The Life of Muhammad

Paper Summary:

The paper relates that Muhammad was a monotheist who preached against the polytheism of the Meccan religion. This aroused the hostility of the merchant leaders of his native city who derived their wealth from pilgrimages to Mecca and its surrounding cities. The author points out that the early Muslim community and its Prophet Muhammad believed that the people of the early Muslim community could trace their contract with Allah (Jehovah) back to the Jewish Patriarch Abraham; however, the Muslims believed that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael instead of Isaac. The paper relates that it may not be an accident that the Qur'an has two distinct voices because, in Mecca, Muhammad was a rebel but in Medina he was head of state; the early Meccan verses, which were those recited while his new religion was being formed, are concern mainly religious dogma; while as, in the Medina verses, Allah took a surprisingly detailed interest in the day-to-day problems of Muhammad's community.

From the Paper:

"Few other religions sanction a man's beating a disobedient wife, as does the Qur'an. But other rules, such as his ban on a woman's being "inherited" as chattel by her late husband's eldest son, were decidedly progressive for the era and remained so relative to the West until the twentieth century. While Allah in his revelations to Muhammad limited to four the number of wives a man could take -- excluding God's Messenger, of course, who was permitted to marry for reasons of state and had at least nine wives (at least one of them a converted Jew) and a Christian concubine when he died -- he did not restrict the number of a man's concubines or slaves. (Slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished de jure only in 1962). But Allah required that men treat their wives equally, that women retain their own wealth, and that they be permitted under certain conditions to ask a judge to order their husbands to divorce them (men could end marriages at will) -- all progressive measures compared to the practices of pre-Islmaic society, the jahiliyya."

More papers on The Life of Muhammad:

• Descriptive Essay # 111017 : "Khadja, the wife of Muhammad"
• Analytical Essay # 4342 : "An Analysis of Muhammad and the Arab World"
• Book Review # 120071 : "The Conquest of Granada"

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