This research will discuss the origins of Islam. The origins of many religions are clouded by the passage of time. When exactly Judaism began, for example, is open to variousinterpretations. Christianity seems more capable of defining the period when it began, but the exact year is really not possible.
Islam is the youngest of the world's major religions. It is perhaps for this reason, or the fact that Islam seems to have kept particularly careful records, that it can name an exact year for its founding. Whatever the reason, the accepted date for the beginning of Islam is 610 A.D. when the Prophet Muhaammed, then forty years old, had the first experience of the Qur'an. However, despite this date, the calendar of Islam does not begin with the prophet's first vision, but begins instead in the year 622 A.D., the year of the hegira, when Muhammed who was despised and rejected in his native Mecca, turned north to Medina, the city if his maternal uncles.
Muhammed's journey to Medina was frought with peril and danger brought on by the constant fighting Muhammed had with the Jews and pagans who feared and despised Muhammed. However, it was in Medina that the state of war between Muhammed and his kinsmen if Mecca was brought to an end. "The total victory of the Islamic forces [was] climaxed by Muhammed's triumphant entry into the city of his birth to destroy the monuments if idolatry. Prophetic though his career remained, Muhammed had increasingly come to wield the sword of the militant ruler and to head the affairs of an aggressive political state, conscious of its role in histiry. When his death occurred, on June 8, 632, he bequeathed to his followers religio-political heritage ever burdened and harassed for many centuries with the task of finding an acceptable caliph (successor) to fill the highest office of Islam."
The question of the successor is important in the history of Islam. This question of course...