Speaking again of the early period in Mecca, it is not difficult to imagine the reaction of the city's notables to Muhammad's preaching, for none of them wanted to subvert the religious status quo of the city, endangering its economic prosperity and ancient traditions, just because of the word of Muhammad, who, although urged, never performed any miracles or gave any tangible sign of the revelations he claimed to have received.
Thus began a persecution of the "prophet" and his followers, to the point that Muhammad had to send at least eighty of them to Abyssinia, to take refuge under the protection of a Christian king.
The Islamic scholar Felix M. Pareja, as well as older Islamic authors, for example Ṭabarī e al-Wāqidī, places in this period the famous episode of the "satanic verses", to which the Qur'an seems to refer in sūra 22/52. [3]
It happened, in fact, that Muhammad, in order to try to come to an agreement with the fellow citizens of Mecca, would have been tempted by Satan while reciting the sūra 53/19 and would have proclaimed:
"How is it that you worship al-Lāt, al-‛Uzzāt and al-Manāṯ Lât, 'Uzza and Manât? They are the exalted Ġarānīq, from whom we await their intercession."
As we have seen, these three goddesses were a fundamental part of the Meccan pantheon and protagonists of various rites that attracted hundreds of pilgrims to the Ka‛ba every year: their title was that of "three sublime cranes" (Ġarānīq) and admitting their existence, in addition to the power of intercession with Allah, if on the one hand it meant reconciling with the Meccan elite and allowing the return of their exiled followers, on the other it meant discrediting himself and the rigid monotheism he had professed until then.
Evidently, the game was not worth playing, so much so that the next morning the "Messenger of God" recanted and declared that Satan had whispered those verses in his left ear, instead of Gabriel in his right; they were to be considered, therefore, of satanic origin. In their place, the following were dictated:
"How is it that you worship al-Lāt, al-‛Uzzāt and al-Manāṯ? [These three idols] They are only names that you and your fathers have invented, and Allah gave you no authority for them."
The episode just cited brought even more discredit to Muhammad, who, with the death of his wife and his uncle-protector Abū Ṭālib, remained without two valid supporters.
Given the situation, he was forced (and the sūra of this period reveal the desolation and abandonment in which he found himself, with the sūra of the ǧinn sūra counting how many goblins became Muslims at those very times) to seek protection elsewhere, something he accomplished by finding valid listeners among the citizens of Yaṯrib, a city north of Mecca, then populated by three Jewish tribes (the Banū Naḍīr, the Banū Qurayẓa and the Banū Qaynuqā‛ and by two Bedouin tribes).
Between the Jews and the Bedouins there was not a good relationship and Muhammad, by virtue of his fame, was called to be an impartial arbiter between the contenders, so that in the year 622, the first year of the Islamic era, began the hiǧra, hegira of the "prophet" and his followers, about one hundred and fifty. The term hiǧra does not mean just "emigration," but estrangement, a kind of renunciation of citizenship and belonging to Mecca and the tribe, with the consequent deprivation of all protection.
Yaṯrib would later be called Medina (Madīnat al-nabī, the city of the prophet). Newly arrived here, in order to win over the Jews, who constituted the wealthy and notables of the city, M. introduced innovations in the primitive Islamic ritual, in particular by orienting the qibla, the direction of prayer, toward Jerusalem. However, when the Jews themselves became aware of Muhammad's confusion in biblical matters, they mocked him, making enemies with him forever.
At that very moment, then, the division began to take place between what would evolve as Islam, on the one hand, and Judaism and Christianity, on the other. Muhammad could not admit that he was confused or that he did not know the biblical episodes he had repeatedly quoted to his followers. What he did, then, was to use his ascendancy over his disciples and accuse Jews and Christians of deliberately falsifying the revelation they received; the same ascendancy and authority are sufficient for Muslims today to continue to believe such accusations.
Once again, however, the intention of Muhammad was not to found a new religion, but to try to restore what, according to him, was the pure and authentic, primitive faith, based on Abraham, who for him was neither a Christian nor a Jew, but a simple monotheist, in Arabic ḥanīf. By that word he was known to the pagan Arabs, who considered themselves his descendants through Ishmael.
And so it was that, in the Qur'an, Ishmael became Abraham's beloved son, instead of Isaac; it is Ishmael whom Abraham is commanded to sacrifice in Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock stands today; it is Ishmael who, together with his father, builds the shrine of the Ka‛ba in Mecca, where, moreover, his mother Hagar had taken refuge after being driven out of the desert by Sarah.
Always to take revenge on the Jews, even the direction of the qibla changed, and it was oriented towards Mecca. Islam became the national religion of the Arabs, with a book revealed in Arabic: the reconquest of the holy city thus became a fundamental purpose.
In Medina, in the figure and in the person of Muhammad, religious and political authority meet, and it is there that the concepts of umma (the community of Muslim believers), of Islamic state and of ǧihād, holy war, are born: the community of Medina, with the various religions. That were professed there (Muslim, Jewish, pagan), lived in peace under the rule of the arbiter, and already political and religious authority, who came from Mecca.
The Muslims prospered particularly well, guaranteeing themselves considerable income through raids on passing caravans. Successes and failures (successes were called divine work, failures lack of faith, indiscipline and cowardice) alternated in the campaigns against the Meccans.
In a few years, however, Muhammad decided to get rid of the Jewish tribes that had become hostile in the meantime: the first were the banū Naḍīr, followed by the banū Qaynuqā‛, whose property was confiscated but whose lives were spared; a more atrocious fate, on the other hand, befell the banū Qurayẓa, whose women and children were enslaved, and whose men, once their property was confiscated, had their throats slit in the square (there were about seven hundred dead: only one of them was spared as he converted to Islam).
In the sixth year of the Hegira Muhammad In the sixth year of the Hegira M. claimed to have received a vision in which he was given the keys of Mecca. He then began a long campaign of reconquest, violating a truce (something that was terribly dishonorable for the time) and taking, one after another, the rich Jewish oases north of Medina. The economic and military success was a magnet for the Bedouins, who began to convert en masse (obviously not for religious reasons). It all culminated in the triumphal entry into the city of origin in 630, without encountering resistance. The idols present in the Ka‛ba (except the effigy of Christ) were destroyed.
The following two years saw the consolidation of the strength and power of M. and his followers, until, in 632, the "prophet" died, in the midst of fever and delirium, without indicating successors.
What emerges from an analysis of Muḥammad's life is above all his great ambiguity, along with his personality that scholars often define schizophrenic, because of how contradictory his attitudes and speeches are, as well as the very revelations reported in the Qur'an. It is for this reason that Muslim scholars and theologians will resort to the practice of nasḫ wa mansūḫ (abrogating and abrogating, a procedure according to which, if one passage in the Qur'an contradicts another, the second nullifies the first). [4]
It may serve as an example of this the episode in which M. goes to the house of his adopted son Zayd (this same episode is quoted in the conclusion of this article) and many others: extravagant and suspicious circumstances in which Allah literally comes to Muhammad's aid and reveals to him verses admonishing the unbelievers and the doubtful who dare to accuse him of having entered into contradiction; or also words encouraging Muhammad himself not to want to follow the laws and customs of men and to accept the favors that God bestowed only on him:
"Sometimes they have wanted to see themselves in Muhammad two almost contradictory personalities; that of the pious agitator of Mecca and that of the overbearing politician of Medina. [---] In his various aspects he seems to us generous and cruel, timid and bold, warrior and politician.
His way of acting was extremely realistic: he had no problem in abrogating one revelation by replacing it with another, in going back on his word, in making use of hired assassins, in letting the responsibility for certain actions fall on other people, in making up his mind between hostilities and rivalries. His was a policy of compromises and contradictions always aimed at achieving his goal. [Monogamous until his first wife lived, he became a great friend of women as circumstances permitted and showed a predilection for widows". [5]
Since the Third Quest for the "historical Jesus" insists on the need to analyze the cultural, religious and linguistic context in which he lived, it is appropriate to make some mention of it, in order to know the true story of Jesus Christ.