{"schema":"hoh-person-v1","site":"https://humansofhistory.com","slug":"prophet-muhammad","fullName":"Prophet Muhammad","honorific":"(PBUH)","altNames":["Muhammad ibn Abdullah","محمد","Muhammad","Mohammed","Mohammad"],"shortDescription":"Final Prophet of Islam whose message united Arabia and today guides two billion people","birthYear":570,"birthDateLabel":"c. 570 CE","birthPlace":"Mecca, Arabian Peninsula","deathYear":632,"deathDateLabel":"8 June 632 CE","deathPlace":"Medina, Arabian Peninsula","nationality":"Arabian (Quraysh)","occupations":["Prophet of Islam","statesman","reformer"],"era":"Medieval","wikidataQid":"Q9458","infobox":[{"label":"Name in Arabic","value":"محمد (Muhammad)"},{"label":"Born","value":"c. 570 CE, Mecca"},{"label":"Died","value":"8 June 632 CE, Medina"},{"label":"Resting place","value":"Green Dome, Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, Medina"},{"label":"Tribe","value":"Quraysh, clan of Banu Hashim"},{"label":"Spouse","value":"Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (first), among others"},{"label":"Children","value":"Six, including Fatimah (RA)"},{"label":"Known as","value":"Final Prophet of Islam · al-Amin, “the Trustworthy”"}],"article":{"version":1,"summary":"Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) (c. 570 – 632 CE) was the final prophet of Islam, whose call to the worship of one God transformed the Arabian Peninsula within his lifetime and grew into a faith today embraced by some two billion people. Born in Mecca and orphaned in childhood, he earned the name al-Amin, “the trustworthy,” long before the revelations he received reshaped world history. Statesman, reformer, and messenger, he united warring tribes under a covenant of faith and justice, and his life remains the most closely studied and most widely followed example in the Muslim world.","sections":[{"heading":"Early Life in Mecca","markdown":"Muhammad (PBUH) was born in Mecca around 570 CE into the clan of Banu Hashim of the Quraysh, the tribe that kept the sanctuary of the Kaaba [3]. His father, Abdullah, died before his birth, and his mother, Amina, passed away when he was about six years old. The double bereavement placed him first in the care of his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and then of his uncle Abu Talib, who protected him faithfully into adulthood [3][4].\n\nAs a young man he worked in the caravan trade that made Mecca prosperous, traveling with his uncle to Syria and earning a singular reputation for honesty. The Meccans came to call him **al-Amin**, \"the trustworthy,\" and **al-Sadiq**, \"the truthful,\" entrusting him with their goods and their disputes [4][5]. When a rebuilt Kaaba raised a quarrel over which clan should set the sacred Black Stone in place, the young Muhammad (PBUH) resolved it by laying the stone on a cloak lifted by all the clans together, a story remembered as an early sign of his gift for uniting rivals [3].\n\nAt about twenty-five he married Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, a respected merchant of Mecca some years his senior, after she was struck by his conduct in her employ. Their marriage of roughly a quarter century was, by every early account, a devoted partnership; she remained his closest confidante until her death, and he honored her memory for the rest of his life [4][8]."},{"heading":"The First Revelation","markdown":"Long drawn to solitude and reflection, Muhammad (PBUH) would retreat to a small cave called Hira on a mountain outside Mecca to contemplate. There, in the month of Ramadan around 610 CE, when he was about forty, Muslims believe the angel Gabriel (Jibril) appeared to him with the first words of the Quran: **\"Read in the name of your Lord who created\"** (Quran 96:1) [1][2].\n\nShaken by the encounter, he returned to Khadijah, who wrapped him in a cloak, reassured him, and became the first person to believe in his message [2][3]. Her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a learned Christian, recognized in the account the mark of earlier prophets. Revelations continued for the remaining twenty-three years of his life, gathered into the Quran: for Muslims the literal word of God, and by any measure among the most influential books ever composed [1][7].\n\nFor three years the Prophet (PBUH) preached quietly among family and friends. The earliest believers included his wife Khadijah, his young cousin Ali, his friend Abu Bakr, and the freed slave Zayd ibn Harithah, a circle notable from the beginning for cutting across rank, wealth, and tribe [3][4]."},{"heading":"Persecution and the Hijra","markdown":"When the message went public, its insistence on one God and on the equality of all believers threatened both the idols of the Kaaba and the profits and pride of Mecca's elite. Persecution followed: mockery, boycott, and violence, borne hardest by believers without tribal protection, such as Bilal ibn Rabah, an enslaved African who endured torture rather than renounce his faith and later became Islam's first muezzin [3][5].\n\nThe Prophet (PBUH) counseled patience, and in 615 CE sent a group of followers across the Red Sea to the Christian king of Abyssinia, who granted them asylum. This was Islam's first hijra, or migration [3]. The year 619 CE is remembered as the **Year of Sorrow**: Khadijah and Abu Talib, his wife and his protector, died within months of each other, leaving him exposed in an increasingly hostile city [4][8].\n\nDeliverance came from the north. Pilgrims from the oasis town of Yathrib pledged themselves to his message, and in 622 CE the Muslims quietly emigrated there, the Prophet (PBUH) traveling last with Abu Bakr and evading a plot to kill him. This migration, the **Hijra**, proved so decisive that Muslims date their calendar from it. Yathrib became known simply as Medina, \"the city\" of the Prophet (PBUH) [3][5][8]."},{"heading":"Life in Medina","markdown":"In Medina the persecuted preacher became a statesman. One of his first acts was the **Constitution of Medina**, a written covenant binding the emigrants, the local tribes, and the city's Jewish communities into one political community with mutual obligations and freedom of religion, a document historians regard as remarkably ahead of its age [6][8]. He paired each Meccan emigrant with a Medinan \"helper\" in bonds of formal brotherhood, dissolving destitution into fellowship [3].\n\nMecca did not let the movement be. In 624 CE, at the wells of **Badr**, a badly outnumbered Muslim force defeated a Meccan army, a victory the Quran attributes to divine aid [1][6]. A year later the Muslims suffered a costly reverse at **Uhud**, where the Prophet (PBUH) himself was wounded; in 627 CE Mecca's grand alliance failed to storm Medina's defensive trench and the siege broke [6].\n\nThrough these years the revelations continued, turning increasingly to the shaping of a just society: the prohibition of usury, the rights of the poor to a share of wealth, the protection of orphans, restraints on the treatment of women that were far-reaching for seventh-century Arabia, and binding standards of contract and testimony [1][7]. In 628 CE the Prophet (PBUH) accepted the **Treaty of Hudaybiyyah** with Mecca on terms his companions thought humiliating; the peace it bought doubled the movement's numbers within two years [3][6]."},{"heading":"The Return to Mecca and Final Years","markdown":"When Mecca's allies violated the treaty in 630 CE, the Prophet (PBUH) marched on his native city with ten thousand followers and took it almost without bloodshed. Standing at the Kaaba, he declared a general amnesty for the population that had persecuted, exiled, and warred upon him for twenty years, asking them: \"Go, for you are free.\" The idols of the sanctuary were removed, and the Kaaba was rededicated to the one God [3][6][8].\n\nDelegations from across Arabia now came to pledge faith, and within two years most of the peninsula, fractious tribes that had never in memory been united, stood under a single banner [5][6]. In early 632 CE the Prophet (PBUH) led the **Farewell Pilgrimage** to Mecca and delivered his final sermon on the plain of Arafat, a testament that still rings: that no Arab is superior to a non-Arab, nor white to black, save in piety; that the lives and property of Muslims are inviolable; and that women possess rights that men are bound before God to honor [2][3].\n\nMonths later, after a short illness, he died in Medina on 8 June 632 CE, in the chamber of his wife Aisha, and was buried where he passed. The spot is now enclosed by the Green Dome of the Prophet's Mosque, visited by millions each year [3][8]."},{"heading":"Teachings and Character","markdown":"At the center of the Prophet's (PBUH) message stands **tawhid**, the absolute oneness of God, and the accountability of every soul before Him [1]. Upon this foundation rest the practices Muslims call the five pillars: the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, obligatory charity (zakat), the fast of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca for those able to make it [2][7].\n\nHis recorded sayings and practice, the **hadith** and **sunnah**, form, after the Quran, the second wellspring of Islamic ethics and law, preserved in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim [2]. They portray a man of austere personal habits and uncommon tenderness: he mended his own sandals, stood in the night to pray until his feet swelled, played with children, and taught that \"the best of you are those best to their families\" [2][4].\n\nContemporaries and later biographers alike dwell on his mercy. He forbade the killing of women, children, monks, and non-combatants in war; he freed slaves and made their emancipation an act of devotion; and he described kindness to animals as a path to paradise [2][7]. The Quran itself addresses him as sent \"only as a mercy to the worlds\" (Quran 21:107) [1]."},{"heading":"Legacy","markdown":"By the measure of consequence, few lives compare. Within a century of the Prophet's (PBUH) death, the faith he preached stretched from Spain to the Indus; today Islam is the world's second-largest religion, professed by roughly a quarter of humanity, and **Muhammad** is believed to be the most common given name on earth [7][8].\n\nHis example shaped whole civilizations: the sciences and medicine of the Islamic golden age grew in societies ordered by the norms he established, and his insistence on literacy (the Quran's first revealed word being \"Read\") set learning at the heart of Muslim culture [5][7]. Secular assessments have echoed the believers' reverence in their own register; the astrophysicist Michael Hart, ranking history's most influential figures, placed him first, citing his unmatched success in both the religious and worldly spheres [8].\n\nFor Muslims, however, his standing rests not on statistics but on love: he is al-Mustafa, \"the chosen one,\" whose name is never uttered without the prayer *peace be upon him*, and whose life as merchant, orphan, husband, refugee, lawgiver, and messenger remains the pattern against which the faithful measure their own [1][2][7]."}],"faqs":[{"answer":"Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was born in Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia, around the year 570 CE, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. The traditional date is expressed as the Year of the Elephant in pre-Islamic Arabian reckoning.","question":"When and where was Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) born?"},{"answer":"He is the final prophet of Islam, who Muslims believe received the Quran as revelation from God over twenty-three years. He united the Arabian Peninsula under one faith, established a covenant-based state in Medina, and left an ethical and legal example followed today by about two billion Muslims.","question":"What is Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) known for?"},{"answer":"The Hijra was the migration of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE to escape persecution. It marks the founding of the first Muslim community and is so pivotal that the Islamic calendar counts its years from this event.","question":"What was the Hijra?"},{"answer":"Delivered at Arafat during his final pilgrimage in 632 CE, the Farewell Sermon summarized the Prophet's (PBUH) message: the sanctity of life and property, the abolition of usury and blood feuds, the rights owed to women, and the declaration that no race is superior to another except in piety.","question":"What is the Farewell Sermon?"},{"answer":"He is buried in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in the chamber of his wife Aisha where he passed away in 632 CE. The site lies beneath the Green Dome within Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet's Mosque, one of Islam's holiest places.","question":"Where is Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) buried?"},{"answer":"Muslims add the blessing “peace be upon him” after the Prophet's name as an act of reverence and love, following the Quran's instruction to invoke blessings upon him (Quran 33:56). In writing it is often abbreviated PBUH, or rendered in Arabic as ﷺ.","question":"Why do Muslims say “peace be upon him” (PBUH)?"}]},"references":[{"marker":1,"title":"The Quran","author":null,"publisher":"(trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford World's Classics, 2004)","url":null,"publicationDate":null,"type":"PRIMARY"},{"marker":2,"title":"Sahih al-Bukhari (hadith collection)","author":"Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari","publisher":"9th century; accessible at sunnah.com","url":"https://sunnah.com/bukhari","publicationDate":null,"type":"PRIMARY"},{"marker":3,"title":"The Life of Muhammad (Sirat Rasul Allah)","author":"Ibn Ishaq, trans. Alfred Guillaume","publisher":"Oxford University Press","url":null,"publicationDate":"1955","type":"BOOK"},{"marker":4,"title":"Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources","author":"Martin Lings","publisher":"Inner Traditions","url":null,"publicationDate":"1983","type":"BOOK"},{"marker":5,"title":"Muhammad at Mecca","author":"W. Montgomery Watt","publisher":"Clarendon Press, Oxford","url":null,"publicationDate":"1953","type":"BOOK"},{"marker":6,"title":"Muhammad at Medina","author":"W. Montgomery Watt","publisher":"Clarendon Press, Oxford","url":null,"publicationDate":"1956","type":"BOOK"},{"marker":7,"title":"Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time","author":"Karen Armstrong","publisher":"HarperOne","url":null,"publicationDate":"2006","type":"BOOK"},{"marker":8,"title":"Muhammad, Prophet of Islam","author":null,"publisher":"Encyclopaedia Britannica","url":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Muhammad","publicationDate":null,"type":"WEBSITE"}],"image":null,"archivedAt":"2026-09-09T22:40:57.214Z"}