Islam

The Birth of Islam (p. 30-31)

Islam’s historical origins lie in the life of a man named Muhammad who was born in the city of Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia in around 570 C.E., and died in a nearby city called Medina in 632 C.E. In Muhammad’s time. Arabia was culturally, politically, and economically impoverished relative to the large and wealthy empires that surrounded it. To the north were the Byzantine Greek and Sassanian Persian Empires and to the south the affluent world of Abyssinia. Arabia itself was divided between the main Arabian plateau and a region called South Arabia (present-day Yemen), which had once been the seat of a thriving agricultural society but had fallen on poorer times. The plateau, where Muhammad was from, was an arid place in which the majority of people lived as nomads, accompanying their herds of camels, sheep, and goats from one place to another in search of good pasture.

The few cities were located on oases, which provided the only reliable source of water for agriculture, and some were centers for trade among the people of Arabia and with the surrounding lands. The Arabs of Muhammad’s time lived in tribes which were large social groups held together by a shared ancestry, each being composed of a number of clans made up of several extended families. A family elder would be recognized as the leader of the clan, and the clan leaders together constituted the ruling council of a tribe. Tribal councils tried to operate through negotiation and consensus building, although powerful clans no doubt had much greater influence over tribal affairs than did weaker ones. The majority of tribes in Arabia were both patriarchal and patrineal; however, there appear to have been some tribes in which lineage was passed down through the mother, and even in very patriarchal tribes it was not uncommon for women to hold property. A good example of this was Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, who was a wealthy widow actively engaged in trade.

The Arabian peninsula had no central government or state, but existed in a state of balance between tribes on the one hand, and the mercantile and agrarian cities on the other. Nomads who belonged to the same or allied tribes as towndwellers would often agree not to attack these places, or the caravans going to or from them. Arabia was located at the crossroads of many trade routes; goods brought by ship to Arabian ports were loaded onto camel caravans to be transported across the desert to distant markets. Mercantile cities were heavily dependent upon the east-west trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and on the north-south trade between Africa and the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. Many nomadic tribes supported themselves by raiding caravans, so much so that the practice was considered an acceptable way of life and was covered by a code of conduct.

Very little is known about the religious situation in Arabia at the time of Muhammad’s birth. The surrounding empires had large Christian populations, Abyssinia and the Byzantine Empire both being Christian kingdoms. Sassanian Persia (modern Iran) was officially Zoroastrian, a major religion of that time which sunives today in very small numbers. Even so, Persia had a large Christian population. In addition, all the empires had significant Jewish populations. There were clearly some Christians within Arabia, but their numbers appear to have been quite small and they were individual believers, not entire clans or tribes who regarded themselves as Christian. There was also no Church based within Arabia. The number of Arabian Jews appears to have been much larger; there were entirely Jewish tribes, some of which seem to have moved to Arabia from Palestine after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans at the end of the first century C.E. There were probably many who, though not formally Jews, identified themselves as Israelites and were familiar with the stories of the Hebrew prophets.

The majority of Arabs did not belong to any formal religion but believed in a combination of supernatural forces, some of which they identified as spirits and others as gods. The spirits were believed to inhabit natural objects such as rocks and trees and to have influence over human lives, whereas the gods were often identified with natural phenomena such as the sun, moon, and rain. Many Arabs viewed the god of the moon and traveling, named Allah (literally, "The God"), as the ancestor and leader of the others, of which the goddesses al-Lat and Man’at also inspired popular religious cults.