Prophet Muhammadਪੈਗੰਬਰ ਮੁਹੰਮਦ

Muhammad ibn Abdullah, born at Mecca in about 570 CE, is the central figure of Islam: Muslims believe him to be the final prophet, the last of a line running through Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and the man to whom the Quran was revealed. This page tells his life as the historical record and Islamic tradition together present it, keeping the two voices distinct: what tradition relates is attributed to tradition, and the dates and places historians accept are stated plainly.

Early life in Mecca

Muhammad was born into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh, the tribe that governed Mecca, a trading city and pilgrimage centre built around the shrine of the Kaaba. His father Abdullah died around the time of his birth, and his mother Amina died when he was about six; he was raised first by his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and then by his uncle Abu Talib, the Hashimite chief. He worked in trade, travelling with caravans, and tradition remembers his honesty with the nickname al-Amin, the trustworthy. In about 595 he married Khadijah, the merchant who had employed him; their children included Fatimah, through whom his line continued.

The first revelation

Muhammad often withdrew to pray in a cave called Hira, in the hills outside Mecca. Islamic tradition relates that in about 610 CE, when he was around forty, the angel Gabriel appeared to him there and commanded him to read, or recite, and that the first words of what became the Quran were revealed. Shaken, he was reassured by Khadijah, who became the first Muslim. Muslims believe the revelations continued for the remaining twenty three years of his life and were gathered after his death into the Quran.

Preaching, persecution and the Hijra

From about 613 he preached publicly: one God, a coming judgement, and care for the poor and the orphan. The Quraysh establishment, whose city lived by the Kaaba's pilgrimage, turned hostile, and in 615 some of his followers took shelter in Christian Abyssinia, present day Ethiopia. In 619, remembered as the Year of Sorrow, both Khadijah and Abu Talib died. Tradition also relates his night journey, the Isra and Mi'raj, in about 621. Delegations from Yathrib, a city torn by feuds, invited him to come as an arbitrator, and in 622 Muhammad and his followers migrated there: the Hijra, the migration after which the city became known as Medina, the City of the Prophet, and from which the Islamic calendar counts its years.

The Medina years and the Constitution

At Medina, Muhammad drew up the agreement known as the Constitution of Medina, some forty seven clauses binding the emigrants from Mecca, the Medinan tribes and the city's Jewish tribes into one community, or ummah, with shared duties of defence and defined rights for each group. Most historians accept the document as authentic, and it is often described as one of the earliest written constitutions. The decade that followed held war and diplomacy in turn: the battles of Badr in 624, Uhud in 625 and the Trench in 627 against Mecca, the truce of Hudaybiyyah in 628, and letters that the sira tradition preserves, inviting surrounding rulers to accept Islam. In 630 Mecca opened its gates to him with little fighting, and in 632 he returned to Mecca for the Farewell Pilgrimage.

Death and legacy

Muhammad died on 8 June 632 at Medina, aged about sixty two, and was buried in the chamber of his wife Aisha's house, on the site where the Prophet's Mosque now stands; the Green Dome in this page's photograph covers his tomb. Muslims revere him as the Seal of the Prophets and follow his example, the sunnah, recorded in the hadith and in the sira biographies of his life; out of reverence they add the words peace be upon him after his name, and they do not depict him in images, which is why this page carries a photograph of his mosque and not of him. His birth is honoured at Milad-un-Nabi, and the five pillars of practice he taught still frame Muslim life, in Punjab as everywhere.

How we know about his life

The sources for Muhammad's life are the Quran itself, which Muslims believe was revealed through him; the hadith, vast collections of reports of his words and actions gathered over the following centuries; and the sira, the early biographies, of which the earliest is Ibn Ishaq's, written about a century and a half after his death and surviving in the recension of Ibn Hisham. Modern historians work from the same materials, reading them critically, and the outline given on this page, the Meccan years, the Hijra, the Medina decade and the death in 632, is the one those sources jointly support.

Why are there no pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?

Out of reverence, Muslims do not make or display images of the Prophet, a practice rooted in Islam's rejection of idolatry and its wish to keep devotion directed to God alone. A few historic court manuscripts did paint him, usually with his face veiled or left blank, but the mainstream practice across the Muslim world, and the rule this Kosh follows, is no depiction at all: his memory is carried in words, in the calligraphy of his name, and in places such as his mosque at Medina.