The history of Islam is believed, by most historians, to have originated with Muhammad's mission in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE, although Muslims regard this time as a return to the original faith passed down by the Abrahamic prophets, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, with the submission (Islām) to the will of God. According to the traditional account, the Islamic prophet Muhammad began receiving what Muslims consider to be divine revelations in 610 CE, calling for submission to the one God, preparation for the imminent Last Judgement, and charity for the poor and needy. As Muhammad's message began to attract followers (the ṣaḥāba) he also met with increasing hostility and persecution from Meccan elites. In 622 CE Muhammad migrated to the city of Yathrib (now known as Medina), where he began to unify the tribes of Arabia under Islam, returning to Mecca to take control in 630 and order the destruction of all pagan idols. By the time Muhammad died c. 11 AH (632 CE), almost all the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam, but disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community during the Rashidun Caliphate.

The early Muslim conquests were responsible for the spread of Islam. By the 8th century CE, the Umayyad Caliphate extended from al-Andalus in the west to the Indus River in the east. Polities such as those ruled by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (in the Middle East and later in Spain and Southern Italy), the Fatimids, Seljuks, Ayyubids, and Mamluks were among the most influential powers in the world. Highly Persianized empires built by the Samanids, Ghaznavids, and Ghurids significantly contributed to technological and administrative developments. The Islamic Golden Age gave rise to many centers of culture and science and produced notable polymaths, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers during the Middle Ages. By the early 13th century, the Delhi Sultanate conquered the northern Indian subcontinent, while Turkic dynasties like the Sultanate of Rum and Artuqids conquered much of Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. In the 13th and 14th centuries, destructive Mongol invasions, along with the loss of population due to the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centers of the Muslim world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, but saw the emergence of the Timurid Renaissance and major economic powers such as the Mali Empire in West Africa and the Bengal Sultanate in South Asia. Following the deportation and enslavement of the Muslim Moors from the Emirate of Sicily and elsewhere in southern Italy, the Islamic Iberia was gradually conquered by Christian forces during the Reconquista. Nonetheless, in the early modern period, the gunpowder empires—the Ottomans, Timurids, Mughals, and Safavids—emerged as world powers.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the Muslim world fell under the influence or direct control of the European Great Powers. Some of their efforts to win independence and build modern nation-states over the course of the last two centuries continue to reverberate to the present day, as well as fuel conflict-zones in the MENA region, such as Afghanistan, Central Africa, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Somalia, Xinjiang, and Yemen. The oil boom stabilized the Arab States of the Gulf Cooperation Council (comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), making them the world's largest oil producers and exporters, which focus on capitalism, free trade, and tourism.

Most Islamic history was transmitted orally until after the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate. At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. The stories were written in the form of “founding conquest stories” based on nostalgia for the golden age then. Humphrey, quoted by Antoine Borrut, explains that the stories related to this period were created according to a pact-betrayal-redemption principle. One of the most important historical sources for which the above-mentioned stories about the birth of Islam were compiled is the work of the Muslim historian Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (839–923 CE). Although the sources concerning the Sasanian realm of influence for the 6th century AD, which represents the time period before the beginning of Islam according to the traditional understanding, are poor, the sources for the Byzantine provinces of Syria and Iraq in the same period, complemented by Syriac Christian writings, provide a relatively better quality. Regarding the depicting of early Islamic history, four trends are prominent concerning the utilization on available (irrational) sources;

Nowadays, the popularity of the different methods employed varies on the scope of the studies produced. Overview treatments of the history of early Islam tend to take the descriptive approach. Scholars who look at the beginnings of Islam in depth generally follow the source-critical and tradition-critical methods. Until the early 1970s, Non-Muslim scholars of Islamic studies—while not accepting mythical accounts, such as divine intervention—did accept its origin story in most of its details.

The quality of historical sources improves after the 8th century CE. Those sources which treated earlier times with a large temporal and cultural gap now begin to give accounts which are more contemporaneous, the quality of genre of available historical accounts improves, and new documentary sources—such as official documents, correspondence and poetry—appear.

Early Islam arose within the historical, social, political, economic, and religious context of late antiquity in the Middle East. Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia may be summarized as follows; Judaism became the dominant religion of the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen after about 380 CE, while Christianity took root in the Persian Gulf. The second half of the 6th century CE saw political disorder in pre-Islamic Arabia, and communication routes were no longer secure. Religious divisions played an important role in the crisis. There was also a yearning for a more "spiritual form of religion", and "the choice of religion increasingly became an individual rather than a collective issue." While some Arabs were reluctant to convert to a foreign faith, those Abrahamic religions provided "the principal intellectual and spiritual reference points", and Jewish and Christian loanwords from Aramaic began to replace the old pagan vocabulary of Arabic throughout the peninsula. The Ḥanīf ("renunciates"), a group of monotheists that sought to separate themselves both from the foreign Abrahamic religions and the traditional Arab polytheism, were looking for a new religious worldview to replace the pre-Islamic Arabian religions, focusing on "the all-encompassing father god Allah whom they freely equated with the Jewish Yahweh and the Christian Jehovah." In their view, Mecca was originally dedicated to this monotheistic faith that they considered to be the one true religion, established by the patriarch Abraham. However, the polytheistic Kaaba temple in Mecca was a popular pilgrimage site and for this reason an important source of income for the surrounding pagan Arabs in those days.

According to the traditional account, the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca, an important caravan trading center, around the year 570 CE. His family belonged to the Arab clan of Quraysh, which was the chief tribe of Mecca and a dominant force in Hejaz region. They supported the establishment of sacred months in which all violence was prohibited and travel was safe, in order to prevent tribal raids for loot, to sustain the Hajj trade. Like the Ḥanīf, Muhammad practiced Taḥannuth, spending time in seclusion at the Cave Hira in the mountain Jabal al-Nour and "turning away from paganism." When he was about 40 years old, he began receiving at mount Hira' what Muslims regard as divine revelations delivered through the angel Gabriel on the Laylat al-Qadr, which would later form the Quran. These inspirations urged him to proclaim a strict monotheistic faith, as the final expression of Biblical prophetism earlier codified in the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity; to warn his compatriots of the impending Judgement Day; and to castigate social injustices of his city. Muhammad's message won over a handful of followers (the ṣaḥāba) and was met with increasing persecution from Meccan notables.