Mecca owes its prosperity to certain shrines in the area that are visited by Arabs from all over the peninsula.

Some Arabs, particularly in the Hijaz, hold religious beliefs that recognize a number of gods as well as a number of rituals for worshiping them.

The most important of these beliefs involves the sense that certain places and times of year are sacred and must be respected.

At these times and in those places, warfare, in particular, is forbidden, and various rituals are required. Foremost of these is the pilgrimage, and the best known pilgrimage site is Mecca.

The leaders of the Muslim community after Muhammad's death choose by consensus Abu Bakr, the Prophet's father-in-law and one of his earliest followers, to succeed him.

At this time, some persons favor Ali ibn Abu Talib, Muhammad's cousin and the husband of his daughter, Fatima, but Ali and his supporters (the Shiat Ali, or Party of Ali) eventually recognize the community's choice.

The next two caliphs (successors)—Umar, who succeeds in 634, and Uthman, who takes power in 644—enjoy the recognition of the entire community.

When Ali finally succeeds to the caliphate in 656, Muawiyah, governor of Syria, rebels in the name of his murdered kinsman, Uthman.

After the ensuing civil war, Ali moves his capital to Iraq, where he is murdered shortly thereafter.

Ali's death ends the last of the so-called four orthodox caliphs and the period in which the entire community of Islam recognizes a single leader.

Muawiyah proclaims himself caliph from Damascus.

The Shiat Ali refuses to recognize him or his line, the Umayyad caliphs, and withdraws in the great schism of Islam to establish the dissident sect, known as the Shia, who support the claims of Ali's line to the caliphate based on descent from the Prophet.

The larger faction, the Sunnis, adhere to the position that the caliph must be elected, and over the centuries they will represented themselves as the orthodox branch.

Religious and secular law merge, and all Muslims traditionally have been subject to the sharia, or religious law.

A comprehensive legal system, the sharia will develop gradually through the early centuries of Islam, primarily through the accretion of interpretations and precedents set by various judges and scholars

Legal opinion will begin to be codified into authoritative schools of interpretation during the tenth century.

The peninsula's tribes have tied themselves to the Prophet with various treaties but have not necessarily become Muslim.

The Prophet expects others, particularly pagans, to submit but allows Christians and Jews to keep their faiths provided they pay a special tax as penalty for not submitting to Islam.

After the Prophet's death, most Muslims acknowledge the authority of Abu Bakr (died in 634), an early convert and respected elder in the community.

Abu Bakr maintains the loyalty of the Arab tribes by force; and in the battles that follow the Prophet's death, which come to be known as the apostasy wars, it becomes essentially impossible for an Arab tribesman to retain traditional religious practices.

Arabs who had previously converted to Judaism or Christianity are allowed to keep their faith, but those who follow the old polytheistic practices are forced to become Muslims.

In this way, Islam becomes the religion of most Arabs.

Everything we know about Muhammad's life comes from Muslim historiography.

The Prophet works for Abu Talib in the caravan business, giving him the opportunity to travel beyond Arabia.

Travel gives the Prophet contact with some of the Christian and Jewish communities that exist in Arabia; in this way he becomes familiar with the notion of scripture and the belief in one God.

Despite this contact, tradition specifies that Muhammad never learned to read or write.

As a child, however, he was sent to the desert for five years to learn the Bedouin ways that were slowly being forgotten in Mecca.

Muhammad marries a rich widow when he is twenty-five years old; although he manages her affairs, he occasionally goes off by himself into the mountains that surround Mecca.

On one of these occasions, Muslim belief holds that the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad and told him to recite aloud.

When Muhammad asks what he should say, the angel recites for him verses that will later constitute part of the Quran, which means literally "the recitation."

Muslims believe that Muhammad continued to receive revelations from God throughout his life, sometimes through the angel Gabriel and at other times in dreams and visions directly from God.

For a while, Muhammad tells only his wife about his experiences, but in 613 he acknowledges them openly and begins to promote a new social and spiritual order that will be based on them.

The Saudis, and many other Arabs and Muslims as well, trace much of their heritage to the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in 570.

The time before Islam is generally referred to as "the time of ignorance" (of God).

Muhammad was born in Mecca at a time when the city was establishing itself as a trading center.

For the residents of Mecca, tribal connections are still the most important part of the social structure.

Muhammad was born into the Quraysh, which has become the leading tribe in the city because of its involvement with water rights for the pilgrimage.

By the time of Muhammad, the Quraysh have become active traders as well, having established alliances with tribes all over the peninsula.

These alliances permit the Quraysh to send their caravans to Yemen and Syria.

Accordingly, the Quraysh represent in many ways the facilitators and power brokers for the new status quo in Arabian society.

Tribes consist of clans that have various branches and families, and Muhammad comes from a respectable clan, the sons of Hashim, but from a weak family situation.

Muhammad's father Abd Allah had died before his son was born, leaving the Prophet without a close protector.

The Prophet is fortunate, however, that his uncle Abu Talib is one of the leaders of the Hashimite clan; his connection to Abu Talib gives Muhammad a certain amount of protection when he begins to preach in 610 against the Meccan leadership.

All Muslims, at least once in their lifetime and if circumstances permit, should make the hajj to Mecca to participate in special rites held there during the twelfth month of the lunar calendar.

Muhammad institutes this requirement, modifying pre-Islamic custom, to emphasize sites associated with God and Abraham (Ibrahim), founder of monotheism and father of the Arabs through his son, Ismail.

The lesser pillars of the faith, which all Muslims share, are jihad, or the permanent struggle for the triumph of the word of God on earth, and the requirement to do good works and to avoid all evil thoughts, words, and deeds.

In addition, Muslims agree on certain basic principles of faith based on the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: there is one God, who is a unitary divine being in contrast to the trinitarian belief of Christians; Muhammad, the last of a line of prophets beginning with Abraham and including Moses and Jesus, was chosen by God to present God's message to humanity; and there is a general resurrection on the last, or judgment, day.

Muhammad holds both spiritual and temporal leadership of the Muslim community during his lifetime.

Abraha, apart from promoting construction projects and massacres of Jews, is chiefly famous for the military expedition that he leads northward against the city of Mecca in the same year as Muhammad's birth, about 570.

Although elephants support the expedition, it fails, and later Muslims, who will remember this year as “the Year of the Elephant,” will profess the belief that Mecca had escaped capture only through a miracle.

According to Islamic tradition, it was in this year that Muhammad was born.

Recent discoveries in southern Arabia suggest that Year of the Elephant may have been 569 or 568, as the Sassanid Empire overthrew the Axumite- and Roman-affiliated regimes in Yemen around 570.

Legends of the founding of Islam relate that Muhammad, a Mecca-born member of the Hashim clan of the powerful Quraish tribe, became an orphan upon the death of his mother, Amina, in about 576, as his father, Abd Allah, had died before he was born.

He became a ward of his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and, after 578, of his uncle Abu Talib, who succeeded as head of the Hashim clan.

Muhammad found work as a trader, traveling with caravans between Syria and Mecca, the center of trade and religion in the Arabian peninsula.

In about 595, Muhammad began working for a rich widow, Khadijah, in her commercial enterprise.

Although Khadijah was fifteen years Muhammad’s senior, they soon married.

While in a cave on Mount Hira outside Mecca in about 610, Muhammad claimed to have received what he has come to understand as a divine revelation from the angel Gabriel.

The angel had charged Muhammad with preaching to his people a religion based on the worship of the one God, the belief in a day of judgment, and the giving of alms for the support of the poor.

Following his revelation, Muhammad, first privately and then publicly in 613, had begun to proclaim that there is but one God and that Muhammad is his messenger sent to warn people of the Judgment Day and to remind them of God's goodness.

The Meccans receive Muhammad's message of monotheism and iconoclasm with hostility, but Muhammad is protected by the Hashim as long as Abu Talib lives.

Muhammad and Khadijah have produced two sons, both of whom had died young, and four daughters.

The house of 'Abd al-Muttalib of the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraish tribe comprises a form of nobility in Mecca, based upon their hereditary duty to act as stewards and caretakers of the pilgrims coming to the city to worship at the Kaabah.

Muhammad’s criticism of the polytheism of the Meccan religion angers the merchants of Mecca, who reap large profits from pilgrims visiting such ancient pagan sanctuaries as the Black Stone, probably of meteoric origin, and a shrine for the pagan deities of the Arabs, which have come to be occupied by some hundreds of idols.

The idols represent many different tribes and as a result Mecca has became a center of pilgrimage, and the Kaabah's environs are an inviolable sanctuary.

This pilgrimage traffic adds considerably to the wealth of the merchants of Mecca, which also benefits from its position astride the caravan routes from Yemen (Arabia Felix) up to the Mediterranean markets.

The Hashim clan to which Muhammad belongs becomes the target of a boycott by other Quraish, but the unpopular preacher is still protected by Abu Talib.

After Abu Talib’s death in 619, however, the new clan leader is unwilling to extend his protection to Muhammad, whose wife Khadijah dies around this time.

The Meccan elite now openly oppose him, harass his small group of dedicated followers, and plot to kill him.

Faced with this persecution and curtailed freedom to preach, Muhammad and about seventy followers decide to sever their ties of blood kinship in Mecca.