Life of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: A Brief History and Timeline

Muhammad ﷺ was orphaned before he could remember his father and lost his mother at six. By 40 he was running a trade business built on his wife’s investment, with a reputation across Mecca for never lying. Then, in a cave outside the city, he received the first words of the Quran, and the next 23 years reshaped Arabia. Here’s that timeline, event by event.

Before the Revelation: Muhammad’s Early Life (570–610 CE)

He was born in Mecca in 570 CE, into the Quraysh tribe. His father, Abdullah, died before he was born. His mother, Amina, died when he was six. His grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, took him in and died two years later. It was his uncle, Abu Talib, who raised him from age eight.

He worked. As a boy he herded sheep for other families in Mecca. As a young man he joined trading caravans north to Syria. What people noticed was not ambition but reliability, and he became known across the city as Al-Amin, “the trustworthy,” a title people gave him, not one he claimed.

At 25, a wealthy businesswoman named Khadijah hired him to run a trade caravan, then proposed marriage. She was 15 years his senior and already twice widowed. She financed the caravans; he ran them. It was a partnership before it was anything else, and it lasted 25 years until her death.

The First Revelation: The Cave of Hira (610 CE)

At 40, Muhammad had a habit of retreating to a cave on Mount Hira outside Mecca to think. In Ramadan of that year, the angel Jibril came to him there with a single command:

“Recite in the name of your Lord who created — created man from a clinging substance. Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous — who taught by the pen — taught man that which he knew not.” [Quran 96:1–5]

Muhammad, who by his own account could not read, ran home shaking. Khadijah wrapped him in a blanket and, when he’d calmed down, took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Christian scholar familiar with earlier scripture. Waraqah told him this was the same angel sent to Moses, and that he was now a prophet.

Persecution in Mecca and the Hijra to Medina (610–622 CE)

For the next decade, the message stayed mostly private, then public, then dangerous. Mecca’s leaders profited from the pilgrimage trade built around its idols; a call to worship one God threatened that economy directly. Early converts who had no tribal protection paid for it. Bilal ibn Rabah, an enslaved Abyssinian, was tortured in the open street for refusing to renounce Islam.

In 619 CE, Khadijah and Abu Talib both died within weeks of each other, in what Muslims call Aam al-Huzn, the Year of Sorrow. Without his uncle’s protection, Muhammad lost his standing in Mecca just as the threats against him grew serious.

In 622 CE he left Mecca for Medina with his companion Abu Bakr, hiding for three days in a cave while search parties looked for them.

“If you do not aid the Prophet — Allah has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out, as one of two, when they were in the cave and he said to his companion, ‘Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us.’” [Quran 9:40]

This migration, the Hijra, is the event the Islamic calendar counts from. Not the birth. Not the first revelation. The move to Medina, where a Muslim community could exist as a community for the first time.

Building the First Muslim Community in Medina

In Medina, Muhammad drafted what’s usually called the Constitution of Medina: an agreement between the Muslim migrants (Muhajirun), the Medinan converts who took them in (Ansar), and the city’s Jewish tribes, setting out mutual defence and freedom of religious practice. He also paired every migrant with a Medinan household, turning strangers with nothing into brothers with somewhere to live.

Key Battles and Turning Points

Badr, 624 CE. Vastly outnumbered (roughly 300 Muslims against a Meccan force three times that size), the Muslims won decisively. The Quran calls it out by name:

“And already had Allah given you victory at Badr while you were few in number. Then fear Allah; perhaps you will be grateful.” [Quran 3:123]

Uhud, 625 CE. The reverse lesson. A group of archers left their post early, chasing what looked like a won battle, and the Meccan cavalry swept round behind the Muslim line. Muhammad was wounded. It’s the battle Muslim tradition points to when it teaches that following orders matters more than winning feels.

Hudaybiyyah, 628 CE. Muhammad led over a thousand pilgrims toward Mecca unarmed, intending umrah. Meccan leaders blocked them, and the two sides signed a ten-year truce instead: one that looked, on paper, like a Muslim concession. The Quran called it the opposite:

“Indeed, We have given you a clear conquest.” [Quran 48:1]

The truce held for two years and let the message spread without fighting; more people entered Islam in that window than in the entire previous decade of war.

The conquest of Mecca, 630 CE. When a Meccan-allied tribe broke the truce, Muhammad marched on the city with 10,000 men and took it without a battle. He declared a general amnesty for a city that had exiled and fought him for eight years, and had the idols cleared from the Kaaba.

The Farewell Sermon and Final Years (631–632 CE)

In 632 CE, Muhammad led what would be his only and final Hajj, now known as the Farewell Pilgrimage. In his sermon at Arafat, delivered to over 100,000 people, he set out the terms he wanted to outlast him: an end to blood feuds and pre-Islamic usury, property and inheritance rights he told men to honour toward women, and a line that closed off tribal and racial hierarchy. No Arab is superior to a non-Arab, no white to black, except by conscious piety.

He died in Medina two to three months later, in his wife Aisha’s home, at around 62 or 63 years old.

Why the Order of Events Matters

None of this happened in the order comfort would suggest. Loss came before Medina: the Year of Sorrow, then the cave, then thirteen years of building something before it looked like it was working. The Hijra isn’t marked as the start of the Islamic calendar because it’s the most dramatic scene in the story. It’s marked because it’s the moment “Islam” stopped being one man’s message and became a community that could survive its founder.

For the fuller picture of what shaped him before any of this, his character, his marriages, the forty years before prophethood, see His Character and Muhammed’s First 40 Years of Life. For how these events connect to what Muslims believe and practise today, start with What Is Islam?

Frequently asked questions

When was Prophet Muhammad born? In 570 CE in Mecca, into the Quraysh tribe. He was orphaned of both parents by age six.

How old was Muhammad when he received the first revelation? 40. It happened in the Cave of Hira, outside Mecca, in the month of Ramadan (Quran 96:1–5).

What is the Hijra and why does the Islamic calendar start there? The Hijra is the 622 CE migration of Muhammad and his companion Abu Bakr from Mecca to Medina (Quran 9:40). The Islamic calendar counts from it because it marks the start of the first functioning Muslim community, not because it was his most dramatic moment.

What happened at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah? In 628 CE, Muhammad and over a thousand pilgrims were blocked from entering Mecca and signed a ten-year truce instead. The Quran describes it as “a clear conquest” (48:1). The two years of peace that followed brought in more converts than the previous decade of conflict.

When did Prophet Muhammad die? In 632 CE in Medina, a few months after delivering his Farewell Sermon at Arafat during his only Hajj.

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