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RAGEH OMAAR: 1,400 years ago,
a man born here in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia,
changed the course of world history.
JOHN ADAIR: If you had to rate
the top people in the history of the world as leaders,
the name of Muhammad would be in the top three.
AJMAL MASROOR: Here we have a man who began a mission.
He gave light to the world.
OMAAR: For one and a half billion Muslims,
he is the last and greatest of that long line of prophets
who have brought the word of God to humanity.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: He was not just a spiritual genius,
but he also had political gifts of a very high order.
OMAAR: He laid the foundations
for a religion, Islam, that after his death
developed a culture and civilization
that spread around the world and inspired
some of the most beautiful architecture.
But today Islam is at the very heart of the conflict
that defines our world.
And Muhammad's name
is associated with some of the most appalling acts of terrorism
the world has ever seen.
ROBERT SPENCER: Osama bin Laden and others
who have committed acts of Jihad terrorism
consistently invoke the Qur'an and Muhammad's example
to justify what they are doing.
Obedience to one true God Allah,
and follow in the footsteps for the final prophet
and messenger Muhammad.
Outside of the Islamic world,
almost nothing is known about Muhammad,
whereas for Muslims he is the ultimate role model
and his life is known in every detail.
So who was he?
What was his message?
And why are so many people, Muslims and non-Muslims,
divided over his legacy?
In this groundbreaking series,
I will explore the many complexities of his life story
about the revelations he is said to have received from God,
about his many wives,
about his relations with the Jews of Arabia,
about his use of war and peace
and about the laws that he enacted
when he set up his own state.
I want to examine his life and times and understand
how they still affect today's world
and whether they are a force for good or evil.
I want to uncover the real Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam,
peace be upon him.
OMAAR: When Muslims come on a pilgrimage to Mecca,
they put on two simple pieces of white cloth.
They discard their everyday clothes
in favor of these simple cloths,
which symbolize purity and make everyone equal,
a tradition dating back to Muhammad's time
more than 1,400 years ago.
Just after I was born,
the very first words whispered into my ear
were those of the Shahada, the simple statement of faith:
"There is no God but Allah, Muhammad is God's messenger"--
words that link me to this holy place
and to the founder of Islam.
Like most Muslims, the first human name I heard
was not that of my mother or father, but of Muhammad.
I first came to Mecca over 30 years ago
as a child of just five years with my family, on Hajj,
the Muslim pilgrimage.
As pilgrims we came to the Grand Mosque,
to the Kaaba, the most familiar symbol of Islam.
It is the place to which Muslims face every day,
wherever they may be, in prayer.
When Muslims circle the Kaaba,
they walk in the footsteps of their Prophet Muhammad,
in devotion to God.
People come from the four corners of the world,
but what unites everyone here
is a desire to emulate the life of the Prophet Muhammad,
a man as important to Muslims as Jesus is to Christians,
a man defines who they are.
But unlike Jesus, Muhammad was not the Son of God.
For him there was no miraculous birth,
no healing miracles and no resurrection after death.
He was just a man.
Muhammad was born 1,400 years ago
in one of the world's most inhospitable regions.
It was a stark, harsh environment of mountain,
desert and searing heat, one-third the size of Europe.
The vast emptiness of Arabia was sandwiched
between two of the ancient world's great powers.
To the north was Christian Byzantium,
the last remnant of the Roman Empire,
with its capital in Constantinople.
To the east was another ancient civilization,
the Sassanids, the remains of the great Persian Empire.
In between were hundreds of Arab tribes and clans,
constantly competing in a battle for supremacy and survival.
There were very few cities.
One of them was Mecca, the city were Muhammad was born.
Muhammad is believed to have been born
on a spot close to here in the year 570.
His father, Abdullah, died before he was born
and his mother, Aminah, was very poor.
And what's really interesting is at the time
there was no sense of the coming of a messiah,
there was no stars in the sky,
and wise men didn't travel from afar in order to worship him.
In fact, at the time, barely anyone noticed,
and no one really cared.
And yet today,
there isn't anything to mark where Muhammad was born.
No shrine, no museum, not even a plaque on a wall.
Most Muslims make a clear distinction
between the messenger and the message.
Muhammad may be held in high esteem
but to worship him is considered shirq,
a heinous and unforgivable corruption of Islam.
So, over the years,
many sites connected with Muhammad and his life
have been removed to ensure there is no worship
of anyone other than God.
The same goes for visual depictions of Muhammad.
Unlike in Christian churches with their myriad images
of Jesus on the cross and the *** Mary,
mosques have no images of Muhammad
or any other person at all.
What is very important in the Islamic tradition
is to understand the very essence
of the Islamic monotheism,
what we call tawhid in Arabic, the oneness of God.
He is beyond everything and we don't represent God,
but in order to be quite clear in this relationship with God,
we never represent or have an image of any of the prophets,
so it's not only the last prophet, Muhammad,
it's all the prophets.
Abraham, Moses, Jesus are not seen and drawn
and anything like this in Islam.
It's out of respect towards this oneness of God
and following the messenger, never worshipping him.
OMAAR: In the past, some Ottoman and Persian miniature paintings
have depicted Muhammad,
but his face was always hidden behind a veil.
But in the West there is a long history of depicting Muhammad
in drawings and paintings.
Most recently a Danish cartoon
portrayed him as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban.
This led to an explosion
of anger and protest right across the Muslim world,
not just because it was showing Muhammad's face,
but also because it was ridiculing him too.
Despite the lack of visual imagery,
the written sources for Muhammad's life are extensive.
The first is the Qur'an itself, Islam's holy book.
But there is also a rich library of stories and sayings
connected to Muhammad
preserved and written down after his death
and known as the Hadith.
Muslim scholars had to sift through thousands of sayings
and stories about Muhammad to check their validity.
AMIRA BENNISON: Muslim scholars themselves
were terribly worried to try and verify
whether the Hadith they were collecting were true,
whether they were false, whether they were fabricated.
ROBERT HOYLAND: The problem that scholars have with it is, one:
it's only set down in writing at a much later time.
The actual earliest physical texts that we can hold
are actually only from the 820s,
and Muhammad dies in 632, so that's a long period.
Obviously yes, of course,
they've been transmitted over time,
but with transmission orally over time, problems can come in.
MUHAMMAD ABDEL HALEEM: The Arabs relied on their memory throughout history.
Their history and their genealogy
were all retained by memory,
and Muhammad was a very important man.
By the time he died he had hundreds of thousands of people
following him or some opposing him,
and they all said and preserved all this,
and that is a source which cannot be ignored
simply because some people say no, this is just an invention
or that it was written later-- it wasn't.
OMAAR: While the veracity of the Hadiths
is still debated and argued over,
there are, remarkably, accounts of Muhammad's existence
from non-Muslim sources.
GERALD HAWTING: Non-Muslim evidence for Muhammad is not copious;
it exists.
The name Muhammad is attested in Greek,
Syriac and Armenian writings
from, say, the first 30 years after the death of Muhammad.
Which 30 years after Muhammad's death is, I suppose,
pretty good.
OMAAR: The Armenian historian Sebeos wrote about Muhammad
just 24 years after his death.
The particular interest here is that for the first time
in Armenian, someone talks about Muhammad
and mentions him by name and says a little bit
about what he did.
Sebeos himself was talking about the events
around the year 630,
which was before Muhammad had actually died.
OMAAR: Sebeos gives a surprisingly accurate account
of Muhammad's background and teachings.
Translating from the Armenian,
"At that time a certain man whose name was Muhammad,"
which is the usual name for Muhammad in Armenian,
"a merchant, as if by the command of God,
"appeared to them as a preacher.
"Now Muhammad gave them laws,
"namely not to eat carrion,
"not to drink wine, not to speak falsehood
and not to engage in fornication."
OMAAR: Sebeos and other non-Muslim historians
write about the existence of Muhammad
in roughly the same timeframe as Muslim accounts.
Together with the Hadiths and the Qur'an,
we have a large body of detailed facts
about the life of Muhammad.
We know he was born into the tribe
that ruled the town of Mecca, the Quraysh,
and that his family was poor.
His father had died before he was born
and left his mother, Aminah, little to live on.
When he was just a few months old,
she handed him over to a Bedouin tribe
living on the outskirts of the town,
a tradition among the Arabs of the time.
Muhammad had a Bedouin wet nurse and lived a nomadic life
for the first four years of his life.
Arabia at the time of Muhammad's birth was a cruel place to live.
There was no law, no state and very little peace.
Tribal loyalty and customs were the only sources of protection.
Justice was harsh, arbitrary and it was swift
and the punishments were brutal.
A man, for example, caught stealing a loaf of bread
would be killed.
And it meant that the daily struggle for survival
left very little room for compassion.
For most people there was very little chance
of a better existence.
Muslims have a special word to describe this era--
the Jahiliyyah, or the age of ignorance.
This was a society that had its structures, a belief system,
but not as we would understand an organized religion today.
The peoples of Arabia were polytheistic;
they venerated a number of different gods.
In general each tribe had their own patron god
and that was the case throughout Arabia.
OMAAR: And Mecca, Muhammad's birthplace,
is believed to have been the most important center
of this polytheistic worship.
ARMSTRONG: There was a long established Arabian paganism
as we'd call it today,
that took virtually the same form
in most of the city's unsettled regions.
There would be a sort of square shrine in the middle,
circumambulation around it
and various gods.
There was Allah, the high God, and there were goddesses,
but most of the Arabs were not particularly religious
in that sense.
This was something more for the settled areas,
the towns the agricultural settlements.
OMAAR: Orthodox Muslims believe the Kaaba was built by God
in the time of Adam,
but there is no archaeological or historical evidence
to confirm its exact origins.
By the time of Muhammad's birth it had long been a shrine
drawing people to the town of Mecca,
the center of pagan cults for the peoples of Arabia.
SAJJAD RIZVI: Muslim sources acknowledge
that the Kaaba is a central temple
for the worship of God which has existed from time immemorial,
so there's a sense in which the first founder
of this particular sanctuary for God was Adam
and then the various prophets after kept it up
and then it was eroded away as people moved away
from the worship of the one God,
and then it was rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael
and then again people forgot what its reason was.
OMAAR: There are no non-Muslim sources
which connect Abraham to Mecca, but by Muhammad's birth,
the Kaaba contained the idols of over 360 different gods,
each one venerated in its own right.
There was a special time of truce declared every year,
when all the hostile tribes could come to Mecca
to circle the Kaaba and worship their gods
without fear of conflict.
This regular pilgrimage brought many people to Mecca
and that meant trade and wealth.
The tribe Muhammad was born into,
the Quraysh, controlled the running of the Kaaba
and so were rich and powerful,
although Muhammad's immediate family
were not part of the ruling elite.
At the age of five,
Muhammad returned to his mother Aminah and lived in Mecca.
But she was in poor health.
She decided to visit some of her family in Yathrib,
a town about 300 kilometers north of Mecca.
But as the camel caravan made its way through the desert,
Aminah's illness got worse.
The caravan stopped here in the small oasis of Abwa
in order to drop off Muhammad and his mother
in the hope that she would recover her strength.
But it was not to be.
After just a few days Aminah died.
With both his parents now dead,
Muhammad was all alone in the world,
an orphan at the tender age of six.
These searing events would have a profound impact
on his outlook and his personality.
BARNABY ROGERSON: Muhammad's virtually alone at this resting place
watching his mother die,
and it's only when the next caravan comes
on this well established journey
that he gets reintegrated into society.
It must have been terrifying and deeply poignant and disturbing.
OMAAR: The young Muhammad was to learn even more
about loss and sorrow.
He was taken in by his paternal grandfather,
who died just two years later,
before coming under the protection of his uncle,
Abu Talib, a powerful figure among the Meccan elite.
Abu Talib was a trader taking caravans to Syria,
part of a business which from ancient times connected Arabia
to the populous centers and civilizations
of the Middle East and beyond.
Mecca was a link in that chain.
ROGERSON: I imagine trading caravans
picking up the spices up the Yemen
or silver or the leather, bringing them to Mecca
and a quite separate group of traders picking them up
and taking them to Syria, to Gaza, to Egypt, to Palestine.
And all around the holy sanctuary you'd have had
the bustle of trading and of camels being gathered.
OMAAR: For Muslims, Mecca is seen
as a major trading center at the time
and a fitting place for the birth of their prophet.
But some historians dispute its historical importance.
The Muslim tradition gives us a portrait of Mecca
as this great trading city,
this great pagan cult center.
And the problem is that
the archaeology and the records of the time do not back this up.
Mecca, if it existed,
was way off any trading routes
and we have no mention of it at all before the Islamic era.
HALEEM: This is easily explained
by the fact that Mecca was in the middle of the desert
and we know that these foreigners, historians,
would not cross such a hostile terrain
as the Arabian desert to get to Mecca.
They kept to the sea or to the coast
and if they haven't talked about it,
this is understandable.
I mean, people here didn't talk about Timbuktu
in the 18th century or before.
It didn't mean that it didn't exist.
(camel nuzzing)
OMAAR: The charge by some historians
is that after Muhammad's death,
Muslim historians deliberately exaggerated
the importance of Mecca.
This was done, they claim, in order to show that Muhammad
was born in a rich and important city
with its own religious history,
independent of any Jewish and Christian influences.
HAWTING: I am not saying, of course, that there was no place called Mecca.
There must have been somewhere called Mecca before Islam.
It's just not very well attested.
But its importance for Islam, I would imagine,
is something that is discovered by the early Muslim community,
as it develops.
By the early Muslim community,
I'm not thinking of the Prophet and his followers,
but rather Islam as it begins to develop
following the Arab conquest of the Middle East.
OMAAR: Whatever the importance of Mecca,
Muhammad's involvement in the caravan trade
was an extraordinary opportunity.
Not only did it lift him out of poverty,
but it also brought him into contact with the outside world.
The pace of travel was slow through deserts and oasis,
through Arabian towns
and past the ruins of ancient civilizations
such as Petra, the capital of the Nabatean Arab civilization
brought to ruin by a massive earthquake.
In his travels, Muhammad would have heard stories
about these other peoples with their alien cultures
and different faiths.
ROGERSON: When I talk to extremely pious Muslims,
they don't want any influences at all,
they just want the Prophet like a white sheet of paper
to be written on by the words of God.
One can still allow that image,
but absolute... for me the caravans are vital.
I mean, experience of knowing the tribes,
of dealing in marketplaces,
seeing what people wanted from the world,
seeing the difficulties of the world,
experiencing the ruins of great Arabic civilizations,
passing by the ruins of Petra,
looking at the glories of Damascus.
I mean, that experience of the world,
he knew about the realities
of what the Arab world was about.
OMAAR: According to Muslim tradition,
by the time he was 21,
Muhammad had gained a reputation for integrity
and was known as "al-Amin" and "al-Sadiq,"
the Honest and Truthful One.
So what did Muhammad, a man entering his prime,
actually look like?
Although Muslim tradition prohibits
any portraits of him, we do have a detailed written account
from one of the earliest biographies that describes him
as "a little above average height.
"He had a sturdy build with long, muscular limbs
"and tapering fingers.
"His hair was long, thick and wavy.
"His eyes were large and black
"with a touch of brown.
"His beard was thick.
"He was of fair complexion.
And now ready to get married."
OMAAR: Muhammad's first attempt to find a wife
ended in humiliating failure.
When he asked his uncle for the hand of his daughter,
he was refused because of his lowly status as an orphan.
But then his luck changed dramatically.
He was asked by a rich older woman called Khadija
to do some business for her in Syria.
When Muhammad fulfilled his promise
and brought her a good profit,
she did a very unusual thing: she asked him to marry her.
PRINCESS BADIYA: His marriage to Syedna Khadija was most unusual.
She was most unusual, to start off with,
being, you know, a little bit older than him
and also being so successful in her own right
as a business woman,
but I think it could actually be quite unusual
even by today's times.
I mean many men,
Western men, Muslim/non-Muslim are intimidated
by successful women,
so I think it shows great strength of character,
confidence and respect for women in the Prophet himself,
that he entered into this marriage back then
and anyone who would do so now
would have to have those qualities as well.
OMAAR: Even in today's Islamic world,
it would be unusual for an older woman to marry a younger man.
But in Muhammad's day it was almost unheard of.
ARMSTRONG: In most of Arabia,
women before the coming of Islam were treated
as little better than animals and had few human rights,
but city life, merchant life often gives women opportunities.
They quite often took an important part
in cottage industries and trading.
And Khadija seems to have been one of these women.
She was widowed,
and her husband had probably left her a sort of a business
and it was a good business, a powerful business
and she was able to manage it.
OMAAR: Muhammad's marriage to Khadija lasted 24 years.
Despite polygamy being the norm, while Khadija was still alive,
Muhammad never took another wife.
And by all accounts, Muhammad never stopped Khadija
from carrying on her business, an independent status
most Muslim societies still struggle to offer
to women today.
An older woman marrying a younger man
is still stigmatized.
The idea of women in business, in politics
is also difficult in Muslim societies.
In the case of Khadija, she is proof
that women are an equal partner
in creating a Muslim society.
OMAAR: Muhammad's marriage to Khadija brought him personal happiness,
but it did not mean that he was content with his life
or the ways of the world in which he lived.
ROGERSON: He, from age 25 to 40,
should have been the prime of his life.
Got Khadija, wealthy, beautiful Arab woman who trusted him.
He'd got four beautiful daughters
and had two sons born of him which didn't survive.
He'd become a man of respect.
He was from a respectful clan anyway,
but now he had the family to back him.
And in a funny way he'd risen to the top of his society
and had become sort of sickened at what that meant,
with the sort of violence of clan society
and the way that wealth could buy you anything.
OMAAR: The fact was that Muhammad was not happy.
He himself had experienced the extremes of Arab tribal society,
and the iniquities of tribal life disturbed him
and made him uneasy.
By all accounts,
he'd reached a moment of personal crisis.
ABDUR-RAHEEM GREEN: He was really upset
by the bad treatment of the poor and the weak
and the downtrodden people in the society.
There's definitely this great ontological anxiety he had
about, you know, the big questions:
Why are we here?
What's the purpose of life?
How do we make sense of the world around us?
MASROOR: I believe he was looking for a connection,
just like Abraham was looking when he was young,
just like Moses was looking when he was wandering the valleys,
just like all the other prophets
of the Old and New Testament were looking.
JOHN ESPOSITO: Probably at the heart of it also
is the most rooted issue
for many who begin to question their society
and even question, if you will, the morality of the society
and the religious values they were raised with,
which get down to the nature of God.
OMAAR: According to Muslim tradition,
at this time, Muhammad had begun to make
regular spiritual retreats.
Throughout the year he would take Khadija and his family
up into the mountains above Mecca
to seek peace and quiet, and pray.
What was Muhammad after?
What was he seeking and what was he doing?
He was certainly troubled,
and he was seeking some kind of spiritual truth.
Muhammad's spiritual retreats were becoming more intense
and ever more frequent and they were devoted
to really intense personal reflection and meditation.
And he chose this spot, Jabal Nur,
which is a hill far up and a really challenging climb
up from the city down below.
And he would climb all the way to the very top to a cave,
known as r'Hira, and it was there that he would spend hours,
in fact whole days and nights
in ever more intense and fervent meditation.
Until one day, in the year 610,
something happened that would transform not just his life,
but the entire history of the world.
According to Muslim tradition,
Muhammad was meditating as usual and he fell asleep.
But then suddenly he awoke in abject terror.
His body was shaking uncontrollably.
He later described the experience as if an angel
had him in such a tight, suffocating embrace,
that he felt that his life was being squeezed out of him.
As he lay there, completely shattered,
Muhammad heard one voice and it commanded him with one word:
"Iqra! Read!"
But Muhammad replied: "I can't.
I'm not one of those who read."
The voice returned for a second time: "Read."
Muhammad replied: "I'm not one of those who read."
Then the voice returned for a third time: "Read."
And on this third command Muhammad replied:
"What shall I read?"
MAN (chanting):
ARMSTRONG: He was able to hear the divine message.
And it's quite clear that revelation--
some of the prophets of Israel had this experience too--
is devastating.
Not a nice peaceful experience,
but something that racks them in every limb.
Prophet Jeremiah cried aloud, "Ah God, God,
"I can't speak, I'm a child.
Your revelation hurts me in every limb."
Isaiah, when he saw his vision of God in the temple, said,
"I'm dead.
I have looked on the Lord of Hosts."
This is a lethal power
because the impact of what's coming through is shattering.
Your world goes, the world as it was before goes.
ROGERSON: You have an essence of the divine power
which you have to articulate--
that's the role of prophets-- into the language of your time,
into the metaphors of your time so that people around you
can understand this completely unworldly experience you have.
And for me the prophet has got
that sort of terrifying brief access to divine power
and he's using that consciousness that sort of
flooded into his body and creating the words.
OMAAR: This is the defining moment in Muhammad's life.
And today for the one and a half billion people
all around the world who follow him,
completely accepting his revelation
defines what it means to be a Muslim.
And yet,
at the time of the first revelation at the Cave of Hira,
Muhammad's reaction was very different.
OMAAR: Muhammad ran to his beloved wife,
"Khadija, oh, Khadija," he said, "cover me, cover me.
"What has happened to me?
I fear for myself."
Khadija took her cloak and covered his exhausted body,
and then with all of his doubts,
she was the one who reassured him about his experience.
Khadija's words not only calmed Muhammad,
but they also helped him reconcile himself
with what had happened.
The seeker had finally found what he was looking for.
But then nothing.
Muhammad's first blinding revelation
was followed by a long silence
that threw him into complete crisis.
Had he been deluded after all?
Was the revelation just meaningless hysteria?
Had Muhammad the Seeker been abandoned by God?
He was absolutely in despair.
I mean one of the sources says he was so despairing
he almost flung himself off the top of the mountain.
OMAAR: Days of silence became weeks, then months.
All the while, Muhammad lived in turmoil,
doubting what he had experienced, doubting himself.
Then one morning, after several months,
the long silence ended and the revelations began again.
OMAAR: Muhammad now began to understand
that he had a special responsibility.
He had a message.
Like the other prophets before him,
he believed God had given him a vision.
His duty was to share this message,
to pass it on to the people around him,
to help them change their lives for the better.
Muhammad's Revelations would become the sacred text of Islam
and what is now known as the Qur'an,
literally "the recitation."
The Orthodox Muslim position is that it is God himself
who is the author of the Qur'an
and Muhammad was just the person to whom it was first revealed.
The Qur'an is considered by most Muslims
to be God's miracle.
Throughout Muhammad's life he steadfastly denied
he had any miraculous powers.
He insisted no extraordinary signs and wonders
were associated with him, except for the words.
He was just a man.
The Qur'an, the message, was the only miracle that mattered.
The spiritual power of the message
is in the words themselves.
(prayer recited from Qur'an)
OMAAR: Almost all Muslims believe
that Muhammad was unable to read or write.
His illiteracy has become essential to their faith.
It is important because some critics of Islam
have often claimed that Muhammad, in his travels,
must have read Christian and Jewish scriptures,
and so borrowed religious ideas from them
which he then rehashed as his own message.
But if he could not read or write, then he was,
the Muslim argument goes, pure and free of any such influences,
and the revelations that form the basis
of the new religion of Islam came direct from God.
HOLLAND: It is very important for Muslims to believe
that the Qur'an is the unmediated word of God,
that Muhammad did not obtain it
from Christian or Jewish or Samaritans.
That is why, despite the Qur'an actually saying the opposite,
tradition says that he was illiterate.
That is also why he is put in the middle of a desert,
because in the middle of a desert
he is hundreds and hundreds of miles away
from the melting pot of the Near East, the place
where all these extraordinary religious traditions
are bubbling and welling up.
ZIAUDDIN SARDAR: To present the argument
that the Qur'an is influenced by Judaism
and Christianity is quite absurd.
I mean, clearly Islam sees itself
as a continuation of the monotheistic tradition.
We are a continuation of Judaism and Christianity,
so of course we are influenced by these religions.
GREEN: The Qur'an clearly says that the Prophet Muhammad
could not write with his right hand.
It is very clearly mentioned in the Qur'an.
And although the term Umi doesn't mean illiterate,
it means not versed, it means not learned,
it means a person who has not studied and learned scripture,
but it has the implication of also being
of being someone who is illiterate.
But the point also is that when the angel Gabriel
comes to the Prophet Muhammad in the cave and tells him "Read,"
the Prophet says, "I can't read."
OMAAR: The Qur'an is as sacred to Muslims
as the person of Jesus is to Christians.
Whereas for Christians,
Jesus is the word of God, the logos,
and for him to remain divine and pure
his conception has to be unsullied by man,
for Muslims it is the Qur'an that is the word of God
and so for it to remain divine,
it has to be untarnished by any human interference too.
So dishonoring the Qur'an is profoundly shocking to Muslims
as it's an attack not only on Muhammad
but also on God himself.
In recent years there have been numerous instances
where the Qur'an has been burnt or desecrated,
sometimes to humiliate Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay,
sometimes as a reaction to a terrorist attack.
Initially Muhammad took his message to those closest to him.
The first convert was his wife Khadija,
followed by family members like his teenage cousin Ali,
who would eventually marry Muhammad's daughter,
and then there were good friends,
like the prominent local businessman Abu Bakr,
who would eventually succeed Muhammad
as the first Caliph of Islam.
RIZVI: It's often said that the earliest Muslims
were a mixture of young men from aristocratic families,
as well as those who were very much in the margins of society.
So there's the idea that Islam was a revolutionary message,
revolutionary in the sense that it actually wanted to overturn
the social order, the cosmic order of society at the time.
OMAAR: The process of conversion
was as straightforward as it is today.
All it requires is the simple statement of faith
in front of two witnesses.
The key requirement is that conversion must be the exercise
of free and informed personal choice.
In fact, one of the most important people
in Muhammad's life, Abu Talib, who was his uncle
and the head of his clan,
who protected him throughout all his troubles in Mecca,
never converted despite Muhammad's best efforts
to persuade him;
and there was nothing he could do about it.
The most direct, the most unequivocal statement
in the Qur'an is, "There is no compulsion in religion."
No ifs, ands or buts.
That is the essence.
Unless you make a free choice, a free willing choice for faith,
you cannot be held accountable for your actions thereafter.
That's the essence of what Islam is about.
MICHAEL NAZIR-ALI: The Qur'an itself is quite clear.
La Ikraha Fiddin is often quoted
as an example from the Qur'an itself,
"There should be no compulsion in religious matters."
And the Prophet said, even vis-à-vis the pagan Arabs...
(speaking Arabic)
"To you your religion and to me mine."
And that seems a very good way of promoting tolerance.
But of course throughout history
we have seen that that kind of attitude has not been respected.
OMAAR: The divine revelation that Muhammad was preaching
would later become known as "Islam,"
which literally means "surrender."
So a believer, a Muslim, is one who surrenders to God.
The origin of the word is from Salaam, meaning "peace."
At first when Muhammad began his mission to the people of Mecca,
he kept referring back to the Abrahamic message
of the Christian and Jewish prophets,
that he was only preaching what they had preached:
the message of the one true God.
And he repeatedly warns against oppression
and the injustices of Meccan society.
ESPOSITO: He becomes, and is, in many ways,
the heart of what a prophet is.
A prophet is one who, yes,
brings and declares God's message,
but a prophet at heart is a warner,
because he is a reformer.
The reformer is warning the society and saying,
this is a society that has departed from the straight path.
OMAAR: Muhammad's message was not always welcome.
The rulers of Mecca, the Quraysh,
disliked what he preached about equality for all.
The more he preached, the more incensed the Quraysh became.
So they tried to make him change his mind by offering him money,
power, anything that he wanted.
To all their proposals, Muhammad gave the same answer:
"I haven't come here to accumulate wealth,
"or to be your leader or to be your king.
"I've only come here for one purpose and that is
"to be the Messenger of God and to convey his word.
"And, if you accept, it will be beneficial for you.
But if you don't, I'll simply wait and await God's judgment."
Now, clearly for the Meccan authorities,
gentle persuasion was not going to work.
They were going to have to try something else,
something a little bit more aggressive.
Gentle persuasion was now replaced by violent persecution.
Muhammad's followers, especially those with no clan
or tribal protection, such as slaves, women and orphans,
were now subjected to brute force.
According to Muslim tradition,
some were thrown on burning coals,
others cruelly beaten and tortured,
and some women were even stabbed to death.
ARMSTRONG: Now, this is because
Muhammad is challenging the Quraysh where it hurts,
in their purse,
because the old cult is very much bound up
with the whole business of Mecca.
People come to the Kaaba
and they come to worship in the Kaaba
and this will be really bad for trade.
They are very, very angry.
They feel it is a profound threat.
OMAAR: Muhammad and his small band of followers
faced a very difficult situation.
They were attacked in public, both verbally and physically.
And in private,
they had nowhere they could meet and pray.
A million miles away from the freedom of worship
that Muslims enjoy today.
This five-story mosque and Islamic center
is being built here in Northwest London,
and similar things are being done almost everywhere
where Muslims live in the West.
Although we take this kind of opportunity for granted today,
the Prophet faced a completely different experience
when he first tried to gather his own Muslim community
amongst his own people in Mecca.
What's amazing standing here with you now
is that the building of this community center is so different
from the experiences that the Prophet had establishing
his own first community, where he didn't have
any of the opportunity or freedom.
Well, yes.
I mean, those were the very difficult times,
obviously Islam started.
They had to work very hard.
They were not allowed to pray,
not allowed to do anything that they had to do,
and even if they are going for praying they had to endure
a lot of problems.
Humiliation.
Humiliation.
But nowadays things are different masha'Allah.
OMAAR: Instead of trying to resist
the Quraysh's persecution with force,
the Prophet looked for another way
to safeguard his followers.
In many ways, a far more radical step.
He got them to leave Mecca,
to abandon their homes and seek refuge
on the other side of the Red Sea
in the African kingdom of Aksum,
ruled by King Negus, a Christian.
(men singing)
In 615 A.D., a group of Muslims
secretly left Mecca with their families
and settled in a refugee camp in what is now modern-day Ethiopia.
The Quraysh were incensed by this exodus.
They immediately sent a delegation to Negus,
the king of Abyssinia, in order to persuade him
to send the exiles back home.
Negus, the king, summoned the leader of the Muslims
in order to explain.
After telling the king that Muhammad was in fact
the Prophet of the one true God,
he famously began to recite a verse from the Qur'an.
OMAAR: The verses he read
described the *** birth of Jesus
and described him to be a prophet of God.
The words worked their miracle.
And Negus, the king of Abyssinia,
was moved to tears
and allowed the Muslims to stay.
Back in Mecca, the Quraysh began to turn the heat up on Muhammad
and his remaining followers.
They instituted a city-wide ban, which basically prevented anyone
from having anything to do with Muhammad and his entire clan.
They weren't allowed to intermarry,
they weren't allowed to trade,
they weren't even allowed to buy food from the local markets.
In Mecca, Muhammad and his followers were now
public enemy number one.
There was now immense pressure on Muhammad
and his remaining followers to compromise their message
of believing in one God only and to give in to the Quraysh
or to at least accept some of the other gods
worshipped by them.
It was at this moment
that an event is supposed to have taken place
that would lead to a fundamental clash of values,
an event that still defines Islam's relationship
with the rest of the world.
Most Muslims deny that this event ever actually happened.
But it has been used by Islam's enemies
to condemn both Muhammad and the Qur'an as bogus.
There are many different accounts of this story,
but the main version goes something like this.
One day Muhammad was sitting somewhere in the Kaaba
when he received a new revelation,
one which suggested that he could strike a compromise deal
with the Quraysh that would allow them
to continue to worship their old gods.
Well, when the Quraysh heard this, they were overjoyed;
at last they thought Muhammad was coming back
to their way of thinking.
But now comes the key part of the story,
which is that Muhammad is then supposed to have received
another revelation that told him
his apparent acceptance of the old gods
had actually been inspired by Satan--
hence, why these verses were later called
"The Satanic Verses."
If true, it seems to suggest that Muhammad was able
to alter the divine word of God at will,
and that in consequence,
both Muhammad and the Qur'an were fake.
SPENCER: Now of course Muslims say
this incident did not happen
and was manufactured by haters of Islam.
It then becomes very hard for them to explain, however,
how it got into Islamic sources that are relatively early
or are, like some a'shari,
based on earlier Islamic sources that are lost.
One wonders how it is that somebody like that
who is a pious Muslim
would have or could have picked up such a thing
if it had originated from the enemies of Islam.
There are three different and conflicting versions
of this story in the Muslim histories of Muhammad's life
compiled after his death.
There is no direct reference to it in the Qur'an
and neither is it mentioned in the earliest
and most reliable account of his life by Ibn Ishaq.
Neither is there any mention of it in the great Hadith
of the ninth century.
Muslims do not generally reject traditions
because they are critical of Muhammad
but because they cannot be properly verified.
In 1989 a storm of violent protest
erupted across the Islamic world,
when a novel written by Salman Rushdie
was published in the UK.
The book, The Satanic Verses,
is a fictional account of this incident
and, Muslims claim,
depicts Muhammad as an impostor with purely political ambitions
and the Qur'an as the work of the devil.
All over the world, Muslim public opinion was outraged.
Well the event of 14th of January 1989
is the day when I can very clearly remember
there were over a thousand people, minimum,
and just to show that we do disapprove this material,
we will publicly burn this book.
And that is what we did on that day.
OMAAR: The burning of the book was just the start.
Violent demonstrations and riots broke out
all over the Muslim world.
Attempts by the Muslim community to have the book banned
were opposed by many
in the name of freedom of speech.
This issue was then taken over
by Ayatollah Khomeini,
the then leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
who declared a fatwa, or religious order,
against Rushdie, calling for his death by any means.
The Fatwa has never been lifted
and although Rushdie survived unharmed,
numerous people connected with the book
have been attacked and even killed.
A single contentious event in Muhammad's life--
and one most Muslim scholars believe never took place--
was being used to define Muhammad,
who he was and what he stood for,
and, most importantly, what it meant
to be a Muslim in today's world.
What this whole issue did was that it highlighted
a fundamental difference of views between those in the West
who believed that they had a right to say
what they wanted to say,
and those Muslims who believed that they had a right
not to be insulted.
ZIA: It was a defining moment.
It was the first time that the British Muslims
came out as a community to assert themselves,
but it was also a defining moment internationally.
On one hand, they rejected what Rushdie wrote,
they were united in condemning the book.
But on the other hand they were also united
in condemning the fatwa.
They realized what is going on in the West
is not acceptable to them,
but they also realized at the same time
that certain mechanisms in traditional Islam
were also not acceptable to them.
OMAAR: This incident led the Muslim community in Britain
to feel that they were part
of a larger international Islamic community
with Muhammad at its heart.
It would also mark the start of a clash
between the liberal values so central to Western identity
and the more traditional and conservative views
in the British Muslim community.
And at the heart of this clash
was the character of Muhammad himself
and conflicting opinions as to whether he was a force for good
or evil in the world.
Whatever the truth of this event,
in Mecca, Muhammad was locked
into a desperate battle of ideas
between his new message of the One God,
and the old tribal values of the Quraysh.
The Quraysh had by now imposed even tougher sanctions
on Muhammad and his followers.
From now on no one was allowed to do any business with them.
They were not allowed to intermarry,
trade or even buy food.
But in contrast to some Muslims now,
even when faced with this extreme provocation,
Muhammad and his followers resisted
without resorting to any violence.
RIZVI: In the earliest period you could argue
that a violent confrontation wasn't even feasible.
You know, we were talking about tens of people,
maybe then hundreds of people,
but certainly not more than, say, 200 or so.
And so if there was a confrontation,
it would have been a massacre
and we certainly wouldn't know such a thing as Islam now.
OMAAR: Muhammad's stoic nonviolent resistance
began to pay off.
The people of Mecca started to react
against the extreme measures imposed on people
who had once been their clan relatives.
A huge amount of social pressure began to be exerted
on the Quraysh leadership,
and within two years after they imposed the ban,
they had to rescind it.
But this was by no means
the end of Muhammad's troubles.
What Muslims call his year of sorrows was about to begin.
A few months after the ban had been lifted,
Muhammad's wife and the constant rock of his life, Khadija, died.
Muhammad was devastated.
She had been his beloved wife, his closest companion
and advisor for 25 years.
She had been the first to recognize him
as the Prophet of God
and had been the first person he had turned to
when confronted by the terrifying
and bewildering experience of revelation.
She must have been astonishing
in that she was the first person to accept the revelations.
I mean, you could almost say that she was the first Muslim
because she believed in the revelations
before the Prophet himself
and so she had that instinctive ability to recognize
authenticity and genius.
We see her in the sources as a very maternal figure,
and this is something the Prophet had lost himself.
He had lost his own mother.
I mean, he really loved Khadija.
You know, Western critics often sneer
at the Prophet's sort of opportunistic marriage
to the wealthy widow.
That's not borne out in the sources.
He loved her all his life.
His later wives used to hate the mention of her
because they knew that none of them could compete with her
in his heart.
OMAAR: Then a few months later,
Muhammad was hit by another devastating loss,
the death of his uncle, Abu Talib,
the man who had protected him from the worst attempts
of the Quraysh to crush him.
The leadership of Muhammad's clan now fell into the hands
of his most violent opponents.
Attacks against him increased.
His enemies now gave him a stark warning:
stop spreading your message or your life could be in danger.
Muhammad and his small band of followers
were now at their most vulnerable.
Half of them had fled to Ethiopia.
The rest were almost in hiding in Mecca.
His enemies were now openly making plans
to crush his embryonic Islamic movement
and even to kill him.
The next step he would take would be critical.
It would shape not only his future,
but the history of the world.
In the next episode,
Muhammad's persecution by the Quraysh intensifies
and he's forced to leave his hometown of Mecca.
It also brings him into conflict
with some of the Jewish tribes of Arabia,
leading to one of the most controversial events
of his life,
a massacre whose consequences still reverberate today.
I think it seared itself into the Muslim historical memory,
and to that extent it has had an impact
that we feel down to this day.