It's always wise I think to begin anything about Islam with the words
In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
What i'm proposing here is a straight rip off of a bloke called N. J Dawood.
Mohammed was born in around 570 AD a few months after his biological father died. His biological mother died in 576 and so as an orphan - having been brought up by his grandfather and then his uncle - he married a rich widow of 40 when he was 25.
He was about 40 years old when he too to putting his head under a blanket - well something like that.His followers got turfed out of their country around five years later.
Now what a lot of people may not know is that it was the Angel Gabriel who came to him in a dream or trance and ordered him to recite.
There was a lot of reciting and there were people in those days called 'professional remembrancers' these were not scribes but people who learned things 'off by heart' for a fee.
So Mohammed starts reciting and people start trying to remember what he says.
After a while they get a bit fed up with this and start writing what they remember of what he had said on leaves and rocks and things.
Eventually - around 644-656, the Caliphate of Othman - they get written down on sheets of an early version of paper.
The thing is, they get 'arranged' in an unconventional way. They are arranged with the longest books or passages first, grading off to the shortest last. Also, some of the books are not written down all at the same time.
In other words, The Koran starts out as a stream of utterances and is in flux for many years and is then fixed by an editor at a later time.
Meanwhile... 615 they off to Ethiopia.
His wife dies in 619 - Khadija.
620 the 'Night Journey' from Mecca to Jerusalem.
622 The Hijra (Flight or Migration) to Medina The beginning of the Muslim Age.
Basically, for the next ten years Mohamed and his Moslems are at war with the Jews and then he dies on 8th June 632.
So his recitations do not begin to be written into a book - The Koran.
The thing is. This process is - for Muslims - a process akin to the Ten Commandments.
Now Moses had written down his Ten Commandments of tablets of stone but he got mad and smashed them.
The Moslems have this belief that their tablets of stone are preserved in heaven and that Mohammed was under the guidance of the Angel Gabriel reciting from those tablets in heaven when he dictated the words of the Koran.
So, what is in the Koran is a transcription of the laws inscribed in heaven. God would not allow error and so it is the infallible word of God.
Essentially, the original Moslems wee the tribe of Quresh living around Mecca and they - in particular Mohammed - took to the ideas of the neighbouring tribe - the Jews - and adapted their religion for themselves.
In fact Islam is a reaction against Christianity but at the time Mohammed was fighting Jews not Christians.
Long before mohammed's call, Arabian paganism was showing signs of decay. At the Ka'b the Meccans worshipped not only Allah, the supreme Semitic God, but also a number of female deities whom they regarded as the daughters of Allah.
So it's one of those things where you see the point of a new idea but you don't want to be seen as a copy cat and so you make much a slight differences of emphasis.
These Arab tribes were all working there way from a many Gods situation to a one God and many Saints situation as in the modern Roman Church.
It can't be denied that Mohammed was the leader of a group at war but it isn't clear how central the fighting was to the religion that was developing and how far it was a separate tribal thing.
I haven't researched the extent to which Mohammed wanted people who were not of the Tribe of Quraysh to become Moslems but it was the Roman Empire which saw the possibilities of a Catholic Church - one anybody could belong to so long as they signed up.
In 627 Mohammed and his followers raided The Jewish Tribe of Qurayza and beheaded 800 men (only one Jew abjuring his religion to save his life and all the women and children sold as salves.
So it looks like Mohammed was trying to set up an Arab reformation, an Arab Catholic Church to rival the Roman Catholic Church and perhaps it is only in the current era that this Arab Catholic Church has had sufficient resources - oil money - to make a worldwide impact.
Both Roman Catholicism and Arab Catholicism borrow deeply from the Semitic - Jewish - religion, and they make their distinction by the Roams believing Jesus to be the Only begotten Son of God and the Moslems believing him to be purely a man but the first Pope.This mirrors the distinction between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion where the former believe that the sacrament becomes the body and blood of Christ but the latter believe it merely symbolises the body and blood of Christ.