by Reza Aslan
The Ghassanids, like so many Christians who lived beyond the ever-tightening grip of Constantinople, were Monophysites, meaning they rejected the Nicene doctrine confirming Jesus’ dual nature. Instead, the Monophysites believed that Jesus had only one nature, simultaneously human and divine, though depending on the school of thought they tended to emphasize one over the other. In general, the Antiochians stressed Jesus’ humanity, while the Alexandrians stressed his divinity. So while the Ghassanids may have been Christians, and while they may have acted as clients of the Byzantine Empire, they did not share the theology of their masters.
Once again, one need only look inside the Ka‘ba to recognize which version of Christianity was taking hold in Arabia. According to the traditions, the image of Jesus residing in the sanctuary had been placed there by a Coptic (i.e., Alexandrian Monophysite) Christian named Baqura. If true, then Jesus’ presence in the Ka‘ba may be considered an affirmation of the Monophysite belief in the Christ as a fully divine god-man—a position that would have been perfectly acceptable to the pagan Arabs.
Christianity’s presence in the Arabian Peninsula—in both its orthodox and heterodox incarnations—must have had a significant effect on the pagan Arabs. It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith. There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved. These similarities do not necessarily contradict the Muslim belief that the Quran was divinely revealed, but they do indicate that the Quranic vision of the Last Days may have been revealed to the pagan Arabs through a set of symbols and metaphors with which they were already familiar, thanks in some part to the wide spread of Christianity in the region.
While the Ghassanids protected the borders of the Byzantine Empire, another Arab tribe, the Lakhmids, provided the same service for the other great kingdom of the time, the Sasanians. As the imperial inheritors of the ancient Iranian kingdom of Cyrus the Great, which had dominated Central Asia for nearly a millennium, the Sasanians were Zoroastrians: followers of the seminal faith initiated by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra nearly fifteen hundred years earlier, whose ideas and beliefs had a formidable influence on the development of the other religions in the region, especially Judaism and Christianity.
More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil. At the center of Zarathustra’s theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), who fashioned the heavens and earth, the night and the day, the light and the darkness. Like most ancients, however, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu (“the beneficent spirit”) and Angra Mainyu (“the hostile spirit”) were responsible for good and evil, respectively. Although called the “twin children” of Mazda, these two spirits were not gods, but only the spiritual embodiment of Truth and Falsehood.
By the time of the Sasanians, Zarathustra’s primitive monotheism had transformed into a firmly dualistic system in which the two primordial spirits became two deities locked in an eternal battle for the souls of humanity: Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), the God of Light, and Ahriman, the God of Darkness and the archetype of the Christian concept of Satan. Although it was a non-proselytizing and notoriously difficult religion to convert to—considering its rigid hierarchical social structure and its almost fanatical obsession with ritual purity—the Sasanian military presence in the Arabian Peninsula had nonetheless resulted in a few tribal conversions to Zoroastrianism, particularly to its more amenable sects, Mazdakism and Manichaeism.
The picture that emerges from this brief outline of the pre-Islamic Arabian religious experience is that of an era in which Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism intermingled in one of the last remaining regions in the Near East still dominated by paganism, albeit a firmly henotheistic paganism. The relative distance that these three major religions enjoyed from their respective centers gave them the freedom to develop their creeds and rituals into fresh, innovative theologies. Especially in Mecca, the center of the Jahiliyyah religious experience, this vibrant pluralistic environment became a breeding ground for bold new ideas and exciting religious experimentation, the most important of which was an obscure Arab monotheistic movement called Hanifism, which arose sometime around the sixth century C.E. and which, as far as anyone is aware, existed nowhere else except in western Arabia, a region the Arabs called the Hijaz.
The legendary origins of Hanifism are recounted in the writings of one of Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Hisham. One day, while the Meccans were celebrating a pagan festival at the Ka‘ba, four men named Waraqa ibn Nawfal, Uthman ibn Huwairith, Ubayd Allah ibn Jahsh, and Zayd ibn Amr drew apart from the rest of the worshippers and met secretly in the desert. There they agreed “in the bonds of friendship” that they would never again worship the idols of their forefathers. They made a solemn pact to return to the unadulterated religion of Abraham, whom they considered to be neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a pure monotheist: a hanif (from the Arabic root hnf, meaning “to turn away from,” as in one who turns away from idolatry). The four men left Mecca and went their separate ways preaching the new religion and seeking out others like them. In the end, Waraqa, Uthman, and Ubayd Allah all converted to Christianity, a fact that indicates the religion’s influence over the region. But Zayd continued in the new faith, abandoning the religion of his people and abstaining from the worship of, in his words, “the helpless and harmless idols” in the sanctuary.
Standing in the shadow of the Ka‘ba, his back pressed against its irregular stone walls, Zayd rebuked his fellow Meccans, shouting, “I renounce Allat and al-Uzza, both of them … I will not worship Hubal, though he was our lord in the days when I had little sense.” Pushing through the crowded market, his voice raised over the din of the merchants, he would cry, “Not one of you follows the religion of Abraham but I.”
Like all preachers of his time, Zayd was also a poet, and the verses that the traditions have ascribed to him contain extraordinary declarations. “To God I give my praise and thanksgiving,” he sang. “There is no god beyond Him.” And yet, despite his call for monotheism and his repudiation of the idols inside the sanctuary, Zayd maintained a deep veneration for the Ka‘ba itself, which he believed was spiritually connected to Abraham. “I take refuge in that in which Abraham took refuge,” Zayd declared.
By all accounts, the Hanif movement flourished throughout the Hijaz, especially in major population centers like Ta’if, where the poet Umayya ibn Abi Salt wrote verses extolling “the religion of Abraham,” and Yathrib, the home of two influential Hanif tribal leaders, Abu Amir ar-Rahib and Abu Qais ibn al-Aslat. Other Hanif preachers included Khalid ibn Sinan, called “a prophet lost by his people,” and Qass ibn Sa’idah, known as “the sage of the Arabs.” It is impossible to say how many Hanif converts there were in pre-Islamic Arabia, or how large the movement had become. What seems evident, however, is that there were many in the Arabian Peninsula who were actively struggling to transform the vague henotheism of the pagan Arabs into what Jonathan Fueck has termed “a national Arabian monotheism.”
But Hanifism seemed to have been more than just a primitive Arab monotheistic movement. The traditions present the Hanifs as preaching an active god who was intimately involved in the personal lives of his creation, a god who did not need mediators to stand between him and humanity. At the heart of the movement was a fervent commitment to an absolute morality. It was not enough merely to abstain from
idol worship; the Hanifs believed one must strive to be morally upright. “I serve my Lord the compassionate,” Zayd said, “that the forgiving Lord may pardon my sin.”
The Hanifs also spoke in an abstract fashion about a future day of reckoning when everyone would have to answer for his or her moral choices. “Beware, O men, of what follows death!” Zayd warned his fellow Meccans. “You can hide nothing from God.” This would have been a wholly new concept for a people with no firm notion of an afterlife, especially one based on human morality. And because Hanifism was, like Christianity, a proselytizing faith, its ideology would have spread throughout the Hijaz. Most sedentary Arabs would have heard Hanif preachers; the Meccans would surely have been familiar with Hanif ideology; and there can be little doubt that the Prophet Muhammad would have been aware of both.
There exists a little-known tradition recounting an astonishing meeting between Zayd, the Hanif, and a teen-aged Muhammad. The story seems to have been originally reported by Yunus ibn Bukayr on the authority of Muhammad’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq. And while it appears to have been expunged from Ibn Hisham’s retelling of Muhammad’s life, Professor M. J. Kister at Hebrew University has catalogued no fewer than eleven other traditions that recount nearly identical versions of the story.
It was, the chroniclers say, “one of the hot days of Mecca” when Muhammad and his childhood friend Ibn Haritha were returning home from Ta’if, where they had slaughtered and roasted a ewe in sacrifice to one of the idols (most likely Allat). As the two boys made their way through the upper part of the Meccan valley, they suddenly came upon Zayd, who was either living as a recluse on the high ground above Mecca or was in the midst of a lengthy spiritual retreat. Recognizing him at once, Muhammad and Ibn Haritha greeted the Hanif with “the greeting of the Jahiliyyah” (in’am sabahan) and sat down to rest next to him.
Muhammad asked, “Why do I see you, O son of Amr, hated by your people?”
“I found them associating divinities with God and I was reluctant to do the same,” Zayd replied. “I wanted the religion of Abraham.”
Muhammad accepted this explanation without comment and opened his bag of sacrificed meat. “Eat some of this food, O my uncle,” he said.
But Zayd reacted with disgust. “Nephew, that is a part of those sacrifices of yours which you offer to your idols, is it not?” Muhammad answered that it was. Zayd became indignant. “I never eat of these sacrifices and I want nothing to do with them,” he cried. “I am not one to eat anything slaughtered for a divinity other than God.”
So struck was Muhammad by Zayd’s rebuke that many years later, when recounting the story, he claimed never again to have “stroked an idol of theirs nor … sacrifice[d] to them until God honored me with his Apostleship.”
The notion that a young pagan Muhammad could have been scolded for his idolatry by a Hanif flies in the face of traditional Muslim views regarding the Prophet’s perpetual monotheistic integrity. It is a common belief in Islam that even before being called by God, Muhammad never took part in the pagan rituals of his community. In his history of the Prophet, al-Tabari states that God kept Muhammad from ever participating in any pagan rituals, lest he be defiled by them. But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture. Not only does the Quran admit that God found Muhammad “erring” and gave him guidance (93:7), but the ancient traditions clearly show Muhammad deeply involved in the religious customs of Mecca: circumambulating the Ka‘ba, making sacrifices, and going on pagan devotional retreats called tahannuth. Indeed, when the pagan sanctuary was torn down and rebuilt (it was enlarged and finally roofed), Muhammad took an active part in its reconstruction.
All the same, the doctrine of Muhammad’s monotheistic integrity is an important facet of the Muslim faith because it appears to support the belief that the Revelation he received came from a divine source. Admitting that Muhammad might have been influenced by someone like Zayd is, for some Muslims, tantamount to denying the heavenly inspiration of Muhammad’s message. But such beliefs are based on the common yet erroneous assumption that religions are born in some sort of cultural vacuum; they most certainly are not.
All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the prophet’s successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of fashioning their master’s words and deeds into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.
Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. “[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus,” the Quran says (42:13). It should not be surprising, therefore, that Muhammad would have been influenced as a young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia. As unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately trying to reach. Because whatever else Muhammad may have been, he was without question a man of his time, even if one chooses to call that a “Time of Ignorance.”
MUHAMMAD WAS BORN, according to Muslim tradition, in 570 C.E., the same year that Abraha, the Christian Abyssinian ruler of Yemen, attacked Mecca with a herd of elephants in an attempt to destroy the Ka‘ba and make the church at Sana’ the new religious center in the Arabian Peninsula. It is written that when Abraha’s army drew near the city, the Meccans, frightened at the sight of the massive elephants the Abyssinians had imported from Africa, retreated to the mountains, leaving the Ka‘ba defenseless. But just as the Abyssinian army was about to attack, the sky darkened and a flock of birds, each carrying a stone in its beak, rained down the wrath of Allah on the invading army until it had no choice but to retreat back to Yemen.
In a society with no fixed calendar, “The Year of the Elephant,” as it came to be known, was not only the most important date in recent memory, it was the commencement of a new Arab chronology. That is why the early biographers set Muhammad’s birth in the year 570, so that it would coincide with another significant date. But 570 is neither the correct year of Muhammad’s birth nor, for that matter, of the Abyssinian attack on Mecca; modern scholarship has determined that momentous event to have taken place around 552 C.E. The fact is that no one knows now, just as no one knew then, when Muhammad was born, because birthdays were not necessarily significant dates in pre-Islamic Arab society. Muhammad himself may not have known in what year he was born. In any case, nobody would have cared about Muhammad’s birth date until long after he was recognized as a prophet, perhaps not even until long after he had died. Only then would his followers have wanted to establish a year for his birth in order to institute a firm Islamic chronology. And what more appropriate year could they have chosen than the Year of the Elephant? For better or worse, the closest our modern historical methods can come to determining the date of Muhammad’s birth is sometime in the last half of the sixth century C.E.
As is the case with most prophets, Muhammad’s birth was accompanied by signs and portents. Al-Tabari writes that while Muhammad’s father, Abdallah, was on his way to meet his bride, he was stopped by a strange woman who, seeing a light shining between his eyes, demanded he sleep with her. Abdallah politely refused and continued to the house of Amina, where he consummated the marriage
that would result in the birth of the Prophet. The next day, when Abdallah saw the same woman again, he asked her, “Why do you not make the same proposition to me today that you made to me yesterday?” The woman replied, “The light which was with you yesterday has left you. I have no need of you today.”
Abdallah never had the chance to decipher the woman’s words; he died before Muhammad was born, leaving behind a meager inheritance of a few camels and sheep. But the signs of Muhammad’s prophetic identity continued. While she was pregnant, Amina heard a voice tell her, “You are pregnant with the Lord of this people, and when he is born, say, ‘I put him in the care of the One from the evil of every envier’; then call him Muhammad.” Sometimes Amina would see a light shining from her belly by which she could make out “the castles of Syria,” a reference, perhaps, to Muhammad’s prophetic succession to Jesus (Syria was an important seat of Christianity).
As an infant, Muhammad was placed in the care of a Bedouin foster mother to be nursed, a common tradition among Arabs of sedentary societies who wanted their children to be raised in the desert according to the ancient customs of their forefathers. Appropriately, it was in the desert that Muhammad had his first prophetic experience. While herding a flock of lambs, he was approached by two men, clothed in white, who carried with them a golden basin full of snow. The two men came to Muhammad and pinned him to the ground. They reached into his chest and removed his heart. After extracting a drop of black liquid from it, they washed the heart clean in the snow and gently placed it back into Muhammad’s breast before disappearing.
When he was six years old, Muhammad’s mother died as well, and he was sent to live with his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, who, as the man in charge of providing Zamzam water to the pilgrims, filled one of the most influential pagan posts in Meccan society. Two years later, Abd al-Muttalib also died, and the orphaned Muhammad was once again shuttled off to another relative, this time to the house of his powerful uncle, Abu Talib. Taking pity on the boy, Abu Talib employed him in his lucrative caravan business. It was during one of these trading missions, while the caravan made its way to Syria, that Muhammad’s prophetic identity was finally revealed.