When Muhammad entered Mecca and entered the shrine and destroyed the idols of the shrine, this is of great cultural and symbolic importance in Islam. By breaking the idols, he was breaking apart the tribal system in which each tribe really had its own independent deity. This was shocking to the Bedouin. This was saying the Gods of our fathers are being destroyed. In some sense you are saying that our fathers themselves were deluded. How can you say this in a tradition in which relationships to one’s father and tribe were primary? So this act of iconoclasm then is seen as an act of prophetic violence that has just as much importance in Islamic tradition as Moses’s breaking of the tablets when he saw the idolatry at Mount Sinai or Jesus’s casting the money-sellers out of the temple.

 

The destruction of the idols was a new beginning, a breaking from the past and the creation of a powerful new force. Mecca was just the beginning. One after another the tribes of a nation were summoned to the fold and united under the banner of Islam. A world-wide community of faith was begun, born in an extraordinary alignment of history, personality and conviction.

 

What Muhammad did was to bring a sense of solidarity, a sense of mission and he united all the separate segments within the peninsula, from then on moved eastward, westward, northward, southward.

 

The Muslims turned to the north, swept into present-day Lebanon and Syria. They continued west into Egypt and quickly across North Africa, fortifying the coastline of the Mediterranean. Only the seas stopped them.

 

Its growth was so explosive from 622, the year one of the Islamic calendar. Within 50 years, people whose father had been camel herders were now governing one of the major empires in world history. Within 200 years, it extended from Spain to China.

 

The Muslims absorbed the Sasanian Empire of Iran and two thirds of the Christian Byzantine Empire.