Why do people follow muhammad

Some of those are men, but many of them are women and children. Muhammad has scored a victory. What has it cost him? Very little. Only one Muslim has been killed on the battlefield.

At this point, the military operation is over, and Muhammad turns around and takes his followers back to Mecca. What about the politics? It was a case of friendly fire. The family of the slain man, under Muslim rules, has a claim to blood money. The slain man has a brother who lives in Mecca. Muhammad thinks that the guy is playing by Muslim rules, and he makes arrangements for the guy to get the blood money. But not quite nothing. This guy who had pretended to be a Muslim and killed the killer of his brother is one of them.

Now let me tell you about an incident that was much more threatening and dangerous. First, two bits of background. This is a very arid part of the world. They feel resentful. We let them come here as refugees, and look at them! Why are we putting up with this? So what happens at the water hole? Two men get into a shoving match. The shoving match escalates into a fight, and the two men then call out for help from their people.

I should mention here a character called Ibn Ubayy. What is Muhammad to do? Like any sensible politician, the first thing he does is ask for advice. What does Muhammad actually do? As politicians often do, he does nothing. He does do something. He orders his followers to march back to Medina on the double.

The plan works — Muhammad gets them back to Medina. After that, Ibn Ubayy fades out; he loses credit with his own people and dies soon after. The first one is the extraordinary success of Muhammad in initiating a chain of events that establishes the Islamic world. He has skill as a military leader and a politician.

But how does he make the leap from a being a guy with a message and political skill to having this enormous impact on world history? Before the days of oil, Arabia is also poor. Very poor compared to the densely settled agricultural lands outside Arabia, and immensely poor compared to, say, northwestern Europe or southern China or the eastern United States. Poor environments are an unfriendly place for states. Instead of states in Arabia, what you find are tribes. That means in Arabia basically every adult male has to be a warrior and a politician in his own right.

The result is, through the centuries, the Arabs fritter away their military and political energy in small-scale conflict among themselves. What Muhammad somehow did — using not only his political skills but also his monotheist message that came from outside the tribal system — was to get the Arabs on the same page. If you could do that, even temporarily, you could send the Arabs out to conquer the world.

They had never done it before, and they never did it again. Muhammad, in his dual role as prophet and politician, is the absolutely crucial factor that made it possible. For the other angle let me go back to what I was saying about Christianity becoming a bandwagon in the fourth century. But world religions vary with regard to the timing of the bandwagon effect. In the Christian case, you have to wait until the fourth century for the Christian bandwagon to start rolling.

Before the fourth century, you have to be pretty concerned about your eternal salvation for it to make sense to become a Christian.

In the Muslim case, the timing is quite different. Once the prophet gets to Medina, once he establishes this state, there is already the beginning of a bandwagon. In other words, the bandwagon effect in Islam comes extremely early. What does this mean? It means three things. One is that the historical experiences of early Christianity and early Islam are completely different. In the Christian case, you have a religion that remains the religion of a persecuted minority for the best part of three centuries.

All the basic shapes of the religion are already set before the bandwagon starts. By contrast, in the Islamic case, you have less than 12 years in which the Muslims are a persecuted minority in Mecca. From that point on, once they get to Medina, and the prophet starts building his state, the bandwagon is rolling.

If, as you listen to my stories of the prophet, you have the Gospels in mind, you must have a sense that these stories are very, very different. They not only relate different historical circumstances, but they are told to a different audience. The audience of the Gospels is people who are seriously concerned about their salvation.

They address people who are interested in military operations, who like to know about preemptive strikes and incidents of friendly fire. These stories are told for people extremely interested in politics, who are fascinated by the judgment calls required to keep a shaky coalition together.

Think what it means that you have, at the present day, these two utterly different heritages, these two utterly different ways of approaching and describing the life of the founder of the religion. I think that helps explain both why Islamic fundamentalism has been such a relative success in recent decades, and why people coming from a Christian background find it incredibly hard to understand it.

COOK: I know you are. But certain features of that heritage are relevant to him. Like the prophet, Bin Laden is a political character, and he is involved in intense military activity. Why not? In the American political context, it is a sound bite that bin Laden has severely perverted a great religion, so your view on that would be interesting.

I think there are genuinely things present in this heritage that Osama bin Laden can legitimately use. It gets tricky where you start asking exact questions about what he does. What is justified in terms of the heritage and what is not? You had a whole series of positions, including one that sticks in my mind, which said that the people in the building had it coming to them, but the people in the plane that was hijacked, they should not have been killed.

I asked my source if that meant Osama bin Laden would go to hell because those people in the airplane had been killed. The answer was no, that was just an error of judgment. One, how closely does it parallel the Arab paganism in which Muhammad was raised, and how much did it break with it?

Secondly, how aware was Muhammad of Christian and Jewish sources, and how do those play into it? COOK: The thing the Koran most obviously shares with the pagan tradition — particularly in the early parts of the Koran, or what are taken to be the early parts of the Koran — is a rhyming prose.

Pagan soothsayers, according to the tradition, used to deliver their — what do soothsayers deliver? Anyway, they used to deliver them in a certain style of rhymed prose, and there are parts of the Koran that are in a similar style of rhymed prose. The whole of the Koran tends to have an element of rhyme running through the verses. Turning to Jewish and Christian sources.

What people since the 19th century and long before have noticed is the accounts you find in the Koran of, say, the career of Noah tend to diverge from accepted narratives in Jewish and Christian sources. The question is why. One possible explanation would be Muhammad got it wrong. He misquoted his sources. He was getting it downstream, by some chain of transmission. Muhammad was aware of Christianity and Judaism. He had various options; this is assuming the Koran is not purely divine revelation.

He might have adopted Christianity or Judaism wholesale or in larger part than he did. Do we know why he chose his course instead of sticking with the two forms of monotheism he had available to him? COOK: The tradition tells he initially saw himself simply as the latest monotheist prophet and expected Jews and Christians to follow him. Or if there were, they were in very small numbers. The Jews were relevant because there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, and they rejected him.

You can follow the tradition and see his decision to come up with a new form of monotheism as a reaction to being rejected by the Jews in Medina. As the tradition explains it, the prophet originally told his followers in Mecca to pray towards Jerusalem. But then, when he starts having bad relations with the Jews, he receives a revelation that says turn around and pray towards Mecca. This event is a nationalization of monotheism.

It links to the belief that Mecca — that is, the sanctuary known as the Kaaba — was not originally a pagan sanctuary but a monotheist sanctuary established by Abraham and Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs.

So the Kaaba becomes a national monotheist sanctuary. I think Lewis said this distinction was not present in the original materials of Islam. As far as they were concerned, the New Testament and the Old Testament were suspect — originally revealed texts but corrupted by subsequent followers of Moses and Jesus. That said, a lot seeped through from Christian and Jewish circles into Islamic circles.

They had knowledge of things that went on in the Gospels. In the later Middle Ages, some Islamic scholars became extremely knowledgeable about the Gospels and the Old Testament. But neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is part of the mainstream Islamic tradition as texts. Your second question: Did they develop something like that distinction later on, without having it in such a neat form as established by the founder of the religion?

The answer is definitely yes. The Islamic state starts off being ruled by Muhammad, who is both a prophet and a politician. He then has successors who rule it after him. They are not prophets; they are Caliphs. But the Caliphs are nevertheless occupying an intrinsically religious office as well as an obviously political one. They have a religious authority as well as political power, so we still have the Islamic state here.

But at some point that nobody has exactly agreed upon, the Caliphate falls apart. It falls apart in material historical terms: The Islamic world breaks up into numerous distinct states. But it also falls apart morally in the sense that people ceased to recognize those who claimed to be Caliphs as having anything like the prestige, the rectitude, the authority of the early Caliphs who came immediately after Muhammad.

By the 11th century, Muslims are talking in terms of what you could call a dichotomy between religion and the state. In doing that, they are partly echoing a pre-Islamic Iranian Persian tradition, in which that dichotomy was a familiar dictum. By the way, the pre-Islamic Persians are damnable unbelievers. They go to hell, they burn. But they were very good at certain things, and one of the things they were good at was statecraft. If you hear something they said about statecraft, you ought to pay attention.

One of the things they said was that religion and the state are twins. That became a paradigm. But nevertheless, it became accepted as a paradigm in the Islamic world, particularly the Eastern Islamic world, on the ruins of the Persian Empire.

The best we can hope is they at least defend Islam against its enemies and behave in a reasonably just fashion, as much as you can expect Turks to do that. When I talked about the contrast between the Gospels and the life of the prophet, as it was written up in the eighth century, one of the things I stressed about the prophet was the smartness of his judgment calls. There are deep cultural differences that trace back into medieval times. Could you talk about those differences, but also talk about the contemporary relevance of those differences in global politics today?

COOK: One fundamental difference is language. The Arabs of Arabia and all the other peoples we classify as Arabs today —from Morocco to Iraq — speak Arabic, whereas the people of Iran speak Persian. That may sound trivial, but it is actually quite significant. When the Muslims conquered Iraq, Syria, Egypt and later North Africa, the populations at the time of the conquest were speaking all sorts of different languages, but they all came within a few centuries to speak Arabic.

You have an enormous historical process of Arabization in those areas. But after the Muslims conquered Iran, that did not happen. They held onto their ancestral language. They know there were the pharaohs and then the Greeks came and the Romans, that Egypt was converted to Christianity. In fact, they have a lot of information and misinformation about it.

But they have no identification with the pre-Islamic past of Egypt. In the 10th century, you have scruffy military leaders who come from the mountains of northern Iran with their mercenaries and take over, trying to present themselves as heirs of the pre-Islamic Persian emperors. That tradition continues, though on a smaller scale, in Iran right down to the present day. Does that have any bearing in terms of openness to other cultures?

That sense can be a unifying force for any religious group. When did a sense of persecution develop? At some point, this did develop in Islam, did it not? COOK: Absolutely. They had very little reason to develop a sense of being persecuted.

All that happened in modern times is, it is dusted off and used for political purposes. By contrast, a sense of being done in by the world is something Sunnis have only developed in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Why did they make these coins? Who was reading them? Was that the way the religion was spread? How literate were people?

My guess would be a substantial proportion of the political and military elite could read, and they could read these coins if they wanted to. The crucial question, to my mind, is non-Muslims. This is obviously a message beamed at non-Muslims. Could they read these Arabic inscriptions on the coins? One definitive piece of evidence is Christian ecclesiastic canons saying that Christians are not to have their sons taught the Koran by Muslim teachers.

The point is not that these teachers are converting the kids. The point is that primary education in the Islamic community consisted of learning to read the Koran, and if you wanted to learn proper Arabic and be able to move in elite circles, as many of these Christians wanted to do, you had to learn your Koran. The church was getting worried about this and saying it has to stop. So those people — Christians — could definitely have read what was on the coins.

COOK: Is it inherent? You could certainly minimize it. What I mean is this: There are two kinds of jihad. One is defensive, and the other is offensive. Defensive jihad is straightforward. If the unbelievers are attacking you, then you have to fight back. What does the law say about offensive jihad? It says that some Muslims somewhere ought to do it, but provided some Muslims somewhere are doing it, no other Muslims have to do it. In other words, yes, a certain element of offensive jihad is inherent in the religion.

Muhammad began working as a merchant and became known for his trustworthiness. When he was about twenty-five, he married Khadija, a wealthy widow whose status elevated Muhammad's position in Meccan society. Muhammad and Khadija had four daughters and two sons, both of whom died in infancy.

About fifteen or twenty years after his marriage, he began to have visions and hear mysterious voices. He sought solitude in a cave on Mount Hira on the outskirts of Mecca. One night during Ramadan , the traditional month of spiritual retreat, when Muhammad was about forty years old, an angel appeared to him in the form of a man and ordered him to;. Muhammad, fearing that he was being attacked by an evil spirit, fled down the mountain in terror.

Eventually, the angel told Muhammad to begin proclaiming God's message. Muhammad slowly began to attract some followers, most of them young and of modest social standing, including his cousin Ali, the son of his uncle and protector Abu Talib.

When Muhammad began to impugn the traditional polytheism of his native town, the rich and powerful merchants of Mecca realized that the religious revolution taking place under their noses might be disastrous for business, which was protected by the Meccan pantheon of gods and goddesses.

The ruling elite ganged up against Muhammad and his followers, and began to persecute them. A few Meccans began to accept Muhammad's message, while other members of his clan came to support their kinsman out of family loyalty, even if they did not yet believe in his cause. Ask pupils to create a collage made from brown ripped paper, of the cave at Mount Hira.

Then, without creating a human image, add the feeling of the angel Jibril, using glitter, holographic paper, cellophane etc. Make a peaceful cave area in the classroom by putting together prayer mats, cushions and glittery material.

Add light changing resources to show the presence of an angel. Introduce pupils to the first of four stories of Muhammad and use the sensory story guide to help pupils know about the revelation that Muslims believe Muhammad received on Mount Hira.

Adults can also ask questions and respond. The following sensory activities can help pupils experience something of the life of Muhammad and the importance of Islam to Muslims:. Play a version of the Call to Prayer adhan to pupils while they use red, orange, purple and yellow crayons or sponge paint to create a sunset sky. Afterwards, encourage pupils to add a black paper cut-out of a dome and minaret, to give a scene of a mosque at sunset.

Encourage them to touch some Muslim prayer mats and then look at how Muslims pray, such as by looking at video clips or animation online. Help pupils make a prayer mat out of sensory materials, such as textured wallpaper. Invite pupils to recognise the moon and stars in a slideshow of pictures and to sort a selection of pictures of crescent moons and stars.

Encourage pupils to use Makaton signing for star and moon while listening to a song about wonder in the universe, for example There is Only One God by Zain Bhikha.

Encourage pupils to make collage pictures of the Muslim symbol — the crescent moon and star, or rub over a moon and star stencil and decorate. Ask pupils to identify what makes them feel peaceful out of a choice of different pictures, such as listening to music, going on the computer, lying down, praying, etc. Ask pupils to make a dove of peace — there are many templates online.

Explain that Muslims believe only Allah is the creator and so natural designs are shown in a non-realistic but beautiful way, with unexpected colours being used. Repetition of designs shows that God goes on for ever. An example can be found in Iznik pottery from the 16 th century Ottoman Empire, although its designs are still being used for ceramics in Turkey.