Peace Be upon You The Story of Muslim, Christian, And Jewish Coexistence

Chapter One: In the Name of the Lord Sometime around the year 570 in the Western calendar, Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in the oasis town of Mecca, just off the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The town was separated from the Red Sea by a narrow, steep mountain range, and it sat at the edge of the vast desert that defined most of the Arabian Peninsula. The oasis was dominated by the Quraysh tribe, who controlled the camel trade that passed through Mecca between Yemen, in the south, and the more settled agrarian regions hundreds of miles north, which were divided between the Byzantine emperor and the Sasanian monarch of Persia. Though Muhammad was a member of the ruling tribe, his clan was not particularly prominent. His father died when Muhammad was a boy, and his uncle Abu Talib became his protector. For most of the next forty years, Muhammad lived an anonymous life like that of many others in Mecca; he established himself as a merchant and married an older widow named Khadija. Had he died before the age of forty, his would have been one of the countless lives invisible to history, and Mecca itself would have remained a small provincial town no more important than thousands of others throughout the world. But around the year 610, Muhammad began to hear the voice of God, and for the first time, God spoke in Arabic. Muhammad did not share these revelations with anyone other than his wife. Prophets were rarely welcome, and Muhammad did not have sufficient standing in the community to defend himself against adversaries who might not welcome the message he was being given. While the experience of receiving the revelations was physically wrenching for Muhammad, the substance was socially wrenching for the Meccans. Rather than a system anchored by tribe, clan, and family, Muhammad announced a new order, anchored by God's will and human submission to ithence the wordsislam, the Arabic word verb for "submit," andmuslim, the Arabic word for one who does. Muhammad began to share the content of what he was being told with a small circle of friends and family, and slowly the word spread. At first, the more powerful members of the Quraysh dismissed the sermons as irrelevant, but as more people started to turn to him for guidance, the Quraysh became concerned. From what they could glean, Muhammad's message represented a challenge to the social order that they dominated. They were right to be concerned. In their Mecca of tribe and clan, they were supreme. Obeisance was given to the various gods and spirits known as jinn (the kindred English word is "genie"), but one's tribe was more consequential than any god. At the time, there was a nascent sense of monotheism, though not much more developed than a vague notion that there was one god more powerful than the others. But the Quraysh of Mecca were not prepared to embrace him alone, because that would have upended the status quo. In their world, the tribe, not any god, determined social standing and marriage, and it was up to the tribe and the clan to avenge wrongs committed by others. Tribal authority was absoluteuntil Muhammad announced that it was not. The core message was simple: there is one God, one messenger, and a choice. The God is Allah, who is the same as the God of Abraham, the God of the Hebrew prophets, the God of Jesus, and the God of the Christians. The messenger is Muhammad, a man like any other until he was chosen to convey God's word in Arabic. And the choice is to surrender to God's will and to the truth of Muhammad's recitations and thus be saved for eternity. The initial revelations emphasized the extent of God's power and the degree of human powerlessness in the face of it. Later assembled in the Quran, these verses paint a vivid picture of a world destined to endKarabell, Zachary is the author of 'Peace Be upon You The Story of Muslim, Christian, And Jewish Coexistence', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400043682 and ISBN 1400043689.