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See also: Wahy, Origin and development of the Qur'an, Hijra (Islam), and Succession to Muhammad


According too the traditionalist view, the Qur'an began with revelations on Muhammad's divine revelations in AD 610. The verses of the Quran were written down and memorized during his life. Makkah was conquered by the Muslims in the year AD 630. In 628 the Makkan tribe of Quraish and the Muslim community in Madina had signed a truce called the Treaty of Hudaybiyya beginning a ten-year period of peace, which was broken when the Quraish and their allies, the tribe of 'Bakr', attacked the tribe of 'Khuza'ah', who were allies of the Muslims. Prophet Muhammad died in June 632. The Battle of Yamama was fought in December of the same year, between the forces of the Rashidun Caliph Abu Bakr and Musailima.



Andrey Korotayev and his colleagues suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socioecological crisis whose model is specified by Korotayev and his colleagues through the study of climatological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. They find that most sociopolitical systems of the Arabs reacted to the socioecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supratribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of the most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms (reflected in Ayyam al-`Arab tradition) led to the elaboration of some definite "antiroyal" freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the 7th century a tribe which would recognize themselves as subjects of some terrestrial supratribal political authority, a "king", risked to lose its honour. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the "celestial" one. At the meantime the early 7th century evidences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist "Rahmanist" tradition which produced "the Arabian prophetic movement". The Monotheist "Rahmanist" prophets appear to have represented a supratribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to explain to a certain extent those prophets' political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad). (Andrey Korotayev, Vladimir Klimenko, and Dmitry Proussakov. Origins of Islam: Political-Anthropological and Environmental Context. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 53/3–4 (1999): 243–276). v