The Prophet Muhammad receiving the Qu'ran from the Archangel Gabriel
Continuing (finally!) with comments related to Hans Küng's Der Islam (2004), I'll pick it back up with Muhammad.
The beginning of Islam
Muhammad ibn Abdallah (ca. 570-632) was the Prophet and founder of the Islamic religion. He was part of the Quraysh tribe in the Arabian city of Mecca. Although the Quraysh were the dominant group in Mecca, Muhammad's particular clan of Banu Hāšim was not one of the most influential. When he was 40 years old, he began receiving the revelations that eventually were collected into the Qur'ān. His following in Mecca was small, but it grewenough that he began to have conflicts with the business elite and the more powerful clans in Mecca. His first followers included his trusted wife Hadiğa and two men who were later to become caliphs, Abū Bakr and ٬Ali.
Muhammad's message challenged the existing Meccan society with "an alternative form of life," says Küng. In particular, he challenged the selfishness and greed of the wealthy, and spoke in soldidarity with slaves and orphans and the poor. (My translation appears below the German quotation; I've retained Küng's somewhat unusual alternation of past and present tense in his description.)
Kein Wunder, dass Muhammads Botschaft unter den Qurais nicht nur auf Neugierde, sondern vor allem auf Unverständnis stösst. Glauben findet sie nur bei ganz wenigen: bei Mitgliedern von Muhammads Familie und Clan sowie bei Freunden (einer Reihe vor allem jüngerer Manner auch aus einflussreichen Clans) und bei einigen Angehorigen der untersten Schicht (Sklaven, Fremde). Muhammad nimmt sie unterschiedslos in seine Gemeinschaft auf. Gewiss, alles keine Sozialrevolutionäre, aber ernsthafte Fromme, die mit dem sich verandernden sozialen und moralischen Klima in Mekka unzufrieden sind (darunter Abū Bakr und ٬Ali, die spateren Kalifen). Jedenfalls bildet sich jetzt die erste kleine muslimische Gemeinde, deren Basis nicht ein bestimmter sozialer Status, sondern der gemeinsame Glaube, das Ritualgebet, die eschatologische Frömmigkeit sowie ein Ethos der Gerechtigkeit sind. Auch dies unterstreicht nur die Tatsache, welch geistiger Energie es bedurfte, damit der Prophet jetzt als Führer einer hochst marginalisierten Gemeinde seinen von vielen Seiten in Frage gestellten Weg weitergehen kann. Schwierigkeiten, Widerstände, Ablehnungen von aussen gibt es denn auch genug, innere Anfechtungen und Zweifel sind oft die Folge. Warum? ...
Muhammads Eintreten fur ein Ethos der Gerechtigkeit angesichts des kommenden Gerichtes, seine mit scharfen Worten, Strafandrohungen und feierlichen Schwiiren erfolgte Aufforderung zur Umkehr und zur sozialen Solidarität bedroht die egoistische und materialistische Einstel-lung der reichen Kaufleute und Händler.
[No wonder that Muhammad's message ran up against not only curiosity among the Quraysh, but above all against a lack of understanding. It found belief among only very few: among members of Muhammad's family and clan as well as among friends (especially a number of younger men also from influential clans) and by some supporters from the lowest stratum (slaves, foreigners). Muhammad took them into his fellowship without discrimination. Certainly they were all not social revolutionaries, but serious, pious people who were discontented with the changing social and moral climate in Mecca (among them Abū Bakr and ٬Ali, the future caliphs. In anycase, the first small Muslim community developed, whose basis is not a particular social status, but rather the common faith, the ritual prayer, the eschatological devoutness as well as an ethos of justice. And this underlines only the reality of what spiritualenergy it required with which the Prophet now, as the leader of a highly marginalized community, to be able to continue on his path, which is being called into question from many sides. There are also quite enough difficulties, resistance, rejection from outside, and inner disputes and doubt are often the result. Why?]
[Muhammad's stand for an ethos of justice in the face of the coming [divine] judgment, his demand to change one's ways and to social solidarity, delivered with sharp words, threats of punishment and solemn oaths, threatened the egotistic and materialistic attitude of the wealthy salespeople and traders.]
Historian Ira Lapidus wrote of the first Meccan period in A History of Islamic Societies (2002):
Significantly, the first converts were rootless migrants, poor men, member 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. ...
[The] opposition [to Muhammad] was couched in religious terms, but Muhammad's preaching was in fact an implicit challenge to all the existing instituitons 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 isntituions inextricably bound up with one another. To attack them at any major point was to attack the whole society root and branch.
The hiğra and the Medina period
In 622, he emigrated to the city of Medina with most of his relatively small number of followers. This move to Medina is known as the hijrah (hiğra). The Islamic calendar begins counting time from July 16, 622, (day 1 of year 1) to commemorate the hiğra. Muhammad found a much larger following in Medina and eventually became their temporal as well as spiritual leader, enabling the Medinans to get beyond the tribal and clan rivalries that had bitterly divided their city. Islam became a formal community, an "umma," which is still the word used to refer to the community of Muslims.
In this community whose rule was now grounded in the new religion, revealed by God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, Muhammad was faced with several groups of opposition, Küng writes: polytheists among some of the smaller Mednan clans; Muslim dissenters (those appeared early!); Beduin tribes in the area; and, many of the Jews in Medina. The Jews of Medina did not recognize Muhammad as the Prophet of God. So his previously favorable attitude the Jews there, "changed into a negative one," as Küng says. And, of course, Muhammad blamed it on them.
Küng gives close attention to the conflict between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,not least because the influence of Jewish ideas, and very specifically Jewish Christian ideas, were very important in Muhammad's religious outlook. Muhammad's conflict was with three local Jewishtribes (not to be confused with the Biblical 12 tribes!): the Qaynuqah, the Nadir and the Qurayzah. As Küng puts it, it came "to (ethnic) cleansing and massacres" by Muhammd's forces against the Jews. The Qaynuqah and the Nadir were driven out of Medina. The Qurayzah men were largely massacred and the women and children taken as slaves.
Küng doesn't try to hide the grim nature of these conflicts and the problems they raise for us today. He does point out that such conduct was standard in the practice of that place and time in tribal/clan conflicts. Muhammad did not thereby adopt a blanket anti-Jewish policy, and both the Qur'ān and later Muslim practice tolerated Judaism and Christianity within Muslim realms outside of Arabia. Forced conversions were not Muhammad's goal.
Return to Mecca
Gaining control over Mecca was. The Prophet and his Medinans had a long war with Mecca (624-630). The final entry of Muhcammad's victorious army into Meccas on January 11, 630 was peaceful. Muhammad had been accepted as the leader of Mecca and of his native Quraysh tribe. The combined forces of Mecca and Medina were now the most formidalbe force on the Arabian peninsula. The religious pilgrimage site in Mecca, the Ka٬ba, was already an important site for the various tribal religions in Arabia. The Prophet adopted it to his new religion. And the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Ka٬ba, the pilgrimage being known as the hajj (hāğğ), also became an exclusively Muslim event.
Muhammad lived only two years after the taking of Mecca. But in those two years, the influence of Islam became dominant in the Arabian peninsula. The Prophet's expansion of his political control brought him into further conflict with Jews and Christians. Although we can distinguish Muhammad's religion from his political power, religion and politics were combined on all sides in a way that is very different from modern conceptions.
This sketch of the Prophet's life says little about his religious ideas. I've just tried to give the general historical background. Many of the details of Muhammad's life were to become important in interpreting the Qur'ān and other traditions stemming from Muhammad. And descent from Muhammad would play an important part in the Sunni/Shi'a split in Islam.
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