Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [391]
Muḥammad’s special title, raṣul, means “apostle” (Aramaic: sheliḥa) showing that, like Paul, Muḥammad’s revelation contained the command to proselytize, conveying a specific message of salvation. The word already meant “apostle” in Muḥammad’s own day. The Quran, however, uses this term especially for Muḥammad and uses other words for previous messengers.3 Even more than Christianity, Islam is organized for mission and expansion. Its view of paradise is central to that purpose.
Muḥammad’s revelations first came to him through the intermediation of the angel Gibril (English: Gabriel) at age 40 in the year 610 CE, while he was meditating in a cave near Mecca in what is today Saudi Arabia. The first revelation began with the word ’iqra, “Recite!” from which the name Al-Quran (“The Recitation”) is derived. Because books were in short supply, and reading itself was almost always done in public declamation, and because Arab culture had already developed extensive oral, public, poetic traditions (conventions which the Quran follows in its internal structure), the word “Recite!” also shares some implications of the word “Read!” or even “Read out publicly!” According to many Muslim traditions, Muḥammad was himself illiterate, a tradition that, among other things, augments the miraculous nature of his revelations. Whatever one may think of this legend, the fact is that Muḥammad’s revelations were oral, and were preserved both orally and in written form throughout his career. Today, the word ’“iqra” serves as the normal Arabic word for “Read!” (as does the same root in Hebrew). Today as well, though there is still a premium on memorization and recitation in Muslim piety; the place that most Muslims look for the revelation oftheir faith is in the book of revelations given to Muhhammad called the Quran.4
The revelations themselves vary from short ecstatic utterances to theological and ethical discourses on the importance of monotheism and moral behavior. The revelations pointed the way to a monotheistic system that Muḥammad was to bring to the originally polytheistic Arabs, although there were already groups of pre-Islamic Arab monotheists in the Hejaz, called by Muslim tradition the ḥunafa (sing. ḥanif), as well as some Arab Jewish and Christian tribes. Muḥammad’s religious teachings soon brought him into conflict with the Jews and Christians, the other Arab tribes, and, indeed, even his own Quraysh tribe. Muḥammad exercised both religious and military leadership over his movement; there has never been a clear distinction between secular and religious power, between religious conversion and conquest in Islam. After many battles, his forces and his teachings gradually unified the whole Arabian peninsula, even making forays into the area of Syria. This unification of the Arabian peninsula was both difficult politically and important strategically because it melded together a new military force in a remote and forbidding peninsula from which neither the Byzantine Christians nor the Sasanian Persians expected any threat. When the Arabs exploded out of Arabia they conquered half the Mediterranean and more, making Islam a world religion as well as a universal one.
The Byzantine Empire in Anatolia and the Sasanian Empire in Iran had exhausted themselves in warring against each other.5 After Muḥammad’s death, Muslim armies took advantage of the power vacuum in the Eastern Mediterranean. Moving quickly out of Arabia,