Muhammad, the Qur'an and Islam
Muhammad's life before ministry. For this period, it appears that the
Meccans' rejection of and opposition to Muhammad's message actually
began before he started to revile their gods, and not afterwards as the Sira
traditions maintain.^193 The pagan Arabs, for example, did not believe in the
Resurrection, much less in a Judgment, Paradise or Hell,^194 and the suras
which contain such descriptions seem to predate Qur'anic passages
proclaiming Monotheism.
Notes:
[1] Guillaume, Muhammad, pp. 104 f; Ibn Sa`d, Classes, vol. 1, 1,
pp. 219 f; Tabari, History, vol. 6, pp. 68, 70 f. Other traditions give Qur'an
74:1f, (Tabari, History, vol. 6, pp. 73 f; Sahih Bukhari, vol. 6, pp. 417 f)
Qur'an 1 or Qur'an 68 (Sell, Development, p. 3) as having been revealed
initially.
[2] It is said that this was a pagan practice among the Arabs in
Muhammad's time; see the editors in Tabari, History, vol. 6, p. 67, n. 95,
however, others view this as a pagan adaptation of a Syrian Christian
practice; see n. 40, below.
[3] The account in Ibn Hisham indicates that Muhammad was asleep, so
that Gabriel's coming to him must have been a dream.
[4] A tradition found in the Ibn Ishaq recension of Yunus b. Bukayr also
reports that Muhammad suffered from the evil eye before and after the first
parts of the Qur'an were revealed; see Guillaume, New Light, p. 29.
[5] Guillaume, Muhammad, p. 107; Ibn Sa`d, Classes, vol. 1, 1, pp. 225 f;
Tabari, History, vol. 6, pp. 68, 72. Sahih Bukhari (vol. 1, p. 4) erroneously
presents Waraqa as being a Christian who wrote out passages of the Gospel
in Hebrew. Sahih Muslim (vol. 1, p. 98) gives Waraqa as writing out
passages of the Gospel in Arabic. Neither of these canonical traditions
mention that Waraqa may have known the Torah.
[6] "Namus" is said to have been Gabriel by practically all Islamic
historians. Western scholars of Islam rather early on recognized that the