The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1592 page)

ammad recognized the contrast as extreme. He went with increasing frequency into isolation in a cave on Mount Hira in order to struggle with the truth of God lying behind the bewildering conflict of idols and religions. On one occasion, he had the strong sense of a presence (later identified with
Gabriel/Jibr
l
) pressing on him and insisting three times, ‘’Iqra’, read (or recite). He resisted, but then felt words being impelled through him, the first words of what became many revelations, collected eventually in the Qur’
n; the opening words of
s
ra
96.
At first Mu
ammad believed that he had gone insane and thought of killing himself. But Khad
jah found him and told him to test the truth of what he was certain he had experienced. There followed some further revelations, but then a break which was equally testing. He began preaching, but encountered great hostility. From his initiating vision he saw with absolute clarity that if God is God, then there can only be what God is: there cannot be a God of the Christians, a God of the Jews, still less can there be the many deities of Mecca. It followed that the idolatry of Mecca was deeply wrong about God and must be abolished. In a sense, the whole of Islam is a footnote to this simple observation: there is only one God and all creation is derived from him. Therefore all humans should live in a corresponding unity (i.e. community, ’umma); and Islam is the quest for the realization of ’umma, under God. Not surprisingly this message was violently resisted by the Meccans. As the crisis and persecution grew worse, Mu
ammad was invited to Yathrib to make his way of unity a practical reconciliation between the two contesting ruling families there. He made this move, the
Hijra
, in 622 (to become later the first year of the Muslim
calendar
) and began to establish the first community under the rule of God's revelations as they continued to be given.
At Yathrib, now to be known as al-
Mad
na
(‘The City’), Mu
ammad was joined by some seventy other emigrants, the Muh
jir
n (see
EMIGRANTS
). The opposition from Mecca did not cease, partly because Mu
ammad took to raiding their caravans. At the battle of
Badr
, in 624, a small army of Muslims defeated a much larger army of Meccans; but in 625, the Meccans reversed this defeat at the battle of Uhud: both battles remain epitomes of faith and lack of trust. In 627, the Quraysh failed to win a siege with numbers overwhelmingly in their favour (the battle of the Trench), and subsequently Mu