The Formation of Islam Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800

The religious and cultural tradition of Islam came to be identified as the legacy of Muhammad the son of cAbdallah. Muhammad, as depicted in the Muslim narrative of Islamic origins, was an inhabitant of the western Arabian town of Mecca. According to those sources, in the early decades of the seventh century Muhammad embarked upon a prophetic career, preaching faith in the single God and articulating to his followers God's revelations to him. Having provoked the wrath of the leaders of the pagan society in which he lived, Muhammad and his small band of followers fled to the oasis of Yathrib some 200 miles north of Mecca in the year 622, an event known to the Muslim tradition as the hijra and which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. In Yathrib, also known as Medina (from madinat al-nabi, “the city of the prophet”), Muhammad first established a Muslim umma or “community.” Over the final decade of his life, Muhammad continued to receive revelations which after his death in 632 were collected into the Koran as we now know it, and gradually brought the inhabitants of virtually the whole of the Arabian peninsula to embrace Islam and to acknowledge the political supremacy of his umma.

The Muslim tradition thus clearly situates the origins of the faith in an Arabian context.