One useful way to unearth the wisdom that Islam may hold for all of us would be to look at Muhammad in his own place and time. So, let’s head that way.
Pre-Islamic Arabia: An Unhappy Place
Muhammad was born around 570 CE into Arabia’s tribal society. Built on rigid hierarchies where power and wealth determined everything, this was a predatory and corrupt environment indeed, with a few small cliques of winners and a lot of losers. Blood feuds between tribes could span generations, with violence answering violence endlessly. Those feuds created a lot of widows and orphans, who had no protections or rights. Neither, for that matter, did the poor.
Mecca, Muhammad’s birthplace, centered on the Kaaba, an ancient shrine housing 360 idols that drew polytheistic pilgrims from the region’s various tribes. The city’s elite, having grown rich from this religious tourism, had every incentive to maintain the unjust status quo.
Muhammad was marked by loss: his father died before his birth, his mother when he was six. Raised by his grandfather, then his uncle Abu Talib, he became known for his honesty and concern for the discarded. At 25, he married Khadijah, a wealthy widow 15 years his senior. For 24 years, until her death, he remained devoted to her alone.
The Revelation and a Revolutionary Message
At 40, while meditating in a cave outside Mecca, Muhammad experienced something that changed everything. Muslims believe the Angel Gabriel appeared with the first words of the Qur’an. Terrified, Muhammad returned to Khadijah, who reassured him: this is real, and you can do what you’re being asked to do.
Over 23 years, revelations continued, creating the foundations of a new way of life. Muhammad’s message was startling: there is one God – Allah – and before this God, all people are absolutely equal. No intermediaries, no privileged class, no tribal advantages.
More than a theology, this was a blueprint for rebuilding society. The revelations created Islam’s comprehensive framework. By the end of Muhammad’s life, this would comprise, aside from the declaration that there is no God but Allah:
Salah – Five daily prayers, bringing the community together.
Zakat – Obligatory charity, ensuring wealth circulated and the vulnerable were protected.
Sawm – The Ramadan fast, reminding everyone what hunger felt like.
Hajj – The pilgrimage where all wore simple white garments, a show of their equality before God.
These were tools for building something new: a community united by shared purpose, bound by principles applying equally to everyone. As Muhammad taught the practices revealed to him, the slaves, merchants, women, and dispossessed who listened to him suddenly found themselves part of something that said their lives had equal worth and took real measures to make sure they were looked after.
Persecution and the Journey to Medina
Immediately seeing the threat posed to them by the ideas being put about by Muhammad, the Meccan elite started persecuting him and his followers. By 622 CE, some of them were plotting Muhammad’s assassination.
Meanwhile, to the north of Mecca, the city of Medina was beset by tribal conflicts. It invited Muhammad, by now something of a noted figure in the region if still an outsider, as a neutral arbiter. In the Hijra – the migration – Muhammad and his modest band of followers slipped away to Medina. This journey marks Year 1 of the Islamic calendar. Tellingly, Islam dates itself not from revelation but from community-building, from when ideals took concrete form.
In Medina, the impossible happened. Refugees, converts, and existing residents – Muslims, Jews, and pagans – came together under the Constitution of Medina, one of the world’s first written constitutions. It guaranteed rights for all residents and established due process for disputes. And local tribe by local tribe, the ranks of the Muslim community steadily grew.
An Improbable Victory
Eight years after fleeing as persecuted refugees, Muhammad marched back toward Mecca with 10 thousand followers.
Mecca surrendered without bloodshed. Muhammad entered the Kaaba, removed those 360 idols, and rededicated it to the one God. Then he granted general amnesty. Those who had persecuted him, driven him out, tried to kill him: forgiven.
This was confidence rather than weakness. Muhammad understood that breaking cycles of retaliation mattered more than revenge. Within a year, most of Arabia embraced Islam, drawn by the same vision that had won over Muhammad’s earliest followers.
The Elevation of Civilization
The foundation built on the principles Muhammad espoused proved remarkably durable. Within a century, Islamic civilization stretched from Spain to India and China.
The Islamic Golden Age, which ran from roughly the eighth to fourteenth centuries, set new civilizational standards. Islamic societies developed, among other things: regulated commerce built around the principle all parties to a contract must profit from it; due process in justice with courts accessible to all; and protection of personal rights, including property rights for women centuries before European women gained them.
These grew from Islam’s core principles: everyone is equal before God, learning is sacred, wealth should be both created and circulated. While Europe became adrift from much of the wisdom that had flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, Islamic cities bustled with trade, scholarship, and peace. And that’s because they were organized around the core insight of what Muhammad shared with the world: communities thrive when united by shared purpose, when principles apply equally to everyone, when law replaces arbitrary power. Today 1.9 billion Muslims live by these timeless principles – submission, compassion, and justice – while grappling with how to keep sacred texts from being weaponized.
A Modern Challenge
When Muhammad and his followers were in Medina, they had to turn to arms to fight off hostile tribes. It was at this point he received the so-called Sword Verses, which gave Muslims a mandate to engage in martial violence against these adversaries.
Islamic scholars continue to debate how best to apply the teachings of those verses in a modern and fundamentally different world. Many Muslims read these Medinan verses about war as specific to survival there and then in the seventh century, not as universal commands. A minority of Muslims, however, apply them literally as being universal, fueling global tensions. And in doing so, they ride roughshod over all the values that turned Islam into a force for civilization and community all those centuries ago.
For the sake of those values of classical Islam, the urgent task, then, is to amplify the context-sensitive reading worldwide.
Questions for Reflection
When have you been part of a community united by shared purpose and common values? What made that possible, and what did it enable you to accomplish together?
