Born in Mecca 570 A.D., Muhammad was a Semite, a race comprized of Jews, Babylonians and Ishmaelites or Arabs. Muhammad has been described as a small man with piercing bloodshot eyes who suffered from epilepsy. He used to paint his eyelashes with kohl and antimony and was fond of loud coloured linen clothes. He was always afraid of noise, thunder, traffic, and war.
His thoughts dwelled mostly on the circumstances of his village which was solely governed by "vendetta". Caravans were the only source of revenue and because of bandits, they were unreliable. Somehow, he needed to turn Mecca into a religious focal point for tourism. He understood the need to abolish the old gods for one in order to attract the wealthy Jews and Christians to Mecca which was founded by Abraham. The idea of one Supreme God was known to the contemporaries of Muhammad and it is an indisputable fact that most of the ceremonies connected with the Muhammadan pilgrimage, which Muhammad pretended had been taught him by revelation, were already in existence long before his time, and were regularly performed by the idolatrous Arabs.
Muhammad garnered information on Judaism and Christianity from the confused recollections of his servant and friend, Zaid, who had been a slave to the Christians. He was struck by the idea of a Messiah. The Day of Judgement inspired Sura 101 "A RAGING FIRE". Examples of Muhammad's miscomprehensions are the Qu'ran's telling that Jews who broke the Sabbath were suddenly changed into red apes; or, that Ezra was raised from the dead after a hundred years still sitting on his ass - it goes on and on.
At 25, Muhammad first married the 40 year old rich and twice widowed Khadija who read to him the former scriptures and knew the stories of the prophets."
Muhammad had heard from the Jews the fable of the burial of Abel as related in the Rabbinical books, and thinking it derived from the scriptures, repeated it with slight alterations, as though revealed to him from heaven as he did with many other Jewish legends. Both the Jews and Sabians observed a month's fast in the year just like Ramadhan.
The famous Biblical phrase "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24) is copied as "To those who reject Our Signs and treat them with arrogance, no opening will there be of the gates of heaven, nor will they enter the Garden, until the camel can pass through the eye of the needle: Such is Our reward for those in sin." (Qur'an 7:40)
Also, any comparison of the Zoroastrian cosmogony with the stories of heaven and hell, death and judgment, which now adorn the pages of the Qur'an, will make it undeniably clear that Muhammad learned them from the many Persians with whom he had intercourse, and then gave them out to the ignorant Arabs in his own eloquent language as a revelation from heaven.
So once he had amassed his new religion, he was ready to announce the changed management of Mecca to the Jews and Christians.
His first followers have all become saints. They were slaves, boys and women. When his followers were small and poor, it was the Bene-Nadir, the Bene-Amar and the rest of the rich, warlike Hebrews of Medina who gave Muhammad refuge. Twelve of them actually took the oath of blood allegiance with the Prophet - the Pledge of Akaba.
On deciding his candidacy to the Messiahship, the Davidists won out against, which angered Muhammad; so that after performing two prostrations towards Jerusalem at the Mosque of Two Kiblas, near Medina, he swung around to the direction of Mecca. This was the parting of the ways of Judaism and Islam. Since bells were Christian and the ram's horn, Jewish, he commissioned Bilal, the African, to chant the first muezzin at dawn from atop the minaret.
Muhammad became powerful in Medina becoming more and more greedy and cruel, marauding caravans from Mecca; then, neighbouring Jewish settlements. Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bekr whom Muhammad married when she was 6 and with whom he consumated that marriage when she was 9, said of Muhammad in her old age "the prophet liked three things most, women, scent, and eating, but mostly women". With Khadija gone, he usually added to his harem the widows of his followers. He once took a beautiful young Jewess, Zeinab, who prepared a meat dish filled with poison. Muhammad spat it out after a few bites but complained he never fully recovered which explains the common charge against the Jews of having martyred him.
Finally, Muhammad conquered Mecca and did so easily. As potentate he had a seal made inscribed "Muhammad, the Apostle of God" for all his correspondence. After his death, his followers conquered Damascus, Egypt, and Persia. A hundred years later they would have reached England had it not been for the cavalry of Charles the Hammer. All this based upon a mass of incoherent writings, cursings, couplets, under the weight of new laws most probably inspired by the domestic bickerings from his harem. Yet, let's recapitulate what Muhammad had invented: a super-tribal unity; an arithmetical theology to replace the complicated and discredited tribal gods; a motive, Paradise; a driving fear, Hell; prayers; an ethic which has all the elements men demand; and, he removed the fear of death that up till then cowered the Arabian warrior sharpening his instinct for plunder by giving it a duty.