At the birth of the prophet Muhammad (c. 570) the Middle East was divided between two great empires: to the West, the Byzantine, which ruled Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt and to the East, the Sassanid, which ruled Iraq and Iran. The religions of the two empires – Christian for the Byzantine and Zoroastrianism for the Sassanid – were monotheistic and transcendental. In addition, Jewish communities of various kinds were found throughout the area. These two empires, however, were agrarian and citied whereas Mecca in the Arabian peninsula, where Muhammad was born, was pastoral, nomadic, and pagan, although open to influences from both imperial cultures.

In the sixth century of the first millennium the migratory Bedouins of the Arabian peninsula raised camels and lived in tight-knit patriarchal families and clans that shared pastures and the duties of security. Individual clans were headed by chiefs but there were no larger loyalties binding the several groups – all were independent and competitive. At this time the peninsula was unusually free of outside political and military influences, and the principal unifying force for the tribes and clans was the city of Mecca. A commercial and religious centre whose shrine (the Ka‘ba) was the repository for numerous gods and idols, Mecca attracted a great many people during its annual pilgrimage. At that time a peninsula-wide truce was observed, and trade and arbitration took place alongside worship. The Quraysh, the chief merchant clan of the city, were part of an extensive trading network, carrying spices, cloth, drugs, and slaves from Africa and the Far East to the towns and cities of Syria and Iraq and beyond. By the middle of the sixth century Mecca had become one of the important caravan cities of the region.

Among the gods of the Ka‘ba there was no overall hierarchy or structure. Rather, for the Arabs of the peninsula the plurality of gods reflected a fragmented view of the world – of man, society, and the cosmos as a whole. Christianity and Judaism, on the other hand, monotheistic religions which had penetrated Mecca and the surrounding area, had an entirely different philosophy. These religions preached a single god who had created a moral universe in which human beings were individually responsible for their actions.