Mecca of the English transliteration for the Arabic name of the city, although the official transliteration used by the Saudi government is "Makkah", which is closer to the Arabic pronunciation. The word "Mecca" in English has come to be used to refer to any place that draws large numbers of people, and because of this some English speaking Muslims have come to regard the use of this spelling for the city as offensive. The Saudi government adopted "Makkah" as the official spelling in the 1980s, but is not universally known or used worldwide. The full official name is "Makkah al-Mukarramah" ()
Muhammad in Mecca historical works survived from the writers of 3rd and 4th century of the Muslim era. The text of the Qur'an is generally considered by university scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad as the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance. The Qur'an, however, mainly records the ideological and spiritual considerations of Muhammad, and only fragmentary references to the details of Muhammad's life in Mecca, which makes it difficult to reconstruct the chronological order of the incidents in his or his followers' lives in Mecca. Modern biographers of Muhammad try to reconstruct