Reference: Islam
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
Muhammad died in A.D. 632 with virtually all of Arabia under his control. With all the power of armies and police, no other Arab had ever succeeded in uniting his countrymen as he had. Before the century closed his followers had conquered Armenia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, North Africa, and Spain, and had crossed the Pyrenees into France.
By this time the Meccan nobility was alarmed. What had begun as a pretentious prophetic claim on the part of a half-crazed camel driver had turned into a serious revolutionary movement that was threatening their very existence. They were determined to rid themselves of the troublemaker for good.
Soon Muhammad’s effort to preach Allah (one God) became alarming to the Meccan nobility.
As he faced this severest crisis of his career, Muhammad was suddenly waited on by a delegation of the leading citizens of Yathrib, a city 280 miles to Mecca’s north. Through pilgrims and other visitors to Mecca, Muhammad’s teachings had won a firm hold in Yathrib. The city was facing internal rivalries that put it in need of a strong leader from without, and Muhammad looked like the man. After receiving a delegation’s pledge that they would worship Allah only, that they 800000 observe the precepts of Islam, and that they would obey its prophet in all that was right and defend him and his adherents as they would their women and children, Muhammad received a sign from God to accept the charge. About seventy familiespreceded him. When the Meccan leaders got wind of the exodus they did everything in their power to prevent his going; but, together with his close companion Abu Bakr, he eluded their watch and set out for Yathrib, taking refuge on the way in a crevice south of the800000city. Horsemen scouring the countryside came so close to discovering them that Muhammad’s companion was moved to despair. “We are only two,” he murmured. “No, we are three,” Muhammad answered, “for God is with us.” The Koran agrees. “He was with them,” it observes, for they were not discovered. After three days, when the search had slackened, they managed to procure two camels and make their hazardous way by unfrequented paths to the city of their destination.
The year was 622. The migration, known in Arabic as the Hijra, is regarded by Muslims as the turning point in world history and is the year from which they date their calendar. Yathrib soon came to be known as Medinat al-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, and then by contraction simply to Medina, “the city.”
In the year 622 AD, Muhammad migrated to Medina (Yathrib). This is considered a turning point in Islam and world history. As planned, his followers had preceded him.
From the moment of his arrival at Medina, Muhammad assumed a different role. From prophecy he was pressed into administration. The despised preacher became a masterful politician; the prophet was transformed into statesman. We see him as the master not merely of the hearts of a handful of devotees but of the collective life of a city, its judge and general as well as its teacher.
Mohammad’s role transitioned into that of the administrator of a city. The despised preacher became a masterful politician; the prophet was transformed into statesman.
Even his detractors concede that he played his new role brilliantly. Faced with problems of extraordinary complexity, he proved to be a remarkable statesman. As the supreme magistrate, he continued to lead as unpretentious a life as he had in the days of his obscurity. He lived in an ordinary clay house, milked his own goats, and was accessible day and night to the humblest in his community. Often seen mending his own clothes, “no emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting.” God, say Muslim historians, put before him the key to the treasures of this world, but he refused it.
Muhammad continued to lead a humble and unpretentious life, while solving problems of extraordinary complexity brilliantly in his role as a statesman.
Tradition depicts his administration as an ideal blend of justice and mercy. As chief of state and trustee of the life and liberty of his people, he exercised the justice necessary for order, meting out punishment to those who were guilty. When the injury was toward himself, on the other hand, he was gentle and merciful even to his enemies. In all, the Medinese found him a master whom it was as difficult not to love as not to obey. For he had, as one biographer has written, “the gift of influencing men, and he had the nobility only to influence for the good.”
Muhammad had the gift of influencing men, and the nobility only to influence for the good. Tradition depicts his administration as an ideal blend of justice and mercy.
For the remaining ten years of his life, his personal history merged with that of the Medinese commonwealth of which he was the center. Exercising superb statecraft, he welded the five heterogeneous and conflicting tribes of the city, three of which were Jewish, into an orderly confederation. The task was not an easy one, but in the end he succeeded 800000 awakening in the citizens a spirit of cooperation unknown in the city’s history. His reputation spread and people began to flock from every part of Arabia to see the man who had wrought this “miracle.”
Exercising superb statecraft, Muhammad welded the five heterogeneous and conflicting tribes of the city, three of which were Jewish, into an orderly confederation.
There followed the struggle with the Meccans for the mind of Arabia as a whole. In the second year of the Hijra the Medinese won a spectacular victory over a Meccan army many times larger, and they interpreted the victory as a clear sign that the angels of heaven were battling on their side. The following year, however, witnessed a reversal during which Muhammad himself was wounded. The Meccans did not follow up their victory until two years later, when they laid siege to Medina in a last desperate effort to force the Muslims to capitulate. The failure of this effort turned the tide permanently in Muhammad’s favor; and within three years—eight years after his Migration from Mecca—he who had left as a fugitive returned as conqueror. The city that had treated him cruelly now lay at his feet, with his former persecutors at his mercy. Typically, however, he did not press his victory. In the hour of his triumph the past was forgiven. Making his way to the famous Ka’ba, a cubical temple (said to have been built by Abraham) that Muhammad rededicated to Allah and adopted as Islam’s focus, he accepted the virtual mass conversion of the city. Himself, he returned to Medina.
There followed the struggle with the Meccans for the mind of Arabia as a whole. It turned into an armed conflict. Finally, in 630 AD, Muhammad won decisively, but in the hour of his triumph he forgave the past. He accepted the virtual mass conversion of the city to Islam.
Two years later, in A.D. 632 (10 A.H., After the Hijra), Muhammad died with virtually all of Arabia under his control. With all the power of armies and police, no other Arab had ever succeeded in uniting his countrymen as he had. Before the century closed his followers had conquered Armenia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, North Africa, and Spain, and had crossed the Pyrenees into France. But for their defeat by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 733, the entire Western world might today be Muslim. Within a brief span of mortal life, Muhammad had “called forth out of unpromising material a nation never united before, in a country that was hitherto but a geographical expression; established a religion which in vast areas superseded Christianity and Judaism and still claims the adherence of a goodly portion of the human race; and laid the basis of an empire that was soon to embrace within its far-flung boundaries the fairest provinces of the then civilized world.”
Two years later, in A.D. 632, Muhammad died with virtually all of Arabia under his control. With all the power of armies and police, no other Arab had ever succeeded in uniting his countrymen as he had. Before the century closed his followers had conquered Armenia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, North Africa, and Spain, and had crossed the Pyrenees into France.
In The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Michael Hart places Muhammad first. His “unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history,” Hart writes. The explanation that Muslims give for that verdict is simple. The entire work, they say, was the work of God.
Muhammad has been ranked first among the Most Influential Persons in History.
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