Unit 9 · Seerah: Mecca, Medina and the Occasions of Revelation

Arabia is a huge peninsula, mostly desert. Around the year 600, most of its people belonged to a tribe: a large family group that shared an ancestor, a name and a duty to protect one another. Some tribes were Bedouin, herders who moved with their camels and sheep to find grass. Others settled in towns built around wells and oases. There was no king of Arabia and no single law. If a member of your tribe was hurt, your tribe took revenge or demanded payment. That was the only justice most people had.

Trade tied the peninsula together. Camel caravans carried goods from Yemen in the south, where incense grew, up to Syria and the Mediterranean world. Along the way they stopped at towns like Mecca, Yathrib (later called Medina) and Ta’if. Mecca had a special advantage. It lay near the route, it had a well, and it held a shrine that drew visitors. Meccans grew wealthy by hosting pilgrims, guarding caravans and trading at seasonal fairs.

Poetry was the great art of Arabia. Tribes held contests, and a poet who could praise his own tribe and mock its rivals was a kind of celebrity. People memorized long poems and passed them down by voice. This matters for the study of the Qur’an. The Qur’an came into a culture that prized spoken Arabic, rhyme and memory. Muslims and scholars alike note that the Qur’an’s early listeners judged it first by how it sounded.

Tradition also describes a harsh side of this world. Warfare between tribes was common. Wealth was unequal, and a widow, an orphan or a person without a tribe could be cheated with little chance of help. Historians say these were the problems of Mecca and the surrounding tribes in the years just before Islam. As we will see, the earliest surahs speak to them directly.

North of Arabia stood two great empires. To the northwest was the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking Roman empire ruled from Constantinople, whose official faith was Christianity. To the northeast was the Persian Empire of the Sasanian kings, whose main religion was Zoroastrianism. From 602 to 628 these two empires fought a long, exhausting war. Some Arab tribes on the borders fought for one side or the other. The Qur’an’s Surah 30, Ar-Rum ("The Romans"), opens by mentioning a Roman defeat, and most commentators tie this to that war.

Arabia was not only a land of the old gods. Jewish communities had lived in Yathrib and other oasis towns for centuries. They farmed date palms, worked as craftsmen and kept their own scriptures and customs. Christian communities lived in the north near the Byzantine border, in the south in Najran, and across the Red Sea in Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), a Christian kingdom. Christian monks and traders passed along the caravan roads. Stories of Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses) and Isa (Jesus) were known in Arabia before the Qur’an.

Most Arabs, though, followed the traditional religion of their tribes. They honored many gods and spirits, kept sacred stones and trees, and made pilgrimages to shrines. Some Arabs, tradition says, were hanifs: people who rejected the many gods and sought the one God of Ibrahim without joining Judaism or Christianity. Historians debate how many hanifs there really were. The word appears in the Qur’an, which calls Ibrahim a hanif (3:67).

This mixed world matters for reading the Qur’an. Its audience already knew the names of the biblical prophets, the idea of one God, and the practices of the old Arabian religion. The Qur’an speaks to all three groups. It calls Jews and Christians "People of the Book," it argues with the followers of the tribal gods, and it presents itself as confirming the message of earlier prophets.

At the center of Mecca stood the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building. Its name simply means "cube." Muslim tradition says Ibrahim (Abraham) and his son Ismail (Ishmael) built it to worship the one God, and that over the centuries the Arabs filled it with idols. Historians can confirm that the Kaaba was an important shrine before Islam. By around 600, tradition says, it held images and stones for many gods, often counted at 360. Three goddesses, al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat, were especially honored, and the Qur’an names them (53:19–20).

The tribe of Quraysh controlled Mecca and the Kaaba. Different clans of Quraysh held different duties: keeping the keys, giving water to pilgrims, feeding them. Each year, Arabs from many tribes came on pilgrimage. During certain sacred months, fighting was forbidden, so trade fairs could be held safely. The shrine, the truce and the market fed one another. This is why, tradition says, the leaders of Quraysh reacted so strongly to a message that attacked the gods of the Kaaba.

Pilgrims walked around the Kaaba, a practice called tawaf. They also touched a dark stone set into its corner, called the Black Stone. Muslims kept both practices after Islam, but they gave them a new meaning: circling the house that, they believe, Ibrahim built for the one God. Today the Kaaba stands inside the Great Mosque of Mecca and is the direction Muslims face in prayer.

Quraysh’s own name appears in the Qur’an. Surah 106, called Quraysh, is only four verses long. In Pickthall’s translation it speaks of the tribe’s winter and summer caravans and tells them to worship "the Lord of this House," who fed them and kept them safe. Commentators read it as tying Mecca’s trade and safety to the one God rather than to the many idols.

Where does the story of Muhammad’s life come from? Not from the Qur’an alone. The Qur’an rarely tells events in order and names Muhammad only four times. The main source is the sira, the traditional biography. The most important early sira was written by Ibn Ishaq, who died c. 767, about 135 years after Muhammad’s death. His work survives mainly in a later edited version by Ibn Hisham (died c. 833). Other early sources include al-Waqidi’s book on the Prophet’s campaigns and the hadith collections, reports of the Prophet’s words and actions.

The sira writers gathered oral reports that had passed from person to person for generations. They tried to give a chain of names showing who told whom. Muslim scholars developed careful methods to judge these chains. Even so, the sira contains different versions of the same event, and its authors sometimes say so themselves. Al-Tabari, a great historian and commentator (died 923), often records two or three versions side by side.

Historians outside the tradition ask a different question: what can be checked? A few things can. Sources written by non-Muslims in the 630s and 640s mention an Arab prophet and Arab armies. Early Qur’an manuscripts, including pages held in Birmingham, England, have been dated by radiocarbon to around the mid-600s. Coins and inscriptions from the 600s name Muhammad. These confirm the broad outline. They do not confirm the details of individual stories, which many historians treat as tradition rather than proven fact.

In this course we tell the life of Muhammad as Muslim tradition tells it, because that is the story that shaped how Muslims read the Qur’an. We mark dates with "c." (around) and say "tradition says" or "the sira reports." Both approaches, the believer’s and the historian’s, take the story seriously. They simply ask different questions of it.

According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was born in Mecca around the year 570 into the clan of Hashim, part of the tribe of Quraysh. His father, Abdullah, died before he was born. His mother, Amina, died when he was about six. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib took him in, and when the grandfather died, his uncle Abu Talib raised him. Abu Talib was not wealthy, but he was respected, and he protected Muhammad for the rest of his life. The Qur’an seems to look back on this childhood when it says God found the Prophet an orphan and gave him shelter (93:6).

As a young man, tradition says, Muhammad worked in trade. He traveled with caravans to Syria, and one story tells of a Christian monk named Bahira who recognized something special in the boy. Historians treat this as a pious story rather than proven fact. What the sources agree on is his reputation. He was called al-Amin, the trustworthy, and Meccans asked him to settle disputes. One well-known story says that when Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba, the clans argued over who should set the Black Stone in place. Muhammad had them lift it together on a cloth.

Around 595, tradition says, he married Khadijah, a wealthy widow and merchant who had hired him to lead her caravans. She was about fifteen years older than he was. They had several children, including daughters; Fatima is the best known. For about twenty-five years, until her death, Khadijah was his only wife. Muslims remember her as the first person to believe in his message, and Shia and Sunni Muslims alike honor her.

Tradition presents these years quietly. Muhammad was a family man and a trader, not a poet or a priest. The Qur’an itself says he was not known for reciting books before the revelation (29:48). Muslims read this as a sign that the Qur’an came from God, not from Muhammad’s learning. Historians note that we know almost nothing about these years from outside sources. Both agree on this: whatever happened next happened to an ordinary, respected man of Mecca.

Muslim tradition says Muhammad often went alone to a cave on a hill outside Mecca called Hira. There, around the year 610, during the month of Ramadan, an angel appeared to him. The angel, later named as Jibril (Gabriel), commanded, "Read" (or "Recite"; the Arabic iqra can mean both). Muhammad answered that he could not read. Tradition says the angel pressed him hard, three times, and then spoke the words that Muslims believe are the first revelation: the opening five verses of Surah 96, Al-Alaq ("The Clot").

Those five verses say that God created humans from a clot, that God is generous, and that God taught by the pen what humans did not know. Tradition tells that Muhammad hurried home trembling and asked Khadijah to cover him with a cloak. She comforted him. Then she took him to her cousin Waraqa, an old man who knew the Christian and Jewish scriptures. Waraqa, the sira says, told them this was the same kind of message that came to Musa (Moses).

Muslims call this night Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, and the Qur’an speaks of it in Surah 97. Many Muslims mark it in the last ten nights of Ramadan. After the first revelation, tradition says, there was a pause of months in which nothing came, and Muhammad feared he had been abandoned. Then, Muslims believe, Surah 93, Ad-Duha ("The Morning Hours"), came to reassure him: his Lord had not forsaken him.

For Muslims, this is the beginning of the Qur’an. For historians, it is an event known only through later tradition and through the text itself. Notice one thing both can see: the first word is a command to read or recite, and the first surah speaks of the pen. From its first lines, the Qur’an presents itself as a message meant to be spoken, learned and passed on.

For about three years, tradition says, Muhammad shared the message only privately. Khadijah believed first. Then came his young cousin Ali, his friend the merchant Abu Bakr, and his adopted son Zayd. Around 613, Muslims believe, the Qur’an told him to warn his own clan and then the city (26:214, 15:94). He began to preach in public. The message was simple and sharp. There is one God. The idols are nothing. A day of judgment is coming. The rich must not cheat the poor, the orphan or the widow.

The first Muslims were a mixed group. Some were young men from good families. Others were poor, foreign or enslaved. Bilal, an enslaved man of African descent, became a Muslim and was, tradition says, tortured by his owner until Abu Bakr bought and freed him. Later Bilal became the first muezzin, the one who calls Muslims to prayer. Muslims remember him as proof that the message reached across rank and race.

The leaders of Quraysh, tradition says, first laughed. Then they grew angry. They asked Abu Talib to silence his nephew, and he refused. They offered Muhammad money and power to stop; the sira says he refused too. Some Muslims were beaten, and Meccans mocked the Prophet as a poet, a soothsayer or a madman. Several Meccan surahs answer these charges directly, which is one reason commentators date them to these years (for example, 52:29–30 and 69:41–42).

Historians note that opposition made sense from Quraysh’s side. Their wealth and honor rested on the Kaaba, the pilgrimage and the peace of the sacred months. A message that called the Kaaba’s gods false and that criticized the rich threatened the whole system. Muslim tradition says the same thing but from the other side: the leaders rejected the truth to protect their power. Both readings agree on what was at stake.

Around 615, tradition says, the pressure on the Muslims grew so heavy that Muhammad sent a group of them across the Red Sea to Abyssinia, a Christian kingdom (today’s Ethiopia). Its king, whom the Arabs called the Negus, received them. Quraysh sent envoys to demand their return. The sira tells that the Muslim spokesman, Jafar, recited part of Surah 19, Maryam, which tells of Maryam (Mary) and the birth of Isa (Jesus). The king, the story says, wept and refused to hand them over. Muslims often tell this as a story of a Christian ruler protecting Muslims.

In Mecca, tradition says, Quraysh declared a boycott of Muhammad’s whole clan around 616. No one would trade with the clan of Hashim or marry into it. The clan, Muslims and non-Muslims together, was shut into a valley on the edge of the city for about three years. Food was scarce. The boycott ended around 619 when some Meccans, ashamed, tore up the agreement. Historians note that the details vary among the sources, but the boycott appears in all the main accounts.

Soon after, tradition says, Muhammad lost the two people who had protected him most. Khadijah died, and then Abu Talib. Muslims call c. 619 the Year of Sorrow. Abu Talib had never become a Muslim, but as head of the clan he had shielded his nephew. His successor as clan head, Abu Lahab, withdrew that protection. Surah 111 is read by commentators as a condemnation of Abu Lahab by name.

With no protector in Mecca, Muhammad tried the nearby town of Ta’if, tradition says, and was driven out with stones. Yet the sira also tells of hope from an unexpected place. Pilgrims from Yathrib, a town far to the north, heard him and were moved. They would return. This is where the next chapter begins.

Muslim scholars divide the Qur’an’s 114 surahs into Meccan and Medinan, according to whether they were revealed before or after the move to Medina in 622. About 86 are counted as Meccan, though scholars differ on a few. Meccan surahs tend to be short, with strong rhythm and rhyme. They speak to a city that did not yet accept the message. Their first theme is tawhid, the oneness of God.

Surah 112, Al-Ikhlas ("Sincerity" or "Purity"), is the tightest statement of this theme. It is four short verses. It says God is one, that all depend on him, that he was not born and did not give birth, and that nothing is like him. Muslims often say this surah is worth a third of the Qur’an, a saying reported in hadith. Many Muslims recite it daily. Commentators read the line about not begetting as an answer both to Meccans who called angels God’s daughters and to Christian teaching about Jesus as God’s son.

The Meccan surahs argue for one God from the world itself. They point to rain, crops, the night sky, the camel, the birth of a child, and ask who made these. The Qur’an calls these ayat, signs, the same word used for its own verses. The argument is not that God exists; the Meccans already believed in a high god they called Allah. The argument is that this God has no partners and alone deserves worship. The Qur’an calls giving God partners shirk, and it treats shirk as the gravest error.

Read closely, Surah 112 shows the Meccan style. No story, no law, no names. Just a claim, stated in the fewest words. Sunni, Shia and Sufi readers all treat tawhid as the heart of Islam, though Sufi writers often add a further meaning: that the believer’s own self should vanish before God’s oneness. The surah supports many readings because it says so little and claims so much.

The second great theme of the Meccan surahs is the Day of Judgment. Many short surahs describe it in vivid pictures: the sky split, the mountains scattered like wool, the sun folded up, every person shown what they did (81:1–14 is one example). The Qur’an says each person will be judged alone, and that deeds will be weighed. Meccans, tradition says, found this hard to accept. Several surahs record their objection: how can bones and dust live again? The Qur’an answers that the God who made a person once can make them again.

Judgment in the Qur’an is not only about belief. Again and again, the Meccan surahs tie it to justice. Surah 107, Al-Ma’un ("Small Kindnesses"), asks who denies religion, and answers: the one who pushes away the orphan and does not urge feeding the poor. Surah 104 condemns the one who piles up wealth and counts it. Surah 83 opens by condemning those who cheat on weights and measures. Commentators read these against Mecca’s trading economy, where such cheating was a real problem.

This is why many readers, Muslim and not, describe the earliest message as social as well as religious. The Qur’an’s own word for a right act is often salih, "good" or "sound." Faith and good works appear together dozens of times: "those who believe and do good works." Surah 90 speaks of "the steep path": freeing a slave and feeding the hungry on a day of hunger. Historians note that this teaching appealed to the poor and the young in Mecca, and worried the wealthy.

Muslim readers connect this theme to zakat, the required giving to the poor that later became one of the Five Pillars. The word appears in Meccan surahs before the rules for it were set in Medina. Sufi readers stress the inner side: greed as a disease of the heart. Modern Muslim writers often stress the social side: the Qur’an as a call for fairness. All of them are reading the same short surahs.

Around 620, tradition says, in the hardest years in Mecca, Muhammad had an experience that Muslims call the Isra and Mi'raj, the Night Journey and the Ascent. The Qur’an mentions it in one verse. Surah 17, Al-Isra, opens by praising God who carried his servant by night from "the Inviolable Place of Worship" to "the Far Distant Place of Worship" (Pickthall’s wording). Muslims read the first as the Kaaba in Mecca and the second as Jerusalem. The verse says God showed him some of his signs.

The sira and hadith fill in the rest. Tradition says the angel Jibril brought a winged animal called Buraq. Muhammad rode to Jerusalem, where he led the earlier prophets in prayer. Then he rose through the seven heavens, meeting Adam, Isa (Jesus), Musa (Moses), Ibrahim (Abraham) and others. At the highest point, tradition says, God gave the command of fifty daily prayers, and on Musa’s advice Muhammad asked for it to be lightened until it became five. This is how Muslims explain the five daily prayers.

Muslims have read this story in different ways. Many hold it was a bodily journey. Some early reports, including one attributed to the Prophet’s wife Aisha, say his body did not leave Mecca and the journey was of the spirit. Sufi writers treat the ascent as a picture of the soul’s journey toward God. All of these readings are found within Islam, and most Muslims mark the night each year on the 27th of the month of Rajab.

The story shaped places. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built c. 691, stands where Muslims believe the ascent began, and Jerusalem became the third holiest city for Muslims after Mecca and Medina. The story also ties Islam to the earlier prophets: in it, Muhammad prays with Musa and Isa, not against them. Historians can say when the buildings went up and when the story was written down; they cannot check the journey itself, and they do not try to.

Historians work from evidence that can be dated and checked. For the Meccan period, that evidence is thin. No document written in Mecca in the 610s survives. The earliest sira was written more than a century later. So historians ask what can be confirmed by outside sources, writings by people who were not Muslims, and by material evidence, such as coins, inscriptions and manuscripts.

Several things can be confirmed. A Greek text from the 630s mentions a prophet who had appeared among the Arabs. An Armenian history from the 660s describes Muhammad as a merchant who taught the Arabs about the God of Abraham. Arab armies conquered Syria, Egypt and Persia in the 630s and 640s; that is documented by many sources. Coins and inscriptions naming Muhammad appear by the late 600s. Qur’an manuscripts, including the Birmingham folios, have been radiocarbon dated to the mid-600s, showing the text existed early.

Other things cannot be confirmed from outside. The cave of Hira, the boycott, the refugees in Abyssinia, the Night Journey: these are known only from Muslim tradition and from hints in the Qur’an. This does not mean they did not happen. It means historians cannot test them the way they test a dated coin. Some historians, such as Fred Donner, argue that the Qur’an’s own text fits the world of early seventh-century Arabia well. Others are more skeptical about the sira’s details. The debate is ongoing.

Muslim scholars have their own long tradition of weighing sources, judging hadith by their chains of names and the honesty of each reporter. The two methods overlap but are not the same. In a public school, we can hold both in view. We can say what Muslims believe and why, and we can say what historians can show. Keeping the two clear is a skill, and it is the skill this course practices.

Yathrib was an oasis town about 210 miles north of Mecca. Its Arab tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj, had been fighting one another for years, and its Jewish tribes had their own forts and farms. Tradition says some pilgrims from Yathrib met Muhammad in Mecca in 620, and that in 621 and 622 larger groups made pledges to him at a place called Aqaba. They promised to protect him as they would their own families. They wanted a fair judge from outside their feuds. Muhammad, with no protector in Mecca since Abu Talib’s death, accepted.

Through the summer of 622 the Muslims left Mecca in small groups. Tradition says Quraysh plotted to kill Muhammad, and that he slipped out with Abu Bakr and hid in a cave on Mount Thawr for three days before reaching Yathrib in September. This move is the hijra, from the Arabic for "leaving" or "migration." Those who made it were called the Muhajirun, the emigrants. The people of Yathrib who took them in were called the Ansar, the helpers. The town itself came to be called Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet," or simply Medina.

The hijra is the turning point of Muhammad’s story as Muslims tell it. In Mecca, he had been a preacher without power. In Medina, he became the head of a community. When the second caliph, Umar, set up an Islamic calendar around 638, tradition says he chose the year of the hijra, not the year of the first revelation or the Prophet’s birth, as year one. Muslim dates are written AH, from the Latin for "in the year of the hijra." The Islamic year follows the moon and is about eleven days shorter than the solar year.

The Qur’an speaks of the emigrants and helpers as two groups God is pleased with (9:100), and it praises those who "left their homes" for God’s sake. Later Muslims used hijra as a word for leaving a bad place or a bad way of life for a better one. For a historian, 622 is also the earliest date in Muhammad’s life that outside evidence supports fairly well, because the Islamic calendar, and coins dated by it, start there.

Soon after the hijra, tradition says, Muhammad drew up a written agreement among the people of Medina. Ibn Ishaq’s sira preserves its text. Modern writers call it the Constitution of Medina, though it is more like a treaty. It says the believers from Quraysh and Yathrib, and those who join them, form one ummah, one community, apart from other people. It sets rules for blood money and ransom, forbids helping an enemy against the community, and says disputes are to be referred to God and to Muhammad.

The agreement also names several Jewish clans of Medina. It says the Jews are a community alongside the believers: the Jews have their religion and the Muslims have theirs. Each side pays its own costs, each helps the other against attack, and neither may go to war without the other’s consent. Historians take this document seriously. Its plain, old-fashioned language and its lack of later Islamic terms suggest it is genuinely early, and most think it reflects real arrangements from the first years in Medina.

For the study of the Qur’an, two things stand out. First, the ummah at this point included non-Muslims as partners. The word ummah appears in the Qur’an for the Muslim community and also for other peoples and even for animals (6:38). Second, Muhammad’s role changed. In Mecca he had been a messenger only. In Medina he was also a judge and a leader, and the verses of this period reflect that: they address the community about its rules.

Sunni and Shia readers, as well as modern Muslim writers on citizenship, often point to this agreement as a model of a community that includes different faiths under shared rules. Historians caution that it was an arrangement for one small town, and that relations with several of the Jewish clans broke down within a few years, as the next lessons tell. Both points are true, and both matter.

Tradition says the first thing Muhammad did in Medina was build a mosque. The Arabic word, masjid, means "place of prostration," a place to bow in prayer. The first one was simple: a walled yard of mud brick, palm trunks for pillars, a roof of palm branches over part of it, and rooms along one side where Muhammad’s family lived. It was a prayer hall, a meeting place, a court and a school all at once. The Prophet’s Mosque in Medina today, vastly enlarged, stands on the same site.

The emigrants had arrived with almost nothing. Tradition says Muhammad paired each Muhajir with an Ansari as a "brother," so the Medinan would share his home and work. This bond of brotherhood, along with the agreement, held the new community together. The Qur’an calls the believers brothers (49:10) and uses the word ummah for the community. Over time ummah came to mean all Muslims everywhere, a meaning it still has.

In Medina the main practices of Islam took their settled form. Tradition says that at first the Muslims prayed facing Jerusalem, and that about sixteen months after the hijra a verse (2:144) turned the qibla, the direction of prayer, toward the Kaaba in Mecca. Fasting in Ramadan was set (2:183–185). Rules for zakat, the giving to the poor, were laid down. The call to prayer, the adhan, began; Bilal, the freed man from Mecca, gave it. Muslims see these as the Five Pillars taking shape.

Historians note how much this changed the message. In Mecca the Qur’an spoke of belief and judgment. In Medina it also spoke of practice: when to pray, how to fast, what to give. The turn of the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca, which the Qur’an itself discusses at length, is read by many scholars as a moment when the community defined itself as distinct from the Jews and Christians of Arabia, while still claiming the same God and prophets.

Conflict with Mecca did not end with the hijra. The emigrants had left property behind, and tradition says Muslim raiding parties began to threaten Meccan caravans passing near Medina. In March 624 (Ramadan, 2 AH), a large Meccan force came out to protect a caravan, and the two sides met at wells called Badr. The sira reports about 313 Muslims against roughly a thousand Meccans. The Muslims won. Several leaders of Quraysh were killed. The Qur’an names Badr (3:123) and says God helped the believers there when they were weak.

Muslims remember Badr as proof that God was with the small community. The Qur’an’s Surah 8, Al-Anfal ("The Spoils of War"), is read by commentators as coming just after the battle. It deals with how to divide what was captured, and it tells the believers that it was God, not they, who won. Historians note that the victory also changed politics in Medina: Muhammad’s standing rose, and doubters grew quieter.

A year later, in 625, Mecca struck back. A Meccan army of about three thousand, tradition says, met about seven hundred Muslims at the hill of Uhud, just outside Medina. The Muslims held at first, but archers left their post to gather spoils, the Meccan cavalry swung around, and the Muslims were driven back. Muhammad was wounded. His uncle Hamza was killed. The Meccans withdrew without taking the city. Surah 3, Al Imran, discusses the battle at length, blaming disobedience and promising forgiveness (3:152–155).

Told factually, these were two battles between a town and a city over trade, honor and religion, fought by a few thousand men. Their weight in Muslim memory is far larger. Muslims name children after the fighters of Badr, and the lessons of Uhud, obedience and steadiness, are taught to this day. The Qur’an does not describe the fighting in detail. It reflects on what the fighting meant, and that is how its readers have used it.

In 627, tradition says, Quraysh gathered a large alliance of tribes, perhaps ten thousand men, to finish Medina. A Persian companion named Salman suggested digging a trench across the open side of the town, a tactic unknown in Arabia. The attackers could not cross it. After weeks of siege, cold weather and quarrels among the allies, they went home. Surah 33, Al-Ahzab ("The Allies" or "The Confederates"), is read by commentators as speaking of this siege. Muslims call it the Battle of the Trench, al-Khandaq.

The years between Badr and the Trench also saw the breakdown of relations with three Jewish tribes of Medina. Told briefly and factually, as the sira tells it: after Badr in 624, a dispute in the market led to the siege and expulsion of the Banu Qaynuqa. In 625, after Muhammad accused the Banu Nadir of plotting against his life, they were besieged and expelled; Surah 59, Al-Hashr, is read as referring to this. Both tribes left with their movable goods, and many settled at the oasis of Khaybar.

The third case was the harshest. During the Trench, tradition says, the Banu Qurayza negotiated with the attackers, breaking the agreement. After the siege lifted, the Muslims besieged them. They surrendered and accepted judgment by Sa’d ibn Mu’adh, a chief of the Aws, their former allies. He ruled that the men be executed and the women and children enslaved. The sira says this was carried out. The Qur’an refers to it in 33:26–27. Traditional numbers for those killed range from several hundred upward; historians note that the figures vary among the sources.

How to understand these events is debated. Muslim scholars have traditionally read them as punishment for broken treaties in wartime, under the customs of the day, not as acts against Jews as such; they point to the agreement of Medina and to Jewish communities that lived under Muslim rule for centuries after. Some historians question details of the Qurayza account. Others accept it. What can be said plainly is this: these were political and military conflicts between specific tribes in one town, and they should be described as such, not as a verdict on any religion.

In 628, tradition says, Muhammad set out with about 1,400 followers to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, unarmed except for travelers’ swords. Quraysh blocked them at a place called Hudaybiyyah, outside the city. After tense talks, the two sides signed a truce for ten years. The Muslims would go home this year and return for pilgrimage the next. The terms looked one-sided; some Muslims, the sira says, were angry. Yet Surah 48, Al-Fath ("Victory"), is read by commentators as coming on the road home from Hudaybiyyah, and it calls the treaty a clear victory.

Why a victory? Historians and Muslim scholars give the same answer. The truce meant Quraysh had treated Muhammad as an equal. It opened Arabia to Muslim preaching, and tribes joined in large numbers. Muslims did make the pilgrimage in 629. Then, in 630, a clash between tribes allied to each side broke the truce, and Muhammad marched on Mecca with a large force. The city surrendered almost without fighting. Tradition dates this to Ramadan, 8 AH, January 630.

The sira describes what happened next. Muhammad entered the Kaaba and had the idols removed and broken. He declared a general pardon for the people of Mecca, with a few named exceptions. He did not make Mecca his capital; he returned to Medina. Surah 110, An-Nasr ("Help" or "Succor"), is read by many as referring to this moment, when people entered the religion "in troops." Soon after, the Muslims fought and won a battle against other tribes at Hunayn, which the Qur’an names (9:25).

For Muslims, the return to Mecca completes a circle: the man driven out in 622 comes back in 630, and the house they believe Ibrahim built for one God is cleared for that one God. For historians, the years 628 to 630 are when a town’s movement became the leading power in western Arabia. Both readings agree that the treaty, not the battles, was the turning point. The Qur’an itself makes that claim in Surah 48.

In 632 (10 AH), tradition says, Muhammad led the pilgrimage to Mecca himself. Muslims call it the Farewell Pilgrimage. On the plain of Arafat he gave a sermon that is reported in the sira and hadith collections with varying wording. The reports have him say that all Muslims are brothers; that a person’s life and property are sacred; that debts of blood from before Islam are cancelled; that men and women have rights over each other; and that no Arab is better than a non-Arab, nor a white person than a black person, except by good conduct.

Commentators connect the pilgrimage to Qur’an 5:3, which says God has this day perfected the religion and completed his favor. Many Muslims hold it was among the last verses revealed. Another verse often read alongside the sermon is 49:13, which says God made humans into nations and tribes so they might know one another, and that the noblest is the most conscious of God. Muslim writers on race and equality, including African American Muslims in Chicago and elsewhere, have often turned to these two texts together.

A few months later, in June 632, tradition says Muhammad fell ill and died in Medina, in the room of his wife Aisha next to the mosque. He was buried there; his tomb is inside the Prophet’s Mosque today. He had named no clear successor. Abu Bakr was chosen as the first caliph, or successor, by a group of leading Muslims. Shia Muslims hold that Muhammad had designated Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, and that the choice of Abu Bakr set aside that wish. This disagreement is the root of the Sunni–Shia division, and both sides tell the story of 632 differently.

At his death, tradition says, the Qur’an existed as memorized recitation and as writings on leather, bone and palm stalks kept by various companions. After many reciters died in battle in 633, Abu Bakr had Zayd ibn Thabit collect the text. Under the third caliph, Uthman, around 650, an official copy was made and sent to the main cities. That is the story of the mushaf, the written Qur’an, as Muslim tradition tells it. Historians note that the early manuscripts, including the Birmingham folios, fit this picture of a text fixed within a generation.

The Qur’an is not arranged in the order Muslims believe it was revealed, and most verses do not say what event they respond to. Early Muslims who had lived through the events remembered, and their reports were passed down. Scholars called these asbab al-nuzul, "the occasions of revelation" (one occasion is a sabab al-nuzul). A report typically says: such-and-such happened, and then this verse came down. The reports live in hadith collections and in tafsir, commentary on the Qur’an.

The best-known collection is by al-Wahidi, a scholar from Nishapur in Persia who died in 1075. His book, called simply Asbab al-Nuzul, gathers hundreds of reports arranged by surah. Al-Suyuti, an Egyptian scholar who died in 1505, made a stricter collection, keeping only reports he judged well attested. Al-Tabari, in his huge commentary (he died in 923), often gives several occasions for one verse and then says which he prefers.

A famous example is the opening of Surah 80, Abasa ("He Frowned"). The verses say that "he" frowned and turned away when a blind man came to him. Reports say a blind Muslim, Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum, interrupted Muhammad while he was speaking with leaders of Quraysh, and that Muhammad frowned; then the verses came, rebuking him. Muslims read this as the Qur’an correcting the Prophet himself, and as a lesson that the poor and disabled matter as much as the powerful. Without the report, a reader might not know who frowned or why.

Scholars are careful with these reports. Several may exist for one verse and they may not agree. A report might be a guess by a later reader. And a famous rule in Islamic scholarship says that what counts is the general meaning of the words, not only the particular occasion. So the occasion helps, but it does not close the meaning. That is the tension the next lessons explore.

Qur’an 2:256 begins, in Pickthall’s words, "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the most quoted lines in the Qur’an. Reports of its occasion vary. One, going back to Ibn Abbas, says that before Islam some women of Medina who lost children had vowed to raise the next child as a Jew, so some Ansar families had Jewish sons. When the Banu Nadir were expelled, the fathers wanted to force these sons to become Muslims and stay, and the verse came to forbid it. Al-Tabari records this and similar reports.

With the occasion in mind, the verse reads as a specific ruling: parents may not force a grown child to change religion. Without it, the verse reads as a general principle: faith cannot be forced on anyone. Most Muslim scholars through history have taken it as a general principle, applying the rule that the general wording matters more than the particular case. Islamic law generally held that non-Muslims under Muslim rule were not to be forced to convert, and many jurists cite this verse.

But readers have also disagreed. Some medieval scholars argued the verse was later narrowed or replaced by verses commanding fighting, using a tool called naskh, abrogation, in which a later verse limits an earlier one. Others rejected that reading, and many modern Muslim scholars call 2:256 a foundation of religious freedom in Islam. The occasion of revelation is one piece of evidence each side uses, and they use it differently.

This is the point of studying asbab al-nuzul: not to settle the argument but to see how it is made. The same verse, the same report, and two careful readers can reach different conclusions about how wide the rule is. When you read any verse of the Qur’an, or any scripture, ask what it was answering and how far its readers have taken it. Both questions are part of understanding it.

In Mecca the Muslims did not fight. In Medina, tradition says, permission came. Qur’an 22:39–40 is often named as the first verse to allow fighting; it says permission is given to those who are fought against because they were wronged and driven from their homes. Commentators tie it to the emigrants who lost everything in Mecca. Then 2:190–194 lays down rules: fight those who fight you, do not begin hostilities, fight in the sacred precinct only if attacked there, and stop if the other side stops.

Two verses in Surah 9, At-Tawbah, are the ones most argued about. Verse 9:5, sometimes called the "sword verse," tells the Muslims, after the sacred months, to fight the idolaters wherever they find them, but the next words say to let them go if they repent and pray. Verse 9:29 concerns fighting People of the Book who do not accept the rules of the community, until they pay the jizya, a tax. Commentators tie Surah 9 to 631, after the return to Mecca, when the Muslims broke off relations with tribes that had broken treaties. Verse 9:4 says treaties with those who kept them are to be honored.

Readers have handled these verses in more than one way. A minority of medieval jurists said 9:5 abrogated the gentler verses. Most classical scholars limited it to the Arab idolaters who had broken treaties, and read the Qur’an’s whole set of war verses together: fight only those who fight you, keep treaties, do not exceed limits, and lean toward peace when the enemy does (8:61). Modern mainstream Muslim scholars overwhelmingly hold the second view, and most also say Islamic law forbids killing non-combatants. Extremist groups quote 9:5 alone; scholars answer by quoting the context.

For a student, the lesson is method. Read the verse before and the verse after. Ask the reported occasion. Ask who is being addressed and about whom. Ask how the tradition’s own scholars, from al-Tabari to today, have read it. A verse on fighting in the Qur’an, like a verse on war in the Hebrew Bible, cannot be understood from a single line pulled out of its surah.

The Medinan surahs look different from the Meccan ones. They are long. Surah 2, Al-Baqarah, has 286 verses; Surah 4, An-Nisa ("Women"), has 176. Their verses are longer too, and the rhyme is looser. They speak to a community that already believes and now needs rules. The Qur’an’s longest single verse, 2:282, is about writing down a debt and having witnesses. Rules on fasting, pilgrimage, food, marriage, divorce, inheritance and charity are mostly Medinan.

Family law is a large part of this. Surah 4 sets shares of inheritance for daughters as well as sons (4:11), which historians note was new in Arabia, where women often inherited nothing. It also permits a man up to four wives on the condition of fairness (4:3), a verse commentators tie to the many widows and orphans left after Uhud. How these verses apply today is debated within Islam. Traditional jurists, reformers and Muslim feminists all read the same verses and reach different rules; that debate is a live part of the tradition, not something outside it.

The Medinan surahs also speak often of Jews and Christians. The Qur’an’s term is People of the Book, those who received earlier scriptures. It says their God is the same God (29:46), that Muslims may eat their food and marry their women (5:5), and that those among them who believe and do good need not fear (2:62). It also argues with them, saying they altered or hid parts of their scriptures, and it criticizes specific groups sharply. Some verses are warm and some are hard, and often both appear in one surah.

Readers have sorted these verses in different ways. Some medieval scholars gave weight to the hard verses; many modern scholars and interfaith leaders stress the shared God and the earlier prophets. At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, a convert named Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb presented Islam to an American audience alongside speakers from other faiths. The verses he could draw on, warm and hard, were the same ones readers weigh today.