Qur’an (Koran)

About the Author

Tradition ascribes the Qur'an to the Prophet, Muhammad. There is certainly no reason to question that Muhammad was the driving force behind the Qur'an and Islam, but the problem lies with the traditional nature of the sources. The Sira, or tradition about the life of Muhammad, was composed over a long period and at least partly as a commentary on the Qur'an, so agreement between the two texts is at best circular evidence for their historicity. Another problem is that the only surviving texts come from the end of the tradition in the ninth century, with no texts from earlier stages of development. Nor is there even a single source that lies outside this tradition. Modern scholars remain deeply divided on the reliability of the Sira tradition.

The received tradition of the Sira reports that Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca, where the Kaaba was already an important pilgrimage site in the polytheist religion of Arabia, about the year 570. After rising up from the disadvantageous position of an orphan to become a successful merchant through family connections and his own initiative, Muhammad began, when he was about forty years old, to pursue a contemplative practice in a cave in the desert. Soon the archangel Gabriel began dictating God’s word directly to Muhammad. The prophet could not write—Qur'an means “recitation,” as opposed to scripture, which means “writing”—but told these revelations to a small circle of companions as he continued to receive the text in bits and pieces up until his death in 632. Muhammad records having a mystical experience of a different character in 620, which Islamic tradition venerates as his night journey, in which he supposedly flew to Jerusalem and to heaven. Muhammad himself remembered the entire revelation and frequently repeated it, even dictating portions of it to scribes later in life.

The religion of the Qur'an was monotheist and claimed the shrine of the Kaaba for itself. Resistance to this idea by the non-Muslim Meccans forced Muhammad and his followers to flee in 622, an event called the Hijra, used as the beginning of the Islamic calendar. As an outsider, Muhammad was chosen by the people of Medina, an oasis near Mecca, to settle disputes between the contentious communities that lived there, including polytheist Arabs and Jews. Soon, most of the Arab population of Medina converted to Islam. After years of warfare with Mecca, Muhammad finally gained control of that city, too, and by 632, through a combination of conquest and skillful diplomacy, Muhammad had consolidated control of the entire Arabian Peninsula. He died on June 8, 632.