The Islamic and Byzantine City

Long before the message of Muhammad initiated the religion of Islam, the thriving city of Mecca was just such a place of safety. It was considered "sacred;" its Ka'ba (an enormous, cubicle black stone) was endowed with holy significance (Esin). In much the same way that the polytheism of Greek mythology derived from the unification of various city-states, each with its own deity, so the Ka'ba was host to the gods of various tribes and peoples who, at least there, could coexist. In this context, "sacred" meant safe. As early as the first millennium B.C.E., Mecca had been established as a place of pilgrimage, where traders could meet without fear. Greco-Roman influences and the monotheistic cults of Judaism and, later, Christianity, were already present in Mecca when Muhammad was born in Arabia in about 570 C.E. He eventually settled in Mecca where he lived with his first wife, Khadijah, serving as commercial agent for her long-distance caravan trade. When he was about forty years old, revelations began to appear to him, in which the text of the Koran was revealed in a series of retreats.

Thus began the formulation of a new monotheism called Islam, considered seditious by the residents of Mecca. In 622, when Muhammad was fifty-three and in declining health, he was forced to escape with his followers to the city of Yathrib (later renamed Al-Medina, meaning "The City") and gained the support of the local tribe there and his first converts to the new religion. The date of the Hegira (flight to Yathrib) is accepted as the founding date of Islam and the first year in the Muslim calendar. The first mosque, a simple unroofed walled square with the prayer direction oriented toward the Ka'ba in Mecca, was built in the desert outside Medina, to which followers were summoned to gather five times per day by a call to communal prayer. Resisting recurring attacks from Meccans, Muhammad finally returned to Mecca in 630 at the head of a powerful army of his followers, accepted the keys to the Ka'ba, destroyed the idols and other signs of polytheism, and dedicated the structure (and the city) to the worship of one God and as the destination of prayer and pilgrimage. Two years later the Messenger of God was dead.