Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet

Fourteen hundred years ago

a humble merchant who could not read or write

changed the face of Arabia.

His name was Muhammad.

Today, his influence has spread to every corner of the world

including the United States...

This is his story.

And the story of millions of Americans who revere him as God's final prophet.

Major Funding of Muhammad Legacy of a Prophet has been provided by

the CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING

and by THE DAVID AND LUCILE PACKARD FOUNDATION

ARABIAN BULK TRADE

SABADIA FAMILY FOUNDATION, THE EL-HIBRI FOUNDATION

the IRFAN KATHWARI FOUNDATION

and MIR IMRAN.

Additional funding has been provided by many other organizations and individuals.

He was neither tall and lanky

nor short and heavy set.

When he looked at someone he looked them in the eyes.

He was the most generous hearted of men

the most truthful of them in speech

the most mild tempered of them

and the noblest of them in lineage.

Anyone who would describe him would say

I never saw before or after him

"the like of him. "

Muhammad, described by a contemporary.

Muhammad was a man who

faced an absolutely hopeless situation.

There was a whole continent virtually of people killing one another

in an endless hopeless vendetta, going down a chute of violence and warfare.

Feeling that society was coming to an end and had no hope.

He gave them hope single-handedly.

In a space of 23 years

he brought peace and new hope to Arabia and a new beacon for the world.

Islam, the religion Muhammad first brought to Arabia

now claims 1.2 billion followers around the world.

There are an estimated 7 million Muslims in America

where it is the country's fastest growing religion

and the most diverse.

Like America itself, the Muslims in this country come from all over the world.

They have a common bond

not only in their religious faith and in their mosques

but in this story of Muhammad, they all look to it.

This is the source of how to behave

of how to be a constructive citizen

of how to be a good parent, of how to be a good child

of how to seek knowledge and truth.

These are values that are expressed most clearly for Muslims

in the story of Muhammad.

In the Quran Allah says that Muhammad is the best example of behavior for you.

And that's what he is the guide for the way we deal with each other

and when we're in a position of authority

how we attempt to implement justice and law.

Prophet Muhammad, he asked the question to people around him

do you love your creator?

Serve your fellow man first.

What does that tell you?

It tells you, forget about all this intellectual

yeah, I love God and this and that.

If you're gonna, you know, forget about talking the talk, walk the walk.

You want to serve God, serve people.

What more noble way to serve people than to risk your own life to save them.

September 11th has changed the whole world

and it has also put the Muslim community in the spotlight.

Muslims have a lot of hostility being hurled at them.

But this is also a time of transformation.

Many people are very eager to understand Islam

and want to know who is the Prophet? What is the Quran?

Who are the Muslims? How do they live?

Through the stories about Prophet Muhammad

we were able to make connections

and all of a sudden you would feel you can relate

to things that happened back 1500 years ago

and that the issues weren't old fashioned

they were universal.

And that's what he's taught me.

This is the story Muslims have passed dow

from generation to generation for 1400 years.

A story about the merchant, husband, father

statesman and warrior whom they consider the final prophet.

The man whose legacy continues to shape their lives today.

The life of MUHAMMAD

is even in its details

probably better known than any other major religious figure before modern times.

His followers made careful efforts

to record memories that they had of things that he had said

and things that he had done.

Many of these traditions may have been made up later on

but at the core there seems to me to be little reason to doubt

that there is a picture and a portrait of a living man.

According to Muslim sources

Muhammad bin Abdullah-or son of Abdullah

was born in the year 570 in the city of Mecca

in what is today Saudi Arabia.

A poet of the times described Mecca

as a place where winter and summer were equally intolerable.

The world into which Muhammad arrived was a brutal one

defined by hunger, violence, and tribal warfare.

You could not exist without your tribe.

An individual in this dangerous world had absolutely no chance of survival.

And that meant that the tribe had become, perhaps, the most sacred value in Arabia.

It's a society that's based on the idea of vigilantism.

That, if somebody attacked my clan

then I have a right to go and attack anyone from his clan.

They saw justice as taking revenge.

The Arabs of the sixth century had no written code of law

no common religion, and no central government.

In this dangerous world

Muhammad had the good fortune to be born into Mecca's powerful tribe, the Quraysh.

But his father died before he was born, and, his mother died when he was only 6.

His uncle Abu Talib was left to raise the young orphan.

He surely had to have worried about his future, what will he be.

And so he he must have been a very introspective child.

Muhammad had the habit of going out in the desert and contemplating

the stars and thinking about why he was an orphan.

And how would life be to him in the future.

Orphans were marginal people and

he felt very, very strongly identified

with the poor and disadvantaged for the rest of his life.

The Mecca of Muhammad's youth was both a religious and a commercial center

located at the crossroads of two major trading routes.

Pilgrims came from all over Arabia to worship

the hundreds of idols that surrounded the Ka'aba

an ancient shrine in the heart of the city.

The Ka'aba was surrounded by a sacred area where fighting was not allowed.

The commerce generated by the pilgrims made it possible

for a young man in Muhammad's circumstances to make a living in the markets of Mecca.

Soon Muhammad began acting as an agent for wealthy merchants

taking their goods on caravans throughout Arabia.

These journeys exposed him to a variety of other tribes and communities

and a range of new ideas.

He probably learned the differences that exist between different tribes.

People speaking different languages. He encountered Christians and Jews.

And learned from them what their faith

what their religion, what their cultures, are.

Muhammad would have become aware that for the Jews

and the Christians the holy scripture was very important.

Both got scriptures in which God had sent

a sacred message to prophets

and this was a way in which people could relate to the divine.

When MUHAMMAD was about 25 years old

he had a major change in his life.

A wealthy widow

older woman named KHADIJA

asked him to take her caravans into Syria for her.

Muhammad took all her goods and went with the caravan to Syria and did

an incredible job.

And her respect for him turned into admiration for him.

And she inquired about him through one of her friends.

Shortly thereafter Khadija asked Muhammad to marry her.

I like you because of our relationship, she said

"And your high reputation among your people;"

"Your trustworthiness, good character, and truthfulness. "

And this is interesting.

She's is a very beautiful woman.

But she's, she's 40.

She is, she is moving into her maturity.

And he's a 25-year-old youth.

Um, he's an orphan.

And, and he accepts this, uh, proposal and it's arranged through the family.

And he does, indeed, marry her.

And people have often said rather sneeringly that

this was just a marriage of convenience on his part.

He'd just married the wealthy widow for his own ah gain and profit.

But there's no doubt in my mind that he deeply, deeply loved Khadija.

Over the course of their marriage, Khadija and Muhammad had four daughters

and two sons who died as infants.

He was a family man, and a successful and respected merchant.

But as Muhammad approached his own fortieth birthday

he was becoming increasingly restless and

troubled by the problems of Meccan society.

Within a few generations

they had gone from this kind of brutal existence in the Arabian Steppes

to becoming financiers, bankers

businessmen, merchants, with a lot of money.

And this was great, of course, and people were delighted.

But it was a very disturbing time

because the market economy demanded

as we know only too well in the West, a strong competitive streak.

People no longer felt that they had to take care of the poor and the needy.

And the weaker members of Quraysh any longer.

They had to make as much money at they possibly could.

They had a marvelous society.

They had a trading town, they were booming

they were doing business.

They were living like an affluent society.

And when you have an affluent society

the tendency is to become hedonistic.

To look at, you know, what are the pleasures of life?

Muhammad would often retreat to the mountains outside Mecca, to meditate.

It was on one such retreat in the year 610 that Muhammad had an experience

that would transform history.

The prophet used to retire from time to time

into a hill called Jabal al-Nur, the Mountain of Light.

When you climb up that mountain and many people still do it

on top of it is a cave called al-Hira in Arabic

Into which the Prophet would often times retire in order to contemplate

and to pray.

To be still with God.