- Karen Armstrong
adan, when Muhammad woke to find himself overpowered
by a devastating presence, which squeezed him tightly until
he heard the first words of a new Arab's scripture pouring
from his lips.
For the first two years, Muhammad kept quiet about his
experience. He had new revelations, but confided only in his
wife Khadija and her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian.
Both were convinced that these revelations came from God,
but it was only in 612 that Muhammad felt empowered to
preach, and gradually gained converts: his young cousin Ali
ibn Abi Talib, his friend Abu Bakr, and the young merchant
Uthman ibn Affan from the powerful Umayyad family. Many
of the converts, including a significant number of women,
were from the poorer clans; others were unhappy about the
new inequity in Mecca, which they felt was alien to the Arab
spirit. Muhammad's message was simple. He taught the Arabs
no new doctrines about God: most of the Quraysh were al-
ready convinced that Allah had created the world and would
judge humanity in the Last Days, as Jews and Christians be-
lieved. Muhammad did not think that he was founding a new
religion, but that he was merely bringing the old faith in the
One God to the Arabs, who had never had a prophet before. It
was wrong, he insisted, to build a private fortune, but good to
share wealth and create a society where the weak and vulner-
able were treated with respect. If the Quraysh did not mend
their ways, their society would collapse (as had other unjust
societies in the past) because they were violating the funda-
mental laws of existence.
This was the core teaching of the new scripture, called the
guran (recitation) because believers, most of whom, including
Muhammad himself, were illiterate, imbibed its teachings by
listening to public readings of its chapters (surahs). The
Quran was revealed to Muhammad verse by verse, surah by
surah during the next twenty-one years, often in response to a