III. The Divine Revelation to the Prophet Muhammad


The Prophet Muhammad received the Divine Order to call the people, once more, for the last time, to the same true religion, that’s of worshipping and submitting to the One true God, Allah in Arabic. God ordered him in the Quran: “Say, we believe in Allah, and that which has been revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and to the Other Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we submit” [3:83].
The creed of Islam is summed up in the Testimony of Faith: There is no deity but God and Muhammad is His Messenger.
The Revelation the Prophet Muhammad received from God is called the Quran, which means the Reading or the Recitation. God sent down the Quran on the heart and soul of the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel. The Revelation began in the month of Ramadan of the year 610c.e. in the cave of Hira`, in the mountains surrounding Mecca, where the Prophet used to retreat for meditation. It continued for 22 years, until the death of the Prophet, at the age of 62, in Medina.
The Revelation was brought in clear and distinct Arabic verses “Ayaat”. They came in an intermittent manner, whenever God found it necessary to reveal how the problems, the circumstances, the needs, the important issues related to the new faith should be dealt with, or to reveal the ways of worshipping, of salvation, of preparation for death and resurrection on the Day of Judgment.
The Prophet was transmitting faithfully the Words of God to the believers, as those Words were engraved forever in his heart and memory. The companions of the Prophet were memorizing and writing down all the Revelations dictated by the Prophet. All the verses constituting the Quran were put in the order they exist now, under the instructions of Angel Gabriel who had transmitted to the Prophet the Will and the Words of God as embodied today in the Quran.

IV. Religious and Spiritual Life of the Prophet


For Muslims, the Prophet is the perfect man and the prototype of the religious and spiritual life. This is difficult to understand for a Christian because, compared to Christ, the earthly career of the Prophet seems often too human and too engrossed in the vicissitudes of social, economic and political activities to serve as a model for the spiritual life.
The spiritual nature of the Prophet is veiled in his human one and his purely spiritual function is hidden in his duties as a guide of men and a leader of a community. The function of the Prophet was to be, not only the spiritual guide but also the organizer of a new social order with all that such a function implies. And it is precisely this aspect of his being that veils his purely spiritual dimensions from foreign eyes. It may be easy to understand his political genius, his great statesman-ship, but less easy to understand how that same leader has been the religious and spiritual guide of men and how his life could be an example for those who aspire to sanctity. This is particularly true in the modern world where religion is separated from other domains of life and most modern men can hardly imagine how a spiritual being could also be immersed in the most intense political and social activity.
In fact, in order for Christians to understand the contour of the personality of the Prophet of Islam, they should not compare him with Jesus-Christ whose message was meant primarily for saintly men and who founded a community based on monastic life which later became the norm of a whole society. Rather because of his dual function as “King” and “Prophet”, as the guide of men in this world and the hereafter, the Prophet should be compared to the Prophets-Kings of the Old Testament, to David and Solomon, and especially to Abraham himself.
This type of figure, who is at once a spiritual being and a “leader of men” has always been rare in the Christian West, especially in modern times. Political life has become so divorced from spiritual principles that, to many people, such a function itself appears an impossibility in proof of which Westerners often point to the purely spiritual life of Christ who said “My kingdom is not of this World”.
The figure of the Prophet is thus difficult for many Occidentals to understand and this misconception, to which often bad intention has been added, is responsible for the nearly total ignorance of his true nature in most works written on him in the West.