The First Revelations of Muhammad

Posted on December 8, 2020 by Ruth

When Muhammad was forty years old, probably in the year 610, he was staying in the cave of al-Hira for prayer and meditation when the first revelation occurred. He saw the figure of a man appear to him and command, “Recite!” (The verb could also mean “Read!” as given in Mohiuddin, 94. Reading was performed out loud; early books were seen as prompting aids for recitation.) Muhammad replied that he could not do it, and the figure commanded him again. This figure was an angel; he embraced Muhammad and made him able to recite. The passage he spoke is the opening (al-Fatihah) of the Quran. It’s fairly short, only seven verses:

  • In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
  • Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;
  • Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
  • Master of the Day of Judgment.
  • Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.
  • Show us the straight way,
  • The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.

This was a confusing experience for him, since traditional Arabic culture had two ready explanations, neither of which Muhammad could accept. Like the Greek Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Arabian pagan gods often had a seer who was seized by the god’s spirit and spoke divinations and oracles. The divination messages were delivered in rhymed prose, that is, rhymed but unmetered and with lines of uneven length. And that’s the way these lines read: in Arabic, they all end in either -een or -eem, while the line lengths vary. Rhymed prose, divine message…such seers were in the pagan worship tradition, and Muhammad did not want to be associated with them. The other explanation was that a Jinn had spoken to him, which was thought to be the source of some poetry. Both sources would point away from God, toward some other spirit.

Muhammad ran from the cave, downhill toward home. The angel called after him, “O Muhammad, you are the Messenger of God and I am Jibril.” He stopped and looked up to where the angel filled the sky, waiting until the angel vanished. When he got home, he was overwhelmed. He threw himself on his bed, calling to his wife, “Cover me!” She covered him with a cloak or blanket.

But his reaction is another of the doubtful points: Sunni tradition emphasizes Muhammad’s discomfiture, while Shi’ite narratives say he was filled with joy. In that telling, he ran down the mountain because he was excited, and he knew from the start that he really was speaking to an angel.

When Muhammad told Khadijah about the experience and the messages, she immediately gave her opinion that it was truly an angel from God. This response made her the first official believer. (Shi’ite sources say that a very young Ali agreed, making him the second believer.) Together, Khadijah and Muhammad consulted her cousin Waraqah, who had pursued his theological questions to the point of becoming a Christian. Waraqah was much older than Khadijah; he lived only a short time after these events. His response was that surely Muhammad was the Prophet, and he wished he could live long enough to help defend him against the rejection that was about to occur.

In one hadith, Muhammad was asked how the revelations came to him. He replied that while sometimes they came from the figure of a man, as in this first one, other times, they came with the sound like a loud reverberation of a bell, and these ones made him feel sick and confused. We don’t know as much about the second revelation, whether it was the bell type or another conversation with Jibril. Even more confusingly, it began with the letter N. Just “N.” That’s especially curious since these letters were known to Muhammad, but not in the familiar way we know our letters. He must have been very puzzled. It probably served as a sort of fact-check on whether he was making up the revelations himself, because this confusing detail made it seem much more likely, to everyone including himself, that they were not his own thoughts.

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Muhammad the Meccan

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Ruth

Muhammad’s revelations did not begin until he was forty years old. During the period of normal life, he ran their caravan trading business and raised his family. As noted earlier, he adopted the former slave Zayd fairly early in this time, and then his cousin Ali (age 5) much later, when the younger of his children were being born. His caravan trips probably followed the Meccan pattern of going to Gaza and Syria during the summer, and south to Aden during the winter. His uncle al-Abbas brought perfume from South Arabia to sell in Mecca during the pilgrimage month. (Mackintosh-Smith, 121) I don’t think we know what wares Khadijah’s and Muhammad’s business majored in, and mostly we hear of trips toward Syria.

Stories of Muhammad during this time depict him as very devoted to worship at the Ka’aba. The Ka’aba had a wide open space around it, known as the masjid. Going to the Ka’aba meant circumambulating (walking around) the building seven times and kissing the black stone embedded in its foundation. Years later, his friend Umar, now Caliph, was asked why Muslims still kiss the black stone. Umar said that he didn’t consider the stone itself to be significant, but if Muhammad had done it, he was going to do it too. It’s part of the sunnah, the customs and ways, of Muhammad.

Because Muslims believe that Abraham and Ishmael founded the Ka’aba as a temple to Allah, they don’t see Muhammad as being involved in idol worship. It’s true that there were idols inside the Ka’aba and that most of the worshippers had these idols in mind. But except for (perhaps) in his youth, Muhammad is believed to have been a Haneef, that is, an Arab who tried to worship the one Creator God without any particular creed to belong to. And at the same time that Muhammad reverenced the Ka’aba and its stone, he expressed disgust at the idols of Mecca and South Arabia.

He referred to God as “al-Illah,” the generic Arabic name for God (or in pagan context, “a god”); this name, of course, gets simplified to “Allah.” So like other Haneefs, Muhammad referred to “Allah” when he prayed or discussed, and although his fellow citizens worshipped Hubal and the rest, they would have recognized the meaning of what he was saying. They just thought he was pushing his luck by excluding the other gods and insisting on generic “Allah.”

Muhammad was nicknamed “al-Amin,” the Just Man, in reference to his insistence on conducting all business strictly and fairly. Many merchants did not follow these principles, so that he witnessed cheating and bribery in daily business. During these main adult years, Muhammad was integrated in city life, but he felt troubled about being part of what he saw going on.

Another feature of Meccan life that bothered Muhammad was the transition from desert virtues of generosity to commercial virtues of thrift. Desert chieftains of war bands gave feasts and lavish gifts (a pattern also followed by Germanic kings at the same time), using their generosity to create a reputation of nobility. Desert chiefs might give away half of what they owned, since loyal warriors might take just as much again at the next raid. But Meccan merchants operated on principles of investment and profit. They held onto profits, giving only limited banquets and never lavishly handing out gold. Worse, some of the desert generosity had always been directed at the unsuccessful herders and hunters, the poor. Meccan thrift did not include support for the poor. Muhammad was troubled to see growing urban poverty of a type that had been unknown in the desert.

As he grew older, Muhammad began spending much of the month of Ramadan in a cave near the city. Ramadan was already established in the Arabic calendar; it means “scorching heat.” I have not been able to determine much else about pre-Islamic meanings for Ramadan. It may have had some traditional purpose of fasting and meditation already, such that if you wanted to withdraw to a cave, that was the obvious time to do it. He didn’t always fast, for they say that he took provisions and shared them with any poor who stopped by the mountaintop.

The cave of al-Hira was located in the nearby mountain of Jabal al-Nour (Mountain of Light). The outskirts of Mecca now go right up to the mountain’s foot. You can hike up the mountain in about two hours, arriving at the cave. The cave entrance is low and stooping, but once inside, the visitor finds that it opens up with a flat floor and reasonable standing space.

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How do we know about Muhammad’s life? (what is a hadith?)

Posted on December 3, 2020 by Ruth

Before going on with Muhammad’s life story, let’s look at one of the basic problems. At the time of Muhammad’s life, Arabia was not a society that wrote much down.

Paper is what makes writing easy; Arabia had parchment like the rest of the Near East and Europe, but while parchment can be reasonably available, its expense restricts use to important documents: charters, wills, decrees. It was very unusual to write notes about someone’s life during the parchment age. Charlemagne’s courtier Einhard wrote his biography, but then Charlemagne was the most powerful king Europe had seen since the Roman Caesars. We occasionally see a monk who uses some parchment to make his own meditations or notes, but it’s rare, and monasteries were places that majored in parchment procurement. South-Central Arabia, not so much.

Furthermore, the Arabic language of Mecca was just starting to be written down. As we’ll see, Muhammad’s close followers realized the importance of writing down his revelations. They certainly believed that his life was also very important. But they lived in an oral society where it was assumed that everyone would remember the stories he had been told. In oral societies, there are sometimes people whose role in the tribe is simply to remember everything. Forgetting wasn’t something they foresaw.

But Muhammad’s influence expanded more rapidly than anyone could plan for, and then they were too busy creating and maintaining an empire. Muslim records suggest that the third Caliph, who had known Muhammad, urged people to write things down but his reign was short. It wasn’t until two hundred years had passed since the Prophet’s death that scholars made a determined effort to collect on paper the oral anecdotes of his life that were floating around. The men who had known Muhammad had been scattered far and wide by the conquest effort, so their descendants might be found anywhere from Morocco to Afghanistan. They had to be tracked down and asked to narrate what their elders had told them to remember.

An anecdote of the Prophet is called a hadith. This just means a story or a saying, pretty much like our word “anecdote.” An anecdote is a short capsule of narrative information, maybe without a plot or storyline, and maybe without a clear lesson or point. The power of an anecdote is that it happened.

Lacking objective data, the main way to tell if a hadith was true or false was to evaluate the person who told it. After 200 years, that’s not just one person, either. Every hadith comes with a chain of transmission, called its isnad. The isnad tells you what type of claim is being made, and how many narrators were involved in passing it on. Were the transmitters generally thought to be honest men? There is a whole science of determining whether a hadith can be trusted. Every link in the chain had to be investigated.

And what about the collector, who had interviewed the last link in the chain? If a few hadiths in his collection have been deemed “fabricated,” then his collecting discernment is cast into doubt. The Shi’a care most about chains of transmission related to the line of Imams descending genetically from Muhammad, and they don’t give much credit to al-Bukhari, who collected most of the Sunn’i favorite hadiths.

Hadiths were also evaluated by whether they agreed with other hadiths. An outlier hadith that claimed Muhammad said something unusual would have a heavier burden of proof in terms of isnad quality. Some hadiths were recounted by multiple chains of transmission, so they were presumed to be true. When two hadiths disagreed head on, someone had to determine whether they were both correct in different contexts, or if one of them should be discarded. Discarded hadiths are considered fabrications or forgeries.

The whole thing reminds me of the current dilemma we have on the internet when we see a wise quotation ascribed to Aristotle, Winnie the Pooh, or Mark Twain. There’s little at stake here, so in that sense it isn’t comparable. But we face similar questions: is the friend who posted it typically careful about checking things, or not? Does the statement sound like something Aristotle would have said? Winnie the Pooh and Aristotle are known only through a defined set of works, but with Mark Twain, the set is less defined. What if the quote was generated from a private letter held in a museum, not typically shown in books? What if someone’s grandfather had met him and claimed Twain said this to him? How can we tell for sure which quotes are fabricated when the set is undefined? Imagine that a current political party had reason to tell us that Mark Twain said something: in a way, the stakes just went up. Does this agenda make the quote more or less likely?

Let’s take a random example of how to evaluate a hadith, leaning on the database “Isnad.io” for facts. One hadith (Vol. 4, Book 56, #710) in al-Bukhari’s collection says that when two teams were competing archery, the Prophet stopped to watch, but the team he wasn’t standing with refused to compete since now his presence was with the other team. Muhammad told them to go on shooting, because he was really “with” everyone. Is that a reliable hadith? First, its isnad has four narrators: “Masdad bin Masrhad narrates from Yahya bin Said bin Farroukh al-Qatan narrating from Yazid bin Abi Ubaid narrating from Salma ibn al-Akwa.” The original teller was a personal disciple of Muhammad, and although I don’t know anything about the other three names, they were all well-known teachers of Islam with many pupils, no sketchy outliers. The hadith itself appears two more times, with only minor variations; both of these also trace back to Salma ibn al-Akwa, so it confirms that the intermediate tellers didn’t alter it much (therefore they are trustworthy). How does it agree with other stories? It shows Muhammad being fair-minded and interested in archery, which means it agrees with them. So my guess is that it’s considered a reliable hadith.

BUT:

One of the most important things to know about Islam is that the various branches and “schools of law” differ greatly in how they evaluate the hadiths. If a hadith shows Muhammad speaking to a point of law, but it’s considered a fabrication, then the Islamic judges won’t regard it as relevant. Perhaps, back in 1023 two judges disagreed over some hadith, and ever since, their law students have passed on their differing opinions, generation after generation. Depending on what the hadith relates to, the judge from one stream might uphold your claim to an inheritance, while the other denies it. One might invalidate an adoption, the other uphold it.

Take a cursory look at the many collections of hadiths, and you’ll see how complicated this can be. The lists from the Sunn’i, Shi’ite, and Ibadi (African) branches include few overlapping collections. Just being from al-Bukhari might be enough to discredit the archery story for the Shi’ites and Ibadis.

This is the long way of saying that it’s not always clear what we know about Muhammad’s life. There’s a consensus story, and some facts emerge through the Quran itself, and some facts can be checked with outside events. But much of what we think we know comes from pooling these hadiths, written long after the fact. In at least one small but important case, another type of record conflicts with an important hadith. Which one should be taken as definitive? Sometimes these points define Shi’ite or Sunn’i viewpoints, and other times they follow other divisions. I intend to present the narrative formed by consensus, without taking any stands. When I’m aware that there are two narratives, I’ll tell both, as with the case of Khadijah’s previous marriages.

For further detailed information about hadiths, British scholar Jonathan A. C. Brown wrote an accessible book, Hadiths: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World.

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Muhammad’s First Marriage

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Ruth

Muhammad is said to have been 25 when his employer, Khadijah, asked him to marry her. She was trying to run a business inherited from her deceased husband, having to depend on relative strangers and men whose interests might go against hers. I am guessing that after her first husband died, her family found her a new match, but after he too died, she was pretty much off the market. Marrying the younger man was in both their interests, since he gained ownership of a business, and she no longer had to employ men to travel for her. It’s worth noting that Shi’ite scholars do not believe she had been married previously, at all.

Traditionally, Khadijah is said to have been fifteen years older than Muhammad, but some scholars have questioned that assumption, just based on common sense. 25 + 15 = 40, which is usually the end of childbearing years. Khadijah is said to have borne her new husband at least six children, very unlikely if she started at 40. It seems more likely that she was in her early 30s. Being widowed twice isn’t a good measurement of passing years, since marriage for girls began at age 14.

Clan life being what it was, Khadijah was already somewhat related to Muhammad. Her brother had recently married his near-age cousin Safiyyah, and they were also related at the level of Muhammad’s great-grandfather. Khadijah’s cousin Waraqah had become a Christian priest in the Assyrian Church, possibly with Nestorian theology. It seems likely that after marrying her, Muhammad’s contacts with Christians increased, if anything. Why does it matter to notice the “Nestorian” theology? The Quran talks about Jesus (Isa in Arabic), but it tells his story a little differently from the traditional Gospels. Nestorian theology separated Jesus’s natures into distinct parts, human and divine. Waraqah’s discussions could have influenced Muhammad’s understanding of the back story.

Whatever her age, the narrative makes clear that she and Muhammad had a close, supportive—and monogamous—-relationship. We remember him as having many wives, but that was only at the end of his life, and it was an aberration to his customs. Their monogamous relationship doesn’t seem to be unusual for Mecca. A few of the clan chiefs drop into stories here and there with sons by different wives, but it’s equally possible that it was a case of a widower remarrying. They were enthusiastic remarriers, for sure.

By Sunni accounts, Khadijah had three children from her first marriages. Shi’ites suggest that she was not married previously, rather that she was raising her sister’s children. In any case, now she bore a son, Qasim, who died in childhood. Then she had four daughters: Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum, and Fatimah. Last, she bore another son, Abd-Allah, named for Muhammad’s father. He, too, died in childhood. (Many Shi’ites believe that the other daughters also died in childhood, with only Fatimah reaching adulthood.)

Additionally, the couple adopted a teenage boy that Khadijah previously owned as a slave. Zayd was from a northern desert tribe, kidnapped by raiders. Slavery was not racial, it was rather a matter of bad luck. Nobody tried to find Zayd’s family until he was gifted to Muhammad as a wedding present. He freed Zayd, who found a way to get a message to his family. Zayd, however, chose to stay with Muhammad and became an adopted son, probably working in the caravan business. By age, he was more like a younger brother, and later changes under nascent Islamic law undid the legal adoption—as we’ll see.

Last, the couple adopted the young son of Muhammad’s uncle, Abu Talib. Abu Talib was apparently struggling to care for his family, but he had been a kind stepfather to Muhammad, so Muhammad proposed to another uncle, Abbas, that each of them should adopt one of Abu Talib’s sons. Abbas took charge of teenage Ja’far, while Muhammad took home five-year-old Ali.

We see from the story of Muhammad’s first marriage and family that he was left with no direct male heirs. His stepsons from Khadija’s first marriage were never considered as his heirs. They may have died, or they may have moved away. Was either Zayd or Ali to be considered his male heir? I think they were at first. But Zayd’s adoption was later set aside, and Ali was still named for his biological father, Abu Talib, although Muhammad was raising him. I doubt lack of heir seemed important to anyone as long as the family was leading a typical life. This, of course, was soon to change.

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Early Life of Muhammad

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Ruth

Muhammad ibn (son of) Abd-Allah ibn Abd al-Muttalib was born at Mecca in approximately 570, maybe earlier. His father had died while returning from a caravan trip to the west, before the baby was born. Not long after his birth, his mother chose to place him with a nomad family to nurse with their infant. He seems to have stayed with them until he was about three, and then lived in Mecca with his mother for three years (or he may have stayed as many as five years in the desert, which fits better with the language-learning goal). When he was six, they went to Yathrib to see his great-grandmother’s family. In Yathrib, he got to know his cousins and learned to swim and fly a kite.

But on the return trip to Mecca, his mother became ill and died at a small village. The servants took Muhammad to his grandfather’s house, where he lived until he was seven, when his grandfather too died. From the age of eight, Muhammad lived with his uncle Abu Talib. There wasn’t any sort of “school” to be sent to, so he was trained in practical skills he would need. He received basic weapons training with his cousins, and they say he did well with archery.

When he was old enough, he went to work in the countryside as a shepherd. He sometimes accompanied caravans to Syria and Palestine, since that was the family business. These were the years when Nabataean script was being adopted for Arabic in cities like Mecca. It’s an open question whether Muhammad could read it. There wasn’t really anything to read, apart from business accounting. He was probably familiar with the letters, but he probably didn’t do the accounting himself.

During his late teenage years, Mecca had a clan feud that developed into open war for a week; Muhammad is said to have witnessed the fighting and helped in a limited way. Not long after, the city was upset by a visiting merchant’s claim that a clan member had cheated him. These events prompted the men of Mecca to bind themselves by an oath to administer justice without regard to clan membership. Participating in this event would have begun the boy’s thought train about the importance of justice, a theme he returned to often later in life.

There are several stories of Muhammad’s youth that involve contact with Christians, and especially with monks. At the Nabataean city of Bosra in southern Syria, he met some monks: once when he was a child, once as a young man. In these stories, the monks take special notice of him, saying that a prophet was soon to arise in Arabia. In Islamic interpretation, Jesus’s last comments that “my Father will send a comforter to you” referred to an additional human prophet, not to a spiritual, invisible presence. Christians don’t understand it this way, so there won’t be any agreement on that point. But we do know from these stories that Muhammad met and talked to Christians. The monks in Syria might have been orthodox believers, but there was also a flow eastward of Nestorians, who were no longer welcome in Constantinople’s territory. In one story, the monk who meets Muhammad is actually named “Nestor,” which suggests that he did meet Nestorians.

By the time Muhammad was 21, he was ready to lead caravans himself. He would have had basic desert skills for reading the weather, weapons skills to defend himself, and commercial skills to handle trading. After making various trips to Syria, at age 25 was hired by a wealthy widow, Khadijah, to make a caravan trip for her. He was unmarried, although he had asked for the hand of a cousin. His uncle preferred to marry her to an older man from a more powerful family, thus making an alliance that his clan’s reduced circumstances made prudent. It worked out well for Muhammad, since Khadijah asked him to marry her when he returned from the journey.

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Muhammad’s Family

Posted on November 28, 2020 by Ruth

It helps to know a little bit of background on Muhammad’s clan and tribe, because the shape of these family structures were extremely important to the way Islam developed. In the entry on Mecca, you read that his tribe, the Quraysh (ku-rye-sh), ruled that city. They were a large clan with several historic offshoots created by some family divisions in the last 200 years.

Qusay, ruler of Mecca around 440, passed on authority to his oldest son, but half of the tribe preferred his grandson Hashim. These clans banded together; they were financially successful but did not have the formal leadership in Mecca. Hashim, a caravan trader, married a woman in the town of Yathrib, but she insisted on raising their son in Yathrib. Eventually this son came back to Mecca, but there remained a strong link between the Banu Hashim clan and the town of Yathrib (later called Medina). When there was trouble in Mecca, they could retreat to stay with their maternal-linked cousins in Yathrib.

There’s an interesting story about Muhammad’s grandfather, who had only one son. He made an offer to the gods that if he had ten sons, he would sacrifice one of them. Of course, more sons began to be born, and the tenth one was Abd Allah (servant of God), the doomed child. Instead of sacrificing the child (which would have caused scandal), he set up a formal bargaining session. Part of the worship of Hubal, warrior god of Mecca, was to cast arrows at his feet. Ten camels were placed on one side, and Abd Allah on the other. The arrow, cast on the ground, pointed to Abd Allah. So they doubled the camels and cast again. The arrow still chose the child, so they added camels. At one hundred camels, Hubal’s arrow finally pointed to the camels, and the son was saved.

Side note: why wasn’t the son named Abd Hubal? Who was “Allah”? The name “Allah” seems to have been a general name for God in the Mecca region. It was used by the Haneefs, the lone-wolf monotheists in Southern Arabia. It might be cognate with Hebrew “El,” meaning “the Highest.” Of course, this Meccan term for God was soon to become extremely well known.

When the grandfather chose a bride for Abd Allah, he made a point of going to a larger clan, the Banu Zuhrah, and asking for not just one (Aminah) but two brides (also Halah), one for himself. In this way, he hoped that the next generation would be able to count membership in more than one wing of the tribe. Father and son married their cousin brides on the same day. The children were Muhammad (born to Aminah and Abd Allah), and Safiyyah and Hamzah (born to her cousin Halah and the grandfather). Hamzah and Safiyyah were lifelong close friends with Muhammad, sharing the roles of cousin and uncle, depending which generation you looked at. This was not unusual in an Arab clan, where large age differences and intermarriages made some people have multiple family relationships to each other.

We don’t know what year these children were born, although tradition says that Muhammad was born in “the Year of the Elephant.” If that’s true, it pinpoints the date to the time when an Ethiopian general was ruling South Arabia, and before a Persian force deposed the Ethiopians. Abraha, a fervent Christian, led an attack on Mecca with one war elephant in the lead. The attack failed; the Quran says that an army of birds bombarded the men and the elephant with stones. It was approximately 570 by the Roman calendar, but outside sources, such as records in Abyssinia, can’t clarify this.

The “Year of the Elephant” story has Muhammad’s grandfather leading the defense of Mecca (by urging them to pray). Where did their family stand in the hierarchy of the town? It appears there was no official ruler among the Quraysh, but there was a pecking order based mainly on wealth. The grandfather may have been wealthy enough at the time of Abraha’s attack to own 200 camels—taken then returned by the southerners—but he was not the richest man, and his fortunes waned over time. It’s important to understand the social position of the family since this affected the city’s reception of Muhammad’s message.

Muhammad’s clan was the Banu Hashim, the sons (banu) of Hashim. (We now call descendants of this clan “Hashemites.”) They were closely related to the Banu Abd Shams, whose patriarch had been Hashim’s brother. One of the Meccan rulers of the time, Abu Sufyan, was from the Banu Abd Shams clan. Another Mecca ruler, commonly known as Abu Jahl, was from another clan among the Quraysh, related to Muhammad at another few generations earlier. (Aminah’s clan, the Banu Zuhrah, was also related at that more distant level.) These clans were larger and more important. Muhammad’s family should be considered middle class, belonging to society but not important. His lineage was counted only through his father, so although he could ask the Banu Zuhrah for help, he was not one of them.

When Muhammad began to rise in influence, the clans took into account how closely related they were when they chose how to react. Muhammad did not like the clan loyalty system. They also paid attention to wealth and influence, apart from personal holiness. Muhammad was of the middle class, respectable but not of the best families.

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The Outside World in Muhammad’s Time

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Ruth

The nearest neighbors to Muhammad’s Arabia (circa 600) were Abyssinia (modern Somalia and Ethiopia), “Rome,” and the Sasanian Empire of Persia. I put “Rome” in quotes because at that time, it included Egypt, some of North Africa, Palestine/Syria, Anatolia (modern Turkey), and all points west, excepting only, perhaps, Rome itself.

From 610 to 641, Heraclius was Emperor of Rome in Constantinople. His father had been the exarch (governor) of North Africa, and together they overthrew the former emperor. Power seesawed between Byzantine Rome and Persia as they fought a series of battles from 602 till 628.

Persian forces occupied Egypt from 619 to 621, when the Sasanian empire reached its greatest extent; at this time, Persia also occupied much of Southern and Eastern Arabia. Egypt had been majority Christian since some time in the 200s.

early Coptic wall mural, thanks National Geographic!

By 600, its bishops had a long history of conflict with the bishops who represented the imperial cities. They had already been declared heretics and experienced almost as much persecution as they had under Diocletian, the pagan Roman Emperor who became infamous for putting Christians to death. The Egyptians spoke Coptic (descendant of Pharaonic) at home and Greek in the government.

The Byzantine-Persian war finally ended when Emperor Heraclius personally led an army during winter into Persia, where they besieged the city of Nineveh. The Persians lost, and their emperor retreated to defend his capital city, Ctesiphon on the Tigris River. But there was no further need for war, as the Persian army mutinied and deposed him. All these details are generally summed up by the phrase, “by 628, both sides were exhausted.” Additionally, they were all still suffering from revisitations of the plague.

To the north of the imperial cities, ethnic groups from Central Asia were slowly moving into their old territories. The Persians made deals with the Avars and Huns to join their forces in besieging Constantinople. The Byzantines hired the Turks (also called Khazars) who had migrated into the Black Sea region. There were also Bulgars (a Turkic, not Slavic, people), who came from Kazakhstan. The old civilizations of the region were all under pressure from a constant influx of darker-skinned nomads in wagons, and this remained true for at least another four centuries.

The Goths, the earliest of the Germanic tribes to come down into Europe from somewhere in the Poland-Russia area, were settled into Italy, Spain, and the Crimean Peninsula. They were tall and blond; the Gothic languages vanished as they intermarried and joined the Latins and Celts who were already there. By 600, they were all Christians, but then the Lombards, another Germanic group, migrated south from Sweden and settled into northern Italy. There was little unity under the Pope in Rome; bishops were more territorial and ethnic, related to powerful families.

Farther west, the Merovingian kings ruled in France, but during the 600s, their personal power grew less as their Majordomos (“mayor of the palace,” or chief of staff) grew stronger.

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes had overrun Celtic Britain during the previous century. If King Arthur was a historical figure, his time was about one hundred years past by the time of Muhammad. Around 600, Latin missionaries were bringing Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons, as they had brought it to the Franks in the time of the first Merovingians. King Aethelberht of Kent had married a Christian Frankish princess, so his coastal kingdom was the first to accept the new religion, although his sons returned the kingdom to pagan worship. During the same time, King Raedwald of East Anglia, just north of them, was buried at Sutton Hoo with a magnificent pagan ship burial.

Scandinavia was the old heartland of the northern Germanic tribes, and it remained the land of Odin and Thor for many centuries yet. It had a lot of cultural exchange and travel with Denmark and England; eventually, it became the source of Viking attacks, but not yet in 600. Beowulf is set more or less in this time, too.

To the east, Christian adherents of Nestorius, a monk who had been declared a heretic, moved away from the Byzantine zone into Persia. The Persian empire was Zoroastrian. Sometimes it persecuted the Christians, other times not. There is still a Church of Assyria in Iraq, dating from this time. In general, Christian dissidents headed east, eventually going into India, China, and Mongolia.

China was ruled by the Tang Dynasty. It was a golden age of literature, and civil service exams were well-established by then. Central Asia had a variety of now-forgotten kingdoms, such as the Khitans, but the Tang Dynasty had just wrapped up a civil war and was expanding its territory.

India was split into many kingdoms, some allied with Persia, some having little to do with outside politics. It shared the Hindu religion with other parts of Southeast Asia, from Ceylon to Java. Buddhism was also dominant in eastern Asia, from the central kingdoms like the Khitan, to Java and Borneo.

North Africa was mainly Berber, with a strong remnant of Punic (Phoenician) farmers. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (Algeria) until his death in 430, was probably part (or all) Berber, though his first language was Latin and he spoke a few words of Punic.

In West Africa, the Sahara caravan routes were controlled by the Empire of Wagadou, whose king was called the Ghana, so it’s often called the Ghana Empire. It wasn’t in modern Ghana, it was in the region of Mali and Mauritania. Its trade was in salt and gold; the same zone in later medieval years was a gold exporting powerhouse.

In North America, the mound-building cultures built some fairly large cities along the major rivers. The Hopewell culture created fine carved art, especially in their pipes, which archeologists have found in mounds throughout Illinois and Indiana.

Farther south, the year 600 finds the Mayan culture in its Classic period. The city of Tikal was at its peak of influence.

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The Arab World in Muhammad’s Time

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Ruth

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?

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Classical Arabic and Poetry

Posted on November 19, 2020 by Ruth

We come to the last major cultural element that brings us up to the time—and the phenomenon—of Muhammad. This is a particularly difficult element for Americans to understand because it’s so unlike us. (1) Every culture has at least one form of art. (2) Nomads are handicapped by needing to carry around anything they own, so (3) Arabians in the desert needed an art form that took no space. We’d understand if they fell in love with music or dance, but actually they fell in love with rhetoric and poetry.

Not only did they fall in love with poetry, but they seem to have created a high-register literary language just for the art form. Its grammar was that of the Arabs of Central and North Arabia, but it had a richer vocabulary than usual. They fell in love with this language. Those who could speak it fell in love with it, and those who could sort-of understand it were so entranced by the art that they redoubled their efforts to become fluent.

In a nutshell, poetry apparently made this branch of North Arabian language into the dominant tongue of the peninsula. I say “apparently” because I am trusting one really good source for this idea: it’s a major theme of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Arabs: a 3000 Year History. His argument is persuasive and detailed; it is based on consulting many original documents. He persuaded me, but my short essay here can only pass on the main points and conclusions. But everyone agrees that poetry in pre-Islamic nomadic Arabic was a very big deal.

There were other reasons that North Arabic might become the dominant tongue, since both caravans and military maneuvers were dominated by Bedouins. Nothing is ever as simple as just “popularity.” However, take the current phenomenon of American teenagers learning Japanese. It’s clearly due to Japan’s dominance in animation, an art form much loved by young Americans. Imagine if Mexico had pulled off the same feat, making several generations of young people fall “weeaboo-crazy” in love with its language and culture. We already have a really high percentage of Spanish-speakers in the US, and while they are concentrated in some regions, you can find Spanish culture enclaves in every city and state. What would it take to start to flip the language dominance toward Spanish? a few generations. That seems to be what happened in Arabia. Nomads lived mostly in the central region, but they lived all through and around the cities and roads of other regions. If you really wanted to learn Bedouin Arabic, it was easy to find speakers to interact with, and you probably needed to learn it anyway for your job.

We see one tip that this process was still actively going on during Muhammad’s lifetime, in that he was sent to live with a Bedouin family when he was learning to speak. It’s presented as so common that the tribes came into the town looking for babies, who were advertised in some way.. In other words, many families in Mecca were sending their sons out to nomad camps in early life, specifically to gain language and culture, so the slots were filled up. It was healthier to grow up with open air, staying away from epidemics. But just as wealthy English-speaking families have sent kids to boarding school to obtain the right accent, so did the Meccans. And Bedouin = the right accent.

Where did the language of poetry develop? Mackintosh-Smith suggests that it caught on partly among nomads and partly in the court of al-Hirah, the Arabic city in Iraq. The Lakhmid dynasty ruled a tribe of South Arabians who had migrated north a few centuries earlier, and they were under Persian influence. Their capital city imitated some Persian culture including the arts, but their domain extended from southern Iraq into eastern Arabia, so they were neighbors of the nomads. Somehow, in this mixture, Classical Arabic was born. Mackintosh-Smith says that it was always a literary language, never a mother tongue. But its foundational layer was nomadic North Arabian, mutually comprehensible across many dialects and perhaps incorporating features of all of them.

Early pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was always recited. It was during this same time that Nabataean writing was spreading in North-Central Arabia, but we have no records that anyone used it to write down these poems. It wasn’t even thought of, since the art form was recitation. It used both meter and rhyme, which helped with memorization (moon and….June? yep). Semitic languages rhyme easily, since whole classes of words have the same vowels. Instead of avoiding it, they embraced it. But since it was easy to do, the art really lived in other aspects of the verse.

One main feature of this literary language was its rich vocabulary. It collected words from neighboring languages, borrowing them as synonyms:

“Multiple synonyms include 80 for ‘honey,’ 200 for ‘beard,’ 500 for ‘lion,’ 800 for ‘sword,’ and 1000 for ‘camel.’ The last figure seems if anything rather low: an old saw among Arabists that says every Arabic word means three things—itself, its opposite, and a camel—is not entirely untrue.”

Mackintosh-Smith, 43

Classical Literary Arabic had so many specific words—like a different word for the space between each finger—that it was considered impossible for any one person to absorb all of it. That was a point of pride. If a man had mastered much of it and could recite poetry by the hour—and compose his own—he gained followers, like a rock band. There were poetry “salons,” comparable to the salons of Paris, with people traveling hundreds of miles to attend. In the northern Lakhmid and Ghassanid courts (set up to compete with each other, as well as doing so naturally), the rulers patronized (financially supported) poets as the later Medici and Sforza families would. (Mackintosh-Smith, 83) In Mecca, a popular feature of the annual pilgrimage was what we’d call a Poetry Slam, with prizes for the winners.

Poetry was not the only verbal art form. Arabs also cherished public speaking and prophecy. In the days before Islam, prophecy meant divination like the Oracle at Delphi, who also delivered messages in (Greek) verse. Prophecy of this type, in Arabic, used a particular rhymed prose style that was not used for any other type of speech. Like poetry, it was beautiful, and its beauty was part of its truth. As Keats wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all…ye need to know.”

This is hard for an English-speaker to grasp; Keats wrote that line in English, but most of us don’t believe him. We love English and argue that it’s the best language ever (because it is). But we fully recognize that a florid speech whipping up emotions may be false at the core; we see English as conveying both truth and lies, and the measure of either is in the objective facts. In some way, Arabic loves its words so much that this doesn’t strike them. Rhetoric and poetry are real in themselves. The beauty and passion of the words are their own reality. The Quran was seen as its own testimonial to its truth, since it was rhetorically beautiful. It was its own miracle.

As hard as it is for me to understand this, I can see the evidence that it’s true. We’ve seen many times that when an Arabic speech or statement is translated into English, it sounds silly and overblown. In Arabic, it doesn’t, any more than a British gentleman looks overdressed sitting down to dinner at his own home in what we (Americans) would call a “tux.” It’s just how it’s done; in its context, it’s fitting. In that context, it’s effective.

The pre-Islamic poems were not written down until, during Islam’s golden years, a corps of scholars who were also in love with Arabic began to create its official literature. Two centuries later, they could count on the poems being recited without change. By that time, much more poetry was being written; Arabic poetry continued to be a living art form perhaps right through to the present with few gaps. Check out this modern poetry contest on Arabic television (see here to learn about a woman who competed), and this museum exhibit of modern poetry.

I’ll leave you with just a few lines in translation from Imru al-Qais, the first major Arabic poet. I’m linking to a great article about this early poetry at Aramcoexpats.com, and I’m lifting these few lines from the same. Imru al-Qais celebrated the beauty of women:

She turns away, and shows her smooth cheek, forbidding with a glancing eye,
Like that of a wild animal, with young, in the desert of Wajrah…

…Her curls creep upward to the top of her head;
And the plaits are lost in the twisted hair, and the hair falling loose…

He celebrated the severe weather of the desert:

But come, my friends, as we stand here mourning, do you see the lightning?
See its glittering, like the flash of two moving hands, amid the thick gathering clouds.

Its glory shines like the lamps of a monk when he has dipped their wicks thick in oil.
I sat down with my companions and watched the lightning and the coming storm.

Other desert poets celebrated war: camels, horses, raiding, danger. If you want to read more, don’t miss both parts of the Aramcoexpats.com articles: Part 1 and Part 2.

Of these short excerpts, I like best the lightning-storm poem. A few months ago, I wrote a triolet with a similar theme, but without having seen Imru al-Qais’s lines! Enjoy:

The color that is you is strong and bright,
A desert tone—black coffee, or the sky—
When thunder strikes the dune, it paints with light
The color that is you. Is “strong and bright”
Enough to name it? Yes, I think on sight
I’ll know it. Red, gold, blue, or…? ”There,” I’ll cry,
“The color! That is you: it’s strong and bright,
A desert tone. Black coffee. Or….the sky?”

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Writing in Arabia

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Ruth

Until very late in Arabia’s history, writing was used only for inscriptions and other short statements made for important occasions. The first book written in Arabic—or in any form of Arabian language—was the Quran.

East Arabia used Sumer’s cuneiform during its Bronze Age heyday. Cuneiform was difficult to learn, only boys intended to use writing as a major part of their employment would be taught. If you wanted something written, you hired a scribe. That’s why the cheap-copper complaint sent to Ea-Nasir begins “Tell Ea-Nasir,” because it was presumed that one hired scribe wrote it, and another would read it.

There were several dozen writing systems in use in the Near East, from the Iron Age forward. The first one was the Phoenicians’ abjad, that is, a consonant-only writing system. Phoenician was a Semitic language in which vowels were more like color than like real information, so the abjad system made sense. It was widely adopted across the Semitophone region: Paleo-Hebrew, Moabite, Aramaic, Sabaean, Himyarite, and Ethiopic languages all used Phoenician-imitative abjads.

Abjads were a disruptive technology in their time; the region around Babylonia still used cuneiform for official records, but no other languages adopted it after abjads came around. You could learn to read and write an abjad in a few days. Once the problem of “what to write on” was solved, anyone could write down anything. In Greece, the notion of vowels improved the technology even more, allowing them to quickly write whole books. But since vowels weren’t needed to denote what was said in a Semitic language, that improvement only took over in Indo-European languages and their neighbors.

South Arabia’s writing system could be written and read either right-left or left-right. You could tell which way to read the letters because they flipped to face forward (English’s b and d pairing make it impossible for us to try that trick). A stone inscription would begin one way, then turn at the end of each line. This method of orienting letters is called boustrophedon.

Ethiopia and Somalia used their high degree of cultural exchange with South Arabia to borrow some Sabaean letters to write Ge’ez, their ancient language. Ge’ez only added vowels when Ethiopia adopted Christianity that came out of Egypt, where the Greek alphabet was in wide use.

The nomadic people of the Arabian interior used various alphabets, often the Sabaean one, if they wanted to write something down. The desert is covered with over 40,000 rock graffiti (Hoyland, 201). The texts don’t seem to have a clear purpose; they are doodles. Shepherds wrote out phrases about their livestock, hunters wrote about their catches. Many nomads wrote out their lineage. The rock inscriptions are known as “Thamudic,” referring to a legendary proto-Arabian tribe. There’s also a script known as Dadanitic, since it was used mostly near the large oasis of Dadan.

But meanwhile, Aramaic-speaking people around Syria and Jordan had developed a very successful form that spread with their merchant culture. “Square” Aramaic was used for formal writing, and we’re familiar with its look from Hebrew. There was also a more cursive Syriac Aramaic, which was adapted by the Nabataeans of Petra for their form of Arabic.

The Nabataean abjad is what North Arabians began using to write Old Arabic. The oldest sample of this adapted writing is a tombstone with a Christian cross.

At the time that Mohammad was giving the first revelations that became the Quran, it was said that fewer than 20 people in Mecca could write or read. Mohammad probably knew the simplest writing, since he worked in caravan shipping to the Nabataean region. But a handful of his early followers were fully literate, and they made the unusual (in Arabia) choice to write down whatever he said, however long and un-inscription-like.

Arabia was poised to go from being mostly non-literate to almost universally literate. In the two generations before Mohammad, oral literature was extremely popular and strong, but it wasn’t written down. The Quran itself was intended to be preserved as oral literature. “Quran” indicates notes for an oral recitation, not a book as we think of books. After the Quran, books were called kitab, a thing that’s been written down. But the Quran itself was the tipping point, called “the Recitation” but becoming the first book.

Arabia and the Arabs: from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. New York: Routledge, 2001.

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