CQ Press : Current Events In Context : Terrorism

From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 535-537.

Muhammad

The prophet of Islam. Islamic sources tell us that Mu-hammad (c. 570-632) was born into the Arab tribe of Quraysh, which was settled in Mecca in the southern Hijaz, around 570. As a young man he became the commercial agent of a rich Meccan woman, who later married him. He began to receive monotheist revelations (later collected as the Qur'an) at the age of forty. When he started to preach the message in Mecca, strong tensions developed between his followers and the traditional Meccan polytheists. He was thus constrained to seek political protection outside Mecca, and in due course he was invited to Yathrib, the later Medina, an oasis of the northern Hijaz that was in a state of internal turmoil.

His move to Medina (the hijra) took place in 622. During his ten years there he continued to receive revelations and established a rudimentary state that extended its military and political power, together with the new religion, over a significant part of Arabia. After his death in 632 his followers created an empire ruling large territories outside Arabia, resulting in the further spread of Islam and the emergence of Islamic civilization.

Muhammad's career must be understood against the background of Arabian society. Arabia was an arid land (some 97 percent desert). As a result, state structures had only a limited existence on the fringes of the peninsula and were entirely lacking in the interior, including the Hijaz. Here each oasis was politically independent of the others, and even individual oases did not have rulers. Groups of nomadic pastoralists were likewise politically independent and internally fragmented. In the absence of states the structures of Arabian society were tribal--that is to say, based on extended kinship. Political and military activity in this society involved a large part of the male population, with raiding and feuding as central features of the tribal way of life. It was virtually impossible for any tribal leader to create a strong state out of such material: there was little to levy taxes on, and the population was too mobile and warlike to be easily coerced into paying them. So far as we know, no major state had ever arisen in Arabia before the time of Muhammad.

Two things may have been crucial to Muhammad's unprecedented success. The first was conceptual: his religious message enabled him to synthesize a type of authority that had not previously existed in Arabia. He thus brought into existence a religious community that, although it remained embedded in tribal loyalties and traditions, to a significant extent transcended them. This made it possible for his followers to think in terms of a new level of sustained collective action. The second had to do with material rewards: collective action delivered goods on a larger scale than the traditional tribal structures, both through raiding (booty, especially livestock and women) and conquest (tribute and other fruits of power). These features of Muhammad's state continued after his death on a larger scale: the unification of the peninsula led to the conquest of much richer lands outside it.

This religious mode of state formation had a long future ahead of it in the tribal lands of the more arid parts of the Islamic world, specifically in Arabia and northern Africa (but not, in general, in the Turkic tribal world of the Eurasian steppes). Outside such an environment, in the agriculturally richer and more urbanized regions of the Islamic world, Islam tended to be yoked to the more patrimonial forms of state power that were already characteristic of these areas in pre-Islamic times. In modern times, as these patrimonial states have been transformed or swept away and their nationalist successors have stumbled, the values associated with Muhammad's venture in state formation have achieved strong resonance under the very different conditions of modern mass politics. This resonance has given rise to a religious populism that is a strong, and sometimes revolutionary, force in many parts of the Islamic world today. The link is no doubt the high level of political and military participation characteristic of both contexts.