At their height, the agriculture-based South Arabian kingdoms of Yemen had the wealth to organize states that boasted institutions of commerce, law, and justice. Elsewhere in the peninsula, societies of oasis dwellers, camel tenders and sheep herders were too small or too poor to organize states. Instead they were organized by a set of relationships for which we use the inadequate term tribe. A tribe was a grouping of people who usually claimed to be descended from a common ancestor, but whose kinship ties might have been quite vague and uncertain. Nevertheless, they found it mutually advantageous to claim family ties, particularly for security. In the absence of a state, there were no written law codes, courts, or police. There appears not to have been even the concept of a law that transcended the limits of the tribe. In such circumstances, tribal ties protected individual life and property. Violence and theft were discouraged by the knowledge that a tribe would retaliate for the harm inflicted on one of its members. The more powerful the tribe, the less likely its members were to be violated. But weaker tribes felt compelled to retaliate against stronger tribes if only to preserve their honor. Retaliation itself demanded retaliation, spawning vendettas that could last for generations. Thus, tribalism did in fact deter individual violence, but exacerbated relationships among tribes themselves, and often led to chronic communal violence or the threat of violence.
Tribes were also important for economic reasons. Marriages took place within closely related families so that the two families’ assets would not be dissipated, and when any family lost its assets due to drought or theft, the tribe would try to replace at least the animals. Generosity was a major virtue among tribesmen, symbolizing the dependence that each individual had on the group as a whole. Being part of a tribe was important for survival: One’s identity was tribal, and one had nothing if he rejected the tribe. Not to have tribal protection was to be at the mercy of potentially hostile individuals and groups, as well as of nature. Because life outside the tribe was practically impossible, each individual felt an overwhelming pressure to conform to tribal norms.
The vast majority of the inhabitants of the peninsula spoke one or more dialects of the Arabic language. By the sixth century, a widely used dialect had come into common use in the northern half of Arabia, primarily in the service of poetry—the primary artistic production of the Arabs at the time. Through this poetic language, Arabs were beginning to share a common vocabulary and legendary tradition, thus gaining a semblance of a common identity. Poetry was not written down, for it was valued in its oral form, but an alphabet was developing at the time, based on the Aramaic one. The earliest Arabic inscription found to date is from the first half of the fourth century. It evolved into the so-called Kufic script that became dominant among the Lakhmids at Hira. It later came to be used for the text of the Qur’an and for official documents and monuments of the early Islamic state.
Arabs in the interior of the peninsula were overwhelmingly followers of traditional tribal gods and goddesses, but large numbers of Christians and Jews lived in settlements on the periphery. As we have seen, many Arabs on the Byzantine and Sasanian frontiers were Christian, and large numbers of Arab Christians lived in the southern part of the peninsula, as well. Najran, a refuge for Syriac Monophysites, became the most important Christian settlement in Arabia. Christian communities existed in Oman, and the religion seems to have come into Yemen from the Kingdom of Axum, on the coast of what is today Ethiopia. South Arabia and Axum had much in common: They were similar in climate and terrain; both were centers of frankincense production; and they shared Red Sea routes to the Mediterranean world. Christianity had penetrated Axum by the fourth century, and it showed up on the southwestern coast of Arabia perhaps as early as the fifth century.
Judaism became well established in oases in the Hijaz and in South Arabia after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Jews eventually made up a large minority at the oasis of Yathrib (later known as Medina), and the royal house of Yemen was Jewish perhaps as early as the fifth century. A Jewish ruler in Yemen, Dhu Nuwas, began persecuting Christians in his realm, apparently out of fear of a growing Byzantine influence in the Red Sea. Massacres at Najran in 523, however, provoked the Christians across the Red Sea, and Axum, with Byzantine help, invaded Yemen. For the next fifty years, Yemen was to be under Axumite Christian occupation, until the Sasanians invaded in the 570s.
In the sixth century, Arabia was undergoing changes that would have profound implications for the future. Economically, Arabian agricultural societies in general were deteriorating. Yemen had experienced a slow decrease in wealth and power since the first century, and other areas of the peninsula offer evidence of a sustained drought. Many peasants were forced into a seminomadic life, and some former seminomads became pure nomads, harassing caravans and raiding settlements. Large numbers of Arabs were migrating to the north, settling on the frontiers of Iraq and Syria.
The northward migration of Arabs coincided with a new determination on the part of the Byzantines and Sasanians to intervene in the affairs of the peninsula. The invasion of Yemen both by the Byzantine-Axumite alliance and by the Sasanians within a span of half a century suggests that the fortunes of Arabia were becoming intertwined in an unprecedented way with those of its imperial neighbors to the north. Large areas of the eastern, southern, and western coasts of the peninsula were under direct or indirect Sasanian control after 575, and economic contacts were increasing between the peninsula and the Iranian empire.
The apparent superiority of the empires over the people of the peninsula was deceiving. The migration of peninsular Arabs was beginning to affect the demographic balance of the area between the Euphrates and the Jordan rivers. Combined with the fact that the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids were no longer serving to restrain the aggression of nomads on imperial borders, the two great empires were more vulnerable to attack from the desert than they had been in two centuries. In their obsession with each other’s ambitions, they neglected their desert frontiers.
The Rise of Islam
During the first decade of the seventh century, the Byzantines and the Sasanians began their titanic struggle for dominance in western Asia. During the second decade, their armies fought in Syria and Egypt, and their navies clashed in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, the economic and demographic changes occurring in the Arabian Peninsula were beginning to have social consequences. It was in this context that the town of Mecca gave birth to a religiosocial movement that would transform large parts of the world for centuries to come.
The Meccan Environment
According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was born about the year 570 in the Hijazi city of Mecca. Visitors to Mecca in the sixth century must have been surprised to find a town there at all. It lay in a dry gorge, surrounded by barren mountains, some of which thrust into the air more than a thousand feet above the town’s mud-brick houses. Mecca was devoid of green plants, and its inhabitants had to import much of their food. The town possessed a spring that yielded slightly brackish water, but otherwise had little to commend itself as a place of human habitation. Perhaps because of the unlikely presence of the spring in that stony, barren wilderness, the site had been a holy place, apparently for centuries. The town itself, however, was little more than a century old when Muhammad was born.
Mecca was built around the Ka‘ba, the shrine that made the place a cultic center for local tribes. Although it has been restored several times, it seems always to have been in the shape of a cube, some fifty feet on each side. Its corners roughly correspond to the four points of the compass. Embedded in the eastern corner are two stones—one of which is the famous Black Stone—that serve ritual, rather than structural, purposes.
Two different traditions exist regarding the function of the shrine, but they may be complementary. According to one tradition, the Ka‘ba was unusual among the shrines in Arabia in that it housed many (perhaps as many as 360) representations, or idols, of gods, instead of just one. On the other hand, Meccans are said to have considered the Ka‘ba the hous
e of Allah, a deity worshiped widely among the Arabs of Syria and the Hijaz as the creator god and supreme god. He did not have an idol to represent him, a feature that conforms to the experience of many other cultures in which the supreme creator- or sky-god becomes removed from the everyday concerns of the people, but is still revered as the god with the highest status. The content of the worship at the Ka‘ba is not known, but evidence exists that some individuals had come together as a group and practiced what the Qur’an calls the “religion of Ibrahim (Abraham).” Apparently, an oral tradition already was strong that linked Abraham with the site of the Ka‘ba, a tradition echoed in the Qur’an’s assertion that he and his son Isma‘il (Ishmael) constructed it.
The Ka‘ba in Mecca.
Within several miles of Mecca were other sites considered holy by Arabs all over the Hijaz. Dedicated to various gods and goddesses, in pre-Islamic times, they were much more important and better known than the Meccan shrine. During three holy months of the year, tribesmen came on pilgrimage from a wide area to these other sites to trade and then perform their rituals. The most important such ritual acts took place at Mina and Arafat and made up the bulk of the rituals later included within the Islamic pilgrimage.
The dominant tribe at Mecca, the Quraysh, made money from serving as custodians of the shrine in their town, but there is no evidence that any of the great trade fairs associated with the pre-Islamic pilgrimages took place there. Mecca’s chief source of wealth was its regional trade, which had begun in the second half of the fifth century C.E. Meccan merchants bought Hijazi agricultural products (especially raisins), hides, skins, and leather goods, as well as Yemeni perfumes, and traded them in southern Syria for products that were prized in the Hijaz and Yemen, such as textiles, weapons, olive oil, and Syrian perfumes. Mecca was not the commercial heir to Petra or Palmyra. There is no evidence that it possessed the wealth that had produced the impressive architecture of those two centers of international trade, and Mecca seems to have been practically unknown outside the peninsula. The international trade in luxury goods did not pass through the town, and even the trade in Yemeni incense seems to have been negligible. Nevertheless, Mecca had become a bustling center of regional trade at the end of the sixth century, and its merchants were confident and knowledgeable about the world outside their narrow, rocky valley. Trade with the southern districts of the Byzantine Empire was regular and lucrative, and travelers were constantly coming in from Hira. The Meccans were well informed about developments in the two empires to the north and had become familiar with the dominant economic, political, and religious characteristics of both empires.
Muhammad
Muhammad was born into a family stricken with tragedy: His father had died by the time he was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. He found a home first in the household of his grandfather and then of an uncle. As a young man, he became involved in the caravan trade and made trips into Syria. To all appearances, Muhammad was a man with remarkable personality gifts. He became known for his empathy, his mediating abilities, and his patience. Having grown up an impoverished orphan, he was acutely aware of how precarious life can be and of the need for mutual support.
When Muhammad was about twenty-five years old, he attracted the attention of a wealthy widow and business woman by the name of Khadijah, and they married. Suddenly his life changed, for he no longer had to worry about making ends meet. But rather than indulging in conspicuous consumption, he began a quest for a deeper religious experience. Muhammad began frequenting a local cave to meditate, and he made a habit of helping the poor. His increasing impatience with the dominant religious tradition in the Hijaz is mirrored in developments elsewhere in the region, suggesting that social conditions had begun to make the old religious traditions of the peninsula inadequate.
Muslim tradition remembers numerous other individuals in the Hijaz who were monotheistic in the era just before the coming of Islam. These hanifs are associated with the “religion of Abraham” in the Qur’an and in the Muslim traditions that arose later. In the interior of the peninsula, as well, near present-day Riyadh, the tribe of the Banu Hanifa was led by a Christian who was a contemporary of Muhammad. When the Christian leader died in 630, he was replaced by a prophet named Musaylima. Musaylima taught about a god named al-Rahman who demanded of his followers an ascetic lifestyle. Although there are legends about Muhammad’s contacts with Syrian Christians in his work in the caravans, we do not know how familiar he was with the doctrines and rituals of Christianity or Judaism, nor the extent of his contacts with Christians and Jews in Arabia.
About the year 610, Muhammad began experiencing visions and trances in which he received messages that he understood to be the words of God. A figure, whom he later identified as the archangel Gabriel, was the channel through whom God provided His message to Muhammad. The experience was physical as well as spiritual, and Muhammad was afraid and even embarrassed, for his symptoms were similar to those of the kahins, or pagan diviners and soothsayers of the region. With the support of Khadija and her cousin, however, he continued to be receptive to the visions and soon came to the conviction that he had been chosen for the role of prophet to deliver God’s revelation to the Arabs. He identified it with the revelation originally sent through Abraham, the Hebrew prophets, and Jesus. Muhammad shared his revelations with his friends and family for about three years and then began preaching publicly. He gained a small band of followers, but most of them were of a distinctly common origin; his themes did not gain widespread acceptance among the Meccan elite.
The concepts and symbols of Muhammad’s teaching bear a striking similarity to those of Judaism and Christianity. Muslims, in fact, have often pointed out that the expression, “the Judaeo–Christian tradition,” should be revised to “the Judaeo-Christian–Islamic tradition.” Muhammad taught that his message was the one that the Jewish prophets, including Jesus, had brought earlier, but that in the course of time, their teachings had been distorted. With Muhammad, God was once again bringing the pristine message, this time directly to the Arabs. Muslims believe that God’s message came through Muhammad in two important ways. One was through the episodic revelations that Gabriel conveyed to Muhammad from God. The Prophet’s followers wrote these down and eventually collected them together in the book known as the Qur’an (Koran). It would eventually be divided into 114 suras, or chapters. Apart from the formal revelations, however, were the Prophet’s commentary on daily issues and his own example of the upright life. His charismatic personality and his stature as the Prophet were both compelling reasons for people to look to him for guidance on a multitude of issues as they tried to live in conformity to the will of God. The recollections of his followers regarding his sayings and his behavior under certain circumstances were later recorded as hadith, or Traditions, a topic that is treated in detail in Chapter 3.
At the center of Muhammad’s teaching was the majesty of Allah. The word Allah derives from the Arabic word for deity or god, which is ilah. Allah is simply ilah with the definite article al- in front of it, rendering the same effect as in English: the supreme or the only god, or God. Allah is not a word specific to Muslims. Because of the meaning of the word, Christian Arabs refer to the focus of their worship as Allah, just as Muslims do. Worshipers of Allah in pre-Islamic Mecca probably recognized Him as the supreme deity within a pantheon of many gods and goddesses, whereas Muslims understand the term to mean the only deity at all. What appear to be the earliest passages in the Qur’an stress God’s majestic power, His compassion for His creatures, and His justice. Gradually, the theme of the unity or oneness of God became prominent, leading to a clash between Muhammad and the polytheism of his environment. Many verses in the Qur’an refer to Allah as al-Rahman al-Rahim, usually translated as the Merciful and the Compassionate. God is a loving God who wants the best for those whom He has created and who is quick to forgive those who err.
God’s mercy is required, however, because of His justice. He demands a hig
h standard of behavior, which is predicated on obedience to His commands. The term most often associated with obedience to God in the Islamic tradition is the verb aslama, which means to submit or to surrender. The noun form, islam, thus means submission or surrender (to God). Submission entails acceptance of the legitimacy of the Prophet’s mission and obedience to God’s will as revealed through revelation. The Qur’an contains numerous specific injunctions that are elements of the path of obedience, but the righteous life is exemplified most clearly in two major categories of attitude and action. The first is recognition and affirmation of the unity of God. The Qur’an makes it clear that to associate any being or object with God is the greatest sin that a person can commit. Shirk, or the compromising of God’s sole claim to worship, is the unforgivable sin.
The emphasis on God’s oneness and on His sole claim to worship led quickly to the frequent use by Muslims of the phrase “Allahu Akbar.” This phrase is often translated into English as “God is Greatest,” but more correctly it has the meaning, “God is Greater”—that whatever one can think of or be tempted to worship or give ultimate allegiance to, God is greater and more worthy of worship, loyalty, and commitment than that.
The other primary indicator of obedience to God is the conscientious use of wealth. The insistence on generosity to the poor, the orphan, and the widow runs as a leitmotiv throughout the Qur’an in a manner strikingly similar to the words of Hosea, Amos, Jesus, and other figures in the Bible. The Prophet himself was reminded of his humble origins and of God’s concern for him, obliging him to be generous in turn to those who were on the margins of society:
A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization Page 5