Muhammad was born in Mecca sometime around 560 AD. We’ve traced the development of culture in Arabia for about the thousand years before this, bringing us up to his time. What did it mean then to be an Arab?
The cultural migration and mixing between north and south, desert and city, meant that most of the people who lived in Arabia now called themselves “Arabs.” The word had previously referred just to the desert nomads, and sometimes it was still used that way by the city-dwellers. But those outside Arabia called all of its inhabitants Arabs, so they had come to adopt this usage too. The opposite of arab was ajam, a foreigner. (Mackintosh-Smith, 85) Arabs were “we,” the insiders, unique among the many ajam, outsiders.
The old South Arabian languages were fading. In Mecca, the North Arabian language we call Arabic had taken over. More or less the same language was dominant from southern Iraq to southern Syria, through the desert and right into some parts of Yemen. The Arabic name “Yemen” was coming into use too; it probably refers to the way travelers from central Arabia turned right while going east, to go south.
Arabic culture was a blend of city customs and desert mythos. Poetry praised the romantic bravery of raiding: night attacks, flights on horseback, melting into the desert. Most of the people who memorized the poetry never went on raids, but they wished they could. People claimed facets of identity that they didn’t actually have, but it seemed all right because they were identifying with the culture. And on the other side, there are examples of individuals or whole tribes that transition neatly from city to desert, perhaps as in the American West some townsmen could make the jump to being cowboys with only a little adjustment.
Politically, the north and west of Arabia were generally under Roman domination, while the south and east were experiencing Persian incursions. Rome and Persia were in a general state of war, sometimes with battles, sometimes with trade competition and power struggles over certain territories. Arabia was not unified at all, rather it was split between these imperial powers. I think that’s an important point for understanding Muhammad’s Arabia. Religious identity was not just about personal belief, it was also a way of signaling which imperial power you leaned toward.
A plague had passed through Arabia and its neighbors between 540 and 550. As with the later Black Death visitation, it faded out and then flared up again later. We don’t hear about it much in the early Muslim histories, but we know that it may have come back as many as four more times in the lifetimes of the younger people. The first visitation in the 540s wiped out as much as one-fifth of the population of Constantinople, and probably did similar damage in Persia, Egypt, and Arabia. Of course, a crowded city was more at risk. It’s possible that in cities weakened by the plague, admiration and emulation of nomadic culture grew because living in the desert seemed healthier. It’s probably also why Meccans began sending children to stay with nomads, where the wind was always blowing and everyone wore masks to keep the sand out.
The fact that Arabs now felt part of a larger Arab world that stretched up to the borders of Persia and Rome had a lot to do with how Islam would develop. In the past, people who lived in Mecca would not have felt much or any commonality with marsh-dwellers in Iraq or pearl-divers in Bahrain. Now, they felt at least some. And yet they had no political unity, which presented a problem. How could Arabs start to own their land without allegiance to outsiders? How could the divisions among them be overcome? There were Arab Jews, Christians, pagans, and even Zoroastrians. How to get them to work together as one?