The secular history of Islam?

[QuoVadisNation]

I was wondering what the secular history of Muhammad and Islam is? After studying, most books would agree that Muhammad was a merchant in Mecca and lived from 571-632. Obtaining visions from Gabriel, he attempted to proselyte pagans in Mecca. In 622, he was exiled for allegedly undermining established Pagan temples. After he 280 mile journey to Yathrib (later known as Medina), he gained a small group of followers. Afterwards, he gained a form of civil and religious leadership over Medina and is known to have utilized the ‘constitution of Medina’.
Anyway.. by 630, the city of Mecca capitulated because of Medina assailing their trade routes. Muhammad dies in 632, and Abu Bakr starts attacking Syria. The first Arab Conquest gave them obvious riches and further propelled the expansion.

This only source I know of that final assertion is from Dionysius of Tal-Mahre (770-845) and his long chronicle of the Syrian church.

That’s pretty much the synopsis of what I know. Is there another theory that I didn’t hear about? Why did Muhammad really attack Mecca? Did Muhammad get rich? Did a family of medina get rich for supporting Muhammad, the Ummayyads maybe? At any rate, if you do know. please share

Thanks for your time. Ps: sorry about my convoluted grammar, I’m not exactly being assiduous while writing this. Think of it more as a terrible colloquialism.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

I wrote this some time back. Though it deals with after Muhammad's demise.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=61455

 

[Plotinus]

I think people who are not themselves religious often underestimate the power of religion as a motive. Thus I've heard various historians say things like, "Pope so-and-so declared such-and-such a view heretical, for the following political reasons..." which may be true as far as it goes, but overlooks the fact that Pope so-and-so may actually have believed the doctrine in question actually to be heretical. That is, religious beliefs really do motivate people. So in the case of the rise of Islam, I see no problem with the view that Muhammad sought to convert the Meccans, and subsequently attacked them, for genuine religious reasons. There's no reason to suppose that Muhammad wasn't perfectly sincere. Similarly, if Muhammad really was as charismatic and inspiring as he presumably was, I see no reason to doubt that people really believed him to be a divinely-inspired prophet and followed him for that reason. Of course motives are hard to disentangle, and no doubt the fact that Muhammad was extremely successful and tended to win battles helped people come to this conclusion!

To put it another way, however "secular" your history, you can't tell it without taking religion into account as a genuine and irreducible factor.

 

[QuoVadisNation]

Plotinus, I’m fully aware that actions can be motivated by religious propensities if they think it is right. And while revered spiritual leaders may be the archetype of this, there will always another class who will always consider the materialistic perspective first and use religion as the expedient. I’m not trying to confute his teachings or religion with ‘deeper research’. I’m simply appealing for an alternative theory on why it happened, who supported it, and what did their support cause them.

And even if bias does manage to enter the alternative theory, would it be any different from being credulous?

 

[Verbose]

But isn't it a fact that the history of Islam is inherently political?
The division in religious and secular isn't very helpful in writing its history, since most of the major divisions within Islam have never been mainly about doctrine, but mostly about politics.

Edit:
Oh, and the whole secular-religious division is actually a bit anachronistic. It would have been a meaningless division to people, Christian or Muslim, just a few centuries ago. The idea of secularism and the secular state was an invention of the 18th c.

And this is where we get history writing that is actually a statement of program as far as it tries not just to identify what historians consider more "realistic" factors that influenced history, but tries to nullify what they consider "irrational", like religion. (This applies equally to liberal and marxist historians.)