From Mecca to the world

The history of Islam

Where Islam came from and how it spread, with the earliest source for each part of the story and the places where historians disagree.

Arabia before Islam

Sixth-century Arabia was tribal, trading and religiously mixed: idol shrines, Jewish tribes, Christian communities and a Kaaba ringed with idols.

The life of Muhammad

Born in Mecca about 570, first revelation in 610, emigration to Medina in 622, conquest of Mecca in 630, death in 632. Almost everything we know comes from Muslim sources written a century or more later.

The revelation accounts

Muslim sources describe the first revelation in a cave near Mecca: a being commands Muhammad to recite, he returns terrified, and his wife and her Christian cousin reassure him.

The caliphs

After Muhammad came the four caliphs Sunnis call rightly guided, then the Umayyad dynasty (661-750) and the Abbasids (from 750). Three of the first four were assassinated.

How the Quran was compiled

By Muslim accounts the Quran was gathered under Abu Bakr and standardised under Uthman, who ordered all other copies burned. Manuscripts from the seventh century survive.

The hadith era

The great hadith collections were compiled between about 850 and 915, two centuries after Muhammad, out of a mass of reports scholars themselves called largely unreliable.

How Islam spread

Within a century of Muhammad's death Arab armies ruled from Spain to the Indus. Conversion followed conquest over centuries, under the jizya tax on non-Muslims; later Islam also spread by trade and Sufi preaching.

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