The Outside World in Muhammad’s Time

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

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

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

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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Exodus of the Marib Dam

For most of Arabia’s history (and prehistory), the Eastern region was oriented toward Persia, the Southern region was oriented toward Africa and Egypt, and the central desert was culturally different from both. But during the years before Muhammad’s birth, a great natural disaster sent many people of the South into other regions as refugees, settlers and traders. This was a major step in the creation of an “Arabian” identity.

Keeping up a civilization based on large-scale water technology requires a lot of central planning and power. We know that ancient Saba (Sheba) used its military and economic muscle to harness the thousands of workers required to build and maintain irrigation canals and dams. But all kingdoms weaken eventually, and Saba’s rule came to an end. None of its successor kingdoms, Ma’in, Qataban and Himyar, were as powerful, and gradually, the water engineering grew weaker too. The Jewish kingdom of Himyar (ca. 450) and the later Ethiopian (Aksumian) occupiers (ca. 540) both tried to repair the dams, especially the great Marib Dam. They were also up against forces of nature, since the soil of Yemen was basically sandy and didn’t do well at sealing in water.

Medieval Arabic historians give different accounts of when the Marib Dam finally failed. It was before Muhammad’s birth, but it may have been three centuries before, or two decades. It sounds like it was probably at least a century before, because of the developments that came after and were already in place by Muhammad’s time. Additionally, the dam’s health must have wavered long enough to have breaches that each seemed like “the big one.” In any case, the event’s timing matters less than its result: a mass emigration of South Arabians whose way of life had been dependent on irrigation.

Marib ruins. Dennis/Flickr

Legends tell that a local king’s wife, a seer, foretold the collapse of the Marib Dam. Tarifah said that the dam was being eaten by rats from within, and that the people should all leave the area. Her people, the tribe of Ghassan or Jafnan, obeyed. They emigrated en masse northwards, out of Yemen and into modern Jordan. There they set up a capital at Jabiyah and became a client and buffer state for Rome.

The tribe of Lakhm also migrated northward, staying to the east of the Ghassanids. They resettled along the eastern coast of Arabia and into Iraq, where they set up a kingdom with a capital city of al-Hirah. They were allied with, and a buffer state for, Persia. The two Arabic immigrant kingdoms faced each other, and the empires counted on them to stay even in their arms race. Both of these Arab-origin buffer states come into the early story of Islam.

The tribe of Azd migrated north and settled in the area of modern United Arab Emirates. This fact is important in our time because in the 1980s, Sheikh Zayed, president of the UAE, funded a new Marib Dam in Yemen. He probably had many reasons to do this, but among them, he said that his tribe of Azd had come from Yemen, so he was just doing something for the Old Country.

The tribe of Kindah moved northward toward Bahrain, but they were not allowed to settle. They established a caravan town at Qaryat al-Faw in central Arabia, and some of them became neo-nomads. Some of the tribe went back to the south and re-established a power base. The Kindah tribe in central Arabia is part of Muhammad’s story because they were the local rivals to Mecca’s power. Other southern tribes, such as the Madh’hijj, also settled in the central area but did not become Mecca’s rivals. Rather, they were part of the pilgrim wave that swelled Mecca’s business each year.

This massive northward migration was somewhat balanced by a tendency among the nomads to move closer to the cities. Nomadic tribes originally from the north and central areas drifted southward, setting up camp close enough to cities like Mecca that they could interface with other caravan businesses. They brought their families near to the cities who were hiring mercenaries and security guards. By the time of Muhammad, there had been two centuries of ethnic and linguistic mixing, moving toward a national identity.

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Arabian Monotheism before Islam

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Jews began moving to other parts of the Empire and its edges. Rome didn’t rule Arabia proper, but its province of Arabia Petraea included the legendary town of Petra and its trade routes. After the Jewish revolt and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, many Jews fled in all directions, including eastward into nearby Arabia. There are some Jewish tombs in north-western Arabia that date back to Roman times.

During the 4th century, many Arabian petty kings and tribal leaders adopted either Judaism or Christianity. In one story, some rabbis with Torah scrolls were not harmed by fire, and so the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar (a successor to Saba) became Jewish. Regardless of who converted to Judaism, Jewish families settled in Arabian towns and grew to become extended-family tribes in the Arabian manner. By the time of Muhammad, on the surface it was impossible to tell which “Jewish” tribes were originally from Israel but spoke Arabic, as opposed to being Arabs who had adopted Judaism. Some towns and even kingdoms were mostly Jewish, especially in the South, where Yemen’s Jewish communities have been famous in modern times.

Christianity’s first inroad to Arabia was its 3rd and 4th century love affair with deserts, where hermits could live truly holy lives away from temptation. Christian Egypt began the hermit tradition in its western desert, but monasteries spread to other deserts. St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai was built during the generation before Mohammad.

Around the same time, Emperor Justinian founded a monastery in Saidnaya, Syria.

These flagship monasteries had many other hermitages and smaller retreats all through the desert, where the monks sometimes met and talked to Arabs, including those who passed through with caravans.

But during these centuries, religion was not a simple matter of the heart. It usually signaled a political alliance. In South Arabia, it began with an Ethiopian conquest of Himyar, a South Arabian kingdom that had adopted Judaism, around the same time that the desert monasteries were founded. The Ethiopian governor, Abraha al-Ashram, built a Christian basilica in Sana’a, riding roughshod over Jewish practices. But Ethiopia was a sideshow compared to the battle between two empires to the north: New Rome and the Sasanian Empire of Persia, based in Ctesiphon.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is The-Persian-Sassanid-Empire-224-651-AD.gif
This was the clearest map I could find, sorry for its being labeled in Russian!

In 5th and 6th century Arabia, a Christian city with a Catholic church in it was allied to Rome, that is, Constantinople (Arabic calls them both “Rum”). The Emperor Justinian had been especially aggressive in forcing conversion on the territories he conquered, including pressure on the Nabataeans and on Yemen to increase their Christian presence. But an Arabian king who held to Nestorian Christian tenets was allied with Persia, since followers of Nestorius had been expelled from the Roman Empire in 451. It’s not clear how Jewish towns were allied, but possibly with Persia, where Jews had also fled. Additionally, in towns allied with Persia—mostly in the East and the South—there were Zoroastrian temples to Ahura Mazda.

Polytheism was increasingly only practiced in old-fashioned places such as Mecca. Mecca’s economic power rested on the polytheistic pilgrimage, so it was not ready to adopt one of the imperial or foreign religions. Many of the nomadic Arabs still followed the sunnah of an ancestor, including his gods. But the monotheistic idea was catching on everywhere. In South Arabia, there are pre-Islamic inscriptions to Al-Rahman, “the Merciful.” This may have been a reference to one of the already-established religions, but it may also have signaled an indigenous movement toward monotheism without imperial ties.

Early Muslim writings refer toHanif” people who did not practice polytheism. Mohammad accepted them as forerunners to his message; in his view, they were people who held onto the religion of Abraham. In addition to the name Al-Rahman, they may also have referred to God by the name “Allah.” The name “Allah” seems to be a contraction of Al-Ilah, “the god.” The word “ilah,” god, is in the Muslim confession “There is no god but Allah.” It’s cognate with Hebrew “Elohim,” god. Among pagans, it was not used as a name, since individual gods had their own names. Just using it alone was a statement for monotheism.

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Origins of Mecca

At the time Mohammad was born there, Mecca was a central place for polytheistic worship. We don’t have much to go on, for its history.

The Quran suggests a faith-based account of Mecca’s history. The story begins with Abraham’s having gone to Egypt, where his wife Sarah was taken into Pharaoh’s house. When Pharaoh realized that she was already married, he sent her away; the Muslim account adds that he was so impressed with her piety that he gave his daughter, Hagar (Hajar in Arabic? I think), to be her servant. Hagar gives birth to Abraham’s first child, at Sarah’s request. Later, Sarah demands that Hagar and her son Ishmael be sent away, but Abraham sends them away with honor. He takes a retinue of servants and accompanies Hagar and Ishmael to a new place, then stays long enough to help build the nub of a new town. This town is Mecca, also called Becca (or Bakkah or Makkah).

Abraham comes back to visit Ishmael, who has married into the local tribe of Jurham, keepers of the Well of Zamzam, which an angel revealed to Hagar when they were thirsty.

On such a visit, Abraham helps his son build a temple for God: the Ka’aba (Surah 2:125, “And We made the House a focal point for the people, and a sanctuary. Use the shrine of Abraham as a place of prayer. And We commissioned Abraham and Ishmael, “Sanctify My House for those who circle around it, and those who seclude themselves in it, and those who kneel and prostrate.”). Muslims believe that for several generations, the descendants of Abraham periodically came to visit Ishmael’s family and worship at the Ka’aba.

Secular, non-Muslim accounts can’t confirm any of this; archeology and outside records have not been able to establish when Mecca was founded. All accounts agree that the Ka’aba was an important structure during Muhammad’s lifetime, and that it was part of the polytheistic system. In the Muslim understanding, idol-worship was a degradation of its original purpose, signifying loss of knowledge of the true God. All accounts also agree that the Ka’aba we have now can’t possibly be the original one, whenever it was built; in a story from Muhammad’s life, he witnesses a rebuilding of the Ka’aba. In the story, Muhammad finds a tactful way to keep the leading men of the city from quarreling over who is to lift the Black Stone into place in the new structure.

Later Muslim records tell of the structure’s being destroyed by fire or war. The part that remains the same is the black stone, though at one time, it was stolen and broken, and has now been encased in silver and restored.

Mecca was one of the pilgrimage sites that hosted a religious festival. It seems to have been linked into the South Arabian economic and social orbit, so the festival may have been similar to Marib’s annual pilgrimage to Almaqah. But Mecca was also on the edge of the great desert, and it operated as a caravan hub. People from many parts of Arabia came through Mecca, including nomads who were at war against each other before and after the festival’s truce.

Mecca was a point on the Incense Route, the road that led up the western coast of Arabia from Yemen to Jordan, but it was also near the seacoast. I believe gold had also been mined in that center-western part of Arabia, so in addition to incense and pearls, gold would have been traded through Mecca. Several caravan roads crossed near Mecca, so it was a major provisioning stop.

The city was basically in the coastal plain, but also at the foothills of the mountains that lead into Arabia’s inner plateau. There were rocky hills all through the city and small mountains just outside it. The city has now grown to include some of those mountains.

Mecca was ruled by the tribe of the Quraysh, of whom Mohammad was a minor member. The Quraysh ran the city as a business, including the pilgrimage festival. Their chief god was Hubal, along with a trio of goddesses—sisters—Manat, Al-Lat and Al-Uzzah.

The goddesses had their own shrines near Mecca, where Manat was the goddess of fate, and one of the others (Al-Lat?) may have represented the moon. Hubal was a god of divination; arrows were cast in front of his idol, and the way they fell determined the omen and its message. But the Ka’aba included other gods, so that most options were available to pilgrims: Almaqah and other gods of South Arabia, gods of Canaan and Greece, and by Muhammad’s time, even an icon of Mary. For the Quraysh, the point of the pilgrimage festival was that it brought a lot of business into the town. Doctrine was very low on the priority chain.

When pilgrims came to Mecca, they worshipped at the Ka’aba by walking around it. They also touched or kissed the sacred stone, and sometimes they used it to make binding oaths, pouring water across it and using the water as sacred. If there was a belief that the stone stood for something, we don’t know of it. Periodically, the Ka’aba had to be rebuilt, as it was in Muhammad’s time. When the city was under attack, the Ka’aba was a major target, since it functioned as the city’s spiritual center.

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Arabian Pagan Religion

Until about the 4th century AD, Arabians were polytheists with beliefs and practices similar to the rest of the world. Their customs were mostly common to other polytheists, but they had a few interesting distinctives. One of the common polytheistic beliefs is that each place or tribe can have its own god, and there is no quarrel over whose god is more real. Gods tend to be local; when you go to a new place, of course there is a new god to honor. So Arabia’s polytheism had many divine personae.

In South Arabia, where civilization was organized around public works and buildings, each place had a chief god. Saba’s chief god was Almaqah, with his primary temple in Marib. He may have been a sun god, but the Arabian gods weren’t organized into sky pantheons as carefully as the Greek ones. Almaqah might have just been “the god.” God of the sun, god of war, god of Sabah. Every year, during the summer rains, Sabaeans had a procession to the temple to ask Almaqah for the blessing of water. Cities that had fallen into Saba’s ruling sphere were expected to send delegations to join them; they could keep their old gods, but they were expected to call Almaqah the chief of the gods.

In Arabia Deserta, there were few temples or fixed places for gods. Tribes paid honor to some god, perhaps borrowed from an important place like Saba. One way to honor the gods was to keep a certain sacred place and time. At a designated season, for some weeks, there would be a pilgrim festival. Animals were off limits for hunting, no fighting or raiding was permitted, and pilgrims were supposed to refrain from sex. ‘Ukaz, a place near modern Riyadh, was one such gathering point. Tribes that usually fought each other could meet for trade, litigation, and contests.

Nomads also honored the gods with temporary idols that didn’t need any particular place. Greek geographers bringing back intelligence for Alexander the Great reported that Arabian nomads used stones to stand for their gods. They didn’t carve or paint the stones, nor did they carry the same stones around. They just chose a stone when setting up camp, and designated it to stand for the god. Hisham al-Kalbi’s 8th century Book of Idols describes this process: “Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station in order to rest or spend the night, he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking-pot.”

Stones were a central feature of Arabian custom. In the northern area where they were more influenced by Greek and Phoenician cultures, the stones were more likely to be carved to look like a person.

But in the interior, long flat stones served as altars, while standing stones served as the gods. The particular way that standing stones were honored as gods was to walk around them in circles. Nomads who had a reason to beseech the god’s favor could sacrifice an animal on a lying stone, then walk in circles a sacred number of times around a nearby standing stone.

Stones may have become objects of worship because of the number of meteorites scattered through Arabia’s interior. Meteorite falls are impresive if you witness them: in 2016, a meteorite crashed into the earth, catching a grove of trees on fire. Chunks of meteorite iron could easily have been the first divine stones.

We know that a stone, possibly a meteorite, is built into the Ka’aba at Mecca. There is some evidence that a few cities other than Mecca had cube-shaped shrines. It’s possible that they were shrines set up for meteorites, or for other stand-out stones. Mohammad ordered such a Ka’aba to be destroyed in Yemen; it had an idol made of white quartz.

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

The interior of Arabia has been a difficult terrain during the period of recorded history, although we know that it had been much wetter in the past, supporting animals like hippopotami. The animal best suited to survive in Arabia as it is now is, of course, the camel—or if you will, the dromedary. Camels are adapted to extremely dry conditions in various ways you wouldn’t immediately think of; for example, their blood cells are oval, fitting more easily through dehydrated veins than round cells. Camels were domesticated in this region a long time ago, used for fuel (dung), milk, meat, and transport.

When we meet desert-dwellers in the Bible, during the Iron Age, they are the Midianites, Moabites, Edomites, Amorites, Amalekites, and possibly others. Not until later are they called “Arabs.” It’s unclear how the term “Arab” came about; one theory is that its root meaning is “mixed,” that is, the mixture of all these tribes living similar nomadic lifestyles in the harsh dry environment. (Hebrew speakers may think of לְעַרְבֵּב, which means “to mix.”) Moab, Midian, and Edom were gradually forgotten, and the resulting population was just called “Arab” by those who lived in cities. The word “Arab” also resembles the compass direction “west,” so that might be part of the root. The earlier Bible-era names matter because they suggest that “Arab” was not a tribal identity in the beginning; each group called itself something else. “Arab” is a label imposed from the outside on people who may not have considered themselves much related, at first.

Nomads in the desert move about to find better pasture for their sheep and goats, using camels to pack and carry their gear. The camels can also form caravans, and they can be ridden to war. But additionally, nomads in the desert adopted horses, who were less hardy but much faster. The one-two punch of desert warfare became the combination of camel and horse. The camel could carry the horse’s food and water, while the horse could attack swiftly on local raids.

Desert tribes tended to be very large extended families that focused on remembering their lineage; perhaps if you have no fixed place, your lineage matters more to locate you in space and time. They were highly aware of following the customs of their particular ancestors, so that customs varied a lot through the region. We tend to assume that, for example, nomadic desert people have always been polygamous, as some Muslim desert sheikhs are now. But the pre-Islamic marriage customs are all over the place, in old records: some brides joined the husband’s family. while some grooms joined the wife’s family. Some tribes permitted multiple husbands (brothers) for one wife, while others allowed a man to leave his property only to his sister’s children, not his own. Some tribes permitted temporary marriage, while others permitted a wife to dismiss a husband by turning the tent so the door faced away. (Hoyland, 128-31)

The point was that each extended family followed the ways of its ancestors, and that’s the culturally unifying point: to follow the sunnah of your progenitor. We know the word “sunnah” from Muslim use, as it refers to the Prophet’s customs. But we can only understand this use if we understand the previous one: to follow the ways of your tribal ancestor. Where he went, you go. What he worshipped, you do too. How he settled disputes, that’s how you will. It was a very basic legal system among nomads, as long as most people operated only within their family groups where the same sunnah was known.

Desert nomads cared for their flocks and worked in caravans, but they also raided each other to steal livestock or other wealth. It’s a traditional way of life around the world: Tim Mackintosh-Smith points out that Sanskrit has a root word that refers to both cattle and war, as Arabic’s word for livestock is also cognate with “plunder, loot.” (Mackintosh-Smith, 62) My Scots ancestors raided cattle and received protection money not to raid the cattle; it was called “reiving.” Raiding only works if you have a wilderness to fall back to, getting lost so your pursuers face real danger if they try to recoup their losses.

Because of the desert tribes’ raiding skill, there was one more social role they played: the mercenary. Having no city to defend, they could be hired to beef up any city’s defensive or offensive forces. They had large families and limited resources, always the formula for supplying fighting men. As their supply of both camels and horses grew, they filled more and more of the interior and came closer to the cities at the edges of the desert, where they picked up work for fighting or for transport. Gradually, some desert tribes came to be semi-settled near some towns, working as bodyguards or other fighters. There was still a clear separation between townsfolk and nomads, but they started to mingle socially much more.

  • Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. Routledge, 2001.
  • Arabs: A 3000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Yale University Press, 2020.

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Saba: Kingdom of the Ma’rib Dam

The Hebrew Bible tell us that Solomon’s Iron Age kingdom grew rich enough that the Queen of Sheba traveled to Jerusalem to see it. It wasn’t a long journey, though in ancient times, every journey was long and dangerous. The Queen of Sheba probably sailed through the Red Sea, then traveled by caravan to the Judean hills. Although her kingdom’s name is given as “Sheba” in English, archeologists call it Saba. In its heyday, Saba included all of the lands on either side of the Jabal Haraz range, coastal and inland, and partway up the Indian Ocean coast toward Oman.

Saba’s government was centralized like Egypt’s, because you need a large, powerful government to organize and compel the labor required for large water engineering. It was ruled by a king whose importance could be compared to the kings of Egypt and Assyria. In 716 BC, Sargon II, conqueror of Babylon, received a gift of aromatic resins and gems from Ita’amara of Saba, who was mentioned in a list of gift-givers that included the king of Egypt and a queen of Arabs (in the Palmyra/Petra region?). (Hoyland, 39)

The patron god of Saba was Ilmaqah (or Almaqah). Cities and regions conquered by Saba were expected to adopt Ilmaqah as their god, though they could keep their own local gods. They must then make an annual pilgrimage to Ma’rib, the capital city, with sacrificial animals for the god. In this way, they became adoptive children of the god, therefore part of the nation. There’s an inscription on a rock some miles west of Ma’rib, in which a local god helpfully instructs his people how to go pay homage to Ilmaqah: stay ritually pure (no sex), and bring 1400 sheep along to sacrifice. (Mackintosh-Smith, 52)

In telling this story, Tim Mackintosh-Smith points out that one advantage of their self-concept was that other cities and tribes could be adopted at all. Presumably, once you had a Sabaean garrison in your city and had made the pilgrimage, you were on reasonably equal terms with natives. Most of Saba, in fact, was probably made up of small communities forced or invited into the confederation. This contrasts with tribal communities that emphasized literal genetic linkage, rather than adoption by a place or god.

Saba’s great power lay in creating and protecting their dams. They had upwards of a hundred dams in the region, some small, some quite large. The biggest one was the Ma’rib Dam at their capital city. This dam was ancient; its original structure may have been built around 1750 BC (Bronze Age), but recorded history has its foundation around 750 BC (Iron Age). It was mostly made of earth and gravel, piled and packed into a large structure, then faced with stone. It was further supported by stone structures that connected it to the mountains.. It collected rain from the slopes of three mountains, channeling the water into two main irrigated plains.

Saba used an ancient writing system that worked well for cutting inscriptions on rock faces. It was unrelated to the Phoenician-derived Mediterranean scripts, and apparently it is the ancestor of modern Ethiopian writing in the Ge’ez language.

All in all, it was more like Egypt or Sumer than like anything we consider “Arabian” today. It had the trappings of empire: monuments, walls, public works, and military campaigns.

  • Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. Routledge, 2001.
  • Arabs: A 3000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Yale University Press, 2020.

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