Muhammad

Muhammad was an Arabian religious and political leader from Mecca whose preaching founded Islam and whose political leadership united the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under a single polity for the first time. According to Islamic tradition and the earliest surviving biographical sources, he began receiving what Muslims hold to be divine revelation around 610 CE, later compiled as the Quran, and preached monotheism in a Mecca dominated by polytheistic tribal religion. Facing opposition from Mecca's ruling clans, he and his followers emigrated to the city of Yathrib, renamed Medina, in 622 CE, an event known as the Hijra that later became the start of the Islamic calendar. In Medina he built a new political and religious community, negotiated and fought a series of conflicts with Mecca and its allies, and by 630 CE had returned to take control of Mecca itself, largely without bloodshed. By his death in 632 CE most of the Arabian Peninsula's tribes had entered alliance or submission to the new Muslim polity, which his successors, known as caliphs, rapidly expanded into one of the largest empires in history within a century. Historians studying the period work primarily from the Quran itself and from biographical and historical literature compiled by Muslim scholars beginning about a century after his death, a source base whose details are actively studied and, on specific points, debated by historians of early Islam.