Muslims consider all three to have been prophets of God and refer to them as Muslims. Thus Islam accepts Christianity and Judaism as true religions, but claims to supersede their truths with a new divine revelation. This religion has been called "Muhammadanism" in the past, and its adherents have been termed "Muhammadans." Neither term is acceptable to Muslims, however, because they do not view themselves as followers of Muhammad, or Muhammad as the founder of their religion; the founder is God, and the Qur'an, their scripture, is seen as the words of God, not the words of Muhammad. The word islám comes from the Semitic root slm, which means submission to a higher power or the peace that comes from that submission. Islám means "submission" in Arabic and refers specifically to submission of one's will to the will of God. "Muslim" means "one who submits" in Arabic. Thus, indeed, Jesus and Abraham were Muslims, for they submitted their wills to the will of God. Springing from the same slm root is the Arabic word salám, which means "peace." (Salám is a cognate to the Hebrew word shalom, which also means peace; Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages, and are closely related to each other.) Thus Islam is often referred to as the "religion of peace" as well.

From the noun "Islam," in English, is coined the English adjective "Islamic." It is important to learn how to use the words Islam, Islamic, and Muslim correctly; one cannot refer to the followers as "islams" or the religion as "Muslim." Islam is the most recent of the world's large religions, and consequently far more is known about the circumstances of its birth and the life of its Founder. With Abraham, Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, scholars are not sure of their years of birth or death, and in the case of Abraham and Buddha are not even certain about the century. The lives of these four figures are probably destined forever to remain mysterious because historical records about them are so unreliable. With Muhammad, however, we know his date of birth within a year or two, and we know the very day of his death. Numerous descriptions of his life and of his own words have come down to us, and most accounts seem fairly accurate. Thus biographies of Muhammad can and have been written.

The Life of Muhammad
In the year 570 Yemen attempted to invade and conquer Mecca and the area, but the invasion failed. Because the Yemenese army was equipped with elephants--the tanks of their day--the year of the invasion was remembered as "the year of the elephant." This was the year in which Muhammad was born. Muhammad was born into a small, weak clan of the Quraysh tribe. His father was named Abdu'lláh, which means "servant of God." The "ulláh" part of the name comes from "Alláh," the modern Arabic word for "god." It is not known where the word "Alláh" came from; possibly it is a contraction of al-iláh, "the god" (al means "the" in Arabic). At any rate, the name of Muhammad's father may be a clue for us, because it sounds like the name a anf--a monotheist--would have. It suggests that polytheism had been rejected by Muhammad's father or grandfather.

Whether this had any influence on Muhammad is not known, because Abdu'lláh died before his son was born. Unfortunately for Muhammad, his mother died when he was about six, leaving him an orphan. The boy was raised by his uncle (the father of 'Al), a caravan operator and merchant. Muhammad was raised a merchant himself, and as a young man was hired by a wealthy widow named Khadjah to run her caravans. At age 25 he married her; they had about six children. Their life together was happy; Muhammad married no other women until after Khadjah died. All accounts indicate that Muhammad did not want to become a prophet. He did not seek out mystical experiences, nor did he meditate or withdraw from life. He was, to put it in modern terms, a successful businessman and family man.

However, he did seek solitude from the troubles he found in Mecca, often in a cave on a nearby hillside. In 610 he began to have visions. In one of them the angel Gabriel came to him and said "You that are wrapped up in your vestment, arise, and give warning. Magnify your Lord, cleanse your garments, and keep away from all pollution." Muhammad fled from these experiences and hid himself in his cloak. Once he ran to Khadjah and hid himself in her robes. But Khadjah encouraged him to listen to his revelations, which often came to him again and again. Khadjah's cousin, Waraqah, who was a Christian, also encouraged him. Finally Muhammad realized that he was receiving messages from God. He began to take them to the people of Mecca, first privately, then more publicly. His message emphasized acceptance of the one, transcendent God; that Muhammad is His messenger; that idol worship and killing of girl babies was forbidden; and that one must prepare oneself for the Day of Judgment.

A few, listening to Muhammad, accepted him as a prophet and became Muslims. Most Meccans, however, looked at him as a crazy poet and made fun of Muhammad. Their taunts are preserved in the Qur'an itself. And when Muhammad began to preach against worship of the idols in the ka'bah many Meccans became outwardly hostile, since such preaching undermined the ajj, and therefore their livelihood. Muhammad also condemned the town's economic inequalities. After ten years the Muslim community grew slowly but tension increased to the point where the Muslims no longer could be protected by their clans against violence.

Without clan protection one was in grave danger, because in the absence of police and courts it was the fear of starting a blood feud that prevented people from killing each other. In one famous case a non-Muslim tried to force his Muslim slave, Bilál, a black man, to recant. Bilál was tied to the ground and heavy stones were piled on his chest in order to torture him. The torture ended when a Muslim purchased Bilál, then emancipated him. In 615 Muhammad had to send some of his followers to Abyssinia, where the Christian king offered them refuge, an act of generosity that Muslims remember to this day.

The Qur'an
Muhammad revealed the verses of the Qur'an over a thirty-two year period. Some verses were revealed more than once; the context of the revelation of each verse has been recorded and scrutinized carefully, to understand its impact on the verse's meaning. Sometimes later verses were revealed to supersede earlier ones. All of them were memorized by Muhammad's followers; some were written down in the lifetime of the Prophet, on leather, palm bark, the shoulderblades of sheep, papyrus, parchment, and whatever material was available. When Muhammad settled in Medina He employed secretaries to write down revelation as it occurred; this was important because some of the revelations concerned matters of legislation. It is also possible that Muhammad organized some of the revelation into surihs (chapters) and determined the order of some of the surihs. Probably between the years 650 and 656 the Caliph 'Uthman commissioned Zayd ibn-Thabit to gather the various texts together and assemble an official Qur'an. One reason for this was the death of many of the companions of the Prophet, some in battle. Short passages probably were sometimes added to existing surihs, so that the entire revelation could be included. Points that distinguish the different consonants from each other in the Arabic alphabet were added and standardized, to create an official text. The 114 surihs were arranged usually by length, longest to shortest, with no effort to rearrange material topically. As a result, chapters often suddenly jump from one subject to another. Finally, previous collections were destroyed, so that they would not weaken the authority of the official text and cause disunity in the community. In spite of the effort considerable information on variant readings, and even variant arrangements of the surihs, have survived; but the information reveals that no great variation in the content of the Qur'an existed. Another fifty years passed before vowel points were added to the Qur'anic text, and its content attained final, modern form.

It is the consensus of the vast majority of modern western Islamic scholars that the text of the Qur'an is an accurate compilation of the revelation that Muhammad claimed to receive. Thus the Qur'an does not suffer from the problems that textual criticism has detected in the Bible. While we cannot be certain of words uttered by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament, we can be certain of words uttered by Muhammad and recorded in the Qur'an. Muslims understand the Qur'an to be the literal word of God, revealed to humanity through Muhammad, but not composed by Muhammad; rather, most Muslims believe the Qur'an was eternal and uncreated, existing in the mind of God since before the world began. One consequence is that Muslims reject translation of the Qur'an, arguing that the word of God cannot be translated without interpretation, and no human can do the translation justice; thus the Qur'an should only be read in the original. For a thousand years Muslims have produced interlinear translations of the Qur'an into Persian, Turkish, and other languages, "translations" where the Arabic verse is given first, then a word-by-word translation into the vernacular, sometimes accompanied by a second, smooth translation into the vernacular as well. The purpose of such translations, however, was to assist the student to learn the Arabic.

Today a few Muslims have translated the Qur'an into English, but Muslims do not consider the result to be the Qur'an, merely an interpretation of it. Titles of such works make this clear, such as Muhammad M. Pickthall's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an and A. J. Arberry's The Koran Interpreted.Because of the desire to avoid interpretation, Qur'an translations tend to be wooden and literal, making the Qur'an a difficult work to read in English. To give a few examples: in a common translation one Qur'anic passage has the refrain "which of your Lord's bounties will you and you deny?" The "you and you" seems strange and off-putting in English; but the "you" is in the dual form in Arabic, and refers to two distinct groups: humans, and jinn (spirits). A more literary, stylistic translation might read "which of your Lord's bounties will ye deny?", and this is how Shoghi Effendi translated the verse (see Bahá'í Prayers, 106). This reads better and sounds more biblical, and therefore more familiar to a western audience; but it reduces the meaning of the Qur'an slightly, something Muslims reject.

Some Muslim translators go so far as to leave many untranslated words like Allah (God), injl (gospel), Musa (Moses), Ibrahm (Abraham), 'Isa (Jesus), and Dawad (David); such an approach makes the Qur'an very hard to read for the layperson! Study of the Qur'an is supposed to be a central activity in the life of each Muslim. Muslims gather to chant the Qur'an or hear it chanted; chanters have a status and prestige in the Muslim world that is similar to the status of opera singers in the west. To some extent, Christian devotion to and use of the Bible is similar; but the Bible is not held in equal veneration by all Christians, some of whom see it as a partially or largely human product. Furthermore, the Bible is not from one author, and contains a variety of theological viewpoints. In a sense, dialogue and pluralism are built into the Bible. They are not built into the Qur'an, which had a single, historical source.