ABSTRACT
Muhammad, the son of ‘Abd Allah and Āmina of the aristocratic tribe of Quraish, was born at Mecca, in the year A.D. 571 according to Arab historians. His parents were noble but impoverished members of a proud clan; his father died before the infant was born, his mother when he was about six years old. He grew up in the protection first of his grandfather ‘Abd al-Muttalib and then, when he died, of his uncle Abū Tālib, a trader. As a boy, Muhammad roamed the hills about Mecca watching over the family’s flocks; thus early he grew accustomed to the loneliness of orphandom and the desolation of Arabia’s arid wastes. At twenty-five he married Khadīja, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior, and during her lifetime took no other partner; he was now for the first time comfortable in circumstance; he attended to his wife’s business with scrupulous care and honesty.
