought and action.
Some time after Muhammad began to preach publicly, but before the hijrah, there occurred the incident of the ‘satanic verses’. This refers to sura 53, known as ‘The Star’, which is reported to have originally stated that three pagan goddesses, al- Lat, al’Uzza and Manat, with shrines not too far from Mecca, were empowered to make intercessions to Allah. Commentators have pointed out that Muhammad delivered this revelation at a time when he was seeking to convert influential merchants to Islam and that the message did bring about their conversion. But a later revelation from the angel Gabriel to Muhammad made it clear that the message had been ‘put upon his tongue’ by Satan. The correct sura was then imparted to him. It stated that the three goddesses ‘are but names which you and your fathers have invented: Allah has vested no authority in them’.4
The cosmogony of the Koran describes creation as consisting of seven earths stacked on one another beneath seven heavens, similarly stacked. The undermost earth houses the devil. Humankind inhabits the highest earth and the lowest heaven is the sky above the highest earth. The seventh and topmost heaven is Paradise. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and indivisible. Any suggestion that his divinity might embrace a trinity or multiplicity of any kind is always rejected. In the second sura of the Koran we read: ‘They say: “Allah has begotten a son.” Allah forbid! His is what the heavens and earth contain; things are obedient to Him. Creator of the heavens and the earth! When He decrees a thing, He need only say “Be” and it is.’ The Koranic Allah is remote, mysterious and entirely other, having ‘no need of the worlds’ yet knowing and influencing every detail of creation.5
Muhammad was a prophet rather than a philosopher. But any influential declaration of the kind that he made concerning God, the universe and the relationship of both with humankind is always the object of critical scrutiny by sceptics and of justification by its upholders. From such activity there emerges a refining of concepts and ideas along with methods of analysis and discussion. And so philosophy develops. Early Islamic thought was largely theological in character and was dominated by the debate between progressive Muslim thinkers who were prepared to subject revelation to rational scrutiny, and a conservative or orthodox element that regarded any such scrutiny as impious. Both positions were rooted in theology and both had to confront difficulties about the interpretation of scriptural commands and legislation for issues and conduct not covered by the scriptures. Discussion tended to focus on the concepts of God’s supreme majesty and power and on the relationship of total obedience in which human beings stood to God. In such a context questions about free will soon surfaced, since the notion of the absolute authority of God suggests the absence of freedom of choice on the part of his obedient subject. Within Islam, the presupposition of all such debates was the view that saw politics, philosophy, law and every aspect of societal life as emanating from and dependent on the one God.
Internal debate was not the only critical stimulus to the development of Islamic philosophy. The Arab conquest of Alexandria in 641 CE meant that Muslim thought became open to investigation from many quarters. In the seventh century, Alexandria was the pre-eminent centre for the study of Greek philosophy and was in touch with smaller centres of learning such as Syria and Iraq. Thus the dogmatic theology of Islam was required to respond to comment from Greeks, Christians, Jews and others and to construct a rational justification for the Koranic scriptures as delivered by Muhammad.6 The free exchange of all kinds of ideas and doctrines was greatly facilitated by the enthusiastic translation, in the two centuries after Muhammad’s death, of Greek works on medicine, science and, in due course, philosophy, into Arabic. This did much to enrich the vocabulary of Arabic as well as to inform Muslim thought with the ideas of Greek philosophy, especially those of Plato, Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists. By the beginning of the ninth century CE the scene was set for the emergence of Islam’s first important philosopher, the Arab prince Ya’qub ibn-Ishaq al-Kindi.
1 This work is called the Sira or Sirat. It has been translated into English as The Life of Muhammad (see sources and further reading).
2 See, for example, remarks in Michael Cook, Muhammad, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 11.
3 Numerous attempts have been made to reorder the suras but there seems to be no standard critical edition of the Koran.
4 See pp. 112, 113 (sura 53) in the Penguin edition of the Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood, Harmondsworth, 1959.
5 Sura 3.
6 See the introduction to Islamic philosophy in this book, pp. 9–11.
Muhammad’s claim was that he was the transmitter, not the author, of the words of the Koran. There are numerous translations. The edition named below gives the traditional numbering of the suras.
The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959
Al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Iqbal
Cook, Michael, Muhammad, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Past Masters series, 1983
Fakhry, Majid, A History of Islamic Philosophy, London, Longman, 1983
Goldziher, I., Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981
Guillaume, Alfred, Islam, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1956
Guillaume, Alfred (trans.), The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1955
Watt, W. Montgomery, Islamic Philosophy and Theology: An Extended Survey, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1987; 1st edn, 1962