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Episode 116, The Life of Muhammad Part 3, Conquest. In this program, we will explore the final five years of

Muhammad's life from April of 627 until June of 632. During these five years, on the heels of

of his victory at the Battle of the Trench, Muhammad set his sights on Mecca and further afield

still, and the world of the Arabian Peninsula was transformed forever. And while Muhammad himself did

not live to see Islam expand beyond the bounds of Arabia, his companions and close kin, Abu Bakr,

Omar, Uthman, and Ali, a single generation after the

prophet's death, had spread the religion from modern-day Libya to Pakistan, and from Yemen to

Azerbaijan, as they engaged with and defeated the armies of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires.

In the previous two episodes, we learned about

how Muhammad went from being an orphan and laborer in the Hijaz caravan circuit to being a respected

trading agent, a husband and father, a reluctant recipient of divine revelations, and then a prophet,

a polarizing preacher, an outlaw, and after the Hizra of 622, the leader of an exiled community, a legislator, and a general.

His story is a long and complex one, often made more so by the massive quantity of writings set down about him, especially

during the eight hundreds. Although the source materials we have on Muhammad are complex,

and though they were set down centuries after he lived, they demonstrate two overarching facts about the prophet of Islam.

Muhammad was a person of considerable intelligence and will.

And he saw the tribal power blocks into which Arabia had been organized since time immemorial

and imagined a different future for the peninsula and for the world.

For this episode, as with the previous two, our source materials are a number

of different biographies, some modern and academic, and others from the early medieval period,

...