It's the same call that sounds five times a day, every day,

in cities across the world.

Nearly a quarter of the people on earth respond to it,

'God is most great' the muezzin calls.

'I testify there is no other god but God.'

'I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God.

'Come and pray. Come and flourish.

'God is most great.

'There is no god but God.'

In the unfolding of history,

Islamic civilisation has been one of humanity's grandest achievements.

A worldwide power founded simply on faith.

A spiritual revolution that would shape the nations of three continets

and launch an empire.

For the West, much of the history of Islam has been obscured

behind a veil of fear and misunderstanding.

Yet Islam's hidden history is deeply, and surprisingly,

interwoven with Western civilisation.

It was Muslim scholars who reclaimed the ancient wisdom of Greeks.

While Europe languished in the Dark Ages.

It was they who sowed the seeds of the Renaissance,

600 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci.

From the way we heal the sick...

to the numerals we use for counting...

cultures across the globe have been shaped by Islamic civilisation.

But all this, began with the life of a single, ordinary man,

and the profound message he proclaimed would change the world forever.

His name was Muhammad.

To Muslims, the life of Muhammad is a story revered.

In its mysteries as much as its certainties,

there are beliefs held sacred.

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.

It's very difficult to pull out,

from all these different sources that are very adoring,

the ordinary human being...

We do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 AD

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 peopl lived in the town of Mecca

felt that the Bedouin were the holders of the deeper cultural Arab values.

And the Bedouin view the towns people

as having lost their really authentic roots in Arab culture

and the poetry 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'd been orphaned early

and developed very early on 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, honour, dignity...

is to face what it really feels like to be marginalised.

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.

Muhammad's clan, like Arabs all across the Arabian peninsula,

would share the stories that had been told and retold for generations.

Pre Islamic Arabian civilisation was largely an oral culture

and there was tremendous respect and admiration

for people who could express themselves orally,

especially those who could recite poetry almost at the drop of a hat.

Some of the most important people in a tribe were the poets.

They sang of the glory of the tribe. They told the story of the tribe.

To the Bedouin, the word had a mystical importance.

Poets linked the tribe to its ancestors and celebrated values older than memory.

Poetry was the sinew that bound the Bedouin together,

celebrating their victories, lamenting their defeats.

The poems themselves, like the poems of Homer,

both celebrate this great heroic ethos

and yet intimate, in the deepest way,

the tragedy that, um...

this war... this ethos of constant tribal warfare brings to people.

Warfare and conflict were the grim realities of a dangerous time.

Muhammad's uncle taught him the skills he'd need to survive

in a world where even a prophet would wield a bow and arrow.

In a wilderness punished by the elements and bereft of water,

rivalry over a single well could provoke a blood feud for generations.

A real rivalry. Real battles, and sometimes quite bloody.

So the allegiance of individuals was to the family, immidiately,

and, a larger extent, to the tribe.

Without the tribe's protection, no one could endure.

Scattered across the peninsula were countless factions,

all embroiled in bitter struggles,

each defending its precious grazing lands, trade routes

and most importantly, its wells.

You have to understand that most of the lands are dry.

So, water is something that everyone always considers precious.

For those of us in climates that are more heavily watered

it's difficult to understand the depth and the centrality of the symbol of water

in societies that are desert

and in which it only rains once or twice a year

and in which a little water makes the difference between life and death.

Each clan had its own separate gods and totems.

To water and wind, fire and night.

They were kept in the caravan town of Mecca,

in a shrine of wood, stone and cloth.

It was called the Kaaba, the Arabic word for 'cube'.

Pre Islamic Arabs worshipped a number of spirits.

They were generally nature-oriented spirits sometimes associated with natural features.

Like trees or rocks or springs.

And the Kaaba in Mecca was one of a number of these sanctuaries

centred around a particular cluster of deities.

It was said the Hebrew patriarch Abraham himself

built the Kaaba centuries before

and that a sacred black stone it held within had fallen from the sky.

In these turbulent times, the Kaaba provided a rare place of peace.

Only here would the Bedouin submit to a temporary truce

before returning to their conflicts of the open sands.

There was this one place in the middle, around the Kaaba,

which was, from even pre Islamic times, a place of... a sacred enclosure

where all people had to put down their arms.

This, of course, facilitated trading

because it meant that you couldn't carry on your feuds, when you were doing your buying and selling

The spiritual and economic importance of the Kaaba and Mecca

are pretty hard to seperate as far as the pre-Islamic Arabs are concerned.

The Kaaba made Mecca a vibrant centre for trade.

Here were found Arabian incense, exotic perfumes and Indian spices,

Chinese silks and Egyptian linens.

But perhaps the greatest treasure to be found at Mecca

was the rich mixture of cultures.

They were people who came through town

who had all kinds of interesting experiences to relate of faraway places.

The local religion was mixed. There were Christians, there were Jews.

There were also the Arabs of the desert who followed an animist type of religion.

Muhammad's world was a centre of trade,

connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean,

linking the ageing empires of Byzantium and Persia

to the great bazaars of India and China.

Muhammad became a merchant.

In fact, he had a great flair for trade.

At the age of 25, while leading a caravan northward to Syria,

his talents caught the eye of the shipment's owner,

a wealth widow named Khadijah.

She was so taken with Muhammad, she proposed marriage.

Ah, Khadijah. Well, I think she was a mentor as well as a wife.

A very strong lady who had her own business

and Muhammad was helping her out.

So, it was a wonderful partnership and I'm sure he learned a lot from her.

He had a tremendous amount of contact

with merchants coming from different parts of the world,

passing through the Arabian peninsula.

I think he was a very intelligent man, very open minded,

and he was able to communicate with a great variety of people.

He must have had great charisma as well.

Muhammad had a way with people, and with resolving their disputes.

Once, when the Kaaba fell into disrepair,

the clan chieftains quarrelled over who would have the honour

of putting the sacred black stone back where it belonged.

Before violence could erupt, Muhammad proposed an equitable solution.

United in the effort, the four leaders shared the weight...

and the honour.

In gratitude, they invited Muhammad himself to replace the secret stone.

He became known as Al Amin, 'The Trusted One'.

There are all kinds of indications

that he was tremendously interested in religious questions.

This is obviously not something

that an ordinary person probably was interested in in those days.

He talked to... sages, Arab sages.

He talked to Jewish and Christian sages who lived in the area.

He used to go up into the rock hills around Mecca

and meditate, think about things.

And at some point he had this extraordinary vision

which is spoken about very evocatively and allusively.

In a cave above Mecca,

Muhammad had an experience that would be the defining moment of his life.

An angel was said to appear before him in the form of a man,

instructing him to recite in the name of God, the Almighty.

For Muhammad, it was an encounter as profound as it was deeply disturbing.

You get a sense of what it would be like

to be a normal person in society...

perhaps unusual in the sense of your intensity for things

like social justice and finding out what the meaning of life is,

but not being endowed with anything that would seem miraculous by your friends.

And all of a sudden having this voice come to you

and then come OUT of you as you speak it and recite it to other people.

And that is the beginning of the prophetic career of Muhammad.

The months to come would bring more revelations...

powerful words of a lyrical quality,

more beautiful than the most exquisite Arabic poetry.

Above all, Muhammad was to bear one message to his people,

a simple yet radical proclamation.

That there is only one God.

The central tenet of Islam is the oneness, the indivisible unity of God.

Not something that is simply... that one pays lip service to

but something that is absolutely the most important concept.

Divine unity is more than saying there's only one God

and there are no other deities.

It's only thinking about one thing.

So, to be thinking about possessions, to be thinking about status,

to be thinking about power,

are all intellectual idols.

The implications were staggering.

One God meant one people.

No more tribal divisions.

To the poor and unprotected, the prospect was revolutionary.

Seems to me that one of the most important things

in his early teaching that isn't often talked about

is the strong social justice message that he delivered.

In Mecca at the time

there was an increasing separation between the haves and the have nots.

He insisted that this was not to be and that we should share the wealth.

It was this social justice message that, i think,

really got him a hearing among many of the folks.

So coming with Islam it was a new order, a new way of life,

and it was a beautiful way of life

because everybody was equal... black, white, men, women, children.

So it had that type of universal appeal

which I think was the reason why Islam spread so rapidly.

Many were moved by Muhammad's message

as he began to speak out in the community.

It had the suppleness and symbolic depth of the great pre-Islamic poems

that had been created by this people

and that had given these people in Arabia

such an Extraordinary ear for verbal expression,

where verbal expression was the commanding cultural force.