Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Yet greatness did not arrive until relatively late in Muhammad’s life. He was working as a merchant when, at around the age of forty (ca. 609–10), he began to experience dreams, visions, and visitations from celestial beings. The turning point came while he was in a cave in Mount Hira, on the outskirts of Mecca, a place he liked to go now and then to meditate and reflect. One day he was visited there by the angel Gabriel, who addressed him directly and commanded him to recite. Muhammad came to understand he had been chosen as Allah’s prophet and messenger—the last such in a long line that stretched back through Jesus, Solomon, David, Abraham, Noah, and Moses all the way to the first man, Adam. This was big news, but he overcame his initial terror and confusion. His next visitation took three years to arrive, but when it did, Muhammad began to receive the word of God regularly, sometimes in spoken form and sometimes as a ringing sound that had to be deciphered. The angel showed him ritual ablutions and the best way to pray to Allah. These were the basic rites of a new religion: Islam. Muhammad’s revelations, as he recited them in Arabic, were eventually collected as the Qur’an. Later on, fragments of the Prophet’s speech, along with oral memories of his opinions and actions, known as hadith, were compiled as the Sunna—which contributed to the formation of an Islamic legal code and moral framework.