The Life and Times of Prophet Muhammad - Research Paper Example

I. Introduction The life and teachings of Muhammad is the theme of a rich Muslim historical narrative. Muhammad was born in southern Hijaz, in the Arab village of Quraysh. The tribe of Quraysh is identified as the progenies of Fihn ibn Malik’s male line, who came way before Muhammad. They were a dignified ancestry, but unsuccessful at first. For generations they acted as a non-political unit and subsisted dispersed among a more expansive tribal grouping. Nor did they have power over a territorial capital; Mecca, a domestic asylum of rich antiquity, was owned by other tribes. Several centuries before Muhammad, this condition was resolved by a venturing member of the Qusayy tribe. He established a coalition, and through bloodsheds and peace talks acquired ownership of the Meccan asylum. Then he was able to consolidate his dispersed fellow people and to bring them in Mecca to live. They greatly revered him to the point that he was practically their king, a status which was not granted to any of his successors (Peters 1994). Hence was created the society which became the birthplace of Muhammad. Mecca remained an asylum, and hence a pilgrimage center. In the customary perspective, it had initially been a monotheist institution, yet at the moment it was in actual fact a pagan asylum. At the time of the occupation of Qusayy, the customs of pilgrimage remained unbothered, but useful agreements for the nourishment of the pilgrims were made. This task was eventually acceded to Muhammad’s grandfather, who as well revived and revitalized the spring formerly linked to the asylum. During the early life of Muhammad the core temple of the sanctuary, the edifice referred to as the Ka’ba, was renovated; Muhammad was involved at the critical moment. There were as well movements of monotheism in the period before Muhammad; yet Mecca stayed as a pagan civilization (Peters 1994). II. Early Life The exact date of Muhammad’s birth is still unknown; however, several scholars date it at AD 570. He died in 632 which put him at the age of around sixty. He was not granted the prophet’s mission until the age of around forty. Before this there was, as could be anticipated, sufficiency of indications of his future prominence. Divinations about his future greatness were uttered by Jews, Arab oracles and from Christians of different forms. One time he escorted Abu Talib, his uncle, on a caravan trip to Syria; suddenly, a Christian cleric identified the boy Muhammad for what he is and what he would be, and told his uncle to make sure that no harm from the Jews will come to the boy (Watt 1964). However, at a more commonplace standpoint his prospects throughout much of this period were uncertain. Before he was born, his father died. Immediately after birth he was entrusted to foster parents in a derelict local tribe for several years; he afterwards went back to his mother. When his mother died when he was only six, he lived with his grandfather for a few years, and then he set off to live with his uncle Abu Talib whom he looked upon as his father. When he reached adolescence, he was kept by a rich widow named Khadija, to serve as her business merchant in the trade with Syria; eventually, because of his good performance, the widow thought he deserved to marry her. Hence, he was, at this point, a quite unimportant person, who owed much of his achievements to his rich and older wife (Watt 1964). III. The Prophetic Mission Finally Muhammad was granted the mission of a prophet. He had been in the practice of visiting and staying for one month every year on the neighboring Mount Hira. Particularly, it would appear, was a spiritual tradition of paganism; while spending his time there, he could be reunited with his family, and would provide food for the poor people who come to him. On one occasion, while he was dwelling on the mountain angel Gabriel appeared in his dream, and commanded him to narrate; in reaction to Muhammad’s bewilderment he then enlightened him of a statement of the Koran’s 96th chapter, which correctly starts with the order ‘recite!’(Watt 1964, 38). The occurrence was in two manners attribute of what happened next: angel Gabriel becomes the regular means of communication between the Lord and the prophet, and it was in such pieces that what was to become the Koran, was regularly divulged to him. Though, at the moment, Muhammad became disturbed with the experience, and thought that he is being victimized by a malevolent spirit. However, a local Christian recognized that the experience of the prophet somewhat resembles that of Moses, and surmised him to be the ‘prophet of his people’; whereas a cautious experiment initiated by Khadija ascertained that his mystical visitor was undoubtedly an angel and not an evil spirit (Watt 1964). Soon after obtaining the mission, the prophet lived for several years in Mecca. Throughout this period the intermittent revelation of the Koran persisted, and a plain sacrament and morality evolved. In the duration of this period Muhammad encouraged a sizeable population of Meccan converts. For three years the developing religion persisted to be a clandestine endeavor. Then the Lord commanded Muhammad to expose it to the world, and it swiftly obtained a local following and attention all over the Arabian Peninsula (Glubb 1971). The response of the Meccan pagans to this expansion was at first an open-minded one. As one of them argued, there was no basis to prevent a person to prefer a religion for himself. There was some insult and suspicion, advices that Muhammad had in fact received his so-called divine revelations from the people, yet there was no genuine problem until Muhammad started to ridicule the local pagan deities. The pagans were utterly offended (Glubb 1971). What happened next is critical for the vocation of Muhammad, and should be viewed against the milieu of tribal politics in an anarchist civilization. Since the time of its creator Qusayy, the polity of Mecca had been devoid of a central authority; instead, it was comprised of several descent factions whose communal relationships could effortlessly worsen into civil war. To a certain extent, the expansion of the new religion mirrored these separations: it was the most powerful among the progenies of Hashim, the Banu Hashim, to whom Muhammad belonged; and it was most defenseless among their foremost enemies, the Banu’ Abd Shams. This circumstance underlies the sanctions which the pagans obliged on the Banu Hashim and their kin for several years, turning down intermarriage or trading relations with them until they sensed the concern with Muhammad. Yet groupings were not actually as definite as this indicates. Important members of the Banu Hashim held on to paganism, while simultaneously a considerable number of members of other descent tribes decided to become Muhammad’s converts (Warraq 2000). The concern for the Muslims was who, in this anarchist social order, would defend them. The most vulnerable were apparently those outside the descent tribe of Muhammad. They were exposed to attack by their own descent tribes, and Muhammad cannot protect them in any circumstances (Warraq 2000). His only alternative was to search outside Mecca for the defense and security he needed, which is a measure already foretold in the Ethiopian incident. However the Ethiopian sovereign was evidently too far-away to provide defense in Arabia, and Muhammad initiated his exploration nearer home. A stopover to the nearby settlement of Ta’if confirmed a disaster; its single blissful moment was the acknowledgement of the prophethood of Muhammad by a Nineveh-local Christian slave. Afterward Muhammad showed himself as a prophet in look for defenders, and made proposals to various tribes; yet he was consistently rejected. Ultimately, liberation emerged from the north (Cook 1983). IV. Conclusion The Muslim vocation of spiritual faith proves that there is no other god but God, and Prophet Muhammad is the chosen courier of God. Merely the first part of this pronouncement suggests a substantive meaning; the second part simply recognizes the bearer. Essentially, the trouble and burden of the teachings of Muhammad was basically monotheism. Such a resolve was not unnecessary in his period. In the Arabian Peninsula, wherein a traditional polytheism persistently thrived, it remarkably sped up the infiltration of the peninsula through the influence of monotheism. Outside the peninsula, it had a number of acquisitions in the territories which the Arabs strived to conquer. Even though real pagans were at the time inadequate in number, Christians and Zoroastrians were not resistant to the challenge of a rigid and firm monotheism. The Zoroastrians revered not merely the good deities of their two-fold cosmology, but also various gods; and though it could be factual that the three personas of the Christian Trinity combine to one God, the reckoning is mysterious, and not merely to the theologically untaught; just in the Jewish instance does the monotheist scripture of Islam appear quite planned. Muhammad, at that time, had an argument. But this argument was nothing more than the lasting monotheistic message, and by itself it neither was, nor was designed to be. It in fact was what the Prophet made of this very old truth that matters the most; and in his time this implied what he formed of it for his fellow Arabian people. References Cook, M. Muhammad. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Glubb, J.B. The Life and Times of Muhammad. New York: Stein and Day, 1971. Peters, F. Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Warraq, I. The Quest for Historical Muhammad. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Book, 2000. Watt, W.M. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Read More