Power to Muhammad the Prophet

MAKING WAY for ISLAM

Power to Muhammad the Prophet

An imageless Muhammad. He insisted that he was
only a prophet, the last prophet, not a god and not to be worshipped. His image is not in any mosque.

While both Persia and Constantinople were becoming weaker, a new religion and political force was rising on the Arabian peninsula: Islam. There, towns were few. Arabia had been divided mainly among warlike nomadic tribes with camels and flocks of cattle and sheep. An individual's survival depended on subordinating himself to his tribe. And tribes sometimes compensated for periods of extreme dryness by raiding neighboring tribes or a passing caravan.

A man from Mecca named Mohammad who was familiar with Christianity, Judaism and the monotheistic movement, claimed to have heard messages from God via the angel Gabriel. He claimed to foresee the end of the world, a day of judgment, when the dead would be awakened, when all would be judged according to their deeds and sent to either paradise or eternal flames. He was rejected by his fellow Meccans, but people from outside Mecca viewed that city as having a special spirituality. They were impressed by Muhammad's preaching and invited him to their town: Yathrib. The town had a population of roughly 10,000, and Muhammad found it without any stable authority outside its Jewish community, and he established himself as someone to come to for judgments.

Muhammad's followers suffered from poverty, and beginning in January 623 some of them resorted to the tradition of raiding the caravans that traveled along the eastern coast of the Red Sea from Mecca to Syria. Seeing himself as their leader, Muhammad put himself at the head of these raids, excusing them on the grounds of the injustice of poverty and describing the raids as part of a holy war (Jihad) against the rulers of Mecca for their having rejected his teaching. Muhammad and his followers had been developing a contempt for people they called "idolaters" -- for people who worshipped traditional, numerous gods. Energized by religious fervor, a sense of unity and the prospect of booty, his men fought well.

Muhammad's movement was still a fraction of those in Yathrib -- maybe around 1,500 strong. But his success in warfare brought new people into his army, and a larger army brought increased success and more converts. In March 624 he had his greatest success so far, at Bedr, where his followers killed from 50 to 70 Meccans who had been accompanying a caravan. Just as Christians attributed divine help in the violence that Constantine conducted against Maxentius at the Tiber River, so too did Muhammad attribute his success to the will of God.

Muhammad's power grew as he distributed booty and made alliances with tribes neighboring Yathrib. The war between Muhammad and Mecca continued. By Arab standards, Muhammad had become the leader of a great military machine, and Mecca had failed to acquire help from tribes elsewhere in Arabia. In January 630 Muhammad's army of around 10,000 men stood outside Mecca and frightened the city into surrendering. Muhammad exercised diplomatic skills and bloodshed was avoided. Muhammad strengthened his movement by giving Meccan leaders important positions under his rule, neutralizing them as potential enemies, maintaining their leadership vis-à-vis other Meccans and soothing what might otherwise have been wounded pride. It was a traditional move by wiser conquerors.

Under Muhammad's authority, Meccans of wealth were obliged to donate to the well-being of Mecca's poor. People saw Muhammad's strength as the power of his god, and they saw the other gods as having become powerless. There was a mass conversion to Muhammad's faith: Islam. With Mecca under Muhammad's rule, the holy shrine there, the Kaaba, was turned into a place of Islamic worship.

Muhammad added Mecca's army to his own. His victory at Mecca alarmed tribes elsewhere in Arabia. But not one of their armies matched Muhammad's. In February and March, 630, Muhammad’s military fought various skirmishes and the battles of Hunsin, Auras, and Taif. He was victorious, and across much of Arabia his dominance was followed by mass conversions. As with Constantine and the Christians, military victories had been of crucial significance -- viewed by his followers, of course, as the work of God.

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