Pre-Islamic Arabia

10 Key excerpts on "Pre-Islamic Arabia"

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  The Poetics of Arabian S?qs

  A Hermeneutic Reading of the Development of Arabian S?qs from the Pre-Islamic Era to Present

  • Jasmine Shahin(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This is evident in many available studies on Arabia, such as those of Ira Lapidus and Albert Hourani, which seldom examine the Pre-Islamic Arabian era sufficiently, focusing instead on fragmented instances that precede Mohammed’s (PBUH) life in Mecca. 2 This implies that prior to the coming of Islam Arabia was an insignificant player in world events, and that its people were nomadic communities of little cultural potency. Yet, the works of Robert Hoyland, Jawad Ali and Georgi Zidan on the urban anthropology of Pre-Islamic Arabia suggest that the region was not a mere territory on the periphery of great ancient empires but was a hub of cultural, social and economic affluence that offered its people and its neighbouring superpowers—Persia and Rome—the means of safe trade and political stability. 3 Similarly, available sources seem to assume that the military expansion of the Islamic realm during the Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid periods orchestrated a likewise cultural expansion, instantly promoting these conquered lands into Arabic-speaking Muslim territories. This assumption is probably based on the Orthodox Islamic exigency regarding the sacred nature of the Arabic language through which the Quran was revealed to Mohammed (PBUH). While we cannot precisely ascertain whether and when the entire population of the newly acquired territories converted to Islam, archaeological evidence confirms that the official language of most of these newly acquired territories, including Damascus (conquered in ad 634), Northern Iraq (conquered in ad 634) and Egypt (conquered in ad 642), was not Arabic, and that these regions’ early Islamic character was solely restricted to matters of everyday politics. 4 2 Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd ed

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  An Introduction to Islam

  • Frederick Denny(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Arabs traditionally trace their roots back to two major sources: the northerners and the southerners. They consider the southern branch, centered in Yemen, to be the peninsula’s aboriginal peoples, whereas the northerners, who settled in Hejaz, Najd, Palmyra, and Nabataea, are thought to have become assimilated to Arabism through a kind of naturalization process. These latter are thought to have descended from Adnān, a descendant of Ishmael. The two branches of Arabs have remained distinct to this day, although Islam did much to narrow the gap between them. The southern branch also regards itself as having descended from biblical forebears: Joktan, the grandson of Shem (Gen. 10:25–26). According to the Bible, other Arabian groups, particularly in the north, sprang from the union of Abraham and his other wife, Ketura (Gen. 25:1–4).

  The Pre-Islamic Arabian past to which Islam looks back is not the civilized past of the Yemen but the pastoral-nomad dominated past of Hejaz, which is generally considered to have been barbarian and wild. No outside power had ever succeeded in subduing the region, owing to its remoteness, the difficulty of the terrain, and the extreme fierceness of its inhabitants, who possessed certain technical as well as systemic advantages when defending their own territories. The term al-Jāhilīya is applied to the life and times of the Arabs in Hejaz and surrounding areas during the centuries before Islam. This term means, literally, “the ignorance,” but it also includes the notion of barbarism. It is a term coined in Islamic times and is thus intended to discredit the idolatrous and licentious days of old, before the Islamic virtues and habits came to transform, to some extent, the life of the Arabs.

  Social Structure and Economy

  Before we describe the pre-Islamic Arabs’ worldview, it is necessary to understand something of their social structure and economy, for these are intimately linked with it. The dominant pattern of life was pastoralist, with the people divided into more or less independent tribes. Although these tribes concluded alliances with one another in an ad hoc

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  History and Development of the Arabic Language

  • Muhammad al-Sharkawi(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  1 The geography and demography of Pre-Islamic Arabia This Chapter This rather short chapter is dedicated to setting the stage for understanding the ecology of the Arabian Peninsula in pre-Islamic times. Ecology is the external non-linguistic factors that help us contextualize and navigate through the blurred historical and structural boundaries among varieties and mitigate the acuity of data shortage, as the knowledge of the stars and the four main directions help a lost hiker in the wilderness (Steffensen and Fill 2014: 6). This chapter, therefore, is not a historical narrative of events. It is rather an attempt to isolate relevant aspects of Pre-Islamic Arabia to the emergence and development of Arabic and the interaction of its speakers with the speakers of other languages. Introduction This is the geographical ecology of Pre-Islamic Arabia in late antiquity and early Islam. In this rather descriptive and small chapter, we will present and discuss the home country of the pre-Islamic Arabs. I will briefly discuss the relevant geographical features of the Arabian Peninsula insofar as their influence on communication among Arabs and between Arabs and non-Arabs is concerned. The reader should not expect to read here a full topographical description of the terrain of ǧazīrat al-‘Arab, ‘the Arabian Peninsula,’ in pre-Islamic times. Our main interest is to demonstrate that there was a geographical continuity and lack of natural barriers between the different parts of the Semitic world. But before this rather small section, the chapter will introduce a description of the internal social structure of the Arab tribes as a Semitic group of people, along with their tribal affiliation and distribution among Bedouin and non-Bedouin tribes and clans in their pre-Islamic shape. I will address this issue in two sections: one will be dedicated to the designation of the Arabs (who was an Arab and who was not), while the other discusses the tribes as social institutions

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  Reimagining Arab Political Identity

  Justice, Women's Rights and the Arab State

  • Salam Hawa(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 History, language, identity of Pre-Islamic Arabia

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429424625-2

  In his book, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (1994), Tarif Khalidi states that in the Qur’an pre-Islamic Arab history is characterised as jahili . This damning indictment of over 5,000 years of ancient Arab civilisation has led modern Arabs to associate their ancestors with wilful ignorance, lawlessness, and debauchery. Khalidi acknowledges that traditional historical narratives depend on an “axial text,” such as the Bible or the Qur’an, and that these texts are themselves products of certain cultures, “a particular way of viewing and representing the past.” For Khalidi, traditions are “not born” but are made up of elements that “belong to the debris of earlier traditions” (Khalidi, 1994: 1). Despite this acknowledgement, the author quickly dismisses ancient Arab culture and starts his account of Arab historical thought with the Qur’an and the first Arab Empire. Khalidi rightly points out that cultural and economic importance shifted from South Arabia to North Arabia and contrasts the economic and cultural rise of Arab cities in the north to the descent into anarchy and oblivion of “Arabia Felix ”1 in the south. As North Arab tribes developed their “own traditions in a new cultural zone,” formed “commercial and religious towns,” and their “script and dialect … dominated the Peninsula,” South Arabian civilisation became “a distant and dimly perceived memory and cherished most of all by tribes claiming southern descent” (Khalidi, 1994: 1–2).

  While there is no doubt this shift had taken place, and the arrival of the Qur’an provided a natural starting point for Muslim historians, this approach is nevertheless problematic on two levels: cultural and religious. First, Arab historians’ decision to overlook the role South Arabian civilisation played in shaping North Arab culture is based on the commonly held view that the two groups were ethnically distinct (Grunebaum, 1963: 5). South Arabians were the original Arabian Arabs (‘aribah ), wealthy traders who established such kingdoms as Saba’ (1200 bce–275 ce) and Himyar (110 bce–525 ce), whose dialect died out in the north during the third century and in the south by the sixth century ce (Macdonald, 2010: 5). North Arabians, on the other hand, were Arabised Arabs (musta‘ribah ) of mainly nomadic stock, who were often employed by South Arabian kings to protect the walls of their kingdoms and to engage in military expeditions (Restö, 2005: 129). The distinction between ethnicities is important, since Arab historiography, which started with the Umayyad dynasty, defined the Arabs as members of certain nomadic tribes.2

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  Classical Islam

  A History, 600 A.D. to 1258 A.D.

  • G. E. von Grunebaum(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  HE devout Muslim is inclined to see the appearance and rise of his religion in the light of a miracle; the overwhelming success of the Prophet’s mission is for him the most compelling confirmation of its truth. Even the non-believer is prepared to see if not a miracle at least something miraculous in the fact that such a towering and finely developed structure should arise on a foundation as narrow from the point of view of population and civilization as pagan Central and North Arabia; a structure which derived its survival and its greatness from its ability to transform itself from a religious community possessed of a national political character into a commonwealth of culture which was both religious and supranational, while yet retaining its existence and validity as a state. The political history of Islam contains a paradox peculiar to this religion alone: it is the history of the transformation of an Arab sect into a community dominating an empire, and furthermore a universal religious community which was primarily non-political, yet was the determining factor in political events and imposed its own qualities on whole cultures. In other words it was not the physical domination but the cultural power of the new teaching, not its origin in a particular geographical and intellectual zone but its immanent universality, which proved the deciding factors in its development. In the same way the new experience of the divine which it brought with it proved more inflammatory than the sense of identification with the Arab nation which was disseminating it. Yet, a further paradox, the Arabs have until the present day always claimed and been conceded a kind of privileged position within the Islamic community.

  Arab pride and at times the townsman’s periodic access of romantic feeling for the desert have served to keep within bounds the tendency to despise pre-Islamic paganism and all its works which followed the conversion. Yet the animosity of the subject peoples, who could only vent it against the pre-Islamic Arabs, the Arab Muslim’s consciousness of progress, and the obvious difference of cultural level between the Syrian and Mesopotamian border lands and the peninsula have all fostered the attitude that the pagan period was one not far removed from general barbarism. This attitude is one shared by the Islamic community and by Western scholars. South Arabia, the Arabia felix

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  Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World

  • James E. Lindsay(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  ARABIA Since Islam originated in the brackish shrine center that was Mecca and the agricultural oasis of Medina in the Hijaz (northwestern Arabia), it is appropriate to begin this examination of daily life in the medieval Islamic world in the Arabian Peninsula. The language, culture, and values of pre- Islamic Arabia informed the religion of Islam at its inception and con- tinued to do so long after the establishment of a vast and cosmopolitan Islamic empire. While reference will be made to areas outside the Hijaz, the world of the Hijaz in the seventh century will be the principal focus of this chapter. It will examine the geography, environment, and trade of the region as well as the kinship-based social order that was shared by nomad and oasis dweller alike and that is taken for granted in the Qur'an. Although the region was the birthplace of the religion of Islam, it soon became peripheral to the political, intellectual, and economic centers of the Islamic empire and emerging Islamic civilization. But first a few com- ments about the sources for this chapter are in order. SOURCES Christian historians divide human history into two distinct periods with Easter as the watershed event between the two, for according to Christian theology it is the death, burial, and especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ that gives meaning to the basic claims of Christian theology. St. Paul summarizes this theological position very succinctly in his statement, "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" 34 Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World (1 Corinthians 15:17)} Muslim historians divide human history into two distinct periods as well. Of course, since Muslim theology does not accept the Christian account of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, the Easter story cannot serve as the dividing line.

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  The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia

  Adaptation and Social Formation from the Neolithic to the Iron Age

  • Peter Magee(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 INTRODUCTION If there is any country which is seen to lie completely outside the stream of ancient history, it is Arabia. In spite of its vast extent; in spite, too, of its position in the very center of the civilized empires of the ancient East, midway between Egypt and Babylon, Palestine and India, – its history has seemed almost a blank. For a brief moment, indeed, it played a conspicu- ous part in human affairs, inspiring the Koran of Mohammed, and forging the swords of his followers; then the veil was drawn over it again, which had previously covered it for untold centuries. We think of Arabia only as a country of dreary deserts and uncultured nomads, whose momentary influence on the history of the world was a strange and exceptional phe- nomenon. (Sayce 1889: 406) Thus wrote Archibald Henry Sayce, the great Welsh professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford in 1889. Sayce countered his own introduction by then expounding upon how the study of ancient inscriptions during the pre- vious decades had begun to cast light on the rich history of Pre-Islamic Arabia. The possibility that Arabia had a prehistoric past, that is, human occupation before the era when inscriptions became common in the eighth century BC, and that these prehistoric cultures were in some way worthy of study did not occur to Sayce, whose views not only were typical of his day but continued to be symptomatic of the position of Arabian studies for most of the twentieth century. To be fair, Sayce was a nineteenth-century Assyriologist par excel- lence, and for him inscriptions and languages defined ancient cultures. He could write prose in twenty ancient and modern languages, and, according to his obituary in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, his last words included ‘When will more Ras Shamra texts be published?’. In the past few decades, scholars have focused greater attention on Arabia’s ‘dreary deserts’ and discovered a rich archaeological record.

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  Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World

  • Adam J. Silverstein(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  ammad’s emigration from Mecca in 622. Accordingly, the term ‘pre-Umayyad Arabia’ has been adopted here rather than the more commonplace ‘Pre-Islamic Arabia’. 42 The pre-Islamic background about other tribes. 201 Second, there is evidence that in their long-standing rivalry both the Byzantines and the Sasanids employed Arabians as messen- gers and spies, a point to which we shall return. Thus, even if we are to assume that the early Umayyads simply perpetuated the practices of the pre-Islamic empires in creating their own system of communication, the methods of communication employed by Arabians would still be of relevance to this study. Third, it will be shown that despite having little need for such a system themselves, Arabians acquired familiarity with the Byzantine and Sasanid postal systems on the eve of Islam. When, during the early Islamic conquests, Arabians came to require a reliable system of swift communication, they were able to adopt (a rudimentary version of) the imperial systems with which they had become acquainted. Arabian communications By its very nature, pre-Umayyad Arabian society was very mobile. The nomadism that characterised life in much of Arabia depended on the ability of all members of society to travel, and the centrality of pilgrimage and trade to the Arabian ‘economy’ is another aspect of Arabian mobility. 202 But the swift transmission of messages was irregular and relatively disorganised. There are three aspects of this type of communication that are central to any discussion of the early Bar  ıd. The first is the use of the term bash  ır with reference to Arabian couriers. The second is the ris  ala mughalghala (‘relayed message’) that was transmitted by Arabian couriers. The third is the frequent use of two couriers to deliver a single message. Importantly, each of these aspects was associated by later writers with the early Umayyad Bar  ıd.

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  Religious Studies

  Made Simple

  • David Stent(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  »s) Pre-Islamic Religion in Arabia Prior to the rise of Islam in Arabia, the people were both polytheists and animists. At this time they already worshipped Allah as one of their gods and in addition to him they revered a host of other gods whom they regarded as intermediaries between them and Allah, the Creator. One of these was Al-Lat, a mother goddess, and there was also Al-Manat, the goddess of fate, and Al-c Uzza, the morning star. All of the gods were worshipped at Mecca. Human sacrifices were sometimes offered to them by the people, who also believed in the existence of a number of'jinn', or spirits, who could be either friendly or hostile. Furthermore, they believed that trees, and many inanimate objects like stones were sacred and to be feared. Worship was centred on the Ka c ba, a cube-shaped building situated in the middle of Mecca, 40 miles from the Red Sea. It is believed that the black stone, which is housed at the eastern corner of the Ka'ba, is a meteorite that fell to earth thousands of years ago. In Muhammad's time there were some 360 idols situated within the Ka'ba's single room. Muhammad the Prophet His Life and Work Muhammad was born at Mecca in AD 570, the son of 'Abdallah ibn c Abd Al-Muttalib and his wife Aminah of the Quraysh tribe. His father died a short while before his birth and his mother died when he was six. He was brought up first by his grandfather and then by his uncle Abu Talib. It was said of him that from an early age he was gentle and kind. As he grew up he distanced himself more and more from the religious practices of the people and often 118 Religious Studies went to the caves of Mount Hira to meditate. He was known for his honesty and truthfulness. He became unhappy about the social and religious conditions of the people and questioned in his own mind whether polytheism and animism were acceptable forms of worship.

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  Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935–2018

  • Sabine Schmidtke(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  The shift is marked by two now well-known and highly respected journals, the Pro-ceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies , which began in 1971, and Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy , launched in 1990. As a result of the recent archaeological efforts one can now speak about Arabia’s penetration of the Fertile Crescent. In addition, G. W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, stimulated many young scholars to pursue the study of Arabia by his pioneering Ro-man Arabia (1983), which has been followed by several books on Arabia in Late An-tiquity, most recently The Crucible of Islam (2017). Some illustrations of the impact of recent Arabian studies on the larger ancient Near Eastern world follow, emphasizing the development of urban centers in the earlier historical periods of the Bronze and Iron Ages as revealed by modern archaeological exploration of the peninsula, pri-marily since WWII. D ILMUN AND N ORTHEAST A RABIA The earliest sign of civilization in Arabia comes from the Eastern Province along the coast of the Persian Gulf, where the distinctive fifth-millennium BCE pottery from Ubaid near Ur in southern Mesopotamia has been found. The finds are scat-tered between Dhahran and Qatar and the coasts of the United Arab Emirates. The assumption is that they are the product of a trading network between Mesopotamia and East Arabia. After an apparent hiatus in the fourth millennium BCE, there is a revival of the same trading network, although now with a much wider international scope. In the middle of the third millennium BCE, pottery from southern Mesopo-tamia and the Diyala region northeast of Baghdad appears again in the Early Dynas-tic period (ca. 2900–2500 BCE), this time accompanied by lapis lazuli from Afghani-stan and carnelian beads from India. The Arabian focal point appears to be the Ta-rut Island, just northeast of Qatif, and the eastern coasts of Arabia.

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