Chapter 71. Muhammad: Revelation in Mecca, State in Medina (570-632)

The prophet who began as a “warner” to his own tribe died as the head of a confederacy covering almost all of Arabia. The library tells his story in sharply different registers: Karen Armstrong’s sympathetic history, Deepak Chopra’s novel, A. Helwa’s devotion, the criticism of Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the account of Nabeel Qureshi (raised Ahmadi, later Christian), and the non-Muslim witnesses collected by Robert Hoyland. They share a basic chronology and one structural fact: in Muhammad, religious and political authority were joined from the start.

The night of Hira (610)

Armstrong dates the first revelation to “the seventeenth night of Ramadan” 610, when Muhammad “felt himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence” and an angel commanded: “‘Recite!’ (iqra!)”. He protested that he was “no kahin, one of the ecstatic soothsayers of Arabia”; after a third crushing embrace “the first words of a new scripture” came [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999, ch. 5 “Unity: The God of Islam”]. The library’s Romanian Quran renders them (Sura 96): “Citeşte! În numele Domnului tău, care a făcut, / A făcut pe om din sînge închegat” (“Recite! In the name of your Lord, who made, made man from a clot of blood”) [Coranul, #40773, Sura XCVI].

Armstrong records the aftermath frankly: “Muhammad came to himself in terror and revulsion, horrified to think that he might have become a mere disreputable kahin whom people consulted if one of their camels went missing”. Fearing he was majnun (jinn-possessed), “he no longer wished to live” and resolved “to fling himself from the summit”, until a vision of Gabriel “with feet astride the horizon” stopped him. He crawled to Khadija crying “Cover me! cover me!”; she reassured him, and her Christian cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal declared it a revelation from the God of Moses [Armstrong, #68999, ch. 5]. He confided in them alone for two years and began preaching in 612. The first converts included Ali, Abu Bakr and “the young merchant Uthman ibn Affan”, many of them “from the poorer clans” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “The Prophet (570-632)”].

The early life as literary portrait

For the early years the library holds Chopra’s Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet, which its author labels: “this is a novel, not an official biography. A few events are told out of order. Characters drop in and out of sight as needed” [Chopra, Muhammad, #46422, Author’s Note]. Through invented narrators (Abdul Muttalib, the hermit Bahira, the wet nurse Halimah, Waraqah) he portrays the orphan, a Mecca that “owed its prosperity to the caravan trade”, Abraha of Yemen’s envy of “the Kaaba and the wealth it brought us”, and Khadijah’s household, where the captive Zayd becomes “Zayd, son of Muhammad” [Chopra, #46422]. These scenes are fiction built on traditional material. Ferrara’s brief outline gives the conventional facts: born in Mecca, “raised by his uncle (a member of the Quraysh tribe) following the premature death of his parents”, illiterate but “well-regarded for his integrity and honor” [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 2 “Islamic Expansion and the Rise of Sufi Mysticism”].

Persecution and the hijra (612-622)

According to Armstrong, by 616 the Meccan elite called Muhammad “a charlatan”. They were angered most by the Last Judgement, which “struck at the heart of their cut-throat capitalism”: “why had they accumulated fortunes instead of sharing their money?” Abu Jahl imposed a two-year boycott that may have hastened Khadija’s death; converted slaves were “tied up, and left to burn in the blazing sun”; and in 619 the death of Abu Talib left Muhammad without protection under “the harsh vendetta lore of Arabia”. Yathrib’s feuding tribes, some Jewish, pledged mutual defence in 620, and in 622 the Muslims “slipped away, one by one”. “The hijrah marks the start of the Muslim era”. To abandon one’s blood-group was “essentially blasphemous”, and Muhammad now led groups bound “not by blood but by a shared ideology” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Prophet”]. Hitchens tells it in a hostile register: the only early interest came from “the greedy guardians of the temple at Mecca, who saw it as a threat to their pilgrimage business, and the studious Jews of Yathrib”, who ended by seeing “yet another disappointment, if not indeed another impostor” [Hitchens, God Is Not Great, #65383, ch. 9].

Medina as polity: ummah, qibla and war

In Medina prophecy became government. The mosque was where Muslims discussed “all the concerns of the ummah – social, political and military as well as religious”, for in the Quranic vision “there is no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the political” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Prophet”]. When most Medinan Jews rejected him, Muhammad in January 624 turned the prayer direction from Jerusalem to the Kaaba, “a declaration of independence”. Without land, the emigrants raided Meccan caravans. Armstrong narrates Badr (624), the defeat at Uhud (625) and the Trench (627), fought by 3,000 Muslims against 10,000 Meccans. The Qaynuqa and Nadir were expelled, and when the Qurayzah sided with Mecca, “the seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their women and children sold as slaves”. She calls this “a horrible incident” but warns against judging it “by the standards of our own time”. The treaty of Hudaybiyyah (628) followed; in 630 Muhammad took Mecca with 10,000 men “without shedding a drop of blood”, destroyed the idols and rededicated the Kaaba. By 632 “almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah” [Armstrong, #53062].

The Sourdels’ Romanian glossary states the doctrinal consequence: Medina was where, as the struggle with the Meccans was organised, “the duty was defined to fight all those who did not adhere to Islam until they converted or agreed to pay tribute, the sign of their submission” [Sourdel & Sourdel-Thomine, Civilizaţia Islamului clasic vol. III, #12462, glossary on jihad, citing vol. I p. 44; translated]. Ferrara adds that “because Mecca was won in battle”, jihad’s outward form “sanctions war against the enemies of Islam”, growing “naturally out of Muhammad’s practice of ‘holy’ warfare”. He calls the community a “commonwealth of adherents” pledged to “what we now call the Five Pillars of Islam”: the profession of one God and his prophet, ritual prayer, alms, the Ramadan fast and pilgrimage [Ferrara, #66945, ch. 2].

Seal of the Prophets

Negru summarises the finality doctrine: “Muhammad is the ‘Seal of the Prophets,’ the last in a long series, while Islam is the final and perfect monotheistic faith (Quran 5:3)” [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part I]. The Romanian Quran’s 5:3 says “…v-am dat Islamul ca lege” (“…I have given you Islam as law”) [Coranul, #40773, Sura V]. Qureshi shows the phrase khatam an-nabiyyin (33:40) becoming a dividing line within Islam. An Ahmadi missionary complains that other Muslims “call us kafir because we do not interpret two words in the Quran the way they do. Two words! ‘Khatam an-nabiyeen, the seal of the prophets.'” Qureshi explains that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, “running into the khatam an-nabiyeen argument”, argued that he was a returning figure, not a new prophet [Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, #68882, Part 1].

What outsiders saw

Hoyland preserves the earliest non-Muslim witnesses. The Greek Doctrina Jacobi, set in July 634, reports that “the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens”, and an old man versed in scripture answers: “He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword” [Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, #55061, ch. 3 “A Christian Apologist of 634”]. Thomas the Presbyter records “the battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza” on 4 February 634, commonly equated with the defeat of the patrician Sergius of Caesarea [Hoyland, #55061, chs. 3-4]. Sophronius of Jerusalem describes Christians “bound by fear of the Saracens” [Hoyland, #55061, ch. 3 “Sophronius”]. The Armenian Sebeos (660s) speaks of “the horror of the invasion of the Ishmaelites”, likening them to Daniel’s fourth beast [Hoyland, #55061, ch. 4].

Critical, devotional and polemical readings

Hitchens accepts that “a person named Muhammad almost certainly existed”, but holds that the accounts “are hopelessly corrupted into incoherence by self-interest, rumor, and illiteracy” and that Islam “is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms”. He concludes that its “core claim—to be unimprovable and final—is at once absurd and unalterable”. He cites the “satanic verses”, the “betrothal to a nine-year-old girl” and the “division of the spoils after his many battles and numerous massacres” [Hitchens, #65383, ch. 9]. Hirsi Ali, in the Romanian edition of Infidel, recounts checking Bin Laden’s citations after 11 September 2001 and finding them in the Quran and hadith. A Dutch paper later headlined that she called the Prophet “a pervert”, after an interview in which she described him as “a cruel man who claimed absolute power” [Hirsi Ali, Necredincioasa, #10646; translated].

Helwa writes from devotion: the Prophet is “the full moon, because he fully faced the divine sun of Truth”, embodying the message “in his gentleness, mercy, loving kindness, and forgiving nature” (citing 33:46, “an illuminating lamp”) [Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love, #65220, ch. 12]. Ahmed Deedat argues the Muslim apologetic case that the Bible is not wholly God’s word and that “parts of it are lost”, invoking Quran 2:79 [Deedat, Este Biblia Cuvântul lui Dumnezeu?, #42350; translated]. Dennis Avi Lipkin (also known as Victor Mordecai) argues the reverse: that “the Bible prophesies the rise and fall of world-conquering Islam starting with the book of Exodus” [Lipkin, Return to Mecca, #67628, Foreword]. Keshe claims that Muhammad “learned from the Jews”, took several wives to “justify” himself, and “never allowed the Arabs to cross Iranian borders” because Iranians “believe in a deeper God”. The invasion of Iran, he says, came after Muhammad’s death, “for the wealth of Iran” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 437, #378149, Q&A “Find the true history”]. Keshe gives no sources for these claims, and the historical sources above do not report a ban by Muhammad on crossing into Iran.

Key points

• Armstrong dates the first revelation to 17 Ramadan 610 and records Muhammad’s terror that he had become a kahin, calmed by Khadija and Waraqa.
• Chopra’s Muhammad is, in his own words, “a novel, not an official biography”.
• Meccan persecution (the boycott, the death of Abu Talib) led to the hijra of 622, which starts the Muslim calendar and replaced blood ties with ideology.
• At Medina, mosque, army and government were one: Badr, Uhud, the Trench, the Qurayzah executions, Hudaybiyyah and the bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630.
• The Sourdels state that the duty to fight non-adherents until conversion or tribute was defined at Medina.
• Finality (“Seal of the Prophets”, 33:40; 5:3) became doctrine and later the test case against the Ahmadiyya (Qureshi).
• Non-Muslim witnesses (Doctrina Jacobi, Thomas the Presbyter, Sophronius, Sebeos) attest an armed prophet and “the Arabs of Muhammad” by 634.
• Critical (Hitchens, Hirsi Ali), devotional (Helwa), apologetic (Deedat), counter-apologetic (Lipkin) and esoteric (Keshe) readings diverge sharply on the same events.