Mohammed and the formation of Islam
“La ilaha illa Allah; Mohammed rasul Allah.” (1)The Worship of the Arabs before Islam
The object of many of the world’s major religions is the attainment of peace, enlightenment and truth. Things any human being can’t deny. In regards to Islam where the word in itself means obtaining peace through total submission to the Will of God Almighty peace and love is at its core. A perfect Muslim, i.e. an individual who is totally obedient to Allah, does not gamble, use tobacco, alcohol or drugs and is modest, honest, truthful and loving neither false nor corrupt.
The Moslem empire that Mohammed founded, and his successors expanded, exceeded at its height the Roman Empire extending from India in the east to Spain in the West.
The Islamic culture is a compound of ancient Semetic, Classical Greek and medieval Indo-Persian where, apart from the language, the Arabs contributed little. The following can be found in Desmond Stewart’s book Early Islam:
“Emerging from the desert with little but keen curiosity, the Arabs quickly adopted ideas and techniques from older societies, and developed many of their own. Today the West is indebted to Islam for many scientific terms, among them:The gods of the Arabs pre-Islam had always been stars, idols and sacred stones. The symbol of the worship of the moon god in Arabian culture, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East, was the crescent moon. Allah, or al-Ilah (the god), can be traced to the South Arabian moon god Ilah. Henotheism, or the worship of only one god while not denying the existence of other gods, was part of the pre-Islamic society.
ALCHEMY = AL-KIMIYA
The medieval predecessor of chemical science.
ALCOHOL = AL-KUHL
A finely ground cosmetic powder, later a term for any highly refined or distilled substance.
ALEMBIC = AL-INBIQ
Literally, “the still”; a vessel used by alchemists – and today by chemists – for distilling liquids.
ALGEBRA = AL-JABR
The binding together of disorganized parts.
ALKALI = AL-QILI
Saltwort ashes, used in making lye, soap, paper.
AMALGAM = AL-MALGHAM
The alloy of mercury, which are used in alchemy and in the refining of silver and gold.
AZIMUTH = AL-SUMUT
An arc of the horizon used to reckon position.
BORAX = BURAQ
A white, powdery mineral used since early times in soldering, cleaning and the making of glass.
CAMPHOR = KAFUR
An aromatic tree gum often used in liniments.
CIPHER = SIFR
Literally, “the empty”; hence, nothingness or zero.
ELIXIR = AL-IKSIR
Agent for changing metals to gold; a cure-all.
NADIR = NAZIR
Opposite of zenith, that is, the lowest point.
ZENITH = SAMT
The upward direction; figuratively, the acme. ”
During the 6th century Mecca was the most prosperous and important city in northern Arabia. Apart from its function as a crossroads for the caravan trade where spices, perfumes, silk, metals, ivory and the like flooded in and out of the city on its way north and east to Syria and Iraq, it housed Arabia’s holiest shrine situated in the centre of the town.
Known as the Kaaba (or Cube, because of the shape) this shrine and temple, covered with an enormous cloth of black brocade during most of the year, contained over 300 gods and goddesses with Allah, the Creator of the Universe, as the chief deity. In one of the corners, embedded in the wall, was (and is) a hallowed meteorite known as the Black Stone. This stone is said to have been white originally but blackened by the sins of the world and the tears of the pilgrims. Edward Gibbon writes in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“The genuine antiquity of Caaba ascends beyond the Christian era: in describing the coast of the Red sea the Greek historian Diodorus has remarked, between the Thamudites and the Sabeans, a famous temple, whose superior sanctity was revered by all the Arabians; the linen of silken veil, which is annually renewed by the Turkish emperor, was first offered by the Homerites, who reigned seven hundred years before the time of Mohammad.”The tribe in control of Mecca was the Quraysh (2) and they established the Kaaba to become so sacred that it was immune from attacks. It is interesting that just like the Christian world and its occult worship of a stone, the Emerald Tablet or Philosopher’s Stone, the Muslim world has a stone of similar importance. All Muslims annually pilgrimage to Mecca, in what is called the Hadji, during the first ten days of the month Dhu’l-Hidja, which is the last lunar month of the Islamic calendar two months after Ramadan.
The Early Life of Mohammed
The Bible, the Torah and the Koran are all religious texts written in an ambiguous manner easily misused for political purposes by its believers, but unlike the former two, which consist of collections of religious narratives, prophecies, prayers and proverbs composed by different people at various periods in time, the Koran (3) has only one source and that is the Prophet Mohammed. (4)
In Islamic doctrine there were six major prophets: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Each of them brought the word of God in his own lifetime, but mankind kept straying from the true path and a new prophet had to be sent to guide them. According to this doctrine there would not be another prophet after Mohammed. He was the last and his words would guide men until the Day of Judgement. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages Manly P. Hall points out an interesting fact/myth:
“The following lines are declared by the followers of the Prophet to have been deleted from the Christian Gospels: And when Jesus, the Son of Mary, said, O children of Israel, verily I am the apostle of God sent unto you, confirming the law which was delivered before me, and bringing good tidings of an apostle who shall come after me, and whose name shall be AHMED.”Mohammed was born about 570 C.E. into meagre circumstances in Mecca. His father, Abdullah, had died shortly before his birth and although he was not a rich man he did belong to the Quraysh tribe. Because of this Mohammed was sent into the desert to be wetnursed by a Bedouin mother according the custom of the Meccan aristocracy. After two or three years he returned and at the age of six his mother died and he was sent to his grandfather whom also passed away and this finally had him end up at his paternal uncle Abu Talib where he would remain for the rest of his childhood.
Mohammed supported himself doing odd jobs here and one day attained the profession as an agent for a widowed woman named Khadija with considerable wealth. Mohammed had a strong personality and striking appearance with large shoulders, hands and feet and a wide forehead with bushy eyebrows above his deep black eyes and a gentle nature with a lot of integrity. He was nicknamed al-Amin, The Trustworthy, in Mecca and he impressed Khadija to such a degree, both in his looks and how he handled her affairs, that she offered him marriage. Mohammed agreed and although she was many years older than himself he remained faithful to her for the rest of her life. She even gave birth to several children of which only one, Fatima, survived Mohammed and bore him descendants. Khadija must be credited with a lot of the success of Islam in its early stages.
During Mohammed’s early life Arabia fell under a lot of outside religious influence coming in over the Red Sea from Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia), from Syria and from Palestine. Many Arabs were dissatisfied with Arabian paganism and Mohammed himself felt that the desert ethos of sharing the wealth one had with those less fortunate was not present in society anymore. There was a lot of arrogance from the rich and powerful and Mohammed, who himself came from a poor start, was distressed by this tendency towards the belief in money and materialism. He knew about the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians and, like many Arabs like himself, he felt they lacked a coherent faith.
Mohammed becomes the 6th Prophet
One night in 610 C.E, when Mohammed was about forty, he went to Mount Hira to meditate. After some time he fell into a trance and was visited by an angel. At first Mohammed found the experience unsettling and began to climb up the mountain to kill himself when a voice from Heaven told him that he was to be the apostle of God. When Khadija heard about this event she went to a holy man that, after hearing the account, pronounced Mohammed to be the prophet of his people having been visited by the same heavenly inspiration that had descended to Moses. But since no more messages came to him Mohammed began suffering self-doubt until one day a second revelation told him to begin the work to rise and warn the people and, thus, in 613 he started to preach publicly. His wife became the first to convert to the new religion now known as Islam.
His message was that Allah was not one of many gods but the solitary and eternal sovereign of the universe and all of mankind was equal before him, that the rich must share their wealth with the poor and that death was no longer the end of existence, like it had been under paganism, but a Day of Judgement where a man’s deeds are held accountable for and are either rewarded with paradise or punished with hell.
A group of people formed around him and he began preaching openly the message of monotheism. There was only one God and Mohammed was his prophet. Manly Palmer Hall writes in The Secret Teachings of All Ages:
“On the occasions when the various suras of the Koran were dictated he is said to have fallen unconscious, and, regardless of the chill of the surrounding air, to have been covered with beads of perspiration. Often these attacks came without warning; at other times he would sit wrapped in a blanket to prevent a chill from the copious perspiration, and while apparently unconscious would dictate the various passages which a small circle of trusted friends would either commit to memory or reduce to writing. On one occasion in later life when Abu Bakr referred to the grey hairs in his beard, Mohammed, lifting the end of his beard and looking at it, declared its whiteness to be due to the physical agony attendant upon his periods of inspiration.”
Mohammed the Conqueror
Naturally Mohammed’s compassionate and anti-materialistic preaching’s antagonised the wealthy Quraysh tribe, but he was protected by the solidarity of the clan. This ended when both his uncle Abu Talib and his wife Khadija died. Medina’s inhabitants invited him to come and live there so he emigrated, the hijrah, in 622 also seen as year 0 of the Muslim era. Here he grew from being merely a religious leader of a small group to a leader of spiritual and political authority.
One of Mohammed’s problems in Medina were the Jews of Medina who refused to recognize him as a prophet. Ramadan stems from the fact that Mohammed adopted the fasting on the Day of Atonement from the Jews in order to win their support, but since he was unsuccessful with this endeavour he later changed this custom into what is now a whole month of fasting. There were many reasons why the Jews refused to accept Mohammed, but most of them were due to the fact that they saw Islam as a threat to their own political and economic self-interests.
After some time Mohammed began organizing raids against Meccan caravans passing through Medinese territory. One of these raids resulted in the first real battle between the Moslems and the Meccans where he was faced, together with his three hundred men, against an army of almost a thousand. He won.
This victory carried the sign of God’s favour and many uncommitted now accepted Islam. During this period Mohammed forged links with the indigenous tribes of Medina by marrying a number of wives. Only eight years after the move to Medina, and numerous battles, Mohammed returned to the capitulated Mecca with ten thousand followers. He entered the Kaaba and exclaimed: “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished.”
All the pagan idols that filled the place were destroyed and the a tradition was established forbidding anyone to enter the city unless they are Moslem. Thus Mecca became the Islamic worlds spiritual capital with Medina as its political.
Two years later Mohammed fell ill, some rumours say due to poison, and he spent his last moments on this earth with A’isha to whom he said: “Nay [I have chosen] the exalted company in heaven.” And died.
The Formation of the Koran
Piers Paul Read hypothesize on the success of Mohammed in his book The Templars like this:
“How do we account for the appeal of Mohammed? Unlike Jesus he performed no miracles… Mohammed’s success came not from the exercise of supernatural power over nature but from his adroit appeal to both the spiritual and material self-interest of the Arabs of his time. Mohammed promised paradise for those who died in battle and plunder for those who did not. When his forces reached a critical mass, it became advantageous for other tribes to join them; and his straightforward monotheism was easy to comprehend. The authority of the Prophet not only ended the incessant feuding of the tribes, it also gave a sense of identity to the Arabs like that already possessed by the Abyssinians, Persians, Byzantine Christians and Jews. Islam was an Arab religion, not, like the other faiths on offer, an import from abroad.”Mohammed, as a person, was a humble and reasonable man. He lacked pride. His diet consisting of barley, bread and water. He mended his own simple clothes, in fact according to A’isha he loved to sew, and he cobbled his own shoes. He did duties around the household. He sat at the same table as servants. He hated lying most of all. The alms given to him and his family he never permitted to be used for personal ends. He divided his time into three parts: the first to God, the second to his family and the third to himself, which he later sacrificed to serve his people.
Before he died he freed all his slaves. And at the time of his death the one thing he craved was a toothpick because he was concerned with the cleanliness of his teeth. This is not the man often portrayed by the West or sometimes not even in the Koran. Never forget he did not write it and although his followers did their best efforts to put down his words into writing the possibilities of human error, and in particular, personal and political motives, such as greed and power sickness could, would and did affect the outcome of the final version of the Koran just as Godfrey Higgins explains in his Anacalypsis:
“…puffed up with pride and vanity. The Koran of the eclectic philosopher was not likely to suit the conquerors of Asia. A new one must be grafted on the old, to find a justification for their enormities.”Since Mohammed was seen as the last prophet his revelations thus became the final Word of God and Muslims took this very seriously. Long before any official written version of the Koran existed many of its adherents memorized the revelations or wrote parts of them down. But fearing that some things might be lost Abu Bakr, shortly after Mohammed’s death, assembled every piece of existing fragment written down of the revelations and compiled them in a book. Several different collections began appearing and since, at that time, Arabic was written in a rudimentary form with no vowels or signs to distinguish certain consonants, this led to disputes.
It wasn’t until Uthman, one of the early converts and husband of two of Mohammed’s daughters, became the third successor of the Prophet and standardized the Koran. (5) He then destroyed all other versions preventing any future dispute or controversy over the text that many other similar holy scriptures have suffered.
The Koran is divided up in chapters, or suras. After a short seven-line introductory sura comes the longest, The Cow, followed by the rest arranged according to length, since no one knew in which order Mohammed received the revelations, with the shortest at the end. All the suras were named after some incident or striking word within them. It is in the second sura that caused most harm for Islam in the eyes of Christianity:
“They say, Allah hath begotten children: Allah forbid! To him belongeth whatever is in heaven, and on earth; all is possessed by him, the Creator of heaven and earth; and when he decreeth a thing, he only saith unto it, Be, and it is.”In conclusion, according to the Koran and Mohammed, Jesus could only be a prophet preaching the Word of God and not actually his son. Of course this so-called blasphemy is not the only attack on Mohammed and Islam by other religions, and then most notably Christianity, who somehow refuses to see its kinship with it. Two other points are Mohammed’s polygamy and the claim that women are denied a soul and ranked with the animals. But Christianity needs only to look within its own Holy Book and read about the harems of David and Solomon to have proof that they are no better. As to the second point this quote from the 33rd sura is enough to put an end to the argument:
“Verily the Muslims of either sex, and the true believers of either sex, and the devout men, and the devout women, and the men of veracity, and the women of veracity, and the patient men, and the patient women, and the humble men, and the humble women, and the alms-givers of either sex, and the men who fast, and the women who fast, and the chaste men, and the chaste women, and those of either sex who remember Allah frequently: for them hath Allah prepared forgiveness and a great reward.”
The Sunnis, the Shiites and the Ismaili
After the death of Mohammed the Muslim community had to solve the problem of who would succeed him and become their new leader. There were four people that could possibly take on this role: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (during the Prophets last illness he was appointed to take the place as leader of public prayer), Umar ibn al-Khattab (an able and trusted companion of Mohammed), Uthman ibn Affan (a respected and early convert) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law).
To avoid argument among various groups, Umar ibn al-Khattab suddenly grasped, in the traditional sign of recognition of a new leader, the hand of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq’s. Soon everyone concurred and before dusk Abu Bakr had been recognized as the caliph (6) of Mohammed with the responsibility to govern according to the Koran and the practice of the Prophet.
The Sunnis and the Shiites agree upon almost all the essentials of Islam. Both believe in the Koran and the Prophet, both follow the same principles of religion and both observe the same rituals. However, there is one prominent difference, which is essentially political rather than religious, and concerns the choice of the caliph or successor of Mohammed.
The majority of Muslims supported the choice of Abu Bakr as the first caliph. This group is known as ahl alsunnah wa-l-jama‘ah, the people of custom and community, or Sunnis who consider the caliph to be Mohammed’s successor only in his capacity as ruler of the community.
The main body of the Shiites, on the other hand, believe that the caliph must remain within the family of the Prophet thus making Ali ibn Abi Talib the first valid caliph, or imam. (7) While the Sunnis consider the caliph a guardian of the religious law, the Shiites see the imam as a trustee inheriting and interpreting the Prophet’s spiritual knowledge.
The division between the Sunnis and the Shiites continued to develop and was widened in 680 when Ali’s son Husayn tried to win the caliphate from the Umayyads and, with his followers, was killed at Karbala in Iraq. His death is still mourned each year by the Shiites.
When the sixth Shiite imam died his oldest son, Ismail, was passed over and the younger Musa-al-Kazim was appointed as imam. The Ismaili were Muslims who believed that Ismaili was the true imam. (8)
Footnotes:
(1) ”There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.” This Islamic creed is whispered into the ear of a newly born child and should be the first words he/she learns to speak and the last spoken before death.
(2) The Quraysh had great financial and military strength governing Mecca through a council consisting of members of the city’s most influential families.
(3) Koran (also spelled Qur’an or Quran) is Arabic for the recitation.
(4) Mohammad means the one who is praisedor highly praised.
(5) In 652 C.E.
(6) Khalifah, anglicized as caliph, is a word that means successor.
(7) The Shiites call their leader imam, not caliph.
(8) A later split among the Ismaili occurred when a group of Fatimids (descendants of Fatima who was Mohammed’s daughter and the wife of the Shiites first imam Ali) did not believe that caliph al-Hakim had died in 1021. This became the beginning of today’s Druze. While the Druze are not regarded as Muslims by other Muslims, they regard themselves as Muslims as well as carriers of the core of this religion, but the Koran is not part of it. The Druze are monotheists and the main theme of their theology is that God incarnated himself in al-Hakim’s disappearance. They believe that al-Hakim is waiting to return to the world in order to bring about a new golden age to the true believers. Druze claim that the qualities of God cannot be understood or defined by humans. Al-Hakim is worshiped in Druze religion and is called Our Lord and his cruelties and eccentricities are all interpreted symbolically.
© deviadah
