Muhammad

1. Who Muhammad was: prophet, merchant and community leader

Muhammad is presented in both Muslim tradition and mainstream reference works as a Meccan-born figure of the Quraysh tribe who worked as a merchant and earned a reputation for trustworthiness before receiving prophetic revelations around age 40 that Muslims believe form the Qurʾān ^{[1] [5]}. Sources agree he married Khadijah, who supported him early in his mission, and that over the next decade his preaching attracted followers and opponents in Mecca, setting the stage for his later role as the head of a religious and political community ^{[6] [7]}.

2. The documentary record and questions of historicity

The Qurʾān itself offers few concrete biographical details, and most fuller narratives come from sīrah biographies and hadith collections compiled in the eighth and ninth centuries — decades to centuries after Muhammad’s death — which raises scholarly caution about which details reflect early history and which reflect later shaping of memory ^{[3] [4]}. Encyclopedic and academic sources note that Ibn Isḥāq’s early sīrah survives mainly through later editors such as Ibn Hisham and that hadith were gathered and authenticated using chains of transmission, a method scholars weigh differently when reconstructing events ^{[3] [4]}.

3. Key events commonly accepted in accounts of his life

Traditional chronologies place Muhammad’s birth around 570 CE in Mecca and his death in 632 CE, and these dates appear consistently across general references and popular biographies ^{[8] [1]}. The migration (hijrah) from Mecca to Medina in 622 — after persecution and loss of clan protection — is marked as a turning point that allowed formation of an organized Muslim community; military engagements with Meccan forces followed, leading to treaties and, ultimately, the peaceful conquest of Mecca by around 630 ^{[3] [8] [7]}. Sources also mark the Farewell Pilgrimage and his death in 632 as significant endpoints to his life and public ministry ^[3].

4. Miracles, religious memory and variant traditions

Muslim devotional and sectarian sources record events treated as miraculous — such as the Night Journey (isrāʾ and miʿrāj) and accounts of early revelations — and these form vital elements of Muslim memory and theology even if they lie beyond the reach of secular historical verification ^{[7] [9]}. Sunni and Shiʿa traditions also diverge after his death over succession, a division with profound historical consequences that is widely recognized in museum, academic and encyclopedic treatments ^[2].

5. Legacy: global religion and contested historiography

By the early eighth century the traditions about Muhammad were being written down and used to instruct communities, and over time those narratives helped shape law, ritual (including the hajj whose model is traced to his Farewell Pilgrimage) and political identities across a rapidly expanding Muslim world; today Muhammad’s life is the focal point for devotion, law and historical debate alike ^{[3] [1] [2]}. Historians and religious scholars continue to balance reverent sources against critical methods: some emphasize the difficulty of recovering fine-grained historical facts because of the time gap in written records, while others work to triangulate Qurʾānic references, early sīrah fragments and non‑Muslim sources to test claims ^{[3] [4]}.

6. How to read accounts of Muhammad now

Readers should treat the Qurʾān and post‑Qurʾānic biographies as complementary but different kinds of testimony — scripture and communal memory — and expect certainty about broad contours (birth in Mecca, revelations beginning in middle age, hijrah, establishment of a Medinan community, unification of much of Arabia, death in 632) while remaining mindful that many specifics derive from later compilations and are debated among scholars ^{[8] [3] [4]}.