The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
The life of Muhammad ﷺ, from an orphaned childhood in Mecca to the migration to Medina, and how Muslims regard him.
Muhammad, peace be upon him, was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Hashim clan of Quraysh, the tribe that ran the city. Mecca was a trading town and a pilgrimage site, built around an ancient shrine called the Kaaba, and its merchant families held the power. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was six, so his grandfather raised him, then an uncle, Abu Talib. As was the custom, he spent part of his early childhood with a Bedouin family in the desert.
In his twenties he went to work for a widowed merchant named Khadijah, running caravans north. He later married her. They had four daughters and two sons, and neither son lived. Nothing in the first forty years of that life reads like the opening of a religion.
The cave, and what followed
Around the age of forty he had taken to going alone to a cave on Mount Hira outside the city to think. Muslims relate that a voice, later identified as the angel Gabriel, told him to recite, that he protested he could not, and that the command came again until the words arrived. Those words open the ninety-sixth chapter of the Quran. He went home shaken and told Khadijah first.
He preached quietly at the beginning, then publicly, and the message was simple and unwelcome: worship God alone, abandon the idols, answer for your conduct on a day of judgement. Mecca’s economy and status were bound up with those idols. The early converts were mostly poor people and slaves, and they were harassed, boycotted and in some cases tortured. He sent one group across the sea to Ethiopia, where a Christian king sheltered them, a kindness Muslim sources have remembered ever since.
In the autumn of 622, after more than a decade of this, he and his closest friend Abu Bakr left for the northern town of Yathrib, where a growing number of people had already accepted his message. That journey is the hijrah, the migration, and the Muslim calendar counts its years from it. Yathrib became Medina. There he was not only a preacher but a head of state, writing an agreement that set out how the city’s Muslim, Jewish and pagan clans would live together and defend the place.
Eight years of intermittent war with Mecca followed, including the battles of Badr, Uhud and the Trench. Mecca opened to him at the end of it without a battle, and he pardoned the men who had driven him out, including some who had led the campaign against him. He died in Medina on 8 June 632, after a short illness.
How Muslims see him
Muslims do not worship Muhammad ﷺ, and the sources are emphatic about it. He was a man, he said so, and he warned his followers not to elevate him the way he believed earlier communities had elevated their prophets. He called himself the slave and messenger of God. The affection Muslims hold for him is real and can surprise outsiders: they add a blessing on him whenever his name is spoken, and mockery of him lands as a personal injury rather than an abstract offence.
The other reason he matters so much is practical. Because Muslims believe he was the model of how the Quran is meant to be lived, his sayings and habits were recorded in detail by the people around him. That record, the sunnah, sits beside the Quran and shapes how Muslims pray, eat, trade, marry and bury their dead.