Unlike many religions who believe their prophets were destined by their blood heritage to be priests and messengers of God, Muslims believe that Muhammad had no intention of becoming a priest or a prophet.  
  Instead, it is the traditional belief taught to Muslims for at least twelve hundred years that Muhammad was a shepherd by trade and illiterate.  
  The Mountain of Light where Gabriel came to Prophet Muhammad.  
  Muslims are taught and believe that at the age of 40, while engaged in a meditative retreat, Muhammad received his first revelation from God through the Angel Gabriel. It is believed that these revelations continued then for a further twenty-three years. It is the accumulation of these revelations that form the basis of the chapters (sura) that is the Qur'an.  
  The traditional story taught to all Muslims is that as soon as Muhammad began to recite the words he heard from Gabriel, and to preach the truth which God had revealed to him, he and his small group of followers suffered bitter persecution, which grew so fierce that in the year 622 God gave them the command to emigrate. This event, the Hijra, 'migration', in which they left Mecca for the city of Medina some 260 miles to the north, marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.
  
  In spite of the official position of Islam that Muhammad had no formal education and no training in warfare, strategy or government, within several years after establishing Medina as his new home, Muhammad had amassed the command of a powerful army and government structure and was able to return with force to Mecca and conquer his former enemies and establish a state ruled by the codes of law of Islam  
  Before the Prophet died at the age of 63, the greater part of Arabia was Muslim, and within a century of his death Islam had spread to Spain in the West and as far East as China.
  
  The Prophet's Mosque, Medina, the dome indicates the place where his house stood and where he is buried.  
     
     
     

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