History

The life story (seerah) of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ — from his birth in Mecca around 570 CE, through the first revelation, the migration to Medina, and the early Muslim community, to his Farewell Pilgrimage and death in 632 CE.

Before Islam, the Arabian Peninsula was a tribal society built on trade and oral poetry, its religious life dominated by idolatry at the Ka'bah alongside Jewish, Christian, and hanif communities, and marked by practices like female infanticide that the Quran later condemned.

From the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ birth and the first revelation in the cave of Hira around 610 CE, through thirteen years of preaching, persecution, and the Night Journey, to the pledges at Aqabah that opened the way to Medina.

In 622 CE the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and Abu Bakr fled a Meccan assassination plot to the cave of Thawr and on to Medina, a migration that gave the Muslim community a home and later became the starting point of the Islamic calendar.

From 622 to 630 CE the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ built a governed community in Medina, weathered the defensive battles of Badr, Uhud, and the Trench, and signed the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah — each episode met in the Quran less as military drama than as moral and spiritual lesson.

In 630 CE the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ entered Mecca almost without bloodshed and freed his former persecutors, then two years later delivered a farewell sermon on human equality before his death — a story whose center is mercy, not conquest.

Islamic tradition holds that the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ character was itself a living expression of the Quran — mercy to children, uncompromising honesty, humility, and self-restraint even toward his enemies.

An overview of Islam's history — from its beginnings in 7th-century Arabia, through the Rightly-Guided Caliphs and the great Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, to a global faith of nearly two billion people today.

In Sunni Islam, the first four caliphs — Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali — are honored as the Rightly-Guided (Rashidun) Caliphs, who led the Muslim community from 632 to 661 CE through a period of consolidation and rapid expansion.