Who was the Prophet Muhammad?
Orphan, merchant, Prophet: the life of Muhammad ﷺ, whose revelation became the Quran and whose community now numbers 1.9 billion souls.
Last updated: October 2026
Fourteen centuries ago, in a desert trading town, a man known for his honesty began to recite words he said were not his own. Today, nearly one in four human beings follows the faith he founded. Muhammad, born around 570 in Mecca, in western Arabia, is revered by Muslims as the final prophet in a line that includes Abraham, Moses, and Jesus — the Seal of the Prophets, who received the revelation of the Quran from God. For Muslims, he is the model of the perfect life: merchant, husband, father, statesman, general, and lawgiver, whose words and deeds, recorded in the hadith, guide daily life to this day.
Muhammad's story is inseparable from the world that made him. Sixth-century Arabia was a land of tribes and trade, of pilgrimage and poetry, standing between two great empires — the Byzantine in the west and the Sasanian Persian in the east. Mecca was a desert oasis and a sanctuary town, home to the Kaaba, a shrine that drew pilgrims from across Arabia. Into this world, Muhammad brought a message of radical simplicity: there is one God, and all human beings are equal before Him. Within a century of his death, that message had reshaped the map of the world.
According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570, in the Year of the Elephant — so named for the year an Abyssinian army, with war elephants, marched on Mecca and, by tradition, was turned back. He belonged to the clan of Banu Hashim, part of the tribe of Quraysh, the custodians of the Kaaba. His father, Abdullah, died before he was born; his mother, Amina, died when he was about six. He was raised first by his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, and then by his uncle, Abu Talib, who protected him for the rest of his life.
As a young man, Muhammad worked as a merchant, travelling with the caravans that carried goods between Yemen, Mecca, and Syria. He earned a reputation for honesty so complete that he was known as al-Amin — the Trustworthy. At about twenty-five, he married Khadija, a wealthy merchant widow fifteen years his senior, who had hired him to manage her caravans. The marriage was, by all accounts, a devoted one: Khadija was his first believer, his closest confidante, and the mother of his children, and he married no one else while she lived.
Muslims believe that in 610, during the month of Ramadan, while Muhammad was meditating in the cave of Hira outside Mecca, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and commanded: Iqra — Read, or Recite. Muhammad, who by tradition could not read or write, answered that he could not. The command came again, and with it the first words of what would become the Quran: words commanding him to recite in the name of the Lord who created. Terrified, Muhammad returned home to Khadija, who comforted him and took him to her cousin Waraqa, a Christian scholar, who told him he had been visited as the prophets before him had been.
For the remaining twenty-two years of his life, Muhammad continued to receive revelations, which his followers memorized and wrote down on parchment, bone, and palm leaves. The collected revelations are the Quran — the word means recitation — a book of 114 chapters, or surahs, that Muslims believe to be the literal word of God. Its central message is tawhid, the oneness of God: God is one, without partner, without image, and all human beings are accountable to Him on a Day of Judgment. Around that centre, the Quran addresses law, morality, prayer, charity, marriage, commerce, and war, and its language — the Arabic of the Quran — became the standard of Arabic literature.
Muhammad's message was not welcomed by Mecca's ruling elite. Its attack on idolatry threatened the pilgrimage trade that was the city's livelihood, and its insistence on the equality of all believers threatened the tribal hierarchy. For a decade, Muhammad and his small band of followers endured boycott, mockery, and persecution. His uncle Abu Talib protected him, but after Abu Talib and Khadija both died in 619 — the Year of Sorrow — Muhammad's position became dangerous.
In 622, Muhammad and his followers emigrated to the oasis town of Yathrib, some 300 kilometres north of Mecca, whose feuding tribes had invited him as an arbitrator. The emigration — the Hijra — is the central event of early Islamic history: the Islamic calendar begins in that year, and Yathrib became known as Madinat al-Nabi, the City of the Prophet — Medina. In Medina, Muhammad was no longer only a preacher. He became a statesman: he drew up the Charter of Medina, binding the city's tribes — Muslim, Jewish, and pagan — into a single community, built the first mosque, and established the institutions of a new society: the call to prayer, the Friday congregation, the alms-tax, and the fast of Ramadan.
In Medina, the Muslim community — the ummah — took shape. The Quran's revelations in this period turned increasingly to law and governance: rules for marriage and inheritance, for commerce and contracts, for war and peace. Muhammad's mosque was not only a place of prayer but a parliament, a court, and a barracks. The ummah was a new kind of community: membership was defined not by tribe or blood but by faith, and the believers called each other brother and sister. In a tribal society, that was a revolution.
The Medinan years were also years of war. Mecca, determined to crush the new community, fought three great battles against Medina — Badr in 624, Uhud in 625, and the Trench in 627 — and a series of smaller raids and skirmishes. The Muslims survived all three, and the balance of power in Arabia shifted. Muhammad also concluded treaties, including the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with Mecca in 628, a ten-year truce that recognized the Muslim community as a political equal and opened the way for Islam's peaceful expansion across the peninsula.
In 630, after the truce was broken, Muhammad marched on Mecca with an army of ten thousand. The city surrendered almost without a fight. Muhammad entered Mecca in humility, granted a general amnesty to his former persecutors, and cleansed the Kaaba of its idols, rededicating it to the worship of the one God. The Kaaba, which Muslims believe was built by Abraham, became the focal point of Islamic worship: Muslims everywhere pray facing it, and the pilgrimage to Mecca — the Hajj — became one of the five pillars of Islam.
In 632, Muhammad made his final pilgrimage to Mecca, the Farewell Pilgrimage, and delivered his Farewell Sermon on the plain of Arafat. Its themes, as recorded in Islamic tradition, were the equality of all believers — no Arab superior to a non-Arab, no white superior to a black, except by piety — the sanctity of life and property, and the rights of women. Within months, he fell ill in Medina and died, in 632, in the house of his wife Aisha. He was buried in his chamber, on the site where the Prophet's Mosque now stands, and where pilgrims still come to pay their respects.
Muhammad died without naming a successor, and the community he founded chose Abu Bakr, his closest companion, as the first caliph — the successor who would lead the ummah. Within a century, the armies and missionaries of the caliphate had carried Islam from Spain to India, and the civilization that grew from Muhammad's message — in law, philosophy, science, art, and architecture — would shape the world for a thousand years and more.
The measure of Muhammad's influence is not only the empire his followers built. It is the daily life of nearly two billion people who pray five times a day, fast in Ramadan, give alms, and make pilgrimage — and who look to Muhammad's example, his character, and his teaching as the pattern of a good life. Historians of every faith rank him among the most consequential figures in human history. Muslims rank him first among the prophets. Both judgments rest on the same fact: a merchant of Mecca, reciting words he said were not his own, changed the world more durably than any emperor.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Muhammad”.
- Armstrong, Karen, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time.
- Lings, Martin, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline: the birth of Islam.
- The British Museum, collections and essays on early Islam and Arabia.