Who was Mohammed?
Mohammed was born in the Arab trading and pilgrimage city of Mecca, in the Arabian peninsula, between 570 and 580 AD. His parents were part of a family of traders, not among the ruling families of Mecca, but certainly not poor either. Mohammed himself however grew up poor, because both his parents died when he was still very young. Probably his grandfather brought him up. When he grew up, Mohammed married a wealthy widow named Khadija, whose first husband had been a trader, and so he became well-off again. Probably he became a trader himself. When Mohammed was almost forty, he said he had heard an angel from God speaking to him for the first time (compare the story of Moses). The angel, Gabriel, told Mohammed that there was only one God, that it was wicked to worship idols (statues and images of gods), and that the end of the world was coming soon, with the Last Judgment. All of these ideas were already common in Mecca, where there were some Christians and many Jews, and presumably als
