Prophet Muhammad Born: A Faith for a Billion Souls

Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, the custodians of the Kaaba. His father Abdullah died before his birth, and his mother Amina died when he was six, leaving him in the care of his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and then his uncle Abu Talib. He grew up as an orphan in a commercially prosperous Arabian city, working as a merchant and earning a reputation for honesty that gave him the title al-Amin, "the trustworthy." He married Khadijah, a wealthy merchant widow fifteen years his senior, when he was twenty-five. She became his most important supporter and the first person to accept his message. He was forty years old when, by his own account, the angel Gabriel appeared to him in the Cave of Hira on Mount Nur during a period of solitary meditation and commanded him to "recite" or "read," the word iqra repeated three times. He returned to Khadijah shaking with fear; she calmed him, wrapped him in a cloak, and told him that God would not disgrace a man who was kind to his relatives and honest in his dealings. Over the next twenty-three years, he received the revelations that would be compiled as the Quran and built a religious, legal, and political community that unified the Arabian Peninsula under Islam for the first time in its history. He faced years of persecution in Mecca, led the migration to Medina in 622 that marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, defended his community through military engagements, and returned to Mecca in 630 as its undisputed leader. He died in Medina on June 8, 632, at approximately sixty-two, with his head resting in the lap of his wife Aisha. Within a century of his death, Arab armies had reached Spain to the west and the borders of China to the east.