Mecca - Part 5

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Mecca - Part 5

 

(p.40) There was widespread spiritual restlessness. The settled Arabs, who lived

in the towns and agricultural communities of the Hijaz [region in northern

Arabian steppes], had developed a different kind of religious vision. They were

more interested in gods than the Bedouin, but their rudimentary theism had no

strong roots in Arabia. Very few mythical stories were told about the various

deities. Allah was the most important god, and was revered as the lord of the

Kabah, but he was a remote figure and had very little influence on the people's

daily lives. Like the other " high gods " or " sky gods " who were a common feature

of ancient religion, he had no developed cult and was never depicted in effigy.

[22] Everybody knew that Allah had created the world; that he quickened each

human embryo in the womb; and that he was the giver of rain. But these remained

abstract beliefs. Arabs would sometimes pray to Allah in an emergency, but once

the danger had passed they forgot all about him. [23] Indeed, Allah seemed like

an irresponsible, absentee father; after he had brought men and women into

being, he took no interest in them and abandoned them to their fate. [24]

 

The Quraysh also worshipped other gods. There was Hubal, a deity represented by

a large, reddish stone which stood inside the Kabah. [25] There were three

goddesses--Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat--who were often called the " daughters of

Allah " ('banat Allah') and were very popular in the settled communities.

Represented by large standing stones, their shrines in Ta'if, Nakhlah, and

Qudhayd were roughly similar to the Meccan Haram. Although they were of lesser

rank than Allah, they were often called his " companions " or " partners " and

compared to the beautiful cranes ('gharaniq') which few higher than any other

bird. (p.41) Even though they had no shrine in Mecca, the Quraysh loved these

goddesses and begged them to mediate on their behalf with the inaccessible

Allah. As they jogged around the Kabah, they would often chant this invocation:

" Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other. Indeed these are the exalted

gharaniq; let us hope for their intercession. " [26]

 

This idol worship was a relatively new religious enthusiasm, which had been

imported from Syria by one of the Meccan elders who believed that they could

bring rain, but we have no idea why, for example, the goddesses were said to be

Allah's daughters--especially since Arabs regarded the birth of a daughter as a

misfortune and often killed female infants at birth. The gods of Arabia gave

their worshippers no moral guidance; even though they found the rituals

spiritually satisfying, some of the Quraysh were beginning to find these stone

effigies inadequate symbols of divinity. [27]

 

But what was the alternative? Arabs knew about the monotheistic religions of

Judaism and Christianity. Jews had probably lived in Arabia for over a

millennium, migrating there after the Babylonian and Roman invasions of

Palestine. Jews had been the first to settle in the agricultural colonies of

Yathrib and Khaybar in the north; there were Jewish merchants in the towns and

Jewish nomads in the steppes. They had retained their religion, formed their own

tribes but had intermarried with the local people, and were now practically

indistinguishable from Arabs. They spoke Arabic, had Arab names, and organized

their society in the same way as their Arab neighbors. (p.42) Some of the Arabs

had become Christians: there were important Christian communities in Yemen and

along the frontier with Byzantium. The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks

and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus

and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and

Christians the 'ahl al-kitab' ( " the People of the Book " ). They admired the

notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own

language.

 

But at this time, Arabs did not see Judaism and Christianity as exclusive

traditions that were fundamentally different from their own. Indeed, the term

" Jew " or " Christian " usually referred to tribal affiliation rather than to

religious orientation. [28] These faiths were an accepted part of the spiritual

landscape of the peninsula and considered quite compatible with Arab

spirituality. Because no imperial power was seeking to impose any form of

religious orthodoxy, Arabs felt free to adapt what they understood about these

traditions to their own needs. Allah, they believed, was the God worshipped by

Jews and Christians, so Christian Arabs made the hajj to the Kabah, the house of

Allah, alongside the pagans. It was said that Adam had built the Kabah after his

expulsion from Eden and that Noah had rebuilt it after the devastation of the

Flood. The Quraysh knew that in the Bible the Arabs were said to be the sons of

Ishmael, Abraham's oldest son, and that God had commanded Abraham to abandon him

with his mother Hagar in the wilderness, promising that he would make their

descendants a great people. [29] Later Abraham had visited Hagar and Ishmael in

the desert and had rediscovered the shrine. He and Ishmael had rebuilt it yet

again and designed the rites of the hajj.

 

Everybody knew that Arabs and Jews were kin. As the Jewish historian Josephus

(37-C.100 CE) explained, Arabs circumcised their sons at the age of thirteen

" because Ishmael, the founder of their nation, who was born to Abraham of the

concubine [Hagar], was circumcised at that age. " [30] Arabs did not feel it

necessary to convert to Judaism or Christianity, because they believed that they

were already members of the Abrahamic family; in fact, the idea of conversion

from one faith to another was alien to the Quraysh, whose vision of religion was

essentially pluralistic. [31] Each tribe came to Mecca to worship its own god,

which stood in the Haram alongside the house of Allah. Arabs did not understand

the idea of a closed system of beliefs, nor would they have seen monotheism as

incompatible with polytheism. They regarded Allah, who was surrounded by the

ring of idols in the Kabah, as lord of a host of deities, in much the same way

as some of the biblical writers saw Yahweh as " surpassing all other gods. " [32]

 

But some of the settled Arabs were becoming dissatisfied with this pagan

pluralism, and were attempting to create an indigenous, Arabian monotheism. [33]

Shortly before Muhammad received his first revelation, they had seceded from the

religious life of the Haram [sanctuary surrounding the Kabah]. It was pointless,

they told their tribesmen, to run round and round the Black Stone, which could

" neither see, nor hear, nor hurt, nor help. " Arabs, they believed, had

" corrupted the religion of their father Abraham, " so they were going to seek the

'hanifiyyah', his " pure religion. " [34] This was not an organized sect. These

hanifs [*] all despised the worship of the stone effigies and believed that

Allah was the only God, but not all interpreted this conviction identically.

(p.44) Some expected that an Arab prophet would come with a divine mission to

revive the pristine religion of Abraham; others thought that this was

unnecessary: people could return to the hanifiyyah on their own initiative; some

preached the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment; others converted to

Christianity or Judaism as an interim measure, until the 'din Ibrahim' (the

religion of Abraham) was properly established.

 

[*] hanif--Originally a pre-Islamic monotheist. In the Qur'an, the word refers

to a person who followed the 'hanifiyyah', the pure religion of Abraham, before

this split into rival sects. (Glossary, p.216).

 

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)

Chapter 1, 'Mecca', p. 40-44

Karen Armstrong

Harper Perennial - London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

ISBN-13 978-0-00-723248-2

ISBN-10 0-00-723248-9

 

Notes:

 

[22] Wilhelm Schmidt, 'The Origin of the Idea of God' (New York, 1912),

'passim'.

 

[23] Qur'an 10:22-24, 24:61, 63, 39:38, 43:87, 106:1-3.

 

[24] Izutsu, 'God and Man in the Koran, Semantics of the Koranic Weltanschauung'

(Tokyo, 1964), 93-101, 124-129.

 

[25] F. E. Peters, 'The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy

Places' (Princeton, 1994), 24-27.

 

[26] Ibn al-Kalbi, 'The Book of Idols' in Peters, 'Hajj', 29.

 

[27] Bamyeh, 'Social Origins of Islam', 22-24.

 

[28] Ibid., 79-80; Reza Aslan, 'No god but God, The Origins, Evolution, and

Future of Islam' (New York and London, 2005), 9-13.

 

[29] Genesis 16.

 

[30] Flavius Josephus, 'The Antiquities of the Jews', 1.12.2.

 

[31] Bamyeh, 'Social Origins of Islam', 25-27.

 

[32] Psalm 135:5.

 

[33] Bamyeh, 'Social Origins of Islam', 89-144; Aslan, 'No god but God', 13-15;

Izutsu, 'God and Man', 107-18.

 

[34] Ibn Ishaq, 'Sirat Rasul Allah', 143, in Guillaume, 'Life of Muhammad'.