Boreal

From Merchant to Messenger

The Prophet Muhammad's struggle for legitimacy as revealed in the Koran

Includes a short biography of his wives and their impact on the Koran.

Paperback, 215 pages

The Koran is very much the story of one man’s struggle to get his Meccan kin, the Quraysh, and neighbours to abandon their smorgasbord of gods and goddesses and to worship only Allah and to deny access to the Ka’ba to anyone who was not willing to do so.

The merchant Muhammad had it on good authority, from the archangel Gabriel no less, that Allah did not want to share His Ka’ba with alleged “associates”.

Gabriel also informed the forty-something Muhammad that he had been personally chosen by God to be His last and greatest Messenger to mankind, and unless they, the Meccans and anyone else, listened to what he had to say about how Allah wanted them to behave and how He wanted to be worshipped, they were doomed.

The Meccans thought this was a ruse concocted by Muhammad to make himself their absolute ruler.

 38:6 And the dignitaries among them went forth saying: “Go on and be steadfast regarding your gods. This is indeed a matter premeditated (Muhammad…. [wants] to subjugate us and rule us as his subjects, Moududi).

In 622, the Meccans, having had enough of his denigrating of their gods and those their ancestors, forced him to leave town. Muhammad would eventually have his way with his detractors when he returned to Mecca in 630 A.D. at the head of an army of believers as the Prophet Muhammad.

From Merchant to Messenger is not about this military-like take-over of Mecca and shortly thereafter the entire Arabian Peninsula (read Jihad in the Koran, Boreal Books, 2015) but about the way the budding Prophet tried to cajole his kin and fellow citizens of Mecca into accepting him as Allah’s legitimate and last spokesman and therefore deserving of their unquestioning obedience.

Muhammad's appeals were almost always laced with threats of a horrible punishment from His Mentor, and later from him, if they did not do as they were told. These threats would lead to possibly the first linking of Islam with terrorism.

50:45 We know better what they say and you are not a tyrant terrorizing them. So, remind, by the Qur’an, him who fears My Warning.