Originally Posted by A critical history of Islam
Social revolution came in the person of Muhammad, born around 571, whose parents died when he was young. Beeing an orphan, commentators describe him to have shown several psychological anomalies (maybe coming from the early death of his parents), a general hypersensitivity of his mind and physical senses, and often it is said that he was epileptic, too. But however, his intellectual and organisational talent soon became evident when he started to help out in the business of his uncle, whose family belonged to the Hashim, a sideline of the trade-controlling Quraysh, which were the elite caste controlling the trade via caravans from and to Mekka, and the complete financial system in the Western provinces of the Arabian peninsula. During his travellings and business negotiations he trained his talents in organisation, perceiving opportunities, and his obviously outstanding intellect. When he was in his mid-20s, he married a woman that with over 40 years was far older than he was, Khadidja, she was a rich business women that already had lost two husbands. Originally it was planned as an instrumental marriage to increase his monetarian basis and her profit incomes by using Muhammads intellectual and organizational and negotiating talents. Both partners later learned that there may have been more in their relation than just material gains, and so they had six children, of which only the four daughters survived childhood.
No longer depending on his original tribe and a low income for himself, but beeing secured in wealthy living conditions, Muhammad now had the freedom and time to concentrate on questions that had found his interest since longer time now, additionally motivated by the experiences of his many travellings. Beeing of high sensual sensibility and intellectuality, he realized the growing dysbalance between the growing wealth of the Quraysh and the increasing social insecurity of the poor that formerly were embedded in their functioning tribal structures, and he became aware of the growing moral and ethical vacuum that came in the wake of the material success. These personal qualities together earned him the reputation of beeing a visionary seer (kahin). He did not stop here, his business travellings brought him into contact with the ideas of the Christians, Jews and Hanufas. Especially the Christians sects, victims of deportation or expulsion by the official Byzantinian church, were struggling hard to widen their influence in the Arabian diaspora. But all the new religions Muhammad came into contact with, described the same single, allmighty, true God that would hold court over each human beeing at the end of his days and would judge him according to his individual bilance of life. That all these religions and their regions of origin had been able to create civilizations that were far superior in practical political power to that of the Arabs of that time, may have had an additional effect on Muhammad that drove him into an intense examination of these religions and cultures. For one and a half decade he spend much time on sharpening his view for the social problems within Arab society, and educated himself in the teachings of the Christians and Jews.
The year 610 marks the time when Muhammad is said to have received teachings and educations by an idea of a higher divine entity that he named „Allah“, and that from now on should have send him regularly visual visions and verbal inspirations („Eingebungen“), that are named ayat (that means: signs of miracles, Wunderzeichen). He used these to start doing threatening, powerful preachings, in which he made it more and more clear, that this entity named Allah was speaking through him and that Muhammad himself for that simple reason rightfully claimed the status of beeing God’s prophet, a „call to duty“ that was delivered to him by the archangel Gabriel in an appearance that almost should have crushed him to the floor and pressed all breath out of his body (sign for his epilleptical disease?) so that he almost feared that he must die and lost allmost all control over his mind, body and senses.
The "divine" inspirations (probably nothing else than epilleptic attacks) did not stop, a cousin of Muhammad, who was of Christian belief, thought of them as “namus“ in the understanding of the Jewish law and Thora. With time passing by, the growing number of Muhammad’s preachings and inspirations started to circulate under the term „qur‘an“, an Arab word that means „recitation“, while there is a link to an old Arameic word as well, „quiryan“, which means „liturgy“. With growing intensity Muhammad was focussing in his preachings on the social dysbalance in society, on the need to turn and put all trust and faith in the source of his inspiration, Allah, and on the responsebility each individual has for his life when there will be his judgement day at the end of his existence. That he also targeted the criminally and/or illegimately accumulated power and wealth of the rich class both earned him the sympathy of more and more people, and reminds me of the constellation 14 centuries later:
In the beginning of his activity as a preacher and prophet, Muhammad was willing to make compromises concerning the content of his sermons, to avoid too much friction with his social and religious environment in the form of the old traditional gods of tribal structures in his place, of which there were namely three in the main (and a large number of minor ones). That gave him the peace and freedom to act that was needed as long as his position was still weak and uncertain. But beeing told by Allah, that these false gods were only creations of Satan, he gave up to display tolerance towards them, what exposed his position somewhat. In a non-Muslim understanding: he showed strong signs of weakening tolerance for ideas opposing his own’s, and acted with mounting intolerance against them to overcome their resistance. This, in combination with his critizism of established power structures of the Quraysh, finally led him to have raised the attention of the feudal elite - that became aware that he started to become a threatening problem for their privileges. His verbal attacks on their trading monopoles and privileges showed the moral and spiritual deficits of the new social order they had established. Of course they reacted. Muhammad’s few followers became subject to expulsion, torture, murder and prosecution. The unique power monopole and influence on trade the Quraysh had, allowed them to even put pressure on traditional tribal social structures that were trying to protect their members to some degree. The conflict became a serious issue. Muhammad, who had spend so much of his life in Mekka, of course knew the power constellations, and that the reserves for his followers to hold out were thin. Long before the conflict escalated, he had started to form contacts with Medina and Abbyssinia, to learn if it was possible to evade into these regions, if Mekka should happen to become too dangerous to stay. Short before the Quraysh were able to extinguish his rebellious teachings completely by killing him and all of his followers, he left Mekka with a small group and escaped to Medina. This escape in 622, named hidjra, is usually agreed on to mark the beginning of an independent Islamic identity. Usually the move to Medina is interpreted by modern Islam not as a sign of weakness, but pragmatism that is a key charcteristic in Muhammad’s life and personality. They evaded not because of fear, but to ensure they can keep trying on. Having left the reprisals of the Quraysh behind, the small community in Medina now had the freedom to bolster their status, to raise their own profile, to strengthen their community, to win new followers. Literature knows them as muhadjirun (exiles, emmigrants), where as their helping sympathizers in Medina are known as ansar. The climate in Medina was helpful for Muhammad, the local religious cults had been exhausted by decades of rivalry and fight to become the dominant dogma, and so had not only little strength left to resists the convincing power of Muhammad’s new revolutionary ideas, but even showed to be all too willing to follow him under his own rulership and give up their own cults.
The attractiveness of Muhammad’s teachings, heavily influenced by the monotheistic ideas of Christians and Jews, need to be explained, else the question remains, why he was so successful and where Islam was getting it’s convincing and high „cultural penetration power“ from. Until Muhammad, Arab society was ruled by cults based around nature phenomenons and tribal gods that acted as guardians for the tribe and thus saw themselves in conflicts with other gods as often as tribes waged wars against each other (which was no rare event at that time). People‘s mind did not realize that it was their own acting – the world of man, not the world of gods - that was leading to the twistings and conflicts they experienced in their history, and that their gods were just projections of their own states of mind and of human flaws, drives and motives. So people focussed on their gods as creators of war, suffering and conflict, which gave them the impression that life was ruled by the will of gods, whose intentions often remained a mystery and thus, life was an event ruled by random chance and man’s inability to influence it. There was the only answer to subjugate to the tribe’s god, assuming that he hopefully would be stronger than that of the others, and to trust in the belief that beeing a follower of his cult saves one from harm that was projected into man’s world from conflicts taking place on the level of the gods.
But now came Muhammad: and his idea of man beeing the deciding factor himself that creates each individual‘s fate (all life, punishment or reward) by his own responsebility - that was revolutionary. Because it freed people from the canon of many gods and their conflicts that led to human suffering, and brought order and foresight to a world that before was experienced as a „labyrinth“ of random chances, in which everything was unsecure and no anticipation of a secure future seemed to be possible. The subjugation to Allah caused law and order, structure and insight to enter man’S world: a fair bilance between one own’s good and bad acts and doings, and one’s resulting fate after death, and these deed‘s consequences (in form of Allah’s judgement) decided the design of desirable ways of behavior to avoid bad consequences and to help good consequences. If man was living a life that was pleasing to Allah, if he was obedient in other words, he now had all reason to trust in his mercy and getting his reward, giving him peace of mind and a sense of certainty and security that before was unthinkable, because what Allah expected from him was preached by Muhammad: an ever-growing set of more or less strict rules, that left little space for misinterpretation and misstepping, and a codex of behavior that assisted man in finding his way to Allah’s mercy and let him in no more existential fear and doubt. That sounds like a fail-safe method for guaranteed ticket to paradise. Man had all reason to feel arrived in life now, to be fulfilled by having a duty in life for which he will be rewarded, to be held by the hand of someone who was bigger than it all. „Success“ at the end of his life – in the understanding of avoiding an empty, dark void after death, or a hellish penalty - was now within man’s own reach and responsibility, it was no longer a lottery that was manipulated by selfish, fighting gods, or the arbitrariness of nature’s phenomenons. The forming and regulating authority of Allah, the destroyer and mercyful („Vernichter und Erbarmer“), should end the increasing disorder of mislead behavior of man, the ratio of monotheism replacing man‘s former fatalism in the face of god-made random rule in life, so that man could start to act with a sense of responsebility for himself, and awareness of Allah’s final judgement as a motivation for that. Divine arbitrariness was replaced with human ratio. And that was a revolutionary idea in the Arab world of that time indeed.
Nevertheless, although having been influenced by Jewish ideas, his knowledge of their religion was far from beeing complete, so his contacts to the Jewish tribes, that had a very strong presence in and around Medina, necessarily ended in the exposure of his theological deficits. That the Jewish theologists, aware of their superior theological agility, also met him with condescension and hurting irony, necessarily must have offended a strong and dominant personality like that of Muhammad. Realizing that the Jewish disrespect threatend his postion in Medina, he took drastical consequences. In 624 he attacked and drove away two Jewish tribes, and three years later he took on the last remaining one, the Quaryza, who were sort of allies of the Quarysh in Mekka; he ordered a two days-lasting massacre, in which up to 800 male tribe members got executed in his very own presence, while all girls and females were traded into slavery or ended in the harems of his followers, or his own.
For the population sizes of that time the size of the massacre was immense. The years 624 to 627 saw Muhammad’s radical extinction of Jewish opposition and any opposition in general. Several short wars and predatory raids against all other tribes settling in his neighbourhod, to strenghten his economical power, were accompanied by the systematical hunt on artists, writers and poets, intellectuals, who did not fully support his rulership and that were killed by a growing dedicated subgroup of murderers amongst his followers. The acting-option to use the later so-called fatwa to call for the killing of an unwanted critics has seen it’s tradition beeing founded in these years and still is a valid option until today. As a matter of historical fact, murder always has been a legitimate tool of securing Islamic power throughout all centuries of it’s existence. Murder was also acceptable in the powerpolitics of Western civilization, but here it never was raised into the official status of beeing religiously acceptable, where a fatwa not only means that it is acceptable according to religious rules, but that it even is allowed to actively order it.
This policy of displaying a tyrannic ammount of power, and using it without scruples or mercy, did it’s part to intimidate his enemies and to silence those who were in doubt. In Mekka people started to look in deep sorrow towards Medina. There were no doubts left about who was in control of rulership. The ursurping of power was complete. The political and economical success and the many raids Muhammad conducted, raised the wealth of his community and raised the convincing power of his example (that’s one reason why it is called the Medina modelm the other reason beeing that the community of Medina for later generations of Muslims served as a model that taught them how to orgnaize their communal life, identity and self-understanding). In 628 he surprised his old enemies in Mekka by using the financial prey from his raids to form and lead an impressively big army to Mekka „for pilgrimage“, by that he left the city no other choice than to accept a dictating of conditions during so-called „negotiations“, that led to a peace treaty that should last for ten years – so said the treaty. But in fact just two years later (in which he conducted a series of more raids throughout the region to fill his community’s treasure chest), in 630, he again attacked Mekka with an even bigger army and broke the peace treaty, and enforced the handover of the city. Bribery, generous gifts and distribution of his prey from former raids were used to calm the hostile sentiments in the city, which led to some anger amongst his followers from Medina. Muhammad now was in control of the Kaaba and changed the cult around it so that it was focussed on Abraham and reflected the monotheistic belief in Allah. New followers joined the community by the thousands. It just took two more years to secure Muhammads conquest of the complete Arabian pensinsula, this part of history ended with the last independent tribe surrendering to the new authority of Muhammad’s rite. Administratively Arabia now was controlled by close and trustworthy followers of Muhammad, who were responsible both for preaching and strengthening faith, and to control the regular payments of taxes: state and religion essentially were united in the same hands.
Two years later, in 632, Muhammad died in Medina.
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