The world before Muhammad
The Muslims would call it 'the Age of Ignorance'
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: ‘Recite!’: Allah reveals the Koran to Muhammad
THE DESERTS and oases of the Arabian Peninsula were the unlikely scene of the birth of a faith that, within a century of its founding in Mecca in 610 CE, would spread to the limits of the known world – north to the Levant, west across North Africa, deep into southern Spain and as far east as the borders of India – borne by warriors on camels and horses, of fearsome mien and astonishing energy.
Within a century this new religion would subdue an empire greater than Rome’s. The Christian world would awake as if from a pleasant dream to the spectacle of millions of Muslims kneeling at…