Who Is Prophet Muhammad ﷺ?

Childhood and the years before

He was born in Makkah around 570 CE into Banu Hashim, a respected but not wealthy clan of Quraysh. His father ʿAbdullah (عبد الله) died before his birth. Following the custom of the city he was sent to be nursed among the desert Arabs, with Halimah (حليمة) of Banu Saʿd, so that he grew up first in open country and in a purer Arabic than the town spoke.

His mother Aminah (آمنة) died when he was six, on the road back from Madinah. His grandfather ʿAbd al-Muttalib (عبد المطلب) took him in and died two years later. His uncle Abu Talib (أبو طالب) raised him after that. The Qur’an refers back to this sequence directly, and without softening it: Sūrah al-Ḍuḥā 93:6 opens by asking whether He did not find you an orphan and shelter you.

He worked as a shepherd, then in trade, travelling with the caravans to Syria. Two things from these years are worth holding onto.

• He was called al-Amin (الأمين), the trustworthy, a name given him by the same Makkans who later fought him. It was a commercial reputation before it was anything else: people left goods and money with him.
• He joined Hilf al-Fudul (حلف الفضول), a pact among some Makkan clans to stand with anyone wronged in the city, including outsiders with no tribe to protect them. He said long afterwards that he would still answer such a call in Islam. It is the earliest recorded thing he did about justice, and it predates the revelation by decades.

At about twenty-five he married Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (خديجة بنت خويلد) (رضي الله عنها), a merchant who had employed him and who proposed the marriage. She was his only wife for the whole twenty-five years they were married, in a society that placed no such limit on him.

Around his thirty-fifth year, Quraysh rebuilt the Kaʿbah and nearly came to blows over which clan would have the honour of setting the black stone in place. They agreed to accept the judgement of the next man to enter. It was him. He laid the stone on a cloak and had a man from each clan lift an edge, so that all of them placed it together. He had made no religious claim at this point; the story is preserved because of what it says about how he was regarded.

The first revelation

He had taken to withdrawing to a cave on Mount Hira (حراء) outside Makkah, sometimes for several nights. There, in his fortieth year, the angel Jibril (جبريل) (عليه السلام) came to him with a command he did not understand.

The instruction was to read, and he answered that he was not a reader. It was repeated, and the angel pressed him until he was at the limit of what he could bear, three times. Then came the first words revealed: Sūrah al-ʿAlaq 96:1-5, which begin with reading in the name of the Lord who created, and go on to the pen and to teaching man what he did not know.

What the sources preserve next is the detail that makes the account credible. He went home shaking, asked to be covered, and said that he feared for himself. Khadijah (رضي الله عنها) did not tell him he was imagining it and did not tell him he was chosen. She reasoned from his conduct: that Allah would not disgrace him, because he kept ties of kinship, carried the burdens of the weak, earned for the destitute, honoured the guest and helped others through hardship.

She then took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal (ورقة بن نوفل), an elderly Christian who knew the scriptures. Waraqah identified what had come to him as the same that came to Musa (موسى) (عليه السلام), and told him that his people would drive him out. He asked whether they really would. Waraqah answered that no man had ever brought what he brought without being opposed (Sahih al-Bukhari 3).

Then the revelation stopped for a period, and the silence distressed him. It resumed with Sūrah al-Ḍuḥā 93:1-3, swearing by the morning light that his Lord had neither forsaken him nor become displeased. That the sequence includes a gap, and includes his own fear inside it, is one of the reasons the account does not read as a constructed legend.

The first to believe

The first person to accept the message was his wife Khadijah (رضي الله عنها). After her the earliest are traditionally listed as ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (علي بن أبي طالب) (رضي الله عنه), a boy in his household; Zayd ibn Harithah (زيد بن حارثة) (رضي الله عنه), a freed slave he had adopted as a son; and Abu Bakr (أبو بكر) (رضي الله عنه), a merchant and his closest friend.

That list is worth reading as a group rather than as four names: a woman, a child, a freed slave and a man of standing. The message was not gathering a constituency of any one kind.

For roughly three years the call was quiet, conducted person to person. Then came the command to proclaim openly, Sūrah al-Ḥijr 15:94, and he climbed the hill of Safa (الصفا) and called Quraysh clan by clan. He asked whether they would believe him if he told them an army was behind the hill, and they said they had never known him to lie. He then told them what he had been sent with, and the opposition began that day.

Thirteen years of persecution, without retaliation

The message was simple and expensive: one God, the idols are nothing, the poor and the enslaved are not lesser, wealth carries obligations, and everyone will be judged. Makkah’s prestige and revenue rested on the shrine, so the theology was also an attack on the economy.

Those with tribal protection were mocked, boycotted and pressured. Those without it were tortured. Bilal ibn Rabah (بلال بن رباح) (رضي الله عنه), an enslaved Abyssinian, was laid on the burning ground under a rock and kept saying one word, ahad, one. The family of Yasir (ياسر) were tortured together, and Sumayyah (سمية) (رضي الله عنها) was killed: the first person to die for this message was an elderly enslaved woman.

Through all thirteen Makkan years the community did not fight back, because permission to fight had not been given. What they did instead was leave. In 615 CE a group emigrated across the sea to Abyssinia, where the Christian king, the Najashi (النجاشي), heard both them and the Qurayshi delegation sent to demand their return, and refused to hand them over.

Quraysh then imposed a boycott on Banu Hashim: no trade, no marriage, no dealings. The clan withdrew to a valley outside the city and stayed roughly three years, and the sources describe children crying from hunger audibly from outside.

Around 619 CE, in a single year, both Khadijah (رضي الله عنها) and Abu Talib died. She was his support and he was his protection, and the tradition calls it the Year of Sorrow, ʿam al-huzn (عام الحزن). Shortly after, he went to Taif (الطائف) to seek a hearing and was driven out with stones until his sandals filled with blood. The report that follows is the one worth knowing: an angel offered to crush the town between the two mountains, and he declined, saying he hoped that from their descendants would come people who worshipped Allah alone.

The night journey

At the lowest point of that period came the Isra (الإسراء) and Miʿraj (المعراج): the night journey from the sacred mosque at Makkah to al-Masjid al-Aqsa (المسجد الأقصى) in Jerusalem, and the ascent from there. The Qur’an states it in a single verse, Sūrah al-Isrāʾ 17:1, and says the purpose was to show him of His signs.

Two things came out of it. The five daily prayers were prescribed, which is why salah (الصلاة) is the only pillar not legislated on earth. And the event became a test in Makkah: he described Jerusalem to people who had seen it, and Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) is reported to have said that if he said it, it is true, which is where his title al-Siddiq (الصديق) is traced from.

The migration, and the state at Madinah

Pilgrims from Yathrib, a city to the north exhausted by a long civil war between its two main tribes, met him at the pilgrimage and accepted the message. Over two meetings at ʿAqabah they pledged to protect him as they protected their own families, and invited him to come.

Quraysh resolved to kill him, taking a man from each clan so that the blood would be spread across all of them and Banu Hashim could not avenge it. ʿAli (رضي الله عنه) slept in his bed so that the watchers would think he was still there. He left with Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) and they hid three nights in the cave of Thawr (ثور) while search parties passed close enough to be heard. Sūrah al-Tawbah 9:40 refers to that moment: the second of two, when he said to his companion, do not grieve, Allah is with us.

The hijrah (هجرة) of 622 CE marks year one of the Islamic calendar, and the choice is itself a statement. The era begins not at his birth, and not at the first revelation, but at the moment a community became free to order its own affairs.

What he built at Madinah (المدينة) was a polity as much as a congregation.

• He built the mosque first, which served as prayer hall, assembly, court and shelter for the destitute.
• He paired each emigrant with a host, the muʾakhah (مؤاخاة), so that people who had arrived with nothing were absorbed into households rather than left as refugees.
• He drew up a written agreement, the Sahifah (صحيفة) or Constitution of Madinah, setting out the obligations of the city’s groups including its Jewish tribes: common defence, freedom of religion, and disputes referred to him.

This is the reason Islam legislates in areas most religions leave alone. Its founder governed, judged, taxed, made treaties and commanded armies, and the material on all of it is part of the record rather than a later accretion.

The Madinan decade and the fighting

Permission to fight came after the migration, and on stated grounds: Sūrah al-Ḥajj 22:39 gives it to those who are fought against, because they have been wronged. The subject and its limits are treated in Jihad: What the Word Means and Where the Limits Are.

Hudaybiyyah is the one worth pausing on, because it shows what he was willing to accept. The terms looked like a defeat: the Muslims turned back without performing the pilgrimage, agreed a ten-year truce, and accepted a clause returning anyone who came to them from Quraysh without their guardian’s permission while Quraysh kept anyone who went the other way. ʿUmar (عمر) (رضي الله عنه) objected openly. The Qur’an then called it a manifest victory, Sūrah al-Fatḥ 48:1, and the two years of peace that followed brought more people into Islam than the preceding years of confrontation had.

In the same period he sent letters to the rulers around him, among them Heraclius of Byzantium, the Persian emperor, the Najashi and the governor of Egypt, inviting them to Islam. Whatever their responses, the act signals what the community now took itself to be.

The return to Makkah

In 630 CE, after the truce was broken, he entered Makkah at the head of a force the city could not resist. It was the place that had boycotted his clan, tortured his followers to death, and plotted his killing. He had the power to settle every account in it, and the custom of the age expected him to.

He declared a general amnesty. The words preserved are that they should go, for they are free. The idols in and around the Kaʿbah were destroyed and the people were not. Among those pardoned were men who had fought him for twenty years and at least one who had mutilated the body of his uncle Hamzah (حمزة) (رضي الله عنه).

He then had Bilal (رضي الله عنه), the formerly enslaved man once tortured on that city’s ground, climb onto the roof of the Kaʿbah to call the adhan (الأذان) over it. As a piece of deliberate symbolism it is hard to better.

The last two years

After Makkah, delegations came from across the peninsula in such numbers that the ninth year is called the Year of Delegations. The structure he had built at Madinah was now absorbing tribes that had never been governed by anyone.

In 632 CE he performed the pilgrimage, and delivered at ʿArafah the address treated in full in The Farewell Sermon: abolishing the blood feuds and interest of the old order beginning with his own family’s claims, denying any precedence by descent, and charging the men present concerning women. During that standing came Sūrah al-Māʾidah 5:3, that this day the religion has been perfected.

He fell ill some weeks later, and in his final days asked Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) to lead the prayers. He died in Madinah, in the chamber of ʿAʾishah (عائشة) (رضي الله عنها), aged about sixty-three.

The reaction is instructive. ʿUmar (رضي الله عنه) refused to accept it. Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) came, confirmed the death, and addressed the people: whoever worshipped Muhammad, Muhammad has died; whoever worships Allah, He is living and does not die. He then recited Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:144, which had been revealed years earlier and asks what the believers would do if he died or were killed. The companions reacted as though hearing it for the first time.

He left no gold and no silver, no palace and no treasury. His armour was pawned with a Jewish neighbour against a debt of barley for his family. He named no heir by blood, and the leadership passed by the community’s decision rather than by descent.

What he was like

The sources on his manner are unusually detailed, because his companions recorded exactly how he lived in order to imitate it. What emerges is a person of ordinary domestic habits holding extraordinary authority.

• He mended his own clothes, repaired his sandals and helped in the house. Asked what he did at home, ʿAʾishah (رضي الله عنها) answered that he was in the service of his family.
• Anas ibn Malik (أنس بن مالك) (رضي الله عنه) served him for ten years and reported that he was never once rebuked, never asked why he had done something or why he had not.
• He sat where there was room rather than at a head place, so that visitors arriving had to ask which of the men was him.
• He was markedly gentle with children, shortening his own prayers when he heard an infant crying so as not to burden the mother.

Asked to describe his character, ʿAʾishah (رضي الله عنها) answered that his character was the Qur’an (Sahih Muslim 746): the book and the man were the same thing in two forms. The Qur’an’s own verdict is in Sūrah al-Qalam 68:4, that he is upon a great character, and its statement of purpose in Sūrah al-Anbiyāʾ 21:107, that he was sent as a mercy to the worlds.

How his life is known

This is a fair question to ask of any figure from the seventh century, and the answer is that the material comes from four distinguishable streams.

• The Qur’an (القرآن) itself, which comments on events as they happened, including reverses and rebukes directed at him.
• The hadith (حديث) collections, compiled with chains of transmission that were themselves examined and graded, which is the machinery described in Introduction to Islam.
• The sirah literature, beginning with Ibn Ishaq (ابن إسحاق) (رحمه الله) in the second century of Islam, surviving mainly through the recension of Ibn Hisham (ابن هشام) (رحمه الله), alongside al-Waqidi (الواقدي) and the Tabaqat of Ibn Saʿd (ابن سعد).
• The early documentary and external material: treaties, letters, and references in non-Muslim sources from the period.

The honest qualification is that the sirah works are later than the events and were not held to the same evidentiary standard as the hadith collections, so historians treat their detail with more caution than their outline. The outline itself, and the major events above, rest on far firmer ground than the biography of almost any comparable figure of the period.

What Muslims hold about him, and what they do not

He is held to be the last of the prophets, sent to all humanity rather than to one people, and the pattern a Muslim follows in practice: Sūrah al-Aḥzāb 33:21 names him an excellent example, and Sūrah al-Aḥzāb 33:40 the seal of the prophets.

What he is credited with is the transmission of the Qur’an and its demonstration in a life, which together form the two sources of the religion. That second source, and why it is structurally necessary rather than merely venerable, is set out in What the Sunnah is.

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