The Life of the Prophet Muhammad

Overview

Recall questions on Muhammad's life, Khadijah, the Night of Power, the hijrah and Madinah, the farewell address, pre-Islamic Arabia and its religion, trade, poetry and society, and Armstrong's and Lings's accounts of the Prophet.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What are the main events of Muhammad's life that Muslims recount?

   Model answer

   Birth in Makkah around 570 into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh; orphaned young and raised first by his grandfather and then by his uncle Abu Talib; marriage to Khadijah; the first revelation at the cave of Hira; about twelve years of preaching under mounting pressure in Makkah; the hijrah to Madinah in 622; the building of a community there and conflict with Makkah; the return to Makkah in 630; the farewell pilgrimage with his final address; and his death in 632.

2. 2

   Why is Khadijah's part in the story more than biographical detail?

   Model answer

   Khadijah was a successful merchant who employed Muhammad before proposing marriage. Muslims hold that she was the first to accept his message, steadying him when he doubted what had happened at Hira. She financed and sheltered the early community, and he took no other wife while she lived. Her death, in the same year as Abu Talib's, left him exposed, and the year is remembered as the year of sorrow.

3. 3

   What happened on the Night of Power as Muslims describe it?

   Model answer

   During a retreat in a cave outside Makkah in Ramadan, Muhammad is said to have been confronted by the angel Jibril and commanded to recite, receiving the first passage of the Qur'an. Muslims seek the night in the last ten days of Ramadan and hold worship then to be of immense worth. Its doctrinal weight is that revelation is given rather than composed: the Prophet is a recipient, not an author.

4. 4

   Why is the hijrah, rather than the first revelation, the start of the Muslim calendar?

   Model answer

   Because it is the point at which the message became a community with a life of its own. Migrating to Yathrib in 622 turned a harassed group in Makkah into a polity in what became Madinah, with the Prophet as arbiter and leader. Muslims count years from that migration because Islam's public existence dates from it rather than from its first private moment.

5. 5

   What did Muhammad's leadership in Madinah actually involve?

   Model answer

   Arbitrating between clans that had been feuding for years; binding the emigrants, the Madinan helpers and the city's Jewish tribes into one body by agreement; organising worship and welfare; conducting relations with Makkah through raids, the battles of Badr, Uhud and the Trench, and finally a treaty; and giving rulings on law. Religious and political authority were not separate offices, which is why Muslims describe a community governed under Allah taking shape there.

6. 6

   What was the farewell address remembered for?

   Model answer

   Muslims recall it as gathering up the message: that Arab and non-Arab stand on the same footing and only piety distinguishes people; that life and property are inviolable; that women have rights over men as men have over women; that the blood feuds of the past are cancelled and lending at interest is abolished. He urged the community to hold fast to what he was leaving them. Shi'a Muslims give great weight to what he said at Ghadir Khumm on the journey home.

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