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their newborns alive if it was a girl.
There were few towns in Arabia in that time. One of these was Mecca (aka Becca / Bathá) and the other Yathrib (now named Medína). The importance of Mecca was twofold: The first reason was that it was built around the Ka’ba (cube) which is a relatively small stone structure (length = 55ft, width = 45ft, height = 55ft). During the time of Prophet Muhammad, the Ka’ba and the area around it housed many idols (one count says 360). All the tribes came there once a year for pilgrimage to the Ka’ba and its idols. The second reason for Mecca’s position was that it lay on an important caravan route south to Yemen and north to Syria. So, the Meccans who were mainly traders, had great power in the region because of their location. Nearly all Meccans were of the Quraysh tribe which had ten main clans (Hashim, Ummaya and Makhzum are the better-known ones).
The Prophet Muhammad belonged to the clan of Hashim and was born (570 CE) and raised in Mecca. His grandfather had been chief of the Hashim. When Prophet Muhammad was about 40 years old (this is about 610 CE), He received His first Revelation and was taught that there is only one God (Alláh) who is unseeable and supreme over all (and that worship of many gods and idols is wrong). As He begun to teach the Meccans, they got very upset because idol worship was not just what they had always believed in but was an important part of their means of living. So virtually all of them opposed Prophet Muhammad. He would have been killed except that His uncle Abú-Tálib who was the head of the Hashim clan then, protected Him. About a decade later Abú-Tálib died, and the new head of the Hashim removed his protection. The persecution of the Prophet Muhammad by the Meccans now really intensified such that the Prophet was close to getting killed. The story of how He escaped the Meccans is for another time. The Prophet escaped to Yathrib, where some people have come to believe in His Message. This move of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Yathrib is called hijra (means emigration) and it happened in July 622 CE. So, July 622 CE marks the start of the 1st year of the Islamic calendar. In English we call it 1 AH (AH = After Hijrat). And Yathrib became known as madínat an-nabí (City of the Prophet) and is now called Medína.
Note: The Islamic calendar (called the Hijrí calendar) is a lunar calendar and one year is composed of 12 lunar months (a new month begins when a new moon is sighted). Each lunar year is therefore 354-355 days, and therefore a bit shorter than the solar year which has 365-366 days. The Gregorian calendar which is used globally today is a solar calendar and its start is fixed at 1 CE, meaning first year of