were other religions in Arabia. The Jews continued to live in Khaybar and other northern towns. There were Christians as well in Najrān in the south-west. The announcement did not apply to these: it applied only to the Arab idolaters. It was important that idolatry should disappear from Arabia.
As the tenth year after the Hijrah was coming to an end, the pilgrimage season was again approaching. The pilgrimage is one of the five main duties of Islamic worship: it is required of every Muslim, man or woman, at least once in a lifetime, provided that they have the means to offer it. So far, the Prophet could not offer the pilgrimage, because the Quraysh denied Muslims access to the Ḥaram area. The Prophet could have offered the pilgrimage a year earlier, but he did not wish to see idolaters performing their worship in the nude. Now that this was no longer the case, the Prophet announced his intention to offer the pilgrimage in the coming season. He sent messages making his intention clear to people all over Arabia. Therefore, pilgrims from all areas around Madinah and to the north came over to join him on his pilgrimage journey. As he proceeded, a large number of people went with him. Estimates of those pilgrims starting with the Prophet from Madinah vary between 90,000 and 130,000 people. A similar number awaited him in Makkah, where people from southern areas joined the population of Makkah.
The pilgrimage involves a series of rituals and duties of worship to be offered at particular places in Makkah and in the area close to it. The Prophet told people to follow his guidance in offering their duties. Throughout the journey the Prophet clearly had an important objective besides showing the people how their rituals should be offered: he wanted to make the pilgrimage easy for all. With such a large crowd moving from one place to another and attending to worship duties within a short span of time, a strict order and a rigid pattern would cause substantial inconvenience and hardship. Therefore, the Prophet provided maximum leeway in every respect, while making sure that the duties and rituals were offered correctly and within time.
The Prophet delivered a speech in which he outlined the main principles of Islam. He abrogated all usurious transactions that were made by anyone prior to their adoption of Islam, starting with those of his own uncle, al-ʿAbbās. He also waived all revenge for any killing that took place prior to Islam, starting with the killing of one of his own cousins. Thus, he provided a model for all Muslims to follow.
In his speech he outlined five basic principles of the Islamic programme of action. The first two principles operate on the level of the individual. The first indicate that Islam severs all ties that a Muslim has with Jāhiliyyah (its idols, practices, financial dealings, usury transactions and so on), because the adoption of the religion of Islam means a start of a new life for a Muslim which is completely divorced from the erroneous ways of the past. The second requires every Muslim to guard against all forms of sin. The Prophet also made it clear that, by sin, he did not mean the sinking back into idolatrous worship: he meant lesser sins that lead people away from the path of Islam. The other three principles provide the basis on which Islamic society is founded. One is the tie of Islamic brotherhood, which moulds the proper relationship between all Muslims. It is this brotherhood that makes every Muslim a patron and ally of every other Muslim. Next is the providing of support for the weak, so that their weakness does not make the whole society vulnerable. It is noteworthy that the Prophet repeatedly stressed the importance of being kind to women, since they were the weaker element in society. The last principle is the co-operation between Islamic government and the members of Islamic society to achieve the proper implementation of Islamic law, which works toward the removal of all evil from society and its replacement with what is good.
The Prophet repeatedly asked his audience whether he had delivered God’s message to them. Every time they replied that he did. He asked God to be his witness. This was an emotional gesture that showed his heartfelt wish that his tireless efforts had enabled him to fulfil his task as God’s Messenger and deliver God’s message to its intended addressees: namely, all mankind.
With the completion of the pilgrimage, the Prophet had indeed completed his mission, advocating God’s message and calling on people to accept the faith of Islam based on self-surrender to God. He had shown them how to offer all their duties. He had shown them the way to conduct their lives in accordance with Islam, to earn God’s pleasure and to be sure of receiving His reward, which is admittance into heaven in the life to come. During the pilgrimage, a Qur’ānic verse was revealed to him: “This day I have perfected your religion for you and have bestowed on you the full measure of My blessings and have chosen Islam as a religion for you.” (5: 3)
The Prophet then returned to Madinah, and less than three months later, he passed away, having fulfilled his mission and given humanity a faith that ensures its happiness whenever it is implemented in any society.
May God grant him the full reward for the inestimable goodness that he brought into human life.
1 Ibn Hishām, Al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, vol. 1, p. 343.
2 Ibn Hishām, Al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, vol. 2, p. 28. Also, Al-Haythamī, Majmaʿ al-Zawā’id, vol. 6, p. 35.
3 Ibn Hishām, Al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, vol. 4, p. 32.
4 Ibn Hishām, Al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, vol. 4, p. 146.
CHAPTER 3
THE KEY TO THE PROPHET’S CHARACTER
EVERY PERSON has a key to his or her character. When the key is identified, it is easy to deal with that person. This key allows us to explain their attitudes and behaviour, and to anticipate their reaction to events. This is just like a house key: it may be small, but it opens into a spacious place with all its contents. Without the key, the inside of the house remains unknown, and we can only hazard a blind guess as to what it contains. Similarly, the key to a person enables us to understand their behaviour, even when they act in a way that others find odd.
For the Prophet, we can only look for a key to his personality on the basis of his life before prophethood, that is, before he started to receive Divine revelations. At that time he acted on his own, knowing nothing about a Divine message that was to be assigned to him. Later, when he began to receive his message, he assumed a role that was unlike any other, and he was also receiving guidance from on high. His mission, responsibilities and actions benefited from this guidance and were based on it. Non-Muslims who wrote about his life in isolation of this fact came up with explanations that Muslims find problematic. Some of these accounts are unbiased, and some even admire him. Nevertheless, studying his life in ordinary human terms, giving no weight to the Divine guidance he received, will show some of his actions as questionable, and perhaps unjustifiable. His attitude in the negotiations with the Quraysh leading to the Ḥudaybiyah peace agreement appeared odd, even to his closest Companions. He consulted no one, which was contrary to his previous patterns of behaviour, and he accepted all of the terms that were imposed by the enemy. In any human situation, what would historians, critics or analysts say about a negotiator who declared at the outset – as the Prophet did – that they would accept any offer, and who actually sought no concession from the other side in return for agreeing to their terms?
When we set about looking for the key to Muhammad’s personality in his life prior to the start of revelations, we soon discover that we will have some difficulty, as the reports we have of that period provide insufficient details and may be unreliable. Only those reports that the Prophet or his close Companions mentioned about his early years can be verified with regard to their authenticity. For example, one report states that as a suckling baby, Muhammad used to take his feed from only one of the breasts of his wet nurse. Muslim historians suggest, “it was as if he was made
