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Islamic tradition portrays Muhammad, long before the angel Gabriel appeared to him and began giving him the Qur’an, as aware that a great destiny awaited him.

As a young man, according to some Islamic traditions, he had a sense of the tremendous future that awaited him. He is portrayedas declining to take up farming with the words, “I have been raised for jihad and I am not raised for tillage.” Much later, he would likewise refrain from instructing his followers to take up farming or trading or any other mundane profession. Instead, he ordered them to raid the caravans of the Quraysh, the pagan Arab tribe from which Muhammad came, but which rejected his claim to be a prophet.

The chain of events that would make him the leader and inspiration of all jihads was set in motion when he met a distant cousin, Khadija bint Khuwaylid, whom his first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, calls “a merchant woman of dignity and wealth.” Ibn Ishaq, who died around 760, wrote his life of Muhammad over one hundred years after Muhammad is supposed to have died. Ibn Ishaq’s work is lost, however, surviving only in a large section of it that one of his students, Ibn Hisham, reproduced early in the ninth century, with an unknowable number of revisions.

Without Khadija, Muhammad might never have become a prophet at all. Fifteen years older than Muhammad, she was a woman of significant accomplishment when they met. She hired him as a traveling salesman to go to Syria and trade her goods, sending with him a slave boy named Maysara. On their way back to Mecca, in the scorching heat, Maysara saw two angels shielding Muhammad. In Mecca, Maysara told Khadija what he had seen. Khadija was also impressed that Muhammad had doubled her wealth on his journey. She even made so bold as to propose marriage, although she was forty and Muhammad just twenty-five.

Traces of Muhammad’s career as a tradesman appear in the Qur’an, which admonishes the unbelievers in language borrowed from the world of commerce: “And they say, If we were to follow the guidance with you, we would be torn out of our land. Have we not established for them a sure sanctuary, to which the produce of all things is brought, a provision from our presence? But most of them do not know.” (28:57) Indeed, such unbelievers “are the ones who buy error at the price of guidance, so their business does not prosper, and they are not guided.” (2:16)

Khadija had a cousin, Waraqa bin Naufal bin Asad bin ‘Abdul-‘Uzza bin Qusai, who was a convert to Christianity from Judaism, a priest who had “studied the scriptures that a prophet would arise among this people.” Khadija told him about Maysara’s vision and Waraqa was deeply moved: “If this is true, Khadija,” said Waraqa, “verily Muhammad is the Prophet of this people. I knew that a prophet of this people was to be expected. His time has come.”

Waraqa would later play a vital role in Muhammad’s early prophetic career, but not until fifteen years later — after, according to Islamic tradition, numerous pagan soothsayers, Jewish rabbis, and Christian monks perceived Muhammad’s prophetic status. According to an early Muslim, Asim bin Umar bin Qatada, in the years before the beginning of Muhammad’s ministry, the Jews in the area used to say to the Arabs: “The time of a prophet who is to be sent has now come. We will kill you with his aid.” But when Muhammad actually began preaching, Asim continued, “We believed in him but they denied him.” The Qur’an laments their perversity: “And when there comes to them a book from Allah, confirming the one in their possession, although before that they were asking for a great victory over those who disbelieved, and when there comes to them what they know, they disbelieve in it. The curse of Allah is on unbelievers.” (2:89)

The repercussions of this rejection would reverberate to our own time. Many Muslims to this day see the Jews through the prism of the Qur’an’s relentless and repeated condemnations of them. To say this makes a lasting peace unlikely would be an irresponsible understatement.