The Life of Muhammad

1,400 years ago a man born here, in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia,

changed the course of world history.

If you had to rate the top people in the history of the world,

as leaders,

the name of Muhammad would be in the top three.

Here we have a man who began a mission.

He gave light to the world.

For one and a half billion Muslims, he is the last and greatest

of that long line of prophets who have brought the word of God to humanity.

He was not just a spiritual genius, but he also had political gifts of a very high order.

He laid the foundations for a religion, Islam,

that after his death developed a culture and civilization that spread around the world

and inspired some of the most beautiful architecture.

But today, Islam is at the very heart of the conflict that defines our world

and Muhammad's name is associated with some of the most appalling acts

of terrorism the world has ever seen.

Osama bin Laden and others who have committed acts of Jihad terrorism

consistently invoke the Qur'an and Muhammad's example, to justify what they are doing.

Obedience to one true God, Allah, and follow in the footsteps

for the final prophet and messenger...

Outside of the Islamic world, almost nothing is known about Muhammad,

whereas for Muslims, he is the ultimate role model and his life is known in every detail.

So who was he? What was his message?

And why are so many people, Muslims and non-Muslims, divided over his legacy?

In this groundbreaking series, I will explore the many complexities of his life story,

about the Revelations he is said to have received from God, about his many wives,

about his relations with the Jews of Arabia, about his use of war and peace

and about the laws that he enacted when he set up his own state.

I want to examine his life and times and understand how they still affect

today's world and whether they are a force for good or evil.

I want to uncover the real Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam.

Peace be upon him.

When Muslims come on a pilgrimage to Mecca they put on two simple pieces of white cloth.

They discard their everyday clothes, in favour of these simple cloths,

which symbolises purity and make everyone equal,

a tradition dating back to Muhammad's time, more than 1,400 years ago.

Just after I was born, the very first words whispered into my ear were those of the Shahada,

the simple statement of faith. "There is no God but Allah, Muhammad is God's messenger."

Words that link me to this holy place and to the founder of Islam.

Like most Muslims, the first human name I heard was not that of my mother or father, but of Muhammad.

I first came to Mecca over 30 years ago, as a child

of just five years, with my family, on Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage.

As pilgrims, we came to the Grand Mosque,

to the Kaaba, the most familiar symbol of Islam.

It is the place to which Muslims face, everyday, wherever they may be, in prayer.

When Muslims circle the Kaaba, they walk in the footsteps of their Prophet, Muhammad,

in devotion to God.

People come from the four corners of the world, but what unites

everyone here is a desire to emulate the life of the Prophet Muhammad...

..a man as important to Muslims as Jesus is to Christians.

A man defines who they are.

But unlike Jesus, Muhammad was not the Son of God.

For him, there was no miraculous birth, no healing miracles and no resurrection after death.

He was just a man.

Muhammad was born 1,400 years ago in one of the world's most inhospitable regions.

It was a stark, harsh environment of mountain, desert and searing heat, one-third the size of Europe.

The vast emptiness of Arabia was sandwiched between two of the ancient world's great powers.

To the north was Christian Byzantium,

the last remnant of the Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople.

To the east was another ancient civilisation, the Sassanids, the remains of the Great Persian Empire.

In between, were hundreds of Arab tribes and clans,

constantly competing in a battle for supremacy and survival.

There were very few cities. One of them was Mecca, the city where Muhammad was born.

Muhammad is believed to have been born

on a spot close to here, in the year 570.

His father Abdullah died before he was born

and his mother, Aminah, was very poor.

And what's really interesting is, at the time, there was no sense of the coming of a messiah,

no stars in the sky and wise men didn't travel from afar in order to worship him.

In fact, at the time, barely anyone noticed and no-one really cared.

And yet today there isn't anything to mark where Muhammad was born.

No shrine, no museum, not even a plaque on a wall.

Most Muslims make a clear distinction between the messenger and the message.

Muhammad may be held in high esteem, but to worship HIM

is considered "shirq", a heinous and unforgivable corruption of Islam.

So, over the years many sites connected with Muhammad and his life

have been removed, to ensure there is no worship of anyone other than God.

The same goes for visual depictions of Muhammad.

Unlike in Christian Churches, with their myriad images of Jesus

on the cross and the Virgin Mary, mosques have no images of Muhammad or any other person at all.

What is very important in the Islamic tradition

is to understand the very essence of monotheism, what we call "tawhid"

in Arabic, the oneness of God. He is beyond everything and we don't represent God,

but in order to be quite clear in this relationship with God, we never represent or have an

image of any of the prophets. It's not only the last prophet, Muhammad,

it's all the prophets - Abraham, Moses, Jesus are not seen and drawn or anything like this in Islam.

It's out of respect towards this oneness of God and following the messenger, never worshipping him.

In the past, some Ottoman and Persian miniature paintings have depicted Muhammad,

but his face was always hidden behind a veil.

But in the West there is a long history of depicting Muhammad in drawings and paintings.

Most recently a Danish cartoon portrayed him as a terrorist, with a bomb in his turban.

This led to an explosion of anger and protest right across the Muslim world,

not just because it was showing Muhammad's face, but also because it was ridiculing him, too.

Despite the lack of visual imagery, the written sources for Muhammad's life are extensive.

The first is the Qur'an itself, Islam's holy book, but there is also a rich library of stories

and sayings connected to Muhammad preserved and written down after his death, and known as the Hadith.

Muslim scholars had to sift through thousands of sayings and stories

about Muhammad, to check their validity.

Muslim scholars themselves were terribly worried to try and verify whether

the Hadith they were collecting were true,

whether they were false,

whether they were fabricated.

The problem that scholars have with it is,

one, it's only set down in writing at a much later time.

The actual earliest physical text that we can hold are actually only

from the 820s, and Muhammad dies in 632, so that's a long period.

Obviously yes, of course they've been transmitted over time,

but with transmission orally over time, problems can come in.

The Arabs relied on their memory throughout history,

their history and their genealogy was all retained by memory and Muhammad

was a very important man.

By the time he died, he had hundreds of thousands of people following him

or some opposing him. And they all said and preserved

all this and that is a source which cannot be ignored

simply because some people say, "No, this is an just an invention"

or that it was written later. It wasn't.

While the veracity of the Hadiths is still debated and argued over,

there are, remarkably, accounts of Muhammad's existence from non-Muslim sources.

Non-Muslim evidence for Muhammad is not copious, it exists.

The name Muhammad is attested in Greek,

Syriac and Armenian writings from, say, the first 30 years after the death of Muhammad.

Which 30 years after Muhammad's death is, I suppose, pretty good.

The Armenian historian, Sebeos, wrote about Muhammad just 24 years after his death.

The particular interest

here is, that for the first time, in Armenian, someone talks about

Muhammad and mentions him

by name and says a little bit about what he did.

Sebeos himself was talking about the events around the year 630,

which was before Muhammad had actually died.

Sebeos gives a surprisingly accurate account of Muhammad's background and teachings.

Translating from the Armenian...

"At that time, a certain man, whose name was Mehmet" -

which is the usual name for Muhammad in Armenian - "a merchant,

"as if by the command of God, appeared to them as a preacher."

"Now, Muhammad gave them laws,

"namely, not to eat carrion, not to drink wine,

"not to speak falsehood and not to engage in fornication."

Sebeos and other non-Muslim historians write about

the existence of Muhammad in roughly the same timeframe as Muslim accounts.

Together, with the Hadiths and the Qur'an,

we have a large body of detailed facts about the life of Muhammad.

We know he was born into the tribe that ruled the town of Mecca,

the Quraysh, and that his family was poor.

His father had died before he was born and left his mother, Aminah, little to live on.

When he was just a few months old, she handed him over to a Bedouin tribe living on the outskirts

of the town - a tradition among the Arabs of the time.

Muhammad had a Bedouin wet nurse and lived a nomadic life for the first four years of his life.

Arabia at the time of Muhammad's birth was a cruel place to live.

There was no law, no state and very little peace.

Tribal loyalty and customs were the only sources of protection.

Justice was harsh, arbitrary, and it was swift and the punishments were brutal.

A man, for example, caught stealing a loaf of bread would be killed,

and it meant that the daily struggle for survival left very little room for compassion.

For most people, there was very little chance of a better existence.

Muslims have a special word to describe this era,

the Jahiliyah, or The Age of Ignorance.

This was a society that had its structures, a belief system,

but not as we would understand an organised religion today.

The peoples of Arabia

were polytheistic. They venerated a number of different gods.

In general, each tribe had their own patron god and that was the case throughout Arabia.

And Mecca, Muhammad's birthplace, is believed to have been the most

important centre of this polytheistic worship.

There was a long established Arabian paganism, as we'd call it today,

that took virtually the same form in most of the cities and settled regions.

There would be a, sort of, square shrine in the middle,

circumambulation around it and various gods.

There was Allah, the high god, and there were goddesses,

but most of the Arabs

were not particularly religious, in that sense.

This was something more for the settled areas - the towns, the agricultural settlements.

Orthodox Muslims believe the Kaaba was built by God in the time of Adam,

but there is no archaeological or historical evidence to confirm its exact origins.

By the time of Muhammad's birth, it had long been a shrine,

drawing people to the town of Mecca, the centre of pagan cults for the peoples of Arabia.

Muslim sources acknowledge that the Kaaba is a central

temple for the worship of god, which has existed from time immemorial,

so there's a sense in which

the first founder of this particular sanctuary for god was Adam

and then the various prophets after kept it up, then it was eroded away,

as people moved away from the worship of the one god

and then it was rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael and then again people forgot what its reason was.

There are no non-Muslim sources which connect Abraham to Mecca, but by Muhammad's birth,

the Kaaba contained the idols of over 360 different gods, each one venerated in its own right.

There was a special time of truce declared every year, when all the

hostile tribes could come to Mecca to circle the Kaaba and worship their Gods without fear of conflict.