The Birth of Islam
Richard J. Karam, J.D.
Michel N. Laham, M.D.

Islam, the faith of over 1 billion people today, began with the teachings of Mohammed who was born and raised near Mecca in the 7th Century. The name "Islam" is an Arabic word meaning "acceptance" or "surrender" to God. "Muslim", on the other hand, is the term given to those who follow the Islamic faith. Although the faith began with the teachings of the prophet, its roots reach back to the patriarch of the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Abraham. Indeed, it was Abraham's submission to the will of God in sacrificing his son which appears to have given the religion its name. Mohammed was a member of a group in Arabia known as the Hanifs, who claimed spiritual descent from Abraham and who believed in one God, while the rest of the population practiced a polytheism peopled with beastly jinns and demons.

It was sometime after the age of 40 that Mohammed was called to prophethood. According to the traditional account, while deep in meditation on Mount Hira near Mecca, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and commanded him to Recite in the name of God. And soon from that mountain cave resounded the electrifying cry that was to rally a nation under the banner of Islam: "La ilaha ill' Allah!" (There is no god but God!). Over a period of more than 20 years, many revelations were made known to Mohammed by the angel, all of which were reduced to writing and ultimately became the holy book, the Koran. The name "Koran" means something to be recited. It was these revelations which launched Mohammed on his public career as a preacher, reformer, and prophet. Through his revelation-inspired teachings, he rekindled in the Arabic speaking descendants of Abraham the monotheistic faith of the patriarch.

The Bible and the revelations recorded in the Koran bear striking similarities. According to Islamic belief, the messages sent down to Mohammed were taken from a heavenly Book, eternal, uncreated, and co-existent with God. Muslims believe that each of the books given to past prophets, the Bible, the Psalms of David, the Torah of Moses, were drawn from this heavenly repository of truth. Nonetheless, Muslims believe that the Jews and the Christians, in some instances, distorted the scriptures when reducing them to written form. In contrast, Moslems believe that neither the content of the revelations in the Koran, nor its form, were of Mohammed's devising. Both were given by the angel, and Mohammed's task was only to repeat what he had heard. So much so, in fact, that Mohammed himself considered the Koran the only miracle that God had worked through him. That he, unschooled as he was, and barely literate, could have produced a book that all at once outlines God's plan for mankind and couches it in the most poetic and grammatically perfect form, was proof of its divine origin. For, apart from its religious significance, the Koran remains the greatest masterpiece of Arabic literature and the gold standard by which all Arabic poetry is judged.

The similarity between the Bible and Koran is apparent in the accounts relating to the historical beginnings of the monotheistic faith and the common descent of the Jews and the Arabs from Abraham. The Old Testament tells us how the Lord commanded Abraham to "go to the land that I will show you." After a short stay in Egypt, he and his clan returned to Canaan and settled in Hebron. There, Abraham and his wife Sarah grew increasingly desperate because she could not bear Abraham a son who would become his heir. God had promised Abraham many descendants, but Sarah remained barren. According to the Bible, Sarah decided to resolve the dilemma and urged Abraham to wed her Egyptian servant, a woman by the name of Hagar. When Hagar became pregnant, however, Sarah grew bitter and treated Hagar cruelly. When Hagar could stand no more, she fled toward Egypt. The Bible tells us that an angel of the Lord finds Hagar in the desert near a spring and asks her origin and her destination. When she explains, the angel tells Hagar to return to her mistress and submit to her. The angel also promises Hagar that God "will generously increase her descendants." She will bear a son. She is to name the child "Ishmael," a name that embodies her experience and means "God has heard her." Hagar then returns as requested and gives birth to a son whom Abraham names "Ishmael." What is significant here is that Hagar is the first woman in the Old Testament to whom an angel appears. She also receives a blessing--- the same promise of descendants---that Abraham had received. That promise to Hagar would be repeated and reaffirmed in the Bible 14 years later.

When Ishmael reached the age of 13 years, Sarah, then 90 years old, miraculously became pregnant and gave birth to a son of her own, Isaac, meaning "laughter." Sarah, now concerned about the conflicting inheritance claims which the two half-brothers would make, caused Hagar and Ishmael to be driven into the Arabian desert, where they were likely to die. Yet, the Bible tells us that God preserved the fugitives in the Valley of Mecca, an isolated caravan rest stop on the edge of Arabia's western mountains. Although they were left with provisions, before long they began to run out of water and food. One day Ishmael dragged his heel through the sand and a spring of clear, cool, water bubbled up beneath his foot. The spring became known over the years as the well of "Zam-Zam", which later would be a landmark to Muslim pilgrims. The location of the spring would ultimately become the holy city of Mecca.

According to legend, Abraham visited Hagar and his eldest son from time to time, and on one such visit, he and Ishmael built the shrine that centuries later would become the holiest place in Islam, the "Kaaba." The descendants of Ishmael thus became known as "Ishmaelites" (also known as the Midianites in the Old Testament) and formed the tribes of Arabia. The descendants of Isaac became the Israelites. But according to the Biblical account in the Book of Genesis, the Midianites (Ishmaelites) kept the monotheistic faith and practices of Abraham and even influenced early Hebrew thought: it was Yahweh, the lord of the Midianites, who was revealed to Moses as the God of the Hebrews, and circumcision, a basic tenet of the Hebrew faith, was practiced by the Midianites before the Israelites.

As a Hanif, Mohammed saw the revelations announced to him by the angel as a continuation of the Hanifi teaching which his tribe had practiced for countless years. After the first revelations, he started to preach in Mecca, but for the first 10 years or more, he failed to gain any followers except among his closest family members, the most important of whom were Abu Bakr and Umar, his first two successors, and among members of the lower and poorer classes of Mecca. The Meccans eventually succeeded in banning Mohammed and his followers from their city and, in 621, he and a small group of the faithful escaped to the neighboring town of Yathrib which was to become Medinat An-Nabi (Medina), the city of the prophet. The flight to Medina is called the "Hegira", and it became the starting point of the Islamic calendar. From the moment of his arrival in Medina, the prophet assumed the role of statesman. Offered the leadership of the city by its inhabitants, he ruled with an ideal blend of justice and mercy. Exercising superb statecraft, he reconciled the five conflicting tribes, three of which were Jewish, welding them into an orderly confederation. People flocked from every part of Arabia to see the man who had accomplished such a feat.

In the second year of the Hegira, the Medinese won a spectacular victory against an attacking Meccan army many times larger than their own, and they saw this as a clear sign that heaven was on their side. Three years later, the Meccans laid siege to Medina in a last attempt to force the Muslims to surrender. The failure of this effort marked the turning of the tide permanently in favor of Medina. Within three more years, in year 8 of the Hegira, Mohammed returned to Mecca as its conqueror. With his former persecutors now at his mercy, he was magnanimous and forgave them. His first act upon entering Mecca was to destroy the pagan idols placed by the Meccans for worship in the Kaaba, to purify it, and to restore it as the sacred shrine built by the Patriarch Abraham and his son Ishmael.

Mecca and the Kaaba became the focal point of Islam, consecrating the link with Abraham and the beginnings of the faith. Mohammed accepted the mass conversion of the city but he, himself, returned to Medina thereby separating the faith from his own person. The basic theological tenets of Islam are virtually identical to those of its forerunners, Judaism and Christianity. Its main contribution was the reaffirmation of monotheism, the same monotheism that Jews are exhorted to by the Shema, Israel--"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Mohammed saw his function as a prophet to renew and restore the guidance given by the prophets who preceded him, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. He never intended to create a new religion. He expected, perhaps naively, that Christians and Jews would accept his prophecy since it was a continuation of their own religious heritage. But in the beginning, the Christians believed that the teachings of Islam represented a heretical form of Christianity, because many Christian concepts were incorporated into the faith, including the belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah promised by the prophets of the Old Testament, the reaffirmation of the virgin birth of Christ, and the reverence for the Virgin Mary.

There was one distinct difference between Mohammed and the prophets who came before him, however, which set him apart. He was chosen as the Seal of the Prophets, the last in the chain of divine messengers. There would be no more prophets after Mohammed. The divinely ordained rules regulating the lives of the faithful were now cast in their final form. The first of the five pillars of Islam is the confession of faith, the Shahadah, which consists of the single sentence: "There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet." The second is to pray five times each day, facing toward Mecca, at sunrise, at noon, mid-afternoon, at sunset, and at bedtime. The third pillar is charity, to give alms generously to the poor. The fourth is the observance of the holy month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Arabic calendar, during which the faithful are urged to fast from sunrise to sunset. The fifth is the pilgrimage to Mecca which every Muslim is urged to make once in his or her lifetime, if physically and economically possible.

At the time of his death in 632, Mohammed had consolidated all of Arabia into one united nation under one faith, Islam, a feat which no man before him had achieved. Under his successor, the first caliph Abu-Bakr, the various tribes of the peninsula were welded into a powerful fighting force, and the invasion of Syria began. And within a hundred years of his passing, the armies of Islam would carry the faith to the very confines of the civilized world.