Muhammad ibn (son of) Abd-Allah ibn Abd al-Muttalib was born at Mecca in approximately 570, maybe earlier. His father had died while returning from a caravan trip to the west, before the baby was born. Not long after his birth, his mother chose to place him with a nomad family to nurse with their infant. He seems to have stayed with them until he was about three, and then lived in Mecca with his mother for three years (or he may have stayed as many as five years in the desert, which fits better with the language-learning goal). When he was six, they went to Yathrib to see his great-grandmother’s family. In Yathrib, he got to know his cousins and learned to swim and fly a kite.
But on the return trip to Mecca, his mother became ill and died at a small village. The servants took Muhammad to his grandfather’s house, where he lived until he was seven, when his grandfather too died. From the age of eight, Muhammad lived with his uncle Abu Talib. There wasn’t any sort of “school” to be sent to, so he was trained in practical skills he would need. He received basic weapons training with his cousins, and they say he did well with archery.
When he was old enough, he went to work in the countryside as a shepherd. He sometimes accompanied caravans to Syria and Palestine, since that was the family business. These were the years when Nabataean script was being adopted for Arabic in cities like Mecca. It’s an open question whether Muhammad could read it. There wasn’t really anything to read, apart from business accounting. He was probably familiar with the letters, but he probably didn’t do the accounting himself.
During his late teenage years, Mecca had a clan feud that developed into open war for a week; Muhammad is said to have witnessed the fighting and helped in a limited way. Not long after, the city was upset by a visiting merchant’s claim that a clan member had cheated him. These events prompted the men of Mecca to bind themselves by an oath to administer justice without regard to clan membership. Participating in this event would have begun the boy’s thought train about the importance of justice, a theme he returned to often later in life.
There are several stories of Muhammad’s youth that involve contact with Christians, and especially with monks. At the Nabataean city of Bosra in southern Syria, he met some monks: once when he was a child, once as a young man. In these stories, the monks take special notice of him, saying that a prophet was soon to arise in Arabia. In Islamic interpretation, Jesus’s last comments that “my Father will send a comforter to you” referred to an additional human prophet, not to a spiritual, invisible presence. Christians don’t understand it this way, so there won’t be any agreement on that point. But we do know from these stories that Muhammad met and talked to Christians. The monks in Syria might have been orthodox believers, but there was also a flow eastward of Nestorians, who were no longer welcome in Constantinople’s territory. In one story, the monk who meets Muhammad is actually named “Nestor,” which suggests that he did meet Nestorians.
By the time Muhammad was 21, he was ready to lead caravans himself. He would have had basic desert skills for reading the weather, weapons skills to defend himself, and commercial skills to handle trading. After making various trips to Syria, at age 25 was hired by a wealthy widow, Khadijah, to make a caravan trip for her. He was unmarried, although he had asked for the hand of a cousin. His uncle preferred to marry her to an older man from a more powerful family, thus making an alliance that his clan’s reduced circumstances made prudent. It worked out well for Muhammad, since Khadijah asked him to marry her when he returned from the journey.
- Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Meraj Mohiuddin and Sherman Jackson.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Martin Lings. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1983.