ABSTRACT
When God’s help and victory come, and you see the people entering the religion of God in droves, then sing the praises of your Lord, and seek his forgiveness.
(Qur’an 110:1-3a) An observer about 600 would probably have predicted that in due time Arabia would become Christian or Zoroastrian or, less likely, Jewish. He or she would hardly have predicted what actually happened, that the Arabs would develop their own form of post-Axial religion. is chapter seeks to present the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, the career of the Prophet Muhammad, and the initial spread of Islam into the Iranian and Hellenistic world as something of a unit. For the critical historian most of this period is problematic; what is presented here is an imperfect consensus about what happened or probably happened. More radical views are discussed at the end of the chapter.
