Growth of Islam, c. 610–632

The first convert to Muhammad’s faith was his wife. Eventually, as Muhammad preached the new faith, others became adherents. But Muhammad’s insistence that the cults of all other gods be abandoned in favor of one brought him into conflict with leading members of the Quraysh tribe, whose control over the Ka‘ba had given them prestige and wealth. Perceiving Muhammad as a threat, they insulted him and harassed his followers.

Disillusioned with the people of Mecca, Muhammad looked elsewhere for converts. In particular, he expected support from Jews because he thought their monotheism prepared them for his own faith. He eagerly accepted an invitation to go to Medina, in part because of its significant Jewish population. Muhammad’s journey to Medina—called the Hijra—proved to be a crucial event for the new faith, and the year in which it occurred, 622, became the first year of the Islamic calendar.*

Although he was disappointed not to find much support among the Jews at Medina, Muhammad did find others there ready to listen to his religious message and to accept him as the leader of their community. Muhammad’s political position in the community set the pattern by which Islamic society would be governed afterward; rather than simply adding a church to political and cultural life, Muslims made their political and religious institutions inseparable.

Yet Muhammad felt threatened by the Quraysh tribe at Mecca, and he led raids against their caravans. At the battle of Badr in 624, the Muslims killed forty-nine of the Meccan enemy, took numerous prisoners, and confiscated considerable treasure. From the time of this conflict, the Bedouin tradition of plundering was grafted onto the Muslim duty of jihad (“striving in the way of God”).

The battle of Badr was a great triumph for Muhammad, who now secured his position at Medina, gaining new adherents and silencing all doubters, including Jews. Turning against those who refused to convert, he expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina and executed the male members of another. Although Muslims had originally prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, the center of Jewish worship, Muhammad now had them turn in the direction of Mecca.

Around the same time, Muhammad instituted new religious obligations. Among these were the zakat, a tax on possessions to be used for alms; the fast of Ramadan, which took place during the ninth month of the Islamic year, the month in which the battle of Badr had been fought; the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca during the last month of the year, which each Muslim was to make at least once in his or her lifetime; and the salat, formal worship at least three times a day (later increased to five). The salat could include the shahadah, or profession of faith: “There is no divinity but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Detailed regulations for these practices, sometimes called the Five Pillars of Islam, were worked out in the eighth and early ninth centuries.

Meanwhile, Muhammad sent troops to subdue Arabs north and south. In 630, he entered Mecca with ten thousand men and took over the city. As the prestige of Islam grew, clans elsewhere converted. Through a combination of force, conversion, and negotiation, Muhammad was able to unite many, though not all, Arabic-speaking tribes under his leadership by the time of his death in 632.

Muhammad was responsible for social as well as religious change. The ummah included both men and women; Islam thus enhanced women’s status. At first, Muslim women joined men during the prayer periods that punctuated the day, but, beginning in the eighth century, women began to pray apart from men. Men were allowed to have up to four wives at one time but were obliged to treat them equally; wives received dowries and had certain inheritance rights. Islam prohibited all infanticide, a practice that Arabs had long used largely against female infants. Like Judaism and Christianity, however, Islam retained the practices of a patriarchal society in which women’s participation in community life was limited.

The ummah functioned in many ways as a “supertribe,” obligated to fight common enemies, share plunder, and peacefully resolve any internal disputes. Bedouin converts to Islam turned their traditional warrior culture to its cause. Unlike intertribal fighting, warfare was now the jihad of people who were carrying out God’s command against unbelievers as recorded in the Qur’an: “Strive, O Prophet, against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal with them firmly. Their final abode is Hell: And what a wretched destination!”