Gone Medieval - Prophet Muhammad

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. John Tolan to explore the profound impact of the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Who was he? And what were the events that attended the birth of a new religion and a new empire? Together Matt and Dr Tolan explore the life of Muhammad, his revelations, and the enduring legacy of the Islamic faith.More Ibn Fadlan: An Arab Among VikingsMedieval JerusalemGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. In the 7th century, a leader emerged who would establish a new empire, but who would also begin a new religion. The Prophet Muhammad changed the religious landscape of the Near East in ways that have emanated around the world and have endured to this day. So who was he? What do we know about his life? And just what did Muhammad believe he was doing when he began to preach his revelations from God? To help answer these questions and more, I'm joined by John Tolan, whose new book, Islam, A New History from Muhammad to the Present, chronicles the emergence and development of the Islamic faith. Welcome to God Medieval, John. It's fantastic to have you with us.

Thank you, Matt. I'm very much looking forward to getting into this topic. When we think about Prophet Muhammad and trying to tell his story, what are the main source materials that we have to look at his early story? The main source materials we have are two. One, there's the Hadith or the oral traditions, which were transmitted orally for the first couple of centuries in Islam, and were put down in writing mostly in the Abbasid period. So in the early 9th century for us, so about two years. centuries after the death of Muhammad. And these were closely related with another source, also composed of orally transmitted material. And that's the Sira, or life of Muhammad. We have a version

composed first by Ibn Ishak at the end of the 8th century, but we don't have his version. We have a version reworked by Ibn Heisham in the Abbasid period. So again, about 200 years after the death of Muhammad. And what Ibn Heisham has done is compile all sorts of traditions about Muhammad. And some of them are even contradictory. But he's said, well, he prefers to record them all and give them to posterity. So that is the main source for the life of Muhammad, which of course is problematic because it's orally transmitted to some of it is quite clearly legendary. Some of it is quite clearly inspired by rivalry. with Christians or Jews, et cetera. And in that way, it's a little similar to material about Jesus.

I mean, what we have is the Gospels, which were written probably 40 to 70 years after Jesus' death and are very partisan documents. So besides this material, the hadith and the Sira, which are derived from the hadith, we have, of course, the Quran, which is the earliest written document of Islam, and which was compiled. Again, the specialists don't all agree, but probably within about a generation after Muhammad's death. And it no doubt reflects, at least in part, the revelations that Muhammad preached to the people around him.

But unlike the Gospels, the Quran does not give a biography of Muhammad. The Gospels, of course, tell the story of Jesus' life, whereas the Quran was revealed by, Muhammad to the people around him. So there was no need to give a narrative of Muhammad's life. But there are little bits and pieces of Muhammad's biography that can be gleaned from the Quran. Yeah, I guess that makes it quite frustrating to try and piece together because you've got that earlier sort of source material in the Quran, which doesn't give you as much detail as you would want.

And then you've got detail, but that's spent a couple of centuries as an oral tradition and may well have morphed and changed. say some of it's contradictory, that must create problems for trying to piece together what we think is the kind of true story of Mohammed's life? Absolutely. And we know very little about the basic facts of his life. There is even some disagreement about the date of his death, which is traditionally dated to 632, but some sources suggest that he was alive a few years after that. So there's a lot we don't know and and you know some historians have said that's really impossible to give a reliable biography of Muhammad. Okay well we're going to try we're going to see how close we can get to some of this and I'm going to see if I can drag some of this out of you.

How close can we get then to understanding about his background and upbringing? Do we know for example kind of when and where Muhammad is born? So again we have to rely on the Hadith, the traditional sources, say that it's about 570 in Mecca. And that he was, again, the traditions say that he had been orphans quite early on. His father died actually before he was born. There are stories about how his mother then later died, and he was brought up by his uncle, Abu Talib, who was part of the Kouraj, who were the, the, the, tribe that were sort of the elite of the city of Mecca, he would have been a merchant's

alongside his uncle, helping out his uncle. Other sources suggest that he had been a sheepherder or a goat herder. The two are both possible and not incompatible. And the legend has it that he then, when he was about 25, he was working for a widow named Khadija. And she then, she then proposed marriage to him. So he became married at 25 to Khadija, who is a rich, independent woman who is 40 years old, and lived with her until her death. And it's around between the year 619 and 621 that Khadija dies and that also his uncle, Abu Talib, dies.

Now, one of the things we also have is a tradition of exegesis, of interpretation of Quran, which, you know, starting again in the Abbasid period, so two centuries after Muhammad's death, has divided the Quran into revelations, Mecca and Medina revelations, because, of course, the big event that marks the first year of the Muslim calendar is the Hidra, or Hejira, when literally flight, when Muhammad and his companions left Mecca to go to Medina, to go to the town of Yathrim, which later became Medinat al-Nabi, literally the city of the prophet. Now we know as Medina. So as I said, the Quran has been divided by a specialist since the Emerson period into two different periods of revelation.

The Meccan period between roughly 610 and 622 and the Medina period, roughly 622 to 632, And if we look at the Meccan period, what we see is that Muhammad is a preacher who is revealing what he affirms our messages from God that later tradition attributes to Gabriel, the archangel Gabriel in Muslim tradition, reveals these suras to Muhammad, or chapters of the Quran, to Muhammad, who then, transmits them to those around him. And if you look at the Mechensuras, the message is very coherent. It's all about monotheism. You should worship only God, and you shouldn't worship anyone or anything next to God. That means not worshiping human representatives of God, not worshiping statues, not

worshiping idols. The other message that we see in these Mechansuras is that the end is coming and you need to repent, you need to worship the only God, you need to show solidarity and sympathy, particularly with the weak and the poor, and to get into heaven, one needs to recognize God and follow his law. And there are a lot of echoes in these suras to earlier prophets because the Quran doesn't affirm that Muhammad is bringing a new religion, but on the contrary, that he's a prophet in the tradition of earlier prophets, from Adam to Noah, to David and Solomon, to Jesus. All of these are prophets who all, according to the Quran, had the same message that Muhammad has, one of monotheism, worshiping only God, one of submission to God's will, which is what

Islam means. And this was popular with some of Muhammad's contemporaries, but also provoke the hostility of the elite, the Quraysh elite in Mecca, because it was an implicit criticism of their wealth, of their power, of their traditional religion. So he faced criticism and persecution, and so did his followers. So some of his followers, according to tradition, went to Ethiopia, where they were received. by the Christian king of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian king in Avakshu. And then in 622, so between the 619 and 621, his uncle Abbotalib, who also was sort of his protector, died. His wife, Khadija, died. There were rumors that the Koresh wanted to kill Mohammed. So he left.

Some of the sources suggested he had been expelled from Mecca, others that he fled, fearing violence, But at any rate, he went to Yathrib or Medina, and there he had negotiated with the rulers of Medina to become the ruler. There had been two rival factions in the city of Medina. They both agreed to submit to Muhammad's rule. So now we get a very different situation, obviously, for Muhammad and his followers, where he's no longer part of a persecuted minority. but he's the leader of this new community. Fascinating. Just before we get into kind of Mohammed's career sort of as a prophet,

or life as a prophet, I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about, I'm curious, and maybe this is showing my ignorance, but I'm curious about what religion Mohammed might have considered himself to have been raised in. He seems very aware, or the Quran seems very aware, of Jewish and Christian teaching, talks about Jews and Christians being people,

of the book. What would Muhammad have considered his religion to be before he became a prophet? That's an interesting question. It's hard to answer. Clearly, at this point, in the Quran, you find the word Islam, literally submission or accepting God's will, but there's no sense in which this word Islam corresponds to a religion per se. He sees himself, and one word that appears much more often than the word Islam or Muslim is the word believer. And this is the historian Fred Donner at the University of Chicago has a book, Muhammad and the Believers, where he sees Muhammad as basically in continuity, as the Quran again presents him as in continuity with the earlier messengers who we consider Jewish and Christian. And he sees himself as a belief. And he sees himself as a

So I don't think he would have said, I'm Jewish or I'm Christian, certainly. He wouldn't have said I'm Muslim either, but he saw himself as a true believer and as a messenger from God. And as you said, the Quran is striking not only how much the Quran integrates of stories from the Bible, both from the Torah and from the Christian, the Gospels. What is also interesting is how the Quran often alludes to these stories of the prophets, whether it's Noah or Abraham, and there's no passage in the Quran that narrates the whole story of Noah or of Abraham. But the Quran alludes to these figures as if the people listening to Muhammad were already familiar with these stories. There's no need to tell the whole story of Noah, but to allude to it in order to say, look, Noah's people rejected him.

what happens, they got the flood. Now, Muhammad's people are rejecting him. Watch out because God is going to punish them too. So there's a lot of this brief allusion to the stories of the prophets of past, the stories from the Bible. So clearly the people that Muhammad is talking to were familiar with these stories. Yeah, it's interesting, the knowledge that they're assuming, they're assuming that people already know all of these things. So you only have to mention Noah and people already know the story, which implies that they're very familiar with those teachings of the Jewish tradition? That's right, which calls into question because often, according to Muslim traditional sources,

the Arabs in Mecca at the time of Muhammad were pagans who worshipped pagan idols, but there's little archaeological evidence of that. And there's also this familiarity with the Bible will suggest, you know, not necessarily that everyone is Jewish or Christian, but at least that they're imbued with this knowledge of these. traditions. Yeah, fascinating. And so kind of when does Muhammad begin to receive the word of God? How does this take place? So again, here we have to look to the Hadith and the Sira for this. And the story is that it's around the year 610. He's about 40 years old. He's been a successful merchant. He's

been married to Khadija for about 15 years. And he starts to take these sort of spiritual retreats where he goes to this cave called Hira near Mecca, and he meditates and he prays. And it's at this point that he receives a visit from the archangel Gabriel. And the story is that Gabriel puts his arm around and squeezes him and says, Ikra, recite, or which can be translated as recite or read. And he says, I don't know how to read. And he says, I don't know how to read. And Gabriel then squeezes him again and tighter. So he thinks he's going to die. And he says, read.

And then finally he says, read, you know, this gives the first revelation, which is now in Surah 97, I think. And it's the first revelation is then. So given by Gabriel in this cave, Muhammad is confused. He's sweating. He doesn't know what to do. He goes back home. His wife, Khadija, puts a blanking around to me. He says, you know, I had this experience. I don't know what to think. I don't know if it's the devil or if it's a message from God. And she convinces this says, you're a good man. You give honor to people. You're generous to the poor. God would not fool you. So this must be a message from God. And so she convinces him that this is a real message. So she becomes the first Muslim according to tradition. So this is how that starts. And then there are a series of revelations.

throughout this Meccan period and then as I said it's the Medina period. And how does Muhammad respond to those? Presumably he begins to preach his revelations to people. He begins to share his revelations with people. Yes. Yes. And the story is that he first shares it with Khadija and other close members of his family and then gets revelations telling him that he has to,

he's sort of afraid to go public with these. And then he gets a revelation, so he has to go public with this. And he has to preach to a wider audience. So he preaches. And again, the stories are that he gets a bigger following, but he also provokes hostility of some of the Meccan elites. And do we get a sense at this early stage of what Mohammed perhaps believed he was doing? It sounds like he didn't necessarily think he was starting a new religion.

You know, hindsight will tell us he's creating a new religion ultimately. but it sounds like he would have believed himself to be continuing the work of others around reinforcing monotheism in the region? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, there's no sense that he thought himself as creating a new religion. And when you look at the difference, you know, as I mentioned, there's the Meccan and the Medina revelations. If you look at the Medinan revelations, you have continuity with the Meccan ones because there's

still the spiritual message, the idea that you need. need to be generous to the poor, that you need to worship only God, and so forth. But there's a new element because now, as I said, Muhammad is the leader of this city, of this community. And so there are legislative elements. There are rules about marriage, about divorce, about inheritance, about how to treat slaves, about battle and booty, and so forth. So these Median revolution, revolutions show how this community around Muhammad and Medina is organizing. It sounds very much like he becomes a political and a military and a religious leader sort of all at once. Is it fair to see him wearing those three different roles?

Yes, yes. So yeah, he's very much in the Muslim tradition sees no contradiction between these roles, which are seen as complementary. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, That plays in with older Testament prophets and things like that, who tended to be political leaders as well, but it's slightly a contrast with Jesus who very much sets himself aside from the political, military leadership role, whereas Muhammad is willing to step into that. That's right. That's right. And this is a point of criticism of many Christians, you know, from the earliest times until today, is that there's such a difference between the two and Jesus' rejection of the political role and the sort of rejection of the

world very different from Muhammad. But one of the things, and to get back to how he thought his relations between, you know, with Christians and Jews, there are a number of passages the Quran that deal with Jews and Christians, and there's some ambiguity, let's say. I mean, in some points, you know, he's presenting Jews and Christians as models for the Mecca. You should do what they do. You should worship only God. He presents the great figures of Judaism and Christianity as prophets. And very much, as I said, he's in continuity of these prophets.

But there are other passages in which he criticizes Jews for not believing their prophets, for killing their prophets. He criticizes Christians for worshiping Jesus, who for the Quran is only a prophet and only holy human, born miraculously from the Virgin Mary, but not the son of God, not God. And so Christians are wrong to preach the Trinity. They're wrong to worship Jesus as if he were God. So there are criticisms of Judaism and Christianity at the same time in an acknowledgment of the essential truths as the Quran sees it of Judaism and Christianity. But the idea is that Muhammad is in continuity of these traditions.

And one of the figures is most frequently mentioned in the Quran is Abraham. And the Quran affirms that Abraham was not Christian, he was not Jewish. He was what's called a Hanif, a pure monotheist. And both the Jews and the Christians tried to claim Abraham, but he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, according to the Quran. Yeah. And how does Muhammad's kind of military career take off? Because he gets involved in quite a few battles, doesn't he, during this period? That's right. The city of Medina is attacked by Mecca on several occasions, and the Medinans attack. Now, Medina is north of Mecca. So when caravans went from Mecca north into Syria, they were easy targets for Medeans to go and raid and attack. So there are a series of battles between the Meccans and Medinans, one of which the Medeans lose and the others of which they win.

So there quickly becomes a war leader. There are expeditions against other towns and other tribes in Arabia. And by the year 6.30, so eight years after the Hidra, Muhammad has become the dominant power in the Arabian Peninsula. And that's when they march towards Mecca and Mecca surrenders. And the Muhammad in his army can enter into Mecca and take control the same. city, and according to legends, that's when they destroy the idols at the Kaaba and return the Kaaba to monotheism. And I guess that kind of military and political success must have helped to reinforce Muhammad's preaching as well. You know, he's not just a preacher with a voice.

He's also a serious political leader and a major military leader in the region too. That must have helped to embed his religious teachings as well. That's right, because we see in the Quran and we've seen other early Muslim writings, the idea that the victories are signs that God is on the Muslim side. And so his role as successful military and political leader reinforces his status as profit. And where is Muhammad at as we get closer to the time of his death? What kind of a political and military force is he in the region and how far are we progressing towards something that we might recognizes Islam today by the early 630s? By the early 630s, he dominates much of the Arabian Peninsula.

There are conflicting stories saying that during Muhammad's lifetime, he may have already started raiding north into Syria, but probably that only took place after his death. But one of the things that's interesting is there's no sense that Mohammed actually sought to imagined further conquests beyond the Arabian Peninsula. And indeed, there's no sense that he had clearly thought about the future beyond his life. And one of the hypotheses that a certain number of historians have put forward is that

your Muhammad was a prophet of the last times. In other words, you see in the Quran a lot of references to the end of the world, which is coming soon, and this is both a hope and a threat, a threat for those who are on the wrong side of history, so to speak, who don't follow Muhammad and don't follow the, don't embrace monotheism, but a hope for those who do follow Muhammad that a better world is upon us. And so the same hypothesis have been made about Jesus too, that Jesus predicted the end was near. And again, there are a number of passages in the Gospels and in other parts of the New Testament where the feeling is, the end of time is near. And it's probably going to happen during this generation.

And of course, then it doesn't happen. So what do you do? You reinterpret. And you know, one of the reasons that people think that this may be true about Muhammad is, one, he doesn't seem to have planned his succession after his death, which created conflict. Now, again, there are conflicting traditions. Some say, and particularly the Shiites, firm that it was Ali, who was both his cousin and his son-in-law, who was supposed to become leader after Muhammad's death, and that Ali was pushed aside by Abu Bakr, who became the first caliph, and by Umar, who became caliph after him. And the story is, one of the stories you find in the hadith is that when

Muhammad died, people were consternated. And Umar, the future caliph, refused to believe that Muhammad had died. He said, no, that's not possible. And if any one of you says that Muhammad has died, I'll run you through with my sword. And then Abu Bakr returned and saying, no, Muhammad has died. Muhammad is dead, but God whom he preached is still alive. So we need to follow God. If Umar and others wouldn't believe that Muhammad had died, it's perhaps because they expected and perhaps Muhammad himself expected that the world would come to an end while he was still alive.

And that may be true for Jesus and his followers as well. And then, of course, one readjusts when that doesn't happen. Yeah. What do we know about the circumstances of Muhammad's death? You mentioned earlier that there's a little bit of doubt about precisely when he dies. Some sources suggesting he was alive after the traditional date that's given for his death. But do we know, so presumably by this point he's around about 60. Do we know the circumstances of his death? Yeah, the traditional date is 632. So he would have been about 60, 62. He becomes ill. It's not clear what the illness is, but he really, he really. realizes he's going to die. He's in the house of his wife, Aisha, and he dies with his head on her lap. And what's curious is that he's not buried right away. It's a few days his body has left in Aisha's room on Isha's bed for several days while there's an argument over who succeeds him. And then finally, several days later, he's buried.

And there was an argument about how and where to bury him. And Abu Bakr affirms that the tradition is that prophets should be buried on the spot where they die. So they move aside Aisha's bed and they dig a grave right there where her bed had been. And that's where he is buried until this day. Fascinating. I thought when you said he was left there for several days that this was going to be out of concern that he might not really be dead, or that he might return in a similar way that Jesus had, but maybe it's not that? It could be that.

There are some, again, these hadith or oral traditions are varied and contradictory, and there are several that suggested that some people thought he wasn't dead or that he was dead and he would resurrect the way Jesus had. And those sources suggest that it was because they realized after three days that he was not going to rise, that they buried him. And so I guess at this point, Muhammad's death is significant

in a number of ways because he is the leading political figure on the Arabian Peninsula. He's a significant military figure and he is also considered to be a prophet. So kind of all of those things disappearing at once must have created political instability in the region

and it sounds like there was a bit of squabbling over what should come next. What does that mean for early Islam, that kind of fight over who should succeed Muhammad? In the immediate case, Ali finally accepted, some of Ali's followers were very unhappy about this, but Ali finally accepted to recognize Abu Bakr as caliph because he didn't want to divide the Muslims. There were rebellions because some of the Arab tribes who had allied themselves with Muhammad considered that at his

death there was no need to continue their allegiance. So Abu Bakr, according tradition, had several expeditions and force people back into allegiance. And then it's during the caliphate of Abel Bacher, which is very short, just 632 to 634, and then in particular under the leadership of Omar, who becomes caliph after him, that there's an expansion into north, into parts of what's now, what is the Roman Byzantine Empire, particularly in what's now Syria, and also. And also, into the Persian Empire. And suddenly within 10, 20 years after the death of the prophet, his successors are governing a huge empire.

Yeah. And when do we see the development of the Sunni-Shia split in Islam? How does that come about? So that comes about in the... So we have this tremendous expansion under Umar. And then under his successor, the third caliph, Uthman, there's division among the Muslims. Uthman is unpopular.

He promotes his members of his own family and clan to important positions. And there's a revolt of soldiers, particularly in Egypt, who then come to Medina and kill Uthman. And then there's a, after Uthman's death, there's a council that meets Anna. elects Ali as his successor. But not everyone accepts Ali because some suspect him of having been behind Uthman's death and behind this rebellion. So there's a civil war, what Muslim tradition is called, the first fitna. And it pitches Ali against other members of the elites, in particular against Aisha, one of Muhammad's wives, who leads the opponents of Ali into battle, defeated at what's called the Battle of the Camel.

So this creates a split, which you can't yet at this point talk about Shiism as a distinct form of Islam. But that's the sort of the beginning and the basis of the split, because after Ali's defeat and death, so Ali is becomes caliph. It was originally victorious. And then he's assassinated. And after his death, there's a new civil. war that brings the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, where Muawiyah, who was a cousin of the former

Khalif Uthman and had been governor of Damascus wins against the successors of Ali and establishes the Umayyad dynasty. This Umayyad dynasty based in Syria, the capital of Damascus, was never recognized by the followers of Ali, who put forward two of Ali's sons and then affirmed that only a descendant of Ali and Fatima. Ali was married to Muhammad's daughter, Fatima. Only descendants of Ali and Fatima could be legitimately imams or caliphs. So this eventually created this split based on political difference, but one also based on traumatic events in this series of civil wars, and in particular when Ali's and Fatima's son, Hussein, was slain by the Umayyads in the Battle of Karbalah in 680. Hussein was considered a martyr, and his tomb at Karbala is

still considered by many of the holiest sight of Shiism. Throughout all of these kind of civil wars, political struggles that are going on, dynastic concerns, empire building still, how does Islam develop? How does it become a separate religion, given that Mohammed, it sounds like he hadn't intended it to become something of its own religion. It was meant to be a continuation of monotheism. How does it break away and become something separate? So it's really during the Umayyad period that Islam becomes a separate religion per se, and in a way an imperial religion. Because of course we have to remember when we talk about the world of Islam in this period, the Umayyad period and then the Abbasin period, Muslims are a small ruling minority amongst a majority of Christians, Zoroastrians in the former Persian Empire, of Jews and others.

Islam becomes way to justify the superiority of Islam over other religions becomes justification for the rule of this elite minority of Muslims over this huge empire. So we see this notably during the reign of Abd al-Malik, who's caliph, no, Khayyah, Kailiff between 685 and 715. he is, among other things, he issues new coinage. Earlier, Caliphs had reissued traditional Byzantine and Persian coins, often with the images of the Byzantine or Persian emperors. He reissued coins that had no images but only texted affirm that there was only one God

and that Muhammad was the prophet of God. We see also he's the one who had the Dome of the Rock built in Jerusalem and in the Dome of the Rock, which is on the site of the former Jewish temple. So it's a real statement that we, the Muslims are now the inheritors of this whole Jewish tradition of the Jewish kings. And it's also in the inscriptions on the interior of the Dome of the Rock. There are passages from the Quran and particularly the Antiguan. Christian passages that I mentioned earlier where Jesus affirms that he never claimed to be God or the son of God. And there are passages against the Trinity. So this is a way of symbolically saying that we Muslims are the real successors to the Jewish kings and to Jesus. And the Christians and the

Jews don't really follow them. So the Christians and the Jews at the same time, Muslim law is developing, and there's this idea of a distinct legal status where Jews and Christians are Vimis, literally protected, which means that they are free to practice their religion, to have their synagogues and churches, to have a certain legal autonomy, but they are inferior legally and socially to Muslims. So all of this emerges during the Umayyad period. And so gradually we see emerge what we now recognize as traits of a Muslim society and Muslim religion. And so it sounds like that separation of Islam from the other monotheistic religions is almost more of a political move rather than a religious one at that point. Yes, yes. The two are very intertwined for Muslims at the time, as they had been for Christians.

of course the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire was closely associated with Christianity. So it was normal to use religion as a justification for empire. Yeah, yeah. And I wonder if you could just talk us through a little bit about how kind of perceptions of Mohammed have changed over the centuries since his life. Do we think about him differently today than he was thought about in the 7th, 8th, 9th centuries? Yes, certainly. and when we say we think of him, it depends on who the we concerned is.

Obviously, for Muslims, the Quran is very clear that Muhammad is only a man, he's human with his weaknesses, but over the centuries it develops a sort of a cult of Muhammad who's seen as a perfect model that one should model one's own behavior and even one's dress and so forth on what Muhammad had done. So there are all sorts of traditions and legends about how Muhammad brushed his teeth, how he prayed, how he slept, et cetera, and some people consider him a model. And other Muslims have criticized what they see is almost a worshipping of the prophet alongside God, which is, of course, exactly what Muhammad preached against.

If you look at how non-Muslims perceived Muhammad, that also develops over time. Early on, many of the Christians, for example, had differing views about Muhammad. Some saw him as a reformer and the prophet of the Arabs and were quite respectful towards him, particularly the Christians who had been persecuted under Byzantine rule, the non-Orthodox Christian, in other words, people who didn't have the same doctrines concerning Jesus concerning the Trinity, as did the Byzantine emperors and who had been persecuted under the Byzantine Church, saw the arrival of Islam as a sort of a liberation and a just punishment of the Byzantine oppressors.

So they had a more positive image of Muhammad, at least at the beginning. Then as, you know, as I said in the early centuries throughout the Uma'ayan Abbas periods, so really into the 12th or 13th centuries, for most of that time, Christians were much more numerous than Muslims. But little by little, more Christians converted to Islam, and this, of course, worried church leaders. So then some of them started writing polemics against Islam for their parishioners, saying, no, no, no, you don't want to convert to this religion.

And in order to convince them, they would paint the negative image of Islam and a negative image of the Prophet Muhammad. And so this negative image of Muhammad as a false reformer, false prophet, sometimes as a heretic, was transmitted throughout these Christian communities under Islam, and then became popular in Europe during the Middle Ages, where Islam was seen as a dangerous rival and was denounced as a heresy. I mean, it's been fascinating to try, I mean, try to get a little bit closer to who the Prophet Muhammad was, but it sounds like, you know, we don't know all that much about him because

the stories that we have are more about his revelations from God than they are about him, and maybe we shouldn't expect anything different from someone in that position. But it's interesting to consider, I think, what he might have thought he would. was doing during his lifetime and what has actually happened subsequently, because it sounds like he wasn't trying to set up this whole new separate religion that would further divide monotheism. He was trying to draw it even closer together, but in some ways, what's happened is a new separate form of monotheism that's sort of divided the monotheistic faiths. Well, that's right. And of course, if you look at the three monotheism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,

they have a lot in common. People sometimes talk about the Abrahamic faiths because they all trace their ancestry back to Abraham. But one of the things they have in common is, paradoxically, they're divisions. And the divisions among Jews, and there are different groups among Jews throughout history. And, of course, the divisions among Christians

that, you know, I just mentioned. And then in Islam, there are divisions between Sunnites and Shiites, and then within each of those branches. there are also conflicts and divisions. There's a certain unity of monotheism, but there are also divisions as part of that tradition. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, John.

It's been fascinating to try and understand Mohammed's life a little bit better and, I guess, frustrating that we don't know a little bit more about him, but it's been wonderful to try and understand exactly what we do know and to look at the impact that he's had over the centuries since his life. So thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, John.

John's new book, Islam, A New History from Muhammad to the present, is out now if you'd like to explore this topic further. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify

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