Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Figures

Muhammad

Also Known As Mohammed The commonest alternative English spelling. · Mohammad Another common English spelling. · Muhammed Another common English spelling.
Prophets

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Muhammad is revered in Islam as the final prophet, the Seal of the Prophets, through whom God revealed the Quran over some twenty-three years by the agency of the angel Gabriel. Born in Mecca about 570, orphaned young and known for his honesty, he received his first revelation in a cave on Mount Hira, preached the oneness of God against the idolatry of his city, and led his followers in the Hijra to Medina, from which the Islamic calendar begins. He united much of Arabia under the new faith before his death in 632. Out of reverence and the Islamic aversion to depicting or typecasting him, no archetype is imposed upon him.

Facts
Attestation
Historicity
Historically attested 2
Earliest Muslim biographies were written a century or more after his death
Traditions Revering This Figure
Islam 3
Traditions Revering This Figure
Baha'i Faith 4
Life
Lifespan or Floruit
570 to 632 CE 1
Place of Activity
Mecca and Medina 1
Manner of Death
Died of natural causes 1
Died at Medina in 632
Origins
Place of Origin
Mecca 1
Identity
Also Known As
Prophet Muhammad 1
Gender
Male 1
Position Profile
Key Text
The Quran, revealed to him over some twenty three years, and the hadith collections recording his life and sayings, are the texts through which he is known. 2
Learn More
The Sources, and How Far They Stand from the Events

Muhammad is a historical figure in a way that is not seriously disputed. The precise reconstruction of his life is a different matter, and the source problem is specific.

The Quran is the earliest material. It is understood by Muslims as revelation received between roughly 610 and his death in 632, and the standard account has it collected under the caliph Uthman within about twenty years. Manuscript evidence supports a very early fixation of the text: the Birmingham folios and the Sanaa palimpsest lower text have been radiocarbon dated to the seventh century, and while radiocarbon dates parchment rather than ink, the results sit comfortably with the traditional account. But the Quran is not a biography. It alludes to events without narrating them and names Muhammad only four times.

Everything narrative comes from the sira and hadith literature, and the gap is the issue. Ibn Ishaq wrote the foundational biography around 767, more than a century after the death, and even that survives only in the later recension of Ibn Hisham, who says openly that he omitted material. The great hadith collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim are ninth century. These traditions come with chains of transmitters, and Muslim scholarship developed an elaborate and serious science for evaluating those chains.

Western scholarship has ranged from broadly accepting the traditional framework with caution to radical scepticism about all of it. The sceptical extreme of the 1970s has receded, partly because of the manuscript evidence. The mainstream position now grants the outline and treats the detail as needing case-by-case argument.

What He Is Not, and the Arguments About the Finality

Two persistent Western errors are worth clearing.

He is not worshipped. Islamic theology is emphatic that he is a man, that the sin the tradition treats as unforgivable is associating anything with God, and that veneration of the Prophet must not cross into it. The obsolete European term Mohammedan, which implied otherwise, was rejected by Muslims for exactly that reason. He is also not held to be the founder of a new religion in Islamic self-understanding: the claim is restoration, that Abraham, Moses and Jesus brought the same message and that it had been corrupted.

The title that carries the weight is seal of the prophets, from Quran 33:40, and the reading of it, that he is the last, that prophecy ends with him, is the point at which Islam draws its sharpest internal and external boundaries. The Ahmadiyya movement, founded in the nineteenth century, understands the seal differently and holds its founder to be a prophet in a subordinate sense; for this it is declared non-Muslim by state law in Pakistan and by most Sunni and Shia authorities, and its members face legal disability and violence.

The other great division is not about him but about what happened after. Sunni tradition accepts the succession of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali as rightly guided; Shia tradition holds that authority was designated to Ali and his descendants and that the community went wrong at once. That disagreement, about the sixty years after his death, has structured the religion for fourteen centuries.

Mecca, the Hijra, and the State at Medina

Beneath the source problem there is a life whose outline commands broad agreement, even where the detail is debated.

He was born in Mecca around 570, into the clan of Hashim of the tribe of Quraysh, and orphaned young; the traditional account has him raised by his grandfather and then his uncle Abu Talib, and working the caravan trade. His marriage to Khadija, a merchant widow, is placed before the preaching began. The tradition dates the first revelation to about 610, on Mount Hira near Mecca, and describes private and then public preaching of one God against the polytheism of the sanctuary, which drew the opposition of the Quraysh, whose prestige was bound up with it.

The turning point is the hijra, the migration to Medina (then Yathrib) in 622. It is from this event, not his birth or the first revelation, that the Islamic calendar counts its years. At Medina he was not only a preacher but the arbiter and leader of a community that included the town's Arab clans and its Jewish tribes, an arrangement recorded in the document later called the Constitution of Medina.

The years that followed are, in the traditional narrative, of conflict with Mecca, Badr, Uhud, the Trench, ending in the largely peaceful submission of Mecca around 630 and the clearing of the Kaaba of its idols. He died at Medina in 632, having brought most of the Arabian tribes into some relation with the new polity. That much is the frame within which the source-critical arguments are conducted.

The Prophet the West Kept Reinventing

For most of a thousand years the figure Europe called Mahomet was less a historical man than a screen onto which Christendom projected its fears, and the history of that projection has itself become a field of study.

Medieval Latin polemic cast him as an impostor, a heretic, or an idol, the Chanson de Roland has Saracens worshipping a golden Mahound, and Dante placed him in the eighth circle of the Inferno among the sowers of discord. The Reformation turned him into a stick with which Protestants and Catholics beat each other. Only with the Enlightenment did the portrait divide: Voltaire made him a fanatic in one play and conceded his genius elsewhere, Gibbon wrote of him with cool respect, and in 1840 Thomas Carlyle delivered a lecture, The Hero as Prophet, that presented him as sincere, a decisive break with the imposture thesis.

The historian John Tolan, tracing this whole sequence, has argued its recurring lesson: the Western Muhammad has generally revealed more about the anxieties of the writer than about the man. The caricature has had real modern consequences, from Orientalist scholarship to present-day controversies over depiction.

Against all of it stands the reverence of the Muslims for whom he is the final Prophet: the blessing sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, invoked after his name, the celebration of the mawlid, and the strong reticence in most of the tradition about depicting him at all, a reticence rooted in the fear of idolatry rather than, as is often assumed, a specific Quranic ban.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Addressed By

A hundred and sixty verses in praise of the Prophet.

Traditionally the song with which the people of Medina greeted Muhammad on his arrival.

Associated With

This source names Muhammad directly: "viewers who had heard only a rumor that Muhammad would be shown, before the film itself "

This source names Muhammad directly: "Al-Risala, composed by Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii around the turn of the ninth century"

Source Al-Risala fi Usul al-FiqhMuhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii

This source names Muhammad directly: "ginal Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad, Claude Andrew Clegg III's 1997 biograp"

Source An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah MuhammadClaude Andrew Clegg III

This source names Muhammad directly: "st year's sins, following a report that Muhammad adopted the practice from a Jewish fast"

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Set in place by Muhammad after the Quraysh rebuilding, c. 605 CE.

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editionsP. Bearman et al. (eds.)

This source names Muhammad directly: "nd displays objects associated with the Prophet Muhammad and other early Islamic figures, includ..."

This source names Muhammad directly: "John V. Tolan's Faces of Muhammad, Princeton University Press, 2019, is a scholarly stud"

Gabriel, Figures

Islamic tradition holds that Jibril conveyed the Quran to Muhammad.

This source names Muhammad directly: " Shiraz home of the merchant Siyyid Ali-Muhammad, and it was here, on the evening of 22 "

This source names Muhammad directly: "he earliest surviving full biography of Muhammad, originally compiled in the mid eighth "

This source names Muhammad directly: "word the Quran records God commanding Muhammad to speak, the channel states its own mission as presenting a moderate and tolerant line of Islam."

Source Iqraa (Wikipedia)

This source names Muhammad directly: "Muhammad and his followers emigrated from Mecca to Medina in 622, the Hijra, an event so"

Source Muhammad at MedinaW. Montgomery Watt

This source names Muhammad directly: "rom Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, a companion of Muhammad, with introducing Islam directly at the"

Source Islam in China (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Muhammad directly: "er around 1192, the same years in which Muhammad of Ghor's forces defeated the last Hind"

Source Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and BeyondCarl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence

This source names Muhammad directly: "ts on a single Quranic verse describing Muhammad carried by night to the farthest mosque"

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

This source names Muhammad directly: "led by the ninth century hadith scholar Muhammad al-Tirmidhi and read here from the Sunn"

Source Jami at-TirmidhiMuhammad al-Tirmidhi
Jerusalem, Cities

Muhammad's Night Journey (Isra) is traditionally understood to have brought him to Jerusalem before his Ascension.

Source Jerusalem: The BiographySimon Sebag Montefiore

This source names Muhammad directly: "Al-Hadi died in 911 with the work incomplete; a follower, Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Kufi, compiled a companion volume, Kitab al-Muntakhab, drawing on his teacher's rulings to round out what al-Hadi..."

Source A Short History of Zaydi Fiqh (Leiden Arabic Humanities Blog)Eirik Hovden and Ebrahim Mansoor

This source names Muhammad directly: "legal compendium of Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Baraka al-Bahlawi, an Omani Ibadi jurist who died in the late fourth Islamic century, the late tenth century CE, roughly two hundred years after..."

Kitab al-Kafi, Sources

This source names Muhammad directly: "sayings and teachings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and the Shia imams. As one of the tradi..."

Source Kitab al-KafiMuhammad ibn Yaqub al-Kulayni

This source names Muhammad directly: "is the foremost theological treatise of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, composed in the Najd"

Source Kitab al-Tawhid (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

The sanctuary at the center of the Hajj and the direction of Muslim prayer.

Source Sahih al-BukhariMuhammad al-Bukhari
Mazar-i-Sharif, Cities

This source names Muhammad directly: "Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. A shrine on the site was rebuilt by th..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Medina, Sacred Sites

Migrated here in 622 CE, the Hijra that opens the Islamic calendar, and is buried within the Prophet's Mosque at the city's center.

Source Muhammad at MedinaW. Montgomery Watt

This source names Muhammad directly: "Jonathan A. C. Brown's Misquoting Muhammad is a scholarly work aimed at a broad educated"

Received the first revelation of the Quran in the summit cave, traditionally dated to around 610 CE.

Source Sahih al-BukhariMuhammad al-Bukhari

This source names Muhammad directly: "e analyzing cinematic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, including Majid Majidi's 2015 film, pu..."

The Qasidat al-Burda is a poem in praise of the Prophet Muhammad.

Source Muhammad at MedinaW. Montgomery Watt

This source names Muhammad directly: "e divine revelation transmitted through Muhammad. As primary scripture it is the stronge"

Quran 96:1-5, Passages

This source names Muhammad directly: " read or recite, and the tradition that Muhammad was unlettered turns partly on which. P"

Source The Quran, Sacred Books of the East, volumes 6 and 9E. H. Palmer (translator)

This source names Muhammad directly: "inning of the Quran's own revelation to Muhammad. Tradition holds that Laylat al Qadr, t"

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

This source names Muhammad directly: "ards as most authoritative, compiled by Muhammad al-Bukhari from the accounts he judged "

Source Sahih al-BukhariMuhammad al-Bukhari
Sahih Muslim, Sources

This source names Muhammad directly: "f sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad compiled and authenticated through the..."

Source Sahih MuslimMuslim ibn al-Hajjaj

This source names Muhammad directly: "ates Ali as the fourth caliph after the Prophet Muhammad. Semah dancers, called semahcis, move t..."

Source Semah, Alevi-Bektasi Ritual, UNESCO Representative List inscription (ich.unesco.org)UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage

This source names Muhammad directly: "isham, is the foundational biography of Muhammad and one of the earliest extended source"

Source Sirat Rasul Allah, in the recension of Ibn HishamIbn Ishaq; edited by Ibn Hisham

This source names Muhammad directly: "heir chains of transmission back to the Prophet Muhammad."

Source Sufism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Tafsir, Doctrines

This source names Muhammad directly: " using the Quran itself, the sayings of Muhammad and the testimony of his companions, an"

Source Encyclopaedia of the Qur'anJane Dammen McAuliffe, general editor

Traditionally the song with which the people of Medina greeted Muhammad on his arrival.

Source Muhammad at MedinaW. Montgomery Watt

This source names Muhammad directly: "which Husayn ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed with his family and compani..."

Source Ta'zieh (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Muhammad directly: "ph Umar ibn al-Khattab rather than from Muhammad. The Ja'fari school grounds the ruling "

This source names Muhammad directly: "date, its origin with Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, and its text on the two commandments shared between Islam and Christianity."

Source The ACW Document, A Common Word Between Us and YouRoyal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought

This source names Muhammad directly: "Iran, a young merchant named Siyyid Ali-Muhammad declared himself the Bab, the bearer of"

Source The Bab (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Source Muhammad at MedinaW. Montgomery Watt
Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)

This source names Muhammad directly: "d twentieth century growth under Elijah Muhammad. Its strength is genuine early access a"

Source The Black Muslims in AmericaC. Eric Lincoln

The subject of the event.

The migration of Muhammad and his followers to Medina.

This source names Muhammad directly: ", chronicling the origins of Islam with Muhammad never shown or voiced. Its strength is "

Source The Message (1976 film) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Muhammad directly: "of Islam and the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad. In keeping with Islamic tradition, Muh..."

Source The Message (1976 film) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Muhammad directly: ", tracing its history from Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad through its later s"

The Qur'an, Sources

This source names Muhammad directly: "be a divine revelation delivered to the Prophet Muhammad. As the primary text of the tradition i..."

Source The Qur'an

The second clause names Muhammad as the messenger of God.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

This source names Muhammad directly: "nematographic approach to not depicting Muhammad, and the reception controversy, cross c"

Source Wikipedia, "Muhammad: The Messenger of God (film)"Wikipedia contributors

Why this is disputed. Tradition holds that Muhammad gave this sword to Ali at the Battle of Uhud, an account first attached to the object within an Islamic relic and literary tradition rather than through any independently verifiable seventh century provenance. The blades fame and its distinctive forked form are attested extensively in later Islamic art and devotion, particularly Shia devotion, but no physical object displayed today can be confirmed as the sword described in the earliest accounts of the battle.

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editionsP. Bearman et al. (eds.)

Attributed Works

Source Sunan Abi DawudAbu Dawud al-Sijistani

Belongs to Tradition

Islam, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Children

Depicted In

One of the seven roundels bears the name Muhammad.

Source Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

The film follows Islamic convention by never showing Muhammad's face on screen; the character appears on screen as a child only through his hands, feet and the back of his head.

Married To

Source Sahih al-BukhariMuhammad al-Bukhari

Related To

A wife of the Prophet Muhammad, and after his death one of the principal transmitters of reports about his practice.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
Hasan ibn Ali, Figures

A grandson of the Prophet.

Ibn Abbas, Figures

A first cousin of the Prophet, a boy at the time of his death.

First wife of the Prophet Muhammad; the marriage lasted about twenty five years and he took no other wife during it.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

He was among the scribes who wrote revelation down as it was given.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Relics

Why this is disputed. The Topkapi swords attributed to Muhammad are old blades whose gold and gem mountings are demonstrably later work, kept in Cairo under the Mamluks before being brought to Istanbul in 1517. Attribution of any specific sword to the Prophet himself rests on continuous Islamic relic tradition honored at the Ottoman court rather than on documentary or scientific proof reaching back to the seventh century, so the claim divides between a tradition of continuous veneration and the absence of independently verifiable provenance for the blades' origin.

Traditions Founded

Islam, Religions
Source The Oxford Dictionary of World ReligionsJohn Bowker (ed.)
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005s.v. MuhammadView the Source
2. Muhammad at Medina
W. Montgomery Watt, Clarendon Press, 1956Introduction and Excursus on the sourcesView the Source
3. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997s.v. MuhammadView the Source
4. A Concise Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith
Peter Smith, Oneworld Publications, 2000s.v. MuhammadView the Source
Sirat Rasul Allah, in the recension of Ibn Hisham
Ibn Ishaq; edited by Ibn HishamThe recension of Ibn Hisham
Quote, The recension of Ibn Hisham
The foundational biography is of about 767, more than a century after the death, and survives only through a later editor who states that he omitted material.
Sirat Rasul Allah, in the recension of Ibn Hisham
Ibn Ishaq; edited by Ibn HishamThe traditional biography of the Meccan and Medinan years
The Qur'an
Quran 33:40
Quote, Quran 33:40
The seal of the prophets, and the reading of it on which Islam draws its sharpest boundaries.
View the Source
Sahih al-Bukhari
Muhammad al-BukhariThe collections of the ninth century
Quote, The collections of the ninth century
The hadith corpus was compiled some two centuries after the events it reports, with an elaborate science developed to evaluate chains of transmission.
View the Source
Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today
John V. Tolan, Princeton University Press, 2019The Western reception of the Prophet, traced
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
Ibn Ishaq (recension of Ibn Hisham), Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by A. Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad
Ibn Ishaq; ed. Ibn Hisham; trans. A. Guillaume, Oxford University Press, 1955View the Source
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