Muhammad was born at Mecca.  Meccans claimed they had descended from Abraham through Ishmael.  The tradition of the Meccans said their temple, the Ka'bah, had been built by Abraham for the worship of the One God. it was called the House of Allah.  (In Sanskrit Kha is one of the names of Brahma, whom many have noted is the Hindu model for Abraham.)  In the temple were icons that some called "daughters of Allah and intercessors," but others called them idols. Some felt disgust toward the icons, seeing them as idolatrous. Some felt a longing for what they regarded as the true tradition of Abraham. These few were known as the Hunafa, Hunafa originally meant "those who turn away." Muhammad was well known to be honest in his dealings with others. He was married 26 years to Khadijah, an older woman for whom he had conducted business.

  In the fortieth year of Muhammad's life Gabriel spoke to Muhammad and said "Read" twice and twice Muhammad replied "I cannot read." The third time the angel said to read, Muhammad replied "What can I read?" And Gabriel replied

"Read: In the name of thy Lord who createth,
Createth man from a clot.
"Read: And it is thy Lord the Most Bountiful
"Who teacheth by the pen,
Teacheth man that which he knew not."

   Therefore the Sacred Book of Muslims is called Al-Quran, "The Reading," the "Reading of the man who knew not how to read."

   For the first three years of his mission, Muhammad preached only to his family members and to his friends. His first convert was Khadijah, his wife, and his second was Ali, his first cousin.  At the end of his third year he received the command to "arise and warn," so then he began to preach in public.
 

   Early biographers tell how Khadijah "tried the spirit." This is significant, because it shows that Muhammad and his revelations were "tested" even by his own wife, and found to be true.  Were Sunnis to "try the spirit" or even to study the Quran in an objective manner, taking Surah 6 Verse 38, seriously as well as the Quran's praise of the vegetarian Sabeans, and naming the true prophet Hud [a term related with Hindustan in ancient Hebrew (Abraham came from the kingdom of Oude in India)] they would, if they were logical, surely convert to the Shia way.  Similarly, so would all sincere objective Jews and Christians (who are not totally addicted to the false teachings of their orthodoxies) change their views if they truly studied objectively the documents relating to their origins.
 

    Muhammad retreated for a month of every year to a cave in the desert for meditation. His place of refuge was called Hira, a desert hill not far from Mecca. And his chosen month was Ramadan, the month of heat, named after?...Rama, of course.  And the desert hill, Hira, may well be the Arabic version of Hara, meaning mountain or hill in Hebrew.  Hara is the name of Shiva as the Destroyer.  Both Rama and Shiva are regarded as vegetarians by mainstream Hindus.  Rama is considered by some to be an incarnation of Vishnu or Krishna.  And Shiva was the renunciate who lived in the wilderness.  Muhammad's habits were not that of a carnivore. Retreating and fasting are more typical of teachers in vegetarian cultures, such as the Hindu, Buddhist, Pythagorean, and the early Maya cultures following Quetzalcoatl who forbid all bloodshed.  It was known that Muhammad visited and lived in Sabean vegetarian wilderness communities.  The fact that Muhammad's preferred diet was admittedly vegetarian, that he warned his followers in hadiths, statements on Islam outside of the Quran, about the health danger of eating flesh, which he said was hard on the body, that the person excluded by force from carrying on the lineage of Muhammad was Ali, his vegetarian cousin, makes the facts rather obvious.  However, orthodox Sunnis, like orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians, do not represent purity of religion which logically follows an all-compassionate Deity, but a businessmen's cult, which created a Quran as well as numerous hadiths which support the orthodox Sunni party line.

    Even today, the fasting during the day by Muslims is a drastic compromise of the notion itself of fasting.  Whereas Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad fasted both day and night from solid food, Muslims fast only during the day and eat at night.  The compromise reminds us of  John the 23rd's pronouncement that Roman Catholics could now eat any kind of flesh on Fridays. Though the world in general welcomed John the 23rd's social policies, which made the Roman Catholic church somewhat more approachable to those who detested its elitism, its authoritarianism, John's policy towards eating all animals was not in the best interests of either the animals of creation nor did it promote the health of the Roman Catholics over whom he governed.  As stated elsewhere, carnivorism is a lose/lose situation: the animals lose their lives; humans lose their health by eating the flesh of those animals.

   Whereas it is recorded by Epiphanius in his Panarion that the earliest followers of Jesus, the Ebionites, ate no flesh at all and condemned the practice as well as the tradition of animal sacrifices, many of the earliest Roman Catholics, even those who were carnivorous, still fasted from flesh several times a week.  They no doubt logically put together the notion that Jesus' mission as stated in "Epistle to the Hebrews" was to abolish the animal sacrifices with Jesus' cleansing of the temple of the animals who were to be sacrificed, and by fasting from flesh two or three times a week, gave Jesus' animal liberation actions a token respect.   But we may logically conclude that the earliest Jews following the Vegetarian Covenant; Jesus and his earliest followers who condemned the animal sacrifices; and Muhammad and his earliest followers, were not into such compromises.  But, as in the histories of Judaism and Christianity businessmen took over Islam pretty much immediately after Muhammad's death, squelching the claim that the vegetarian Ali was the logical heir to Muhammad's authority, and changing the scriptures of the Quran to sanction animal sacrifices, slavery and bigotry towards both women and homosexuals.

    According to the Sunni version of history, all surahs in the Quran had been written down, and there were many Muslims who had committed the entire Quran to memory.  During the time of the Caliphate of Abu Bakr, who is considered by the Shias to be one of the heretics breaking away from the original teachings of Muhammad contained in the Quran, within two years of Muhammad's death, a large number of people who had memorized the Quran were killed.  They knew too much about the deceptions of those who were inventing scriptures for a gain.

    So, a collection of the whole Quran was made in the Caliphate of Othman, when all existing copies of surahs were called in, and an authoritative version, based on Abu Bakr's collection and the testimony of those who had memorized the Quran (those who had not been killed). Abu Bakr, however, we must note to the reader unaware of early Islamic history, is considered by Shias to be one of the heretics or apostates who departed from the true teachings that were supposed to be carried on by the lineage of Ali, Muhammad's vegetarian cousin, whom Shias state was supposed to be the authority on Islam after Muhammad had passed.
 

   Interestingly, while reading a Sunni version of what occurred, in Mohd. M. Pickthall's Holy Quran, I realized that Pickthall didn't even bother mentioning the Shiite's point of view,  which is a quite different version of what had occurred.  The Shiites (Shias) claim that surahs of the Quran were revised, and did not express the original purity that Muhammad had channeled into the surahs. The same attitude prevails among the orthodox writers of Judaism and Christianity as well, namely, that there is only one true version of what occurred, and that minority and non-orthodox versions of what occurred after Muhammad's death are literally not worth mentioning, at least not in this introduction to the Quran. Pickthall is quite content to say that Othman and his helpers had been Comrades of the Prophet and therefore collated the Surahs into a legitimately authoritative Quran.

     The same is not true in The Iranian Revolution, which in fact discusses in some detail the different Shiite versions of the same events, never even using the word vegetarianism, however, since that concept is abhorrent to the Sunni orthodoxy, as well as to the orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity.

    So, those who have already read in previous chapters how a cattleman cult in Israel wishing to profit from selling the flesh of sacrificed animals, as well as from the institution of wage slavery, changed the original Vegetarian Torah into a book which sanctioned animal sacrifices and slavery; and how Paul and Roman sympathizers changed the scriptures to sanction the animal sacrifices and how finally Constantine, a Roman Emperor banished bishops who disagreed with him, supervised the final writing of the official Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, which also sanctioned animal sacrifices and the institution of slavery, and had copies of the New Testament printed and passed out in the Roman Empire, at the Empire's expense.  So too, the ostensible followers of Muhammad's teachings took over and marginalized the Quran's praise of the vegetarian Sabeans, and the fact that the Quran praises Hud as the true prophet, Hud being a name that to the earliest Muslims, and Jews and Christians aware of their history, signified the Hindustani (Hoduwe) origins of Judaism, and therefore the origins also of Christianity and Islam.