Muhammad

Most Muslims feel a great love and veneration for Muhammad, and express this feeling in many ways. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature," wrote Kepler, "it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.". 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. "I was merely thinking God's thoughts after him. Even later, Islam expanded peacefully into much of Africa and Southeast Asia. The De cometis libelli tres (1619) is also replete with astrological predictions. 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. In the On the new star (1606) Kepler explicated the meaning of the new star of 1604 as the conversion of America, downfall of Islam and return of Christ.

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). As court mathematician, he explained to Rudolf II the horoscopes of the Emperor Augustus and Muhammad, and gave astrological prognosis for the outcome of a war between the Republic of Venice and Paul V. 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. Kepler is known to have compiled prognostications for 1595 to 1606, and from 1617 to 1624. 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. As part of his duties as district mathematician to Graz, Kepler issued a prognostication for 1595 in which he forecast a peasant uprising, Turkish invasion and bitter cold, all of which happened and brought him renown. Before his death in 632, Muhammad had established Islam as a social and political force and had unified most of Arabia. At least 800 horoscopes and natal charts drawn up by Kepler are still extant, several of himself and his family, accompanied by some unflattering remarks.

In various Muslim countries, there are societies that authenticate claims of descent; some societies are more credible than others. In The Intervening Third Man, or a warning to theologians, physicians and philosophers (1610), posing as a third man between the two extreme positions for and against astrology, Kepler advocated that a definite relationship between heavenly phenomena and earthly events could be established. 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. He strove to unravel how and why that was the case and tried to put astrology on a surer footing, which resulted in the On the more certain foundations of astrology (1601), in which, among other technical innovations, he was the first to propose the quincunx aspect. Descendents of Muhammad are known by many names, such as sayyids, syeds سيد, and sharifs شريف (plural: ِأشراف Ashraaf). Kepler believed in astrology in the sense that he was convinced that astrological aspects physically and really affected humans as well as the weather on earth. The Sunni do not accept this view, but they still honor Muhammad's descendents. As one historian, John North, put it, 'had he not been an astrologer he would very probably have failed to produce his planetary astronomy in the form we have it.'.

In Shi'a Islam, it is believed that Fatima's husband 'Ali and his descendants are the rightful leaders of the faithful. Yet, it would be a mistake to take Kepler's astrological interests as merely pecuniary. (Some say that he had a daughter Zainab, who had borne a daughter, Amma or Umama, who survived him as well.). Kepler disdained astrologers who pandered to the tastes of the common man without knowledge of the abstract and general rules, but he saw compiling prognostications as a justified means of supplementing his meagre income. Muhammad was survived only by his daughter Fatima and her children. Although he did not discover gravity, he seems to have attempted to invoke the first empirical example of a universal law to explain the behaviour of both earthly and heavenly bodies. With unity restored in Arabia, the Muslims looked outward and commenced the conquests that would eventually unite the Middle East under the caliphs. Kepler also made great steps in trying to describe the motion of the planets by appealing to a force which resembled magnetism, which he believed emanated from the sun.

He spent much of his short reign suppressing rebellious tribes in the Ridda Wars. Kepler's willingness to abandon his most cherished theory in the face of precise observational evidence also indicates that he had a very modern attitude to scientific research. However it happened, Abu Bakr became the new leader. This realization was a direct consequence of his failed attempt to fit the planetary orbits within polyhedra. 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. His most significant achievements came from the realization that the planets moved in elliptical, not circular, orbits. But Abu Bakr and Umar intrigued to oust Ali and make Abu Bakr the leader or caliph. To his disappointment, Kepler's attempts to fix the orbits of the planets within a set of polyhedrons never worked out, but it is a testimony to his integrity as a scientist that when the evidence mounted against the cherished theory he worked so hard to prove, he abandoned it.

According to Shi'a Islam, Muhammad had appointed his son-in-law Ali as his successor, in a public sermon at Ghadir Khom. In 1975, nine years after its founding, the College for Social and Economic Sciences Linz (Austria) was renamed Johannes Kepler University Linz in honor of Johannes Kepler, since he wrote his magnum opus harmonices mundi ("The Harmony of the world") in Linz during the early 17th century. After a short illness, Muhammad died around noon on Monday 8 June 632, in the city of Medina at the age of sixty-three. There is some evidence this association was of ancient origin, as Plato tells of one Timaeus of Locri who thought of the Universe as being enveloped by a gigantic dodecahedron while the other four solids represent the "elements" of fire, air, earth, and water. List in alphabetic order:. In his 1619 book, Harmonices Mundi or Harmony of the Worlds, as well as the aforementioned Mysterium Cosmographicum, he also made an association between the Platonic solids with the classical conception of the elements: the tetrahedron was the form of fire, the octahedron was that of air, the cube was earth, the icosahedron was water, and the dodecahedron was the cosmos as a whole or ether. There were many other companions in addition to the ones listed here. Each of these celestial spheres had a planet embedded within them, and thus defined the planet's orbit.

Companions are responsible for the transmission of hadith, as each hadith must have as its first transmitter a companion. To emphasize his theory, Kepler envisaged an impressive model of the universe which shows a cube, inside a sphere, with a tetrahedron inscribed in it; another sphere inside it with a dodecahedron inscribed; a sphere with an icosahedron inscribed inside; and finally a sphere with an octahedron inscribed. Third, he must have converted to Islam. Here is a selection explaining the relation between the planets and the Platonic solids:. Second, he must have seen or heard Muhammad speak on at least one occasion. In 1596 Kepler published Mysterium Cosmographicum, or The Cosmic Mystery. First, he must have been a contemporary of Muhammad. He thereby identified the five Platonic solids with the five intervals between the six known planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; and the five classical elements.

The term companions refers to anyone who met three criteria. The smallest orbit, that of Mercury, was the innermost sphere. For further information on Muhammad's family life and consideration of these criticisms, see Muhammad's marriages. Having embraced the Copernican system, he set out to prove that the distances from the planets to the sun were given by spheres inside perfect polyhedra, all of which were nested inside each other. 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. In his cosmologic vision, it was not a coincidence that the number of perfect polyhedra was one less than the number of known planets. (See Aisha for a discussion of other, conflicting, traditions). Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion while trying to achieve the Pythagorean purpose of finding the harmony of the celestial spheres.

His marriage to Aisha is often criticized today citing traditional sources that state she was only nine years old when he consummated the marriage. In addition, since he was the first to recognize the non-convex regular solids (such as the stellated dodecahedra), they are named Kepler solids in his honor. One of the later unions resulted in a son, but the child died when he was ten months old. theoretical explanation of the camera obscura — and Dioptrice). Others were daughters of his close allies or tribal leaders. antiprisms and the Kepler telescope (see Kepler's books Astronomiae Pars Optica — i.a. Some of these women were recent widows of warriors in battle. He was also one of the founders of modern optics, defining e.g.

He married his other wives after the death of Khadija. Kepler also made fundamental investigations into combinatorics, geometrical optimization, and natural phenomena such as snowflakes, always with an emphasis on form and design. Khadija was Muhammad's first wife and the mother of the only child to survive him, his daughter Fatima. No further supernovae have since been observed with certainty in the Milky Way, though others outside our galaxy have been seen. Some say that he also married his slave girl Maria al-Qibtiyya, but other sources speak to the contrary. It has since been determined that the star was a supernova, the second in a generation, later called Kepler's Star or Supernova 1604. Later he was to marry more wives, for a total of eleven (nine or ten living at the time of his death). (It was first observed by several others on October 9.) The appearance of the star, which Kepler described in his book De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii ('On the New Star in Ophiuchus's Foot'), provided further evidence that the cosmos was not changeless; this was to influence Galileo in his argument.

After her death he married Aisha, then Hafsa. On October 17, 1604, Kepler observed that an exceptionally bright star had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus. From 595 to 619, Muhammad had only one wife, Khadijah. (From the modern vantage point, the equal-area law is more easily understood as arising from conservation of angular momentum.). Muslim commentators, however, argue that he fought only to defend his community against the Meccans, and that he insisted on humane rules of warfare. Isaac Newton eventually showed that the laws were a consequence of his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation. Critics say that his wars went well beyond self-defense. Kepler, however, never discovered the deeper reasons for the laws, despite many years of what would now be considered non-scientific mystical speculation.

Much criticism has been leveled at Muhammad for engaging in caravan raids and wars of conquest. Kepler's laws were the first clear evidence in favor of the heliocentric model of the solar system, because they only came out to be so simple under the heliocentric assumption. He was a warrior for only ten years. Using these laws, he was the first astronomer to successfully predict a transit of Venus (for the year 1631). He took up the sword late in his life. The constant of proportionality is the same for all the planets. For most of the sixty-three years of his life, Muhammad was a merchant, then a preacher. Kepler's law of periods: The time required for a planet to orbit the sun, called its period, is proportional to the long axis of the ellipse raised to the 3/2 power.

The Muslims were clearly the dominant force in Arabia, and most of the remaining tribes and states hastened to submit to Muhammad. Kepler's equal-area law: The line connecting a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time. This authority was not enforced by any formal governments, however, as he chose instead to rule through personal relationships and tribal treaties. Kepler's elliptical orbit law: The planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus. 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. He finally arrived at his three laws of planetary motion:. Henceforth the pilgrimage would be a Muslim pilgrimage and the shrine a Muslim shrine. Kepler, unlike Brahe, held to the heliocentric model of the solar system, and starting from that framework, he made twenty years of painstaking trial-and-error attempts at making some sense out of the data.

Most Meccans converted to Islam and Muhammad destroyed the idols in the Kaaba. As shown in the example below, this can even cause the other planets to appear to move in strange loops. Muhammad in turn promised a general amnesty (from which some people were specifically excluded). We view the orbital motions of the other planets from the vantage point of the Earth, which is itself orbiting the sun. Eager to placate the powerful Muslims and anxious to regain their lucrative tribal alliances, the Meccans submitted without a fight. However, it was not a simple matter to make sense of these data. Muhammad marched on Mecca with an enormous force, said to number 10,000 men. Kepler inherited from his boss Tycho Brahe a wealth of the most accurate raw data ever collected on the motion of the planets.

The agreement lasted only two years, however, as war broke out again in 630. Although the subsections below separate the two, Kepler did not see them as separate. 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. His ideas are therefore a fascinating mixture of what would today be considered mathematical physics and nonsensical mysticism. After some negotiation, a treaty was signed at the border town of al-Hudaybiyah. Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, and no consensus on the scientific method as the correct way to decide what was correct or incorrect in science. In March of that year, he set out for Mecca, followed by 1,600 men. In 1632, only two years after his death, his grave was demolished by the Swedish army in the Thirty Years' War.

By 628, the Muslim position was strong enough that Muhammad decided to returned to Mecca, this time as a pilgrim. On November 15, 1630 Kepler died of a fever in Regensburg. 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. However, only the courageous personal intervention of Kepler (despite the risk to be arrested as well) and his reputation as the famous Imperial Mathematician rescued her. All the property from the tribe was then divided among the Muslims. Even though she was subjected to torture, she refused to confess to the charges. The remaining women and children were taken as slaves or for ransom. She was released in October 1621 after attempts to convict her failed.

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. In August of 1620, Katherine, Kepler's mother, was arrested in Leonberg as a witch; she was imprisoned for 14 months. But Muhammad had dug a trench around Medina and successfully defended the city in the Battle of the Trench. He initially rejected this idea, but later confirmed it on May 15 of the same year. He was aided by sympathizers among the Medinans, the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza, a tribe that had signed a treaty with Muhammad. On March 8, 1618 Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion: distance cubed over time squared. In April 627 Abu Sufyan led another strong force against Medina. The question of snowflakes was not resolved until the 20th century.

The Meccans claimed victory, but they had lost too many men to pursue the Muslims into Medina. He correctly theorized that their hexagonal nature was due to cold, but did not ascertain a physical cause for this. The ensuing Battle of Uhud took place on March 23, ending in a stalemate. In 1611, Kepler published a monograph on the origins of snowflakes, the first known work on the subject. In 625 the Meccan general Abu Sufyan marched on Medina with 3,000 men. In January 1612 the Emperor died, and Kepler took the post of provincial mathematician in Linz. (See Succession to Muhammad for more information on the controversy regarding the question of who the first caliph should have been). In October 1604, Kepler observed the supernova which was subsequently named Kepler's Star.

Sunni Muslims regard these caliphs as the Rashidun, or Rightly Guided. After Tycho's death, Kepler was appointed Imperial Mathematician (from November 1601 to 1630) to the Habsburg Emperors. Thus all four of the first four caliphs were linked to Muhammad by blood, marriage, or both. In December 1599, Tycho Brahe wrote to Kepler, inviting Kepler to assist him at Benatek outside Prague. Each of these men, in later years, would emerge as successors to Muhammad and political leaders of the Muslims. She died in 1611 and was survived by two children. According to the Sunni, another daughter, Umm Kulthum, married Uthman. In April 1597, Kepler married Barbara Müller.

Muhammad's daughter Fatima married Ali. He accepted the position in April of 1594, at the age of 23. These marriages sealed relations between Muhammad and his top-ranking followers. However, before he took his final exams he was recommended for the vacant post of teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria. In Medina, he married Hafsah, daughter of Umar (who would eventually become Abu Bakr's successor). Upon his graduation from that school in 1591, he went on to pursue study in theology, becoming a part of the Tübingen faculty. 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). In 1587, Kepler began attending the University of Tübingen, where he proved himself to be a superb mathematician.

Virtually all the remaining Medinans converted, and Muhammad became de facto ruler of the city. At age six, he observed the Comet of 1577, writing that he "...was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it." At age nine, he observed another astronomical event, the Lunar eclipse of 1580, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the moon "appeared quite red.". 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. He was introduced to astronomy/astrology at an early age, and developed a love for that discipline that would span his entire life. 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 ostracizing probably led him to turn to the world of ideas, as well as an abiding religious conviction, for solace. 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 he excelled in his schooling, Kepler was frequently bullied, and was plagued by a belief that he was physically repulsive, thoroughly unlikable and, compared to the other pupils, an outsider.

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. Born prematurely, Johannes is said to have been a weak and sickly child, but despite his ill health, he was precociously brilliant. On March 15, 624 near a place called Badr, the Meccans and the Muslims clashed. His mother, an inn-keeper's daughter, had a reputation for involvement in witchcraft. They sent a small army against Medina. His father earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and abandoned the family when Johannes was 17. The Meccans successfully defended the caravan and then decided to teach the Medinans a lesson. His grandfather had been Lord Mayor of that town, but by the time Johannes was born, the Kepler family fortunes were in decline.

In March of 624, Muhammad led some 300 warriors in a raid on a Meccan merchant caravan. Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 at the Imperial Free City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, 30 km west of Stuttgart's so center). 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. He is sometimes referred to as "the first theoretical astrophysicist", although Carl Sagan also referred to him as the last scientific astrologer. 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. Kepler's career also coincided with that of Galileo Galilei.

Muhammad turned to raiding caravans bound for Mecca. Early in his career, Kepler was an assistant to Tycho Brahe. In Medina, Muhammad signed treaties of alliance and mutual help with neighboring tribes. Kepler was a professor of mathematics at the University of Graz, court mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, and court astrologer to General Wallenstein. Relations between Mecca and Medina rapidly worsened (see surat al-Baqara) Meccans confiscated all the property that the Muslims had left in Mecca. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion, expounded in the two books Astronomia nova and Harmonices Mundi. 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). Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630), a key figure in the scientific revolution, was a German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer.

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. Somnium (The Dream) (1634) - considered the first precursor of science fiction. In this system, the Jews and other "Peoples of the Book" were allowed to keep their religions as long as they paid tribute. Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627). 622-623), which laid out the terms on which the different factions, specifically the Jews, could exist within the new Islamic State. Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds) (1619). Muhammad drafted a document now known as the Constitution of Medina (ca. Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (published in three parts from 1618-1621).

Non-Muslim settlements within Muslim territories were taxed rather than expelled. Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum (New Stereometry of wine barrels) (1615). 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. Dioptrice (Dioptre) (1611). Muhammad had hoped that they would recognize him as a prophet, but they did not do so. Astronomia nova (New Astronomy) (1609). 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"). De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii (On the New Star in Ophiuchus's Foot) (1604).

He ultimately did so by absorbing both factions into his Muslim community, and forbidding bloodshed among Muslims. Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy) (1604). Muhammad came to Medina as a mediator, invited to resolve the feud between the Arab factions of Aws and Khazraj. Mysterium cosmographicum (The Cosmic Mystery) (1596). 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.