To understand the life of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, it helps to begin with the world he was born into.

Sixth-century Arabia was a peninsula of desert and dry hill country, with no central government and no single ruling power. Its people lived mostly as tribes, some moving with their herds, others settled around oases and trading towns. Honour, lineage and loyalty to one's tribe governed daily life far more than any written law. A wrong done to one member was answered by the whole tribe. That kept a rough kind of order, but it also fed long cycles of conflict.

Makkah stood at the centre of this world for a different reason: trade and pilgrimage. It sat on a route linking Yemen in the south to Syria in the north, and grew wealthy on the caravans passing through. The Qur'an later refers to the familiar “journey of winter and summer” of the Quraysh, in Surah Quraysh. At the heart of the city stood the Ka'bah, already regarded across Arabia as an ancient sacred shrine, traditionally linked to Ibrahim and Isma'il. The Prophet's own tribe, the Quraysh, held the prestige of guarding it and hosting the pilgrims who came each year.

Religiously, Arabia at this time was overwhelmingly polytheistic. Idols, reportedly numbering in the hundreds, stood in and around the Ka'bah itself, each associated with different tribes. Alongside this majority, a small number of people known as the Hunafa had already rejected idol worship on their own, seeking the older monotheism associated with Ibrahim, without yet having any revealed scripture to follow. There were also Jewish communities, most significantly in Yathrib, later called Madinah, and in Khaybar, and Christian communities in places such as Najran in the south. So the idea of one God was not unknown in Arabia, even if it was not what most people in Makkah practised.

This society had real strengths: hospitality, courage, eloquence, and strong bonds of loyalty. It also had real harms, including tribal warfare and, as the Qur'an later condemned, the burying alive of infant daughters by some.

It is against this background that the message the Prophet would carry, the oneness of God, and the equal worth of every person regardless of tribe, wealth or status, was such a fundamental challenge to the world around him.