For Muhammad's followers, leaving the place of their ancestors, their families and tribes was the ultimate test of devotion. In doing so, they began a new community, a new tribe. For the first time, they were bound together not by blood, but by faith...
To the non-believers, the divine reckoning Muhammad invoked wasnt average. His dismantling of their heritage and customs deeply unset them. It was a threat, a threat in several ways, to their social order, to their age-old traditions, and an economic...
Rather than a physical image of God or of Muhammad, it is the beauty of the Koran itself that is celebrated in Islam. Islam developed in this context where pictures were not favored. The Koran, as it was revealed, was Gods representation on earth, an...
Muhammad's following began to grow. They called themselves Muslims for those who surrendered to God. They set out to preserve the message Muhammad had brought. This was the beginning of the Koran. The Koran was revealed orally, but very soon people r...
And that is the beginning of the prophetic career of Muhammad. The months to come would bring more revelations, powerful words of a lyrical quality, more beautiful than the most exquisite Arabic poetry. Above all, Muhammad was to bear one message to...
She was so taken with Muhammad, she proposed marriage. Ah, Hadijia, well I think she was a mentor as well as a wife, a very strong lady who had her own business, and Muhammad was helping her out, so it was a wonderful partnership and I'm sure he lear...
Each clan had its own separate gods and totems to water and wind, fire and night. They were kept in the caravan town of Mecca, in a shrine of wood, stone and cloth. It was called, the Kaaba, the Arabic word for Cube. Pre-Islamic-Arabs worshiped a num...
Muhammads clan, like Arabs all across the Arabian Peninsula, would share the stories that had been told and retold for generations. Pre-Islamic-Arabian civilization was largely an oral culture, and with tremendous respect for and admiration for peopl...
To Muslims, the life of Muhammad is a story revered in its mysteries as much as its certainties that our beliefs held sacred. Whatever we can tell about the prophet, of course, is screened through the filter of what has been preserved over the centur...
In Cairo, a muezzin calls faithful Muslims to prayer. Its the same call that sounds five times a day every day in cities across the world. Nearly a quarter of the people on earth respond to it, bound together by the enduring spirit of Islam. ''God is...
