Muhammad

Most Muslims feel a great love and veneration for Muhammad, and express this feeling in many ways. As Eugene Wigner wrote: "Ten days before Fermi had passed away he told me, 'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself perfectly to his fate". Islam is now the faith of well over a billion people all over the globe, and believed to be the second largest religion of the present day. On November 28, 1954, Fermi died at the age of 53 of stomach cancer in Chicago, Illinois and was interred there in Oak Woods Cemetery. Even later, Islam expanded peacefully into much of Africa and Southeast Asia. He never forgot this experience of being ahead of his time, and used to tell his protégés: "Never be first; try to be second". Under the Ghaznavids, in the tenth century, Islam was spread to the Hindu principalities east of the Indus by conquering armies in what is now northern India. Thus, Fermi saw the theory published in Italian and in German before it was published in English.

The rest of north Africa had come under Muslim rule, as had the southern part of Spain and much of Central Asia (including Sind, in the Indus Valley). When he submitted his famous paper on beta decay to the prestigious journal Nature, the journal's editor turned it down because "it contained speculations which were too remote from reality". By 750, Islam had emerged as the spiritual counterpart to the two great monotheistic belief systems, Judaism and Christianity, and as the geopolitical successor to the Roman Empire. Not finding him either in his lab or his office, the executive was surprised to find the Nobel Laureate in the machine shop, cutting sheets of tin with a big pair of shears. A few decades after his death, his successors had united all of Arabia, and conquered Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and much of North Africa. Walking into the lab one day, Smyth saw the distinguished scientist helping a graduate student move a table, under another student's directions! Another time, a Du Pont executive made a visit to see him at Columbia. Before his death in 632, Muhammad had established Islam as a social and political force and had unified most of Arabia. Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was Chairman of the Princeton Physics department, had once invited Fermi over to do some experiments with the Princeton cyclotron.

In various Muslim countries, there are societies that authenticate claims of descent; some societies are more credible than others. It was this quality that made him popular and liked among people of all strata, from other Nobel Laureates to technicians. Many rulers and notables in Muslim countries, past and present, claim such descent, with various degrees of credibility, such as the Fatimid dynasty of North Africa, the Idrisis, the current royal families of Jordan and Morocco, and the Agha Khan Imams of the Ismaili branch of Islam. Fermi's most disarming trait was his great modesty, and his ability to do any kind of work, whether creative or routine. Descendents of Muhammad are known by many names, such as sayyids, syeds سيد, and sharifs شريف (plural: ِأشراف Ashraaf). Later on, this method of getting approximate and quick answers through back of the envelope calculations became informally known as the 'Fermi method'. The Sunni do not accept this view, but they still honor Muhammad's descendents. (Rhodes, page 674).

In Shi'a Islam, it is believed that Fatima's husband 'Ali and his descendants are the rightful leaders of the faithful. He estimated 10 kilotons of TNT, the measured result was 18.6. (Some say that he had a daughter Zainab, who had borne a daughter, Amma or Umama, who survived him as well.). By measuring the distance they were blown, he could compare to a previously computed table and thus estimate the bomb energy yield. Muhammad was survived only by his daughter Fatima and her children. As the blast wave reached him, Fermi dropped bits of paper. With unity restored in Arabia, the Muslims looked outward and commenced the conquests that would eventually unite the Middle East under the caliphs. An instance of this was seen during the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

He spent much of his short reign suppressing rebellious tribes in the Ridda Wars. He was famous for getting quick and accurate answers to problems which would stump other people. However it happened, Abu Bakr became the new leader. He disliked complicated theories, and while he had great mathematical ability, he would never use it when the job could be done much more simply. The majority Sunni sect dispute this, and say that the leaders of the community conferred and freely chose Abu Bakr, who was pre-eminent among the followers of Muhammad. Fermi's ability and success stemmed as much from his appraisal of the art of the possible, as from his innate skill and intelligence. But Abu Bakr and Umar intrigued to oust Ali and make Abu Bakr the leader or caliph. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole".

According to Shi'a Islam, Muhammad had appointed his son-in-law Ali as his successor, in a public sermon at Ghadir Khom. Snow, says about him, "If Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. After a short illness, Muhammad died around noon on Monday 8 June 632, in the city of Medina at the age of sixty-three. P. List in alphabetic order:. The well-known historian of physics, C. There were many other companions in addition to the ones listed here. Fermi was one of the few physicists of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally (see link below in 'References').

Companions are responsible for the transmission of hadith, as each hadith must have as its first transmitter a companion. That is the time when I left Columbia University, and after a few months of commuting between Chicago and New York, eventually moved to Chicago to keep up the work there, and from then on, with a few notable exceptions, the work at Columbia was concentrated on the isotope separation phase of the atomic energy project, initiated by Booth, Dunning and Urey about 1940". Third, he must have converted to Islam. In Fermi's 1954 address to the APS he also said, "Well, this brings us to Pearl Harbor. Second, he must have seen or heard Muhammad speak on at least one occasion. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America in 1944. First, he must have been a contemporary of Muhammad. Eventually Fermi and Szilárd's reactor work was folded into the Manhattan Project.

The term companions refers to anyone who met three criteria. The chain-reacting pile was important not only for its help in assessing the properties of fission — needed for understanding the internal workings of an atomic bomb — but because it would serve as a pilot plant for the massive reactors which would be created in Hanford, Washington, which would then be used to "breed" the plutonium needed for the bombs used at the Trinity test and Nagasaki. For further information on Muhammad's family life and consideration of these criticisms, see Muhammad's marriages. The natives were very friendly'. Critics also question his marriage to his adopted son's ex-wife, Zaynab bint Jahsh, and his alleged violation of the Qur'anic injunction against marrying more than four wives. When man first achieved the first self sustained nuclear chain reaction, a coded phone call was made to one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, James Conant: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.. (See Aisha for a discussion of other, conflicting, traditions). Every step had been carefully planned, every calculation meticulously done by him.

His marriage to Aisha is often criticized today citing traditional sources that state she was only nine years old when he consummated the marriage. This experiment was a landmark in the quest for energy, and it was typical of Fermi's brilliance. One of the later unions resulted in a son, but the child died when he was ten months old. The money was used in studies which led to the first nuclear reactor — Chicago Pile-1, a massive "pile" of graphite bricks and uranium fuel which went critical on December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. Others were daughters of his close allies or tribal leaders. Roosevelt in 1939, the Navy awarded Columbia University the first Atomic Energy funding of US$ 6,000. Some of these women were recent widows of warriors in battle. After the famous letter signed by Albert Einstein (transcribed by Leó Szilárd) to President Franklin D.

He married his other wives after the death of Khadija. Fermi recalled the beginning of the project in a speech given in 1954 when he retired as President of the American Physical Society:. Khadija was Muhammad's first wife and the mother of the only child to survive him, his daughter Fatima. Fermi then began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile. Some say that he also married his slave girl Maria al-Qibtiyya, but other sources speak to the contrary. At Columbia, Fermi verified the initial nuclear fission experiment of Hahn and Fritz Strassman (with the help of Booth and Dunning). Later he was to marry more wives, for a total of eleven (nine or ten living at the time of his death). Soon after his arrival in New York, Fermi began working at Columbia University.

After her death he married Aisha, then Hafsa. By this time, the Fascist government in Italy had instituted anti-Semitic laws, and Fermi's wife, Laura Capon, was Jewish. From 595 to 619, Muhammad had only one wife, Khadijah. After Fermi received the prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children emigrated to New York. Muslim commentators, however, argue that he fought only to defend his community against the Meccans, and that he insisted on humane rules of warfare. In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". Critics say that his wars went well beyond self-defense. Fermi remained in Rome until 1938.

Much criticism has been leveled at Muhammad for engaging in caravan raids and wars of conquest. Some of these include Fermi-Dirac statistics, the theory of beta decay, and the discovery of slow neutrons, which was to prove pivotal for the working of nuclear reactors. He was a warrior for only ten years. During their time in Rome, Fermi and his group made important contributions to many practical and theoretical aspects of physics. He took up the sword late in his life. The group went on with its now famous experiments, but in 1933 Rasetti left Italy for Canada and the United States, Pontecorvo went to France, Segrè left to teach in Palermo. For most of the sixty-three years of his life, Muhammad was a merchant, then a preacher. For the theoretical studies only, Ettore Majorana also took part in what was soon nicknamed "the Via Panisperna boys" (after the name of the road in which the Institute had its labs).

The Muslims were clearly the dominant force in Arabia, and most of the remaining tribes and states hastened to submit to Muhammad. Corbino worked a lot to help Fermi in selecting his team, which soon was joined by notable minds like Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè. This authority was not enforced by any formal governments, however, as he chose instead to rule through personal relationships and tribal treaties. Fermi took a professorship in Rome (the first for theoretical physics in Italy, created for him by professor Orso Maria Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics). The capitulation of Mecca and the defeat of an alliance of enemy tribes at Hunayn effectively brought the greater part of the Arabian world under Muhammad's authority. While there, he also met Albert Einstein. Henceforth the pilgrimage would be a Muslim pilgrimage and the shrine a Muslim shrine. Fermi became unhappy, though, with what he saw as an excessively formal theoretical style under the influence of Max Born, and so after six months left for the University of Leiden, Netherlands, to work with Paul Ehrenfest.

Most Meccans converted to Islam and Muhammad destroyed the idols in the Kaaba. He graduated with a doctorate in 1922, and the next year left for the University of Göttingen, then the center of the quantum physics world. Muhammad in turn promised a general amnesty (from which some people were specifically excluded). Fermi did especially well, and the examiner at the Scuola Normale thought the 17-year-old Fermi's competition essay worthy of a doctoral exam. Eager to placate the powerful Muslims and anxious to regain their lucrative tribal alliances, the Meccans submitted without a fight. Amidei also suggested Fermi attend not a university in Rome but to apply to the prestigious "Scuola Normale Superiore" of Pisa, a special university-college for selected gifted students in 1918. Muhammad marched on Mecca with an enormous force, said to number 10,000 men. A friend of the family, Adolfo Amidei, guided the young Fermi's study of algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry, calculus and theoretical mechanics.

The agreement lasted only two years, however, as war broke out again in 630. According to his later recollection, he would walk each day in front of the hospital where Giulio had died, until he could look back at the event with detachment. While Muhammad would not be allowed to finish his pilgrimage that year, hostilities would cease and the Muslims would have permission to make a pilgrimage to Mecca in the following year. When his brother Giulio died during a minor surgery in 1915, 14-year-old Enrico threw himself into the study of physics as a way of coping with his grief. After some negotiation, a treaty was signed at the border town of al-Hudaybiyah. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy in 1901. In March of that year, he set out for Mecca, followed by 1,600 men. .

By 628, the Muslim position was strong enough that Muhammad decided to returned to Mecca, this time as a pilgrim. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity. Following the Battle of the Trench, the Muslims were able, through conquest and conversion, to extend their rule to many of the neighboring cities and tribes. Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 – November 28, 1954) was an Italian-American physicist most noted for his work on beta decay, the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for the development of quantum theory. All the property from the tribe was then divided among the Muslims. The remaining women and children were taken as slaves or for ransom.

After the battle, all the Banu Qurayza adult males (including boys who had reached puberty), as well as one woman, were beheaded by the order of Saad ibn Muadh, an arbiter chosen by the Banu Qurayza. But Muhammad had dug a trench around Medina and successfully defended the city in the Battle of the Trench. He was aided by sympathizers among the Medinans, the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza, a tribe that had signed a treaty with Muhammad. In April 627 Abu Sufyan led another strong force against Medina.

The Meccans claimed victory, but they had lost too many men to pursue the Muslims into Medina. The ensuing Battle of Uhud took place on March 23, ending in a stalemate. In 625 the Meccan general Abu Sufyan marched on Medina with 3,000 men. (See Succession to Muhammad for more information on the controversy regarding the question of who the first caliph should have been).

Sunni Muslims regard these caliphs as the Rashidun, or Rightly Guided. Thus all four of the first four caliphs were linked to Muhammad by blood, marriage, or both. Each of these men, in later years, would emerge as successors to Muhammad and political leaders of the Muslims. According to the Sunni, another daughter, Umm Kulthum, married Uthman.

Muhammad's daughter Fatima married Ali. These marriages sealed relations between Muhammad and his top-ranking followers. In Medina, he married Hafsah, daughter of Umar (who would eventually become Abu Bakr's successor). After Khadija's death, Muhammad married again, to Aisha daughter of his friend Abu Bakr (who would later emerge as the first leader of the Muslims after Muhammad's death).

Virtually all the remaining Medinans converted, and Muhammad became de facto ruler of the city. Following this victory, after minor skirmishes, and the breaking of a treaty that risked the security of the city state, the victors expelled a local Jewish clan, the Banu Qainuqa. To the Muslims, the victory in Badr appeared as a divine vindication of Muhammad's prophethood, and he and all the Muslims rejoiced greatly. This seminal event, celebrated in the Koran, marked the real beginning of Muslim military achievement and led the nascent Islamic society (the Ummah) to associate victory in arms with providential favor.

Though outnumbered 800 to 300 in the battle, the Muslims met with success, killing at least forty-five Meccans and taking seventy prisoners for ransom; only fourteen Muslims died. On March 15, 624 near a place called Badr, the Meccans and the Muslims clashed. They sent a small army against Medina. The Meccans successfully defended the caravan and then decided to teach the Medinans a lesson.

In March of 624, Muhammad led some 300 warriors in a raid on a Meccan merchant caravan. They owned no land in Medina and if they did not raid, they would have to live on charity and whatever wage labor they could find. Secular scholars will add that this was a matter of survival for the Muslims as well. Caravan raiding was an old Arabian tradition; later Muslim apologists justified the raids by the state of war deemed to exist between the Meccans and the Muslims.

Muhammad turned to raiding caravans bound for Mecca. In Medina, Muhammad signed treaties of alliance and mutual help with neighboring tribes. Relations between Mecca and Medina rapidly worsened (see surat al-Baqara) Meccans confiscated all the property that the Muslims had left in Mecca. In this, the Islamic empire was more tolerant than the other great powers of the area, the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, which were actively hostile to any religions or sects other than the state-sponsored religions (Orthodox Christianity and Zoroastrianism).

This system would come to typify Muslim relations with their non-believing subjects and that tradition was one reason for the stability of the later Muslim caliphate or Khilafah. In this system, the Jews and other "Peoples of the Book" were allowed to keep their religions as long as they paid tribute. 622-623), which laid out the terms on which the different factions, specifically the Jews, could exist within the new Islamic State. Muhammad drafted a document now known as the Constitution of Medina (ca.

Non-Muslim settlements within Muslim territories were taxed rather than expelled. Some academic historians suggest that Muhammad abandoned hope of recruiting Jews as allies or followers at this time, and thus the qibla, the Muslim direction of prayer, was changed from the site of the former Temple in Jerusalem to the Kabaa in Mecca. Muhammad had hoped that they would recognize him as a prophet, but they did not do so. However, Medina was also home to a number of Jewish tribes (whether they were ethnically as well as religiously Jewish is an open question, as is the depth of their "Jewishness").

He ultimately did so by absorbing both factions into his Muslim community, and forbidding bloodshed among Muslims. Muhammad came to Medina as a mediator, invited to resolve the feud between the Arab factions of Aws and Khazraj. The Muslim calendar counts dates from the Hijra, which is why Muslim dates have the suffix AH (After Hijra). This Hijra or emigration (traditionally translated into English as "flight") marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

By breaking the link with his own tribe, Muhammad demonstrated that tribal and family loyalties were insignificant compared to the bonds of Islam, a revolutionary idea in the tribal society of Arabia. Muhammad then resolved to emigrate to Medina, then known as Yathrib, a large agricultural oasis where there were a number of Muslim converts. Muslim traditions say that there were several attempts to assassinate Muhammad. By 622, life in the small Muslim community of Mecca was becoming not only difficult, but dangerous.

About 620, he announced that he had gone on a heavenly journey - the Isra and Miraj - further alienating his enemies. It was a bleak time. Muslims patiently endured hunger and persecution. In 619, both Muhammad's wife Khadijah and his uncle Abu Talib died; it was known as "the year of mourning." Muhammad's own clan withdrew their protection of him.

The incident is reported in only a few sources, and Muslims disagree as to its authenticity. It is said that Muhammad was briefly tempted to relax his condemnation of Meccan polytheism and buy peace with his neighbors, but later recanted his words and repented (see the article on the Satanic Verses). It was during this period that the episode known as the Satanic Verses may have occurred. Several suras and parts of suras are said to date from this time, and reflect its circumstances: see for example al-Masadd, al-Humaza, parts of Maryam and al-Anbiya, al-Kafirun, and Abasa.

Some of them fled to Abyssinia and founded a small colony there. Muhammad and his followers were persecuted. Mohammed’s denunciation of polytheism was especially offensive to his own tribe, the Quraysh, as they were the guardians of the Ka'aba. If they threw out their idols, as Muhammad preached, there would be no more pilgrims, no more trade, and no more wealth.

Their wealth, after all, rested on the Ka'aba, a sacred house of idols and the focal point of Meccan religious life. As the ranks of Muhammad's followers swelled, he became a threat to the local tribes and the rulers of the city. Some, however, believed and joined his small group. A few mocked him.

Most of those who heard his message ignored it. Around 613, Muhammad began to spread his message amongst the people. This silence worried him, until he received surat ad-Dhuha, whose words provided comfort and reassurance. Until his death, Muhammad received frequent revelations, although there was a relatively long gap after the first revelation.

She was soon followed by his ten-year-old cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib and Abu Bakr, whom Sunnis assert to have been Muhammad's closest friend. The first vision of Gabriel disturbed Muhammad, but his wife Khadijah reassured him that it was a true vision and became his first follower. He taught man with the pen; taught him all that he knew not." (See surat Al-Alaq for a fuller account.). Read and your Lord is the Most Honored.

He created man from something which clings. Around the year 610, while meditating, Muhammad had a vision of the Angel Gabriel and heard a voice saying to him in rough translation "Read in the name of your Lord the Creator. Muhammad had a reflective turn of mind and routinely spent nights in a cave (Hira) near Mecca in meditation and thought. The Shi'a say that Muhammad had only the one daughter, Fatima, and that the other daughters were either children of Khadijah by her previous marriage, or children of her sister.

The four daughters are said to be Zainab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum, and Fatimah. His son Qasim died at the age of two. All of Khadija's children were born before Muhammad started preaching about Islam. Ibn Ishaq records that Khadijah bore Muhammad five children, one son and four daughters.

By Arab custom minors did not inherit, so Muhammad had received no inheritance from either his father or his grandfather. He became a wealthy man by this marriage. The young twenty-five-year old Muhammad so impressed Khadijah that she offered him marriage in the year 595. One of Muhammad's employers was Khadijah, a rich widow then forty years old.

He thus became well-travelled and knowledgeable as to foreign ways. As a teenager Muhammad began accompanying his uncle on trading journeys to Syria. Merchants from different tribes would visit Mecca during the pilgrimage season, when all inter-tribal warfare was forbidden and they could trade in safety. Mecca was a thriving commercial center, due in great part to a stone temple called the Kaaba that housed many different idols.

Muhammad now came under care of his uncle Abu Talib, the new leader of the Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, the most powerful in Mecca. At the age of six, Muhammad lost his mother Amina, and at the age of eight his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib. Tradition says that as an infant, he was placed with a Bedouin wetnurse, Halima, as desert life was believed to be safer and healthier for children. Muhammad's father, Abdullah, had died before he was born and the young boy was brought up by his paternal grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, of the tribe of Quraysh.

Some calculate his birthdate as April 20, 570 (Shia Muslims believe it to be April 26), and some as 571; tradition places it in the Year of the Elephant. Muhammad was born into a well-to-do family settled in the northern Arabian town of Mecca. His nickname was Abul-Qasim, "father of Qasim", after his short-lived first son. (ibn = "son of" in Arabic; alternate names of people with two names are given in brackets.).

Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Muttalib (Shaiba) ibn Hashim (Amr) ibn Abd Manaf (al-Mughira) ibn Qusai (Zaid) ibn Kilab ibn Murra ibn Ka`b ibn Lu'ay ibn Ghalib ibn Fahr (Quraish) ibn Malik ibn an-Nadr (Qais) ibn Kinana ibn Khuzaimah ibn Mudrikah (Amir) ibn Ilyas ibn Mudar ibn Nizar ibn Ma`ad ibn Adnan. Muhammad's genealogy up to Adnan is as follows:. Adnan in turn is said to be a descendant of Ismaeel (Ishmael), son of Ibrahim (Abraham) though the exact genealogy is disputed. According to tradition, Muhammad traced his genealogy back as far as Adnan, whom the northern Arabs believed to be their common ancestor.

Traditionalists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, paint a much more detailed picture of Muhammad's life, as described below. However, the historicity of the biographical material about Muhammad presented in the Summary above is not generally contested. (Indeed, most of these traditions are acknowledged by Muslim clerical authorities to be weak; only a few hadith collections are considered sahih, or reliable.) A very small minority called the "Quran Alone Muslims" consider all hadith as unreliable. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike agree that there are many inauthentic traditions concerning the life of Muhammad in the hadith collections.

Traditionalists rely on their efforts; the skeptics feel that the question must be revisited, using modern methods. Traditions multiplied, and Muslim scholars made a strenuous effort to weed out what they felt were spurious stories. Each sect and school had its own sometimes conflicting traditions of what Muhammad and his companions had done and said. They argue that by the time the oral traditions were being collected, the Muslim community had fractured into rival sects and schools of thought.

Some skeptical scholars (Goldziher, Schacht, Wansbrough, Cook, Crone, Rippin, Berg, and others) have raised doubts about the reliability of these sources, especially the hadith collections. They are stories of the words and actions of Muhammad and his companions. The third source, the hadith collections, like the Qur'an, are not a biography per se. Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death.

822) biography of Muhammad. 833); and al-Waqidi's (d. 768), edited by Ibn Hisham (d. The earliest surviving biographies are the Life of the Apostle of God, by Ibn Ishaq (d.

While the Qur'an is not a biography of Muhammad, it does provide some information about his life. The sources available to us for information about Muhammad are the Qur'an, the sira biographies, and the hadith collections. Later conquests, commercial contact between Muslims and non-Muslims, and missionary activity spread his faith over much of the globe. Under Muhammad's immediate successors the Islamic empire expanded into Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.

By the time of Muhammad's death, he had unified Arabia and launched a few expeditions to the north, towards Syria and Palestine. The military organization honed in this struggle was then set to conquering the other pagan tribes of Arabia. War between Mecca and Medina followed, in which Muhammad and his followers were eventually victorious. In 622 he was forced to flee from Mecca and settle in Yathrib (now known as Medina) with his followers, where he was the leader of the first avowedly Muslim community.

He soon acquired a following by some and rejection and hatred by others in the region. He did not completely reject Judaism and Christianity, two other monotheistic faiths known to the Arabs; he said to have been sent by God in order to complete and perfect their teachings. He was a successful leader on both religious and political levels. He eventually expanded his mission as a prophet, publicly preaching a strict monotheism and predicting a Day of Judgement for sinners and idol-worshippers — such as his tribesmen and neighbors in Mecca.

Gabriel told him that God had chosen him as the last of the prophets to mankind. Later he described the experience to those close to him as a visit from the Angel Gabriel, who commanded him to memorize and recite the verses later collected as the Qur'an. Early Muslim sources report that in 611, at about the age of forty, while meditating in a cave near Mecca, he experienced a vision. Muhammad is said to have been a merchant who traveled widely.

. 570 in Mecca (Makkah) and died June 8, 632 in Medina (Madinah); both Mecca and Medina are cities in the Hejaz region of present day Saudi Arabia. According to traditional Muslim biographers, he was born ca. Most non-Muslims generally consider him the founder of Islam.

Islam is considered by Muslims to be the final step in the revelation of a monotheist religion of which earlier versions were the teachings of Moses, Jesus and the other prophets. Muhammad  listen^? (Arabic: محمد, also transliterated Mohammad, Mohammed, Muhammed, and sometimes Mahomet, following the Latin or Turkish), was the final prophet of Islam. Beyond the stories accepted as canonical by Islamic scholars of hadith, or oral traditions, there are many folktales praising Muhammad and recounting miraculous stories of his birth, upbringing and career. While even non-iconic representations of Muhammad are discouraged, some Muslims (e.g., Persian miniaturists) believe it permissible to picture Muhammad as long as his face is veiled.

Muhammad's relics, such as his grave, his sword, his clothing, even strands of his hair, are revered by some. Muhammad is often referenced with titles of praise. Criticism of Muhammad is often equated with blasphemy, which is punishable by death in some Muslim-majority or Islamist states. (Some do not, believing that such festivities are modern innovations.).

Some Muslims celebrate the birthday of Muhammad (Mawlid) with elaborate festivities. Concerts of Muslim and especially Sufi devotional music include songs praising Muhammad (see Muslim music, Qawwali). When speaking or writing, Muhammad's name is preceded by the title "Prophet" and is followed by the phrase, Peace be upon him, in English often abbreviated to PBUH. Zubair.

Uthman. Umar. Talha. Salman the Persian.

Sad Ibn Abi Waqqas. Sa'eed. Sa'd. Hamza.

Ali. Abu Bakr. Abdulrahman. Abdullah ibn Abbas.

Aamir.