Arabia. The Sixth Century C.E.
IN THE ARID, desolate basin of Mecca, surrounded on all sides by the bare mountains of the Arabian desert, stands a small, nondescript sanctuary that the pagan Arabs refer to as the Ka‘ba: the Cube. The Ka‘ba is a squat, roofless edifice made of unmortared stones and sunk into a valley of sand. Its four walls—so low it is said a young goat can leap over them—are swathed in strips of heavy cloth dyed purple and red. At its base, two small doors are chiseled into the gray stone, allowing entry into the inner sanctum. It is here, inside the cramped interior of the sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess the Egyptians knew as Isis and the Greeks called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataean god of writing and divination; Jesus, the incarnate god of the Christians, and his holy mother, Mary.
In all, there are said to be three hundred sixty idols housed in and around the Ka‘ba, representing every god recognized in the Arabian Peninsula. During the holy months, when the desert fairs and the great markets envelop the city of Mecca, pilgrims from all over the Peninsula make their way to this barren land to visit their tribal deities. They sing songs of worship and dance in front of the gods; they make sacrifices and pray for health. Then, in a remarkable ritual—the origins of which are a mystery—the pilgrims gather as a group and rotate around the Ka‘ba seven times, some pausing momentarily to kiss each corner of the sanctuary before being captured and swept away once more by the current of bodies.
The pagan Arabs gathered around the Ka‘ba believe this sanctuary to have been founded by Adam, the first man. They believe that Adam’s original edifice was destroyed by the Great Flood, then rebuilt by Noah. They believe that after Noah, the Ka‘ba was forgotten for generations until Abraham rediscovered it while visiting his firstborn son, Ismail, and his concubine, Hagar, both of whom had been banished to this wilderness at the behest of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. And they believe it was at this very spot that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ismail before being stopped by the promise that, like his younger brother, Isaac, Ismail would also sire a great nation, the descendants of whom now spin over the sandy Meccan valley like a desert whirlwind.
Of course, these are just stories intended to convey what the Ka‘ba means, not where it came from. The truth is that no one knows who built the Ka‘ba, or how long it has been here. It is likely that the sanctuary was not even the original reason for the sanctity of this place. Near the Ka‘ba is a well called Zamzam, fed by a bountiful underground spring, which tradition claims had been placed there to nourish Hagar and Ismail. It requires no stretch of the imagination to recognize how a spring situated in the middle of the desert could become a sacred place for the wandering Bedouin tribes of Arabia. The Ka‘ba itself may have been erected many years later, not as some sort of Arab pantheon, but as a secure place to store the consecrated objects used in the rituals that had evolved around Zamzam. Indeed, the earliest traditions concerning the Ka‘ba claim that inside its walls was a pit, dug into the sand, which contained “treasures” (ritual objects) magically guarded by a snake.
It is also possible that the original sanctuary held some cosmological significance for the ancient Arabs. Not only were many of the idols in the Ka‘ba associated with the planets and stars, but the legend that they totaled three hundred sixty in number suggests astral connotations. The seven circumambulations of the Ka‘ba—called tawaf in Arabic and still the primary ritual of the annual Hajj pilgrimage—may have been intended to mimic the motion of the heavenly bodies. It was, after all, a common belief among ancient peoples that their temples and sanctuaries were terrestrial replicas of the cosmic mountain from which creation sprang. The Ka‘ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a “navel spot”: a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven. That would explain why there was once a nail driven into the floor of the Ka‘ba that the ancient Arabs referred to as “the navel of the world.” According to the traditions, the ancient pilgrims would sometimes enter the sanctuary, tear off their clothes, and place their own navels over the nail, thereby merging with the cosmos.
Alas, as with so many things about the Ka‘ba, its origins are mere speculation. The only thing scholars can say with any certainty is that by the sixth century C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and stone had become the center of religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that intriguing yet ill-defined era of paganism that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah—“the Time of Ignorance.”
TRADITIONALLY, THE JAHILIYYAH has been defined by Muslims as an era of moral depravity and religious discord: a time when the sons of Ismail had obscured belief in the one true God and plunged the Arabian Peninsula into the darkness of idolatry. But then, like the rising of the dawn, the Prophet Muhammad emerged in Mecca at the beginning of the seventh century, preaching a message of absolute monotheism and uncompromising morality. Through the miraculous revelations he received from God, Muhammad put an end to the paganism of the Arabs and replaced the “Time of Ignorance” with the universal religion of Islam.
In actuality, the religious experience of the pre-Islamic Arabs was far more complex than this tradition suggests. It is true that before the rise of Islam the Arabian Peninsula was dominated by paganism. But “paganism” is a somewhat meaningless and derogatory catchall term created by those outside the tradition to categorize what is in reality an almost unlimited variety of beliefs and practices. The word paganus means “a rustic villager” or “a boor,” and was originally used by Christians as a term of abuse to describe those who followed any religion but theirs. In some ways, this is an appropriate designation. For unlike Christianity, paganism is not so much a unified system of beliefs and practices as it is a religious perspective, one that is receptive to a multitude of influences and interpretations. Often, though not always, polytheistic, paganism strives for neither universalism nor moral absolutism. There is no such thing as a pagan creed or a pagan canon. Nothing exists that could properly be termed “pagan orthodoxy” or “pagan heterodoxy.”
What is more, when referring to the religious experience of the pre-Islamic Arabs, it is important to make a distinction between the nomadic Bedouin who wandered through the Arabian deserts and the sedentary tribes that had settled in major population centers like Mecca. Bedouin paganism in sixth-century Arabia may have encompassed a range of beliefs and practices—from fetishism to totemism to manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned with the more metaphysical questions that were cultivated in the larger sedentary societies of Arabia, particularly with regard to issues like the afterlife. This is not to say that the Bedouin practiced nothing more than a primitive idolatry. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the Bedouin of pre-Islamic Arabia enjoyed a rich and diverse religious tradition. However, the nomadic lifestyle is one that requires a religion to address immediate concerns: Which god can lead us to water? Which god can heal our illnesses?
In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine intermediaries who stood between the creator god and his creation. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply “the god.” Like his Greek counterpart, Zeus, Allah was originally an ancient rain/sky deity who had been elevated into the role of the supreme god of the pre-Islamic Arabs. Though a powerful deity to swear by, Allah’s eminent status in the Arab pantheon rendered him, like most High Gods, beyond the supplications of ordinary people. Only in times of great peril would anyone bother consulting him. Otherwise, it was far more expedient to turn to the lesser, more accessible gods who acted as Allah’s intercessors, the most powerful of whom were his three daughters, Allat (“the goddess”), al-Uzza (“the mighty”), and Manat (the goddess of fate, whose name is probably derived from the Hebrew word mana, meaning “portion” or “share”). These divine mediators were not only represented in the Ka‘ba, they had their own individual shrines throughout the Arabian Peninsula: Allat in the city of Ta’if; al-Uzza in Nakhlah; and Manat in Qudayd. It was to them that the Arabs prayed when they needed rain, when their children were ill, when they entered into battle or embarked on a journey deep into the treacherous desert abodes of the Jinn—those intelligent, imperceptible, and salvable beings made of smokeless flame who are called “genies” in the West and who function as the nymphs and fairies of Arabian mythology.
There were no priests and no pagan scriptures in pre-Islamic Arabia, but that does not mean the gods remained silent. They regularly revealed themselves through the ecstatic utterances of a group of cultic officials known as the Kahins. The Kahins were poets who functioned primarily as soothsayers and who, for a fee, would fall into a trance in which they would reveal divine messages through rhyming couplets. Poets already had an important role in pre-Islamic society as bards, tribal historians, social commentators, dispensers of moral philosophy, and, on occasion, administrators of justice. But the Kahins represented a more spiritual function of the poet. Emerging from every social and economic stratum, and including a number of women, the Kahins interpreted dreams, cleared up crimes, found lost animals, settled disputes, and expounded upon ethics. As with their Pythian counterparts at Delphi, however, the Kahins’ oracles were vague and deliberately imprecise; it was the supplicant’s responsibility to figure out what the gods actually meant.
Although considered the link between humanity and the divine, the Kahins did not communicate directly with the gods but rather accessed them through the Jinn and other spirits who were such an integral part of the Jahiliyyah religious experience. Even so, neither the Kahins nor anyone else, for that matter, had access to Allah. In fact, the god who had created the heavens and the earth, who had fashioned human beings in his own image, was the only god not represented by an idol in the Ka‘ba. Although called “the King of the Gods” and “the Lord of the House,” Allah was not the central deity in the Ka‘ba. That honor belonged to Hubal, the Syrian god who had been brought to Mecca centuries before the rise of Islam.
Despite Allah’s minimal role in the religious cult of pre-Islamic Arabia, his eminent position in the Arab pantheon is a clear indication of just how far paganism in the Arabian Peninsula had evolved from its simple animistic roots. Perhaps the most striking example of this development can be seen in the processional chant that tradition claims the pagan pilgrims sang as they approached the Ka‘ba:
Here I am, O Allah, here I am.
You have no partner,
Except such a partner as you have.
You possess him and all that is his.
This remarkable proclamation, with its obvious resemblance to the Muslim profession of faith—“There is no god but God”—may reveal the earliest traces in pre-Islamic Arabia of what the German philologist Max Müller termed henotheism: the belief in a single High God, without necessarily rejecting the existence of other, subordinate gods. The earliest evidence of henotheism in Arabia can be traced back to a tribe called the Amir, who lived near modern-day Yemen in the second century B.C.E., and who worshipped a High God they called dhu-Samawi, “The Lord of the Heavens.” While the details of the Amirs’ religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
The Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula can, in theory, be traced to the Babylonian Exile a thousand years earlier, though subsequent migrations may have taken place in 70 C.E., after Rome’s sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem, and again in 132 C.E., after the messianic uprising of Simon Bar Kochba. For the most part, the Jews were a thriving and highly influential diaspora whose culture and traditions had been thoroughly integrated into the social and religious milieu of pre-Islamic Arabia. Whether Arab converts or immigrants from Palestine, the Jews participated in every level of Arab society. There were Jewish merchants, Jewish Bedouin, Jewish farmers, Jewish poets, and Jewish warriors throughout the peninsula. Jewish men took Arab names; Jewish women wore Arab headdresses. And while some of these Jews may have spoken Aramaic (or at least a corrupted version of it), their primary language was Arabic.
Although in contact with major Jewish centers throughout the Near East, Judaism in Arabia had developed its own variations on traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. The Jews shared many of the same religious ideals as their pagan Arab counterparts, especially with regard to what is sometimes referred to as “popular religion”: belief in magic, the use of talismans and divination, and the like. For example, while there is evidence of a small yet formal rabbinical presence in some regions of the Arabian Peninsula, there also existed a group of Jewish soothsayers called the Kohens who, while maintaining a far more priestly function in their communities, nevertheless resembled the pagan Kahins in that they too dealt in divinely inspired oracles.
The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices. One need look no further for evidence of this influence than to the Ka‘ba itself, whose origin myths indicate that it was a Semitic sanctuary (haram in Arabic) with its roots dug deeply in Jewish tradition. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were all in one way or another associated with the Ka‘ba long before the rise of Islam, and the mysterious Black Stone that to this day is fixed to the southeast corner of the sanctuary seems to have been originally associated with the same stone upon which Jacob rested his head during his famous dream of the ladder (Genesis 28:11–19).
The pagan Arab connection to Judaism makes perfect sense when one recalls that, like the Jews, the Arabs considered themselves descendants of Abraham, whom they credited not only with rediscovering the Ka‘ba, but also with creating the pilgrimage rites that took place there. So revered was Abraham in Arabia that he was given his own idol inside the Ka‘ba, where he was depicted in traditional pagan fashion as a shaman casting divining rods. That Abraham was neither a god nor a pagan was as inconsequential to the Arabs as the association of their god, Allah, with the Jewish god, Yahweh. In sixth-century Arabia, Jewish monotheism was in no way anathema to Arab paganism, which, as mentioned, could easily absorb a cornucopia of disparate religious ideologies. The pagan Arabs would likely have perceived Judaism as just another way of expressing what they considered to be similar religious sentiments.
The same could be said with regard to Arab perceptions of Christianity, which, like Judaism, had an influential presence in the Arabian Peninsula. The Arab tribes were surrounded by Christians: from the Syrians in the northwest, to the Mesopotamian Christians in the northeast, to the Abyssinians in the south. By the sixth century C.E., Yemen had become the seat of Christian aspirations in Arabia; the city of Najran was widely considered to be the hub of Arab Christianity, while in Sana’, a massive church had been constructed that, for a time, vied with Mecca as the primary pilgrimage site in the region.
As a proselytizing faith, Christianity was not content to remain at the borders of the Arab lands. Thanks to a concerted effort to spread the gospel throughout the peninsula, a number of Arab tribes had converted en masse to Christianity. The largest of these tribes was the Ghassanids, who straddled the border between the Roman and Arab worlds, acting as a buffer between the Christian Byzantine kingdom and the “uncivilized” Bedouin. The Ghassanids actively supported missionary efforts in Arabia, while at the same time the Byzantine emperors sent their bishops deep into the deserts to bring the rest of the pagan Arabs into their fold. And yet, the Ghassanids and the Byzantines were preaching two very different Christianities.
Ever since the first Council at Nicaea in 325 C.E.—which declared Jesus to be “fully God”—and the Council at Chalcedon in 451 C.E.—which entrenched the doctrine of the Trinity into Christian theology—Roman Orthodoxy had transformed a large portion of the Christian Near East into heretics. Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities. Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God. Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God in three successive modes of being: first as the Father, then as the Son, and finally and forevermore as the Holy Spirit. Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures—one human, the other divine—while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human but was in fact fully God. And of course there were those like the Arians who rejected the Trinity altogether.
After Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, all of these variations on Jesus’ identity were replaced by the single orthodox position, most clearly presented by Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), that the Son was “of the same substance or being” as the Father—one God in three personae. All at once, the Montanists, the Modalists, the Nestorians, the Gnostics, and the Arians were declared heretics and their doctrines suppressed.
The Ghassanids, like so many Christians who lived beyond the ever-tightening grip of Constantinople, were Monophysites, meaning they rejected the Nicene doctrine confirming Jesus’ dual nature. Instead, the Monophysites believed that Jesus had only one nature, simultaneously human and divine, though depending on the school of thought they tended to emphasize one over the other. In general, the Antiochians stressed Jesus’ humanity, while the Alexandrians stressed his divinity. So while the Ghassanids may have been Christians, and while they may have acted as clients of the Byzantine Empire, they did not share the theology of their masters.
Once again, one need only look inside the Ka‘ba to recognize which version of Christianity was taking hold in Arabia. According to the traditions, the image of Jesus residing in the sanctuary had been placed there by a Coptic (i.e., Alexandrian Monophysite) Christian named Baqura. If true, then Jesus’ presence in the Ka‘ba may be considered an affirmation of the Monophysite belief in the Christ as a fully divine god-man—a position that would have been perfectly acceptable to the pagan Arabs.
Christianity’s presence in the Arabian Peninsula—in both its orthodox and heterodox incarnations—must have had a significant effect on the pagan Arabs. It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith. There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved. These similarities do not necessarily contradict the Muslim belief that the Quran was divinely revealed, but they do indicate that the Quranic vision of the Last Days may have been revealed to the pagan Arabs through a set of symbols and metaphors with which they were already familiar, thanks in some part to the wide spread of Christianity in the region.
While the Ghassanids protected the borders of the Byzantine Empire, another Arab tribe, the Lakhmids, provided the same service for the other great kingdom of the time, the Sasanians. As the imperial inheritors of the ancient Iranian kingdom of Cyrus the Great, which had dominated Central Asia for nearly a millennium, the Sasanians were Zoroastrians: followers of the seminal faith initiated by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra nearly fifteen hundred years earlier, whose ideas and beliefs had a formidable influence on the development of the other religions in the region, especially Judaism and Christianity.
More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil. At the center of Zarathustra’s theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), who fashioned the heavens and earth, the night and the day, the light and the darkness. Like most ancients, however, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu (“the beneficent spirit”) and Angra Mainyu (“the hostile spirit”) were responsible for good and evil, respectively. Although called the “twin children” of Mazda, these two spirits were not gods, but only the spiritual embodiment of Truth and Falsehood.
By the time of the Sasanians, Zarathustra’s primitive monotheism had transformed into a firmly dualistic system in which the two primordial spirits became two deities locked in an eternal battle for the souls of humanity: Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), the God of Light, and Ahriman, the God of Darkness and the archetype of the Christian concept of Satan. Although it was a non-proselytizing and notoriously difficult religion to convert to—considering its rigid hierarchical social structure and its almost fanatical obsession with ritual purity—the Sasanian military presence in the Arabian Peninsula had nonetheless resulted in a few tribal conversions to Zoroastrianism, particularly to its more amenable sects, Mazdakism and Manichaeism.
The picture that emerges from this brief outline of the pre-Islamic Arabian religious experience is that of an era in which Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism intermingled in one of the last remaining regions in the Near East still dominated by paganism, albeit a firmly henotheistic paganism. The relative distance that these three major religions enjoyed from their respective centers gave them the freedom to develop their creeds and rituals into fresh, innovative theologies. Especially in Mecca, the center of the Jahiliyyah religious experience, this vibrant pluralistic environment became a breeding ground for bold new ideas and exciting religious experimentation, the most important of which was an obscure Arab monotheistic movement called Hanifism, which arose sometime around the sixth century C.E. and which, as far as anyone is aware, existed nowhere else except in western Arabia, a region the Arabs called the Hijaz.
The legendary origins of Hanifism are recounted in the writings of one of Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Hisham. One day, while the Meccans were celebrating a pagan festival at the Ka‘ba, four men named Waraqa ibn Nawfal, Uthman ibn Huwairith, Ubayd Allah ibn Jahsh, and Zayd ibn Amr drew apart from the rest of the worshippers and met secretly in the desert. There they agreed “in the bonds of friendship” that they would never again worship the idols of their forefathers. They made a solemn pact to return to the unadulterated religion of Abraham, whom they considered to be neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a pure monotheist: a hanif (from the Arabic root hnf, meaning “to turn away from,” as in one who turns away from idolatry). The four men left Mecca and went their separate ways preaching the new religion and seeking out others like them. In the end, Waraqa, Uthman, and Ubayd Allah all converted to Christianity, a fact that indicates the religion’s influence over the region. But Zayd continued in the new faith, abandoning the religion of his people and abstaining from the worship of, in his words, “the helpless and harmless idols” in the sanctuary.
Standing in the shadow of the Ka‘ba, his back pressed against its irregular stone walls, Zayd rebuked his fellow Meccans, shouting, “I renounce Allat and al-Uzza, both of them … I will not worship Hubal, though he was our lord in the days when I had little sense.” Pushing through the crowded market, his voice raised over the din of the merchants, he would cry, “Not one of you follows the religion of Abraham but I.”
Like all preachers of his time, Zayd was also a poet, and the verses that the traditions have ascribed to him contain extraordinary declarations. “To God I give my praise and thanksgiving,” he sang. “There is no god beyond Him.” And yet, despite his call for monotheism and his repudiation of the idols inside the sanctuary, Zayd maintained a deep veneration for the Ka‘ba itself, which he believed was spiritually connected to Abraham. “I take refuge in that in which Abraham took refuge,” Zayd declared.
By all accounts, the Hanif movement flourished throughout the Hijaz, especially in major population centers like Ta’if, where the poet Umayya ibn Abi Salt wrote verses extolling “the religion of Abraham,” and Yathrib, the home of two influential Hanif tribal leaders, Abu Amir ar-Rahib and Abu Qais ibn al-Aslat. Other Hanif preachers included Khalid ibn Sinan, called “a prophet lost by his people,” and Qass ibn Sa’idah, known as “the sage of the Arabs.” It is impossible to say how many Hanif converts there were in pre-Islamic Arabia, or how large the movement had become. What seems evident, however, is that there were many in the Arabian Peninsula who were actively struggling to transform the vague henotheism of the pagan Arabs into what Jonathan Fueck has termed “a national Arabian monotheism.”
But Hanifism seemed to have been more than just a primitive Arab monotheistic movement. The traditions present the Hanifs as preaching an active god who was intimately involved in the personal lives of his creation, a god who did not need mediators to stand between him and humanity. At the heart of the movement was a fervent commitment to an absolute morality. It was not enough merely to abstain from idol worship; the Hanifs believed one must strive to be morally upright. “I serve my Lord the compassionate,” Zayd said, “that the forgiving Lord may pardon my sin.”
The Hanifs also spoke in an abstract fashion about a future day of reckoning when everyone would have to answer for his or her moral choices. “Beware, O men, of what follows death!” Zayd warned his fellow Meccans. “You can hide nothing from God.” This would have been a wholly new concept for a people with no firm notion of an afterlife, especially one based on human morality. And because Hanifism was, like Christianity, a proselytizing faith, its ideology would have spread throughout the Hijaz. Most sedentary Arabs would have heard Hanif preachers; the Meccans would surely have been familiar with Hanif ideology; and there can be little doubt that the Prophet Muhammad would have been aware of both.
There exists a little-known tradition recounting an astonishing meeting between Zayd, the Hanif, and a teen-aged Muhammad. The story seems to have been originally reported by Yunus ibn Bukayr on the authority of Muhammad’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq. And while it appears to have been expunged from Ibn Hisham’s retelling of Muhammad’s life, Professor M. J. Kister at Hebrew University has catalogued no fewer than eleven other traditions that recount nearly identical versions of the story.
It was, the chroniclers say, “one of the hot days of Mecca” when Muhammad and his childhood friend Ibn Haritha were returning home from Ta’if, where they had slaughtered and roasted a ewe in sacrifice to one of the idols (most likely Allat). As the two boys made their way through the upper part of the Meccan valley, they suddenly came upon Zayd, who was either living as a recluse on the high ground above Mecca or was in the midst of a lengthy spiritual retreat. Recognizing him at once, Muhammad and Ibn Haritha greeted the Hanif with “the greeting of the Jahiliyyah” (in’am sabahan) and sat down to rest next to him.
Muhammad asked, “Why do I see you, O son of Amr, hated by your people?”
“I found them associating divinities with God and I was reluctant to do the same,” Zayd replied. “I wanted the religion of Abraham.”
Muhammad accepted this explanation without comment and opened his bag of sacrificed meat. “Eat some of this food, O my uncle,” he said.
But Zayd reacted with disgust. “Nephew, that is a part of those sacrifices of yours which you offer to your idols, is it not?” Muhammad answered that it was. Zayd became indignant. “I never eat of these sacrifices and I want nothing to do with them,” he cried. “I am not one to eat anything slaughtered for a divinity other than God.”
So struck was Muhammad by Zayd’s rebuke that many years later, when recounting the story, he claimed never again to have “stroked an idol of theirs nor … sacrifice[d] to them until God honored me with his Apostleship.”
The notion that a young pagan Muhammad could have been scolded for his idolatry by a Hanif flies in the face of traditional Muslim views regarding the Prophet’s perpetual monotheistic integrity. It is a common belief in Islam that even before being called by God, Muhammad never took part in the pagan rituals of his community. In his history of the Prophet, al-Tabari states that God kept Muhammad from ever participating in any pagan rituals, lest he be defiled by them. But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture. Not only does the Quran admit that God found Muhammad “erring” and gave him guidance (93:7), but the ancient traditions clearly show Muhammad deeply involved in the religious customs of Mecca: circumambulating the Ka‘ba, making sacrifices, and going on pagan devotional retreats called tahannuth. Indeed, when the pagan sanctuary was torn down and rebuilt (it was enlarged and finally roofed), Muhammad took an active part in its reconstruction.
All the same, the doctrine of Muhammad’s monotheistic integrity is an important facet of the Muslim faith because it appears to support the belief that the Revelation he received came from a divine source. Admitting that Muhammad might have been influenced by someone like Zayd is, for some Muslims, tantamount to denying the heavenly inspiration of Muhammad’s message. But such beliefs are based on the common yet erroneous assumption that religions are born in some sort of cultural vacuum; they most certainly are not.
All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the prophet’s successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of fashioning their master’s words and deeds into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.
Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. “[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus,” the Quran says (42:13). It should not be surprising, therefore, that Muhammad would have been influenced as a young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia. As unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately trying to reach. Because whatever else Muhammad may have been, he was without question a man of his time, even if one chooses to call that a “Time of Ignorance.”
MUHAMMAD WAS BORN, according to Muslim tradition, in 570 C.E., the same year that Abraha, the Christian Abyssinian ruler of Yemen, attacked Mecca with a herd of elephants in an attempt to destroy the Ka‘ba and make the church at Sana’ the new religious center in the Arabian Peninsula. It is written that when Abraha’s army drew near the city, the Meccans, frightened at the sight of the massive elephants the Abyssinians had imported from Africa, retreated to the mountains, leaving the Ka‘ba defenseless. But just as the Abyssinian army was about to attack, the sky darkened and a flock of birds, each carrying a stone in its beak, rained down the wrath of Allah on the invading army until it had no choice but to retreat back to Yemen.
In a society with no fixed calendar, “The Year of the Elephant,” as it came to be known, was not only the most important date in recent memory, it was the commencement of a new Arab chronology. That is why the early biographers set Muhammad’s birth in the year 570, so that it would coincide with another significant date. But 570 is neither the correct year of Muhammad’s birth nor, for that matter, of the Abyssinian attack on Mecca; modern scholarship has determined that momentous event to have taken place around 552 C.E. The fact is that no one knows now, just as no one knew then, when Muhammad was born, because birthdays were not necessarily significant dates in pre-Islamic Arab society. Muhammad himself may not have known in what year he was born. In any case, nobody would have cared about Muhammad’s birth date until long after he was recognized as a prophet, perhaps not even until long after he had died. Only then would his followers have wanted to establish a year for his birth in order to institute a firm Islamic chronology. And what more appropriate year could they have chosen than the Year of the Elephant? For better or worse, the closest our modern historical methods can come to determining the date of Muhammad’s birth is sometime in the last half of the sixth century C.E.
As is the case with most prophets, Muhammad’s birth was accompanied by signs and portents. Al-Tabari writes that while Muhammad’s father, Abdallah, was on his way to meet his bride, he was stopped by a strange woman who, seeing a light shining between his eyes, demanded he sleep with her. Abdallah politely refused and continued to the house of Amina, where he consummated the marriage that would result in the birth of the Prophet. The next day, when Abdallah saw the same woman again, he asked her, “Why do you not make the same proposition to me today that you made to me yesterday?” The woman replied, “The light which was with you yesterday has left you. I have no need of you today.”
Abdallah never had the chance to decipher the woman’s words; he died before Muhammad was born, leaving behind a meager inheritance of a few camels and sheep. But the signs of Muhammad’s prophetic identity continued. While she was pregnant, Amina heard a voice tell her, “You are pregnant with the Lord of this people, and when he is born, say, ‘I put him in the care of the One from the evil of every envier’; then call him Muhammad.” Sometimes Amina would see a light shining from her belly by which she could make out “the castles of Syria,” a reference, perhaps, to Muhammad’s prophetic succession to Jesus (Syria was an important seat of Christianity).
As an infant, Muhammad was placed in the care of a Bedouin foster mother to be nursed, a common tradition among Arabs of sedentary societies who wanted their children to be raised in the desert according to the ancient customs of their forefathers. Appropriately, it was in the desert that Muhammad had his first prophetic experience. While herding a flock of lambs, he was approached by two men, clothed in white, who carried with them a golden basin full of snow. The two men came to Muhammad and pinned him to the ground. They reached into his chest and removed his heart. After extracting a drop of black liquid from it, they washed the heart clean in the snow and gently placed it back into Muhammad’s breast before disappearing.
When he was six years old, Muhammad’s mother died as well, and he was sent to live with his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, who, as the man in charge of providing Zamzam water to the pilgrims, filled one of the most influential pagan posts in Meccan society. Two years later, Abd al-Muttalib also died, and the orphaned Muhammad was once again shuttled off to another relative, this time to the house of his powerful uncle, Abu Talib. Taking pity on the boy, Abu Talib employed him in his lucrative caravan business. It was during one of these trading missions, while the caravan made its way to Syria, that Muhammad’s prophetic identity was finally revealed.
Abu Talib had prepared a large trading expedition to Syria when he decided, at the last moment, to take Muhammad along. As the caravan moved slowly across the scorched landscape, a Christian monk named Bahira caught sight of it passing by his monastery at Basra. Bahira was a learned man who possessed a secret book of prophecy passed down from generation to generation by the monks in his order. Crouched day and night in his cell, he had pored over the ancient manuscript and discovered within its weathered pages the coming of a new prophet. It was for this reason that he decided to stop the caravan. For he noticed that as the convoy balanced its way over the thin gray horizon, a small cloud hovered continuously over one member of the group, shielding only him from the heat of the merciless sun. When this person stopped, so did the cloud; and when he dismounted his camel to rest under a tree, the cloud followed him, overshadowing the tree’s meager shade until its slender branches bent down to shelter him.
Recognizing what these signs could mean, Bahira sent an urgent message to the caravan leaders. “I have prepared food for you,” the message read. “I should like you all to come, both great and small, bond and free.”
The members of the caravan were startled. They had passed the monastery many times on their way to Syria, but Bahira had never before taken notice of them. Nevertheless, they decided to break for the evening and join the old monk. As they ate, Bahira noticed that the one he had seen in the distance, the one who was attended by the clouds and the trees, was not among them. He asked the men if every member of the caravan was present. “Do not let any of you remain behind and not come to my feast.”
The men replied that everyone who ought to be was present; except, of course, for the young boy, Muhammad, whom they had left outside to watch over the baggage. Bahira was elated. He insisted the boy join them. When Muhammad entered the monastery the monk gave him a brief examination, and declared to everyone present that this was “the Messenger of the Lord of the Worlds.”
Muhammad was nine years old.
If the childhood stories about Muhammad seem familiar, it is because they function as a prophetic topos: a conventional literary theme that can be found in most mythologies. Like the infancy narratives in the Gospels, these stories are not intended to relate historical events, but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience. They answer the questions: What does it mean to be a prophet? Does one suddenly become a prophet, or is prophethood a state of existence established before birth, indeed before the beginning of time? If the latter, then there must have been signs foretelling the prophet’s arrival: a miraculous conception, perhaps, or some prediction of the prophet’s identity and mission.
The story of the pregnant Amina is remarkably similar to the Christian story of Mary, who, when pregnant with Jesus, heard the angel of the Lord declare, “You will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:31–32). The story of Bahira resembles the Jewish story of Samuel, who, when told by God that one of Jesse’s sons would be the next king of Israel, invited the entire family to a feast in which the youngest son, David, was left behind to tend the sheep. “Send for him,” Samuel demanded when the rest of Jesse’s sons were rejected. “We will not sit down until he arrives.” The moment David entered the room, he was anointed king (1 Samuel 16:1–13).
Again, the historicity of these topoi is irrelevant. It does not matter whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are “true.” What matters is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings: that theirs is a holy and eternal vocation, established by God from the moment of creation.
Even so, when combined with what is known about pre-Islamic Arabian society, one can glean important historical information from these traditions. For example, we can reasonably conclude that Muhammad was a Meccan and an orphan; that he worked for his uncle’s caravan from a young age; that this caravan made frequent trips throughout the region and would have encountered Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish tribes, all of whom were deeply involved in Arab society; and finally, that he must have been familiar with the religion and ideology of Hanifism, which pervaded Mecca and which very likely set the stage for Muhammad’s own movement. Indeed, as if to emphasize the connection between Hanifism and Islam, the early Muslim biographers transformed Zayd into a John the Baptist character, attributing to him the expectation of “a prophet from the descendants of Ismail, in particular from the descendants of Abd al-Muttalib.”
“I do not think that I shall live to see him,” Zayd reportedly said, “but I believe in him, proclaim the truth of his message, and testify that he is a prophet.”
Perhaps Zayd was wrong. Perhaps he did meet this prophet, though he could not have known that the young orphan boy he had instructed against sacrificing to the idols would one day stand where Zayd once stood, in the shadow of the Ka‘ba, and raise his voice over the din of the spinning pilgrims to ask, “Have you considered Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat? … These are only names that you and your fathers invented … I prefer the religion of Abraham the Hanif, who was not one of the idolaters” (53:19, 23; 2:135).