Whatever we can tell about the prophet, of course, is screened through the filter of what has been preserved over the centuries, and what people have wanted to preserve, and it's very difficult to pull out from all of these different sources that are very adoring and the ordinary human being, the person that he was.

 

We do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 A.D. in the sun-blasted Arabian Peninsula, a land of savage scarcity, whose Bedouin tribes were locked in a constant state of tribal war. While still an infant, Muhammad's parents gave him his first taste of life in the desert.

 

Muhammad was from a town, Mecca, but he was sent off to live with the Bedouin because the people living in the town of Mecca felt that the Bedouin were the holders of the deeper cultural Arab values, and the Bedouin viewed the townspeople as having lost the really authentic roots in Arab culture and the poultry and animal husbandry and all the things that they do so well.

 

By the time Muhammad was six, both of his parents had died and he was taken under the protection of his uncle, chief of his clan. Being an outsider gave him a singular perspective.

 

He had been orphaned early and developed very early a passionate sense of concern for those who are left out of society. To be orphaned in a tribal society where clan and family relationships are your keys to everything--success, status, honor, dignity, is to face what it really feels like to be marginalized and that obviously had a very deep impression on him as a young man.

 

In some ways it was detrimental of course to grow up without parents, but in other ways he was so adaptable. He had many parents. He had many fathers. He had many mothers, so it made him a child of everybody.

 

Bedouin: an Arab of any of the nomadic tribes of the Arabian, Syrian, Nubian, or Sahara deserts.