History Before Islam
At the time in Islamic history where “Islam” was formed, the spoken language of the people was that of Greek, not Arabic. The districts didn’t have a unified language in the native tongue. Literature was not available in Arabic for that reason, because few could read Arabic, and those that could were then presented with the problem of having to translate it into the native language of whatever region they were in. Arabic, for the most part, had been only available in small pockets throughout the Middle East. Classical written Arabic was inaccessible to the majority of the Arabian population, even if it was read out loud! Places which didn't have speakers of Greek had small local dialects. Because of this, the development of popular folk literature via oral transfirmation had storytellers who would talk about oral stories and add new anecdotes and individual touches. After all, the storyteller needed the money, and the people of the region certainly didn't know how the story went!
Because of the immense popularity of Greek, their influence and ideas was well-known throughout the Arabic and North African World. Greek writings were found all throughout the regions, the largest of which is preserved in Arabic medicine. Arabian physicians had been introduced to Greek medicine via Christian scholars by the fourth century CE. A medical school which was teaching Greek medicine was found in Jundi-Shapur, Southwest Persia, by the Sassanid King Shapur 11. Jundi-Shapur was originally a prisoner camp, but it later had citizens who spoke Greek, Syriac, and Persian. Strangely, this was not the chief language of the people there, who used the speech of Khuzistan, which was not Syriac, Hebrew, nor Persian. Modern day linguistic experts suppose that this language was Khuzi, which had been used by kings in domestic occupations. (Taken from a lecture given on March 17, 1993, "The Origins of Literary Persian", by Professor Gilbert Lazard). Khuzi could be a remant of Elamite. However, like most places, the oral language was a different language than the written language. The written language was Syriac, as Syriac translations show that they were made specifically for lectures. This school grew steadily in the next centuries, through the contribution of intellectual refugees. Greek philosophers from Athens, and Nestorian Christians from Edessa, had been expelled by the Byzantine emperors. The religion of Islam was to be shaped by these people.
The Nestorian missionaries went south until they hit Wadi l-Qura', northeast of Medina. This was a military outpost of the Qoda' tribes. By the time of Muhammad, these tribes were predominately Christian, with monasteries, cells, and hermitages. Using this as their headquarters, the Nestorian monks wandered went throughout the Middle East, attending large scale events and preaching to anyone who would listen to them. The language the people used was a Hamito-Semitic branch-off of Aramaic, (Eastern Aramaic), called Syriac. Syriac was used to translate Greek works of medicine, philosophy, and theology. The Greeks texts were later translated directly into Arabic or translated from Syriac into Arabic. The Greeks influence had spread so far that it went to India in the first century CE, and the Greek astronomical works were already partially tranlsated into royal languages. Transmition then occured between India and Arabia, where Indian mathematical and astronomical work was known throughout Arabia. This material had been passed to India by the sea route which connected Alexandria to northwest India.
Islamic conquerers had begun translating Greek texts into Arabic within a century of the regional conquests. Before that, Hellenized Greek beliefs could be seen amongst the Hellenized Jews and Christians which were in this area, the Jews holding a lot of power in this region. The tremendous influence of the Greeks had spread even amongst the illiterate parts of the population, and certainly at the time of Islam's founding, the knowledge of the Greeks had been long echoed throughout the Middle East.
This spread was initiated by the conquest and ruling of Alexander the Great, and his successors, who pushed the Greek knowledge through Syria, Arabia, India, North Africa, Egypt, and Persia. In Egypt and Carthage of North Africa, direct colonization was done by the Greeks, and the oral storytellers and philosophers, the poets, the sermons of preachers, holy men, Hellenized Rabbi's, and merchants from Greek lands had obviously pushed a simplified Hellenic/Zoroastrian cosmology throughout the North African and Middle Eastern countries. Some historians surmise that the Greek influence went so far as into China, and that martial arts traditions found in China sprang from Greco-Roman wrestling. Not only had the Greeks directly influenced the Arabians, but they had also directly influenced the two chief neighbors of the Arabians, the Persians and the Syriacs.
The first Muslims appear to have been familiar with the Greek language, as is obvious in the fact that they could translate Greek texts into Arabic. Not only that, but even as late as the end of the 7th century, the Arabians were still using Greek for their administrative documents. By the time the Qur’an was written, all of the Arabic world had been under the domination of the Greek Byzantine Empire for centuries, and had been settled by Greeks since the invasion of Alexander the Great a thousand years before. Thus we have established some basic facts that will help us understand the rest of the book. Primarily, that scientific knowledge had been passed around throughout the Arabian area, and as we have examined in small parts here, and in greater detail elsewhere, the Arabians of this era were not ignorant. They were great sea-travelers and merchants known throughout the World.
The second thing we find here is important for the rest of the book. The Arabians had contact extensively with Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, and some contact with Hindu's and Buddhists. This gives us a good context for the rest of the book, that the Arabians had many friends from afar, that they knew their languages, that they knew their ideas, and not only did they know them, they transformed them. No seventh century Arabian could not have been familiar with the knowledge of the Greeks, having gone to Greek schools in Greek cities, serving in Greek armies and administrations, having traded with them, having worked with them, and having been colonized by them. The Arabians used Greek as their primary language for adminstrative duties until the collapse of Greco-Roman power and the devotion to their native language gave way to a new form of literacy.
This is all important because one of the most oft-repeated claims in dealing with the Qur'an is that it contains great scientific knowledge that is too far advanced for a seventh century Arabian. Look at the knowledge which the Greeks, Romans, and Persians possess, and try to find something in the Qur'an which was not known at this period. All of the scientific evidence given in the Qur'an was already known by the Greeks centuries before Islam ever came about, yet we do not give the Gods of Olympus much credit for having knowledge of "great scientific discoveries". (Of course, it can be equally argued that the Greeks didn't literally believe in their Gods, and thus they can't attribute them to their Gods.)
In order to get around the problem that the ideas of the Qur'an are nothing new to the ancient World, so far as science goes, the next oft-repeated claim is that Muhammad was not educated. Therefore, even if the knowledge of the Qur'an was known to the Greeks, it wouldn't have been known to Muhammad. The first problem is even assuming Muhammad wrote the Qur'an, which will be examined much later. For now, let's just look to what we know about Muhammad. The historical documents concerning Muhammad range from murky to outright lies, but the most well-known story goes like this. Muhammad was born to a rich and powerful family, who controlled the influential trade city of Mecca. Our first historical problem is that Mecca was never a great historical trade city, but we'll let that slide by. We find that this city had major and regular connections with Byzantine Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and Persia, all of them bastions of ancient Hellenized cultures.
We know that this town wasn't much in terms of glory, but, what we do find next is that his first wife was a wealthy merchant woman. Is it possible for this business woman not to have any knowledge of the Greeks and not inform her husband is it? Is it possible that Mecca, being populated with large quarters of Hellenized Jews and Christians, with whom “Muhammad” would have had ample oral contact with, could not know their cosmology? Having his relatives and his wife, we can confirm that Muhammad would have known how to write. Further, Muhammad was an oral reciter, who'd receive divine revelations and speak them. Even if we take a priori that the writers of the Qur'an lost most of their material due to wars and death, it would seem strange that something as powerful to the Middle Eastern nations as the words of Muhammad, straight from his mouth, would not be preserved. Muhammad himself wrote down a few things in his lifetime, and we don't have any "writings of Muhammad" , (Montgomery Watt surmises that the evolution of the Qur'an was directly related to Muhammad's grasping of how to write), surviving to this day, we don't have the first-hand written testimony, so we must only accept the story of how the writing trasnmitted at face value.
The basic claim Muhammad's current day followers make is not too far off from the same claim that Joseph Smith made, in that they had both "received" the ability to write and know things through “divine” revelation. Believers don't take neither claim to be outrageous, but skeptics and freethinkers often do. Imagine someone telling you that they had learned an entire language, that was already spoken in the World, and being able to write that language through divine revelation. It makes me wonder if Muslism accept John Dee and Edward Kelly's divine revelations in writing the Enochian language. (To be fair, the Enochian language was hitherto unknown, Arabic wasn't.)
Since I touched briefly upon the subject of Pre-Islamic documents earlier, I’ll expound just for a second. There are two current trains of thought on Pre-Islamic poetry. Toby Lester comments:
“. . . the prominent Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein . . . devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to lend outside support to Koranic mythology. . . .[T]he Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti . . . repeatedly took his fellow Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad's life, much of which he called myth-making and miracle-mongering.”
The first was that Pre-Islamic poetry was proof of God’s divine revelation, and that the Qur’an had been around longer than suspected, just that Muhammad was the first one to codify it. After this came out, however, Islamics claim that the study of pre-Islamic poetry was done by anti-Islamics out to undermine the revealed teachings of the Prophet.
It's for this reason I earlier mentioned Rev. Tisdall's book. Despite what his opponents are saying, anyone who can grab the book and read it will note that he repeatedly states that the borrowings did not occur because some Islamic scribes wrote and copied down parts of the Talmud, the Avesta, etc., rather, his argument is that these were oral traditions which were well-known throughout the time and region. We know that there was a large amount of contact between the Islams and foreign cultures, most of whom provided the groundwork for the formation of the Qur’an. As the Muslims themselves often point out, it was an oral society, and it would be strange for people close to Muhammad who had converted NOT to know the transmit the teachings which they had known their whole life. Tisdall makes the same assumptions that everyone who studied Islam at that time, (Watt, Tisdall, etc.) However, let's look at some of Tisdall's own words. From "Origins of the Koran" ed. by Ibn Warraq, p. 242,
"Comparing, now, this Jewish story with what we saw of it in the Koran, little difference will be found and what there is no doubt arose from Muhammad hearing of it by the ear from the Jews."
A theory of religious borrowing does not depend on a verbatim retelling of the story by the later source. On the contrary, differences are to be expected, particularly as the story moves from one source to the next. Harry Slochower, Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in Literary Classics, p. 34. tells us that:
"In the re-creation of the myth by outstanding individual artists, the hero's quest becomes a critique of the existing social norms and points to a futuristic order which is envisaged as integrating the valuable residues of the past and present."
(For more on the effect of India, trade with Greece, and other nations that were Hellenized in Arabian culture, see De Lacy O'Lear, "How Greek Science Passed Onto Arabia".)
Whose religion is this?
The inhabitants of Arabia were not all of one race, each place had local speaking dialects, even when it comes to Arabic. The Hadith preserves this somewhat when it states in Al Hadis, Book 3, Chapter 37, No. 601, attested by Baihaqi, Razimi:
"Huzaifah reported that the Apostle of Allah said: "Read the Quran with the tunes (reading tones) of the Arabs and their accents, and guard yourselves from the tunes of the paramours and the tunes of the People of the Books. There will soon appear a people after me who will sing the Quran with songs and mournings. It will not cross their throat. Their hearts will be tried...."
We can therefore begin by preliminarily assuming that the Qur'an must preserved down to the tonal accents in Arabic only. However, we find that:
Al Hadis, Book 3, Chapter Same Book and Chapter 37, No. 605:
"Ibn Mas'ud reported that the Messenger of Allah said: 'The Quran has been revealed upon seven dialects. For every verse therein, there is an inner and outer meaning; and for every end, there is study (of tones).'
The Koran is pure only in Arabic, but it has seven tonal dialect forms. The problem with this is that it affects the meaning, as Arabic is spoken differently from one area to the next, which means that it is unintelligible to certain places, and that it also changes the meaning. An Arabic scholar and translator of the Qur'an, N.J. Dawood, writes in his book "The Koran" p. 10 that:
"... owing to the fact that the kufic script in which the Koran was originally written contained no indication of vowels or diacritical points, variant readings are recognized by Muslims as of equal authority."
The Qur'an was passed to us by a series of men, who were known as "The Readers". They were reciters of the Qur'an in the early centuries of the formation of Islam. The Readers would then pass onto their information unto people who are known as the "Transmitters". With this, there are seven copies of the Qur'an. Commentating on that is Adrian Brockett, `The Value of the Hafs and Warsh transmissions for the Textual History of the Qur'an', Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur'an, ed. Andrew Rippin; p. 34 and 37:
Lists of the differences between the two transmissions are long, ... (however) The simple fact is that none of the differences, whether vocal (vowel and diacritical points) or graphic (basic letter), between the transmission of Hafs and the transmission of Warsh has any great effect on the meaning. Many are differences which do not change the meaning at all, and the rest are differences with an effect on meaning in the immediate context of the text itself, but without any significant wider influence on Muslim thought. One difference (Q. 2/184) has an effect on the meaning that might conceivably be argued to have wider ramifications.
Now, to the history of Arabia before Islam, we need to look at how many groups there were at the time. Arabic writers in general divide them into pure or original Arabs, and those who come from other countries that had become integrated as Arabian citizens. Himyarites, (variously known as Sabaeans or Yemenites), and certain other tribes present us with traces of affinity with the Ethiopians, and accounts which are taken from early cuneiform tablets give us of early conquests of parts of the country by the Sumerian kings of Babylonia. We must then take into account that the early Egyptian Pharaoh’s, for a time at least, had taken domain over the Sinaitic Peninsula, and possibly over other districts in the North and West. From about the beginning of the second millennium BCE, through about 1200 BCE, Egypt ruled the region known today as Palestine. We know this from Egyptian records which talk about tribute taken from the various towns and cities in Canaan, and also from archaeological evidence within the region itself, which shows a number of settlements which were clearly Egyptian military outposts.
What this means is that there is little doubt that there were very early signs of a multi-nationalistic area, even in early times. All throughout this time period, empires rose and fell, massive natural disasters would happen which would either cause immigrants to enter a country, or to flee it, and return with foreign cultural elements. Among other problems that were faced amongst the nomadic people was the fact that they had no source of constant agriculture, and when drought took place, they often fled to places which could sustain them until they could return to their nomadic, or actually, semi-nomadic lifestyle.
Hamitic and other foreign elements were all throughout the population. In the days of the great Cushite monarchies in Babylonia, not only must the people of Arabia have been to some degree affected by their civilization, their trade, and their ideas in general, but also the influence of their religious beliefs must have been considerable. Early Arabian inscriptions prove this, containing as they do the names of such deities as Sin (the Moon-god) and Aththar (Ashtoreth, Ishtar), worshipped by the Sumerians first, and afterwards by the Semites of Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, Syria, Israel, and in some parts of Arabia. Mesopotamia itself was ruled in turn by Babylonians, Kassites, Hittites, Assyrians, Nebuchadnezzar's neo-Babylonian empire, the Persians, the Greeks, Parthians, and subsequently by Sassanian Persians in the period before the Arabian conquest. (Michael Wood, "Legacy: The Search for Ancient Cultures", p. 34) Yet, though there was doubtless a Hamitic element in the population, the great mass of the people from very early times has always been Semitic in origin, language, character, and religion.
Early Arabian history is divided into four periods: Pre-Bedouin (2000-1000 BCE), proto-Bedouin (1000-600 BCE), early Bedouin (600 BCE-300 BCE), and the high-Bedouin. Western Semites broke off from the Southern Semites in the pre-Bedouin period, and the Arabians practiced oasis agriculture and raised animals, particularly camels. This is part of the reason why we have so many oasis inscriptions throughout the area. This group did not know the nomadic lifestyle just yet, because the center of their civilization was Midian at the time.
In understading Arabian history, you have to understand something very clearly. There are two Arabia's. Sounds like a paradox doesn't it? However, historians and geographers tell us that there were doubtless two seperate regions, divided by distinct climate and geographical zones. Southern Arabia is an area along the coast of the Arabian Sea that gets regular rain and has an astonishing variety of plant life. This area is well known for its wealth, tropical plants, beautiful cities and architecture, and it's frankincense and myrrh, valuable exports which made it receive national attention. Southern Arabia was usually the home of people who were non-nomadic, they would live in cities and rely upon agriculture to suit their needs for food. The Semitic people in Africa are largely from this origin.
Anywhere north of the southern coast is Northern Arabia, a very difficult place to live. The east is a large desert, and to the west there are mountains and steppes. There are no rivers in this area to provide a sedentary way of life, thus while the Southern Arabian areas are dense in terms of populations and their relative distance to each other, the Northern region is sparse and isolated. The most predominate plant of the Northern Arabian area is the date palm, one of the most known symbols of Arabia. The people who lived to the east in North Arabia were Bedouins, who had small tribal groups, while to the West, they lived in larger tribal groups and could be sedentary for at least a while. It's for these climatic regions that the Southern Arabians always feared invasion from their bordering groups. Whenever things went really bad for the Northerners, they would raid and pillage the Southern Arabian area. The Sabaeans, (Himyarites, Yemenites) lived in the South, while what we loosely term "Arabians" lived to the north.
Southern Arabia
This Southern Arabia area was divided into political factions, the Minaeans, Sabaeans, Qatabanians, and Hadramautites. Five kingdoms flourished in South Arabia during the first millennium BCE. Saba (Sheba) with its capital at Marib, Qataban with its capital at Timna, and Hadhramaut with its capital at Shawba, were the earliest of the three kingdoms. Maain had its capital at Qarnaw, and Ausan in the mountains between Qataban and Aden, appeared somewhat later, around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Each kingdom enjoyed periods of prosperity and predominance. Historians and archaeologists have differed on the periods of dominance of each of these kingdoms but, in general, the ascendancy of the western kingdoms (Saba, Qataban, and Maain) was successive, while Hadramaut, to the east, had periods of importance at the same time as some of the western kingdoms.
The "Caravan Kingdoms" (8th BCE to 1st BCE) were founded by tribes who lived on the edge of the desert, at the foot of the mountains, and who thrived on the incense trade. Each valley ("wadi") gave its name to a different state: Hadhramaut (wadi Hadhramaut), Awsan (wadi Markha), Qataban (wadi Bayhan), Saba (wadi Dhana), Jawf (Saba and Main). At the beginning of the 7th BCE. the Sabean King Karib'il Watar unified the major part of what is today Yemen: he was called "al Mukarrib", the federator. His reign inaugurated a period of Sabean hegemony which lasted several centuries, followed by a period of Qataban hegemony, and a brief Hadhrami period, at the turn of the Christian era.
The "Highland Kingdoms" lasted from the 1st century until the 6th century CE. In the north, Sabean tribes established their kingdoms around Saana.
In the south, a new tribal confederation, called dhu- Raydan or Himyar, founded its capital at Zafar. Their history is very complex too, since these tribes which separated themselves from Qataban, spoke Sabean, and called themselves "Kings of Saba and dhu-Raydan". The 2nd century is marked by the disparition of Qataban, around 175 A.D. It is a major event in the history of South Arabia, since this kingdom goes back to the beginnings of the South Arabian civilisation, and had always played a major role. The 3rd century sees the invasion of the Abyssinians who occupy the western flank of the Yemeni mountains. But at the end of the 3rd century Himyar asserts its power, annexing Saba, conquering Hadhramaut, and expelling the Abyssinians. The Himyar Kingdom lasted until 525.
What religion were these people? Until the end of the fourth century, they were almost completely pagans. Towards the end of the fourth century, we see heavy leanings towards the Jewish faith, until the Abyssinians came back into the picture. From here, a struggle between factions seems to have arisen, between paganism, atheism, (yes, atheism was prominent in these times), a sort of monotheistic religion with no real religious text or dogma, Judaism, and Christianity. Ironically, none of these were the winners of the faction struggle.
In addition to exporting locally grown frankincense and myrrh, the kingdoms profited as middlemen for trade goods from Asia and Africa, shipped to the port at Aden. Dispersed over a wide area, all the kingdoms shared a culture and spoke dialects of a common language. Saba dominated the others, especially the three that were its satellites, but as is suggested by the absence of fortifications, relations between the kingdoms were generally amicable.
The Himyarite dynasty emerged as Saba was on the decline. It became the main power in the region, and the two kingdoms were linked. Himyar kings referred to themselves as kings of Saba and Dhu Raydan, the mountain on which their capital was built. The Himyarites centered their empire in the highlands, where they developed terraced agriculture. Their trade routes ran from near the seaport at Mocha through the mountains to modern day Sana'a and on to Mecca.
Like the Sabaeans, the Himyars appear to have had an elaborate political system based on alliances with chiefs of tribal confederations. Himyarite power was also influenced by trends elsewhere. The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity ended the use of frankincense in funeral rites, and the discovery of new sea routes reduced the use of caravans. Originally polytheists, Himyarite kings and their followers practiced Christianity and later converted to Judaism. Eventually, religious warfare and the decline of trade weakened the Himyarite empire. It was overrun by the Ethiopians in 525.
The Ethiopian occupation stimulated new resistance, as the Jews fought on from the mountains of eastern Himyar. Although the invaders were able to hold on to Tafara and the coastal area along the Red Sea, Hadramut, and the ports along the Arabia Sea held out and remained in Jewish hands. With the help of the Persians, the Jews gradually drove out the Ethiopians from everywhere except their Red Sea base. In the decades preceding the rise of Islam, the struggle for control of southern Arabia seesawed between Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and Ethiopia.
Starting from the turn of the era bedouin of the inland steppes began to show themselves in the affairs of the established kingdoms and the populations of the Red Sea coast.
The Southern Arabians had come under the control of city-states ruled by priest-kings, who we know as mukkarib. They were similar to the rulers of Sumer and Akkad in earlier times. Texts from the area tell us about how the people thought, it seemed to be a theocracy. The “state” is referred to in the formula of “ Almawah, Karib II and Saba”. This suggests that it rests on two pillars, the God and the ruler. Whenever the Sabeans would conquer an area, two things would happen. Either the place conquered would become a slave place, which would lose their political independence, along with their religious freedom. We know these tribes because of the destruction of their royal palace and the disfiguration of their secular and religious inscriptions. The other option is that they would only become a subgroup of Sabean rule, where they would retain their pantheon and political institutions. Whenever this happened, the tribe could still worship their own pantheon, but they had to acknowledge the supreme God of the Sabeans, Almaqah. This seems to be more along the lines of acknowledging Sabean rule than it is at acknowledging a new God. The Romans had the same idea, where a group had to offer a pinch of offering to show reverence for the Emporer, which was a tribute to the Gods of Olympus. Karib II gives us a list of these tribes, and tells us who their kings were, but he doesn't make any mention of the deities. We also know from his list that certain groups had to pay tribute to the king, either in the form of cattle or by helping erect a public building. Saba and its tributary groups are referred to in Karib II's text as "the children of Almaqah". The name for a Sabean king who had this city-state theocratic society was a “mukarrib”, in English, “the covenant maker”. However, by the first millenium CE, the priest-kings had mostly faded away and the new monarch was secular, which we term the "malik", or "king".
There were four primary city-states in Southern Arabia, those being Saba', Hadramawt, Qataban, and Ma'in, all located to the southwest. The term "Sabaeans" is derived from Saba', much like Sumeria is named after "Sumer" and Akkadian after "Akkad". This region never went under a political unification, but Saba' had expanded its political influence to most of the major kingdoms by 300 CE. The reason it was never politically unified was due to excessive in-fighting amongst the people therein. Everyone was trying to control the lucrative trade industry which was there. This vital international trade affords the only reason why the most important ancient towns were situated in the rather arid lower reaches of the rivers instead of the rich and fertile highlands of the Yemen. Agriculture was difficult and costly there: it presupposed the power to control and exploit the seasonal rain-floods with the aid of complex irrigation systems. This didn't work, however, because unusually strong floods; canals and dams had to be maintained in good working order; finally, one had to reckon with years of drought at a time, which put a hard loss on any harvest.
Saba was the pearl of the old, and it was obvious that other people wanted its riches. Agatharchides of Kindos, an Alexandrian scholar of the 2nd century BCE, has this to say about the riches of the Sabians:
The Indian Ocean trade was carried to Arabia by ships and from Aden was transported largely overland to the markets of the western Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Navigation on the northern part of the Red Sea was dangerous because of monsoon winds; therefore, goods for Egypt were usually transported halfway by sea and then transferred to overland caravans. Caravan cities, colonies of southern Arabia, developed along these trade routes and became the nuclei for the important cities of the Hijaz in the medieval period. The use of the camel as a carrier and the development of such caravan cities as Yathrib (present-day Medina), Palmyra, and Petra formed a part of the legacy of the southern Arabs to the north that eventually enabled the north to succeed to mercantile supremacy. Because demand for South Arabian products grew, prices rose, trade routes increased, and the transportation of goods became organized under stricter control. Increased trade was possible because of more effective use of the camel, which had originally been domesticated by the southern Arabs as a dairy animal.
The Sabaeans, a desert tribe to the north, were the first southern Arabs to control the inland trade route. More accustomed than some of the southern and more strictly commercial tribes to the intricacies of tribal politics, the Sabaeans established a confederation of tribes, each under a local chieftain who was responsible for frankincense production and transport in his area. The Sabaeans developed an elaborate political and administrative system; their capital, originally east of Sanaa, was later moved to Marib, an area with natural defenses.
In the first period of Sabaean dominance in South Arabia, toward the end of the fifth century B.C., a federation was formed under Sabaean rule that included most areas of South Arabia. Robert Stookey, a specialist on Yemeni affairs, notes that the Ptolemaic explorer, Anixicrates, sent by Alexander the Great in 322 BCE to explore the Arabian Peninsula, found complete Sabaean domination of South Arabia and made no mention of any other state in the area.
By the third century BCE, this unity had disappeared as the kingdoms of Hadhramaut, Qataban, and Maain reasserted themselves. The geographer Eratosthenes, writing in the third century BCE, described four equal and prosperous kingdoms. Monument inscriptions from this period of Sabaean decline refer with increasing frequency to the Hamdan tribal federation, and the Hashid and Bakil tribes.
The way that Southern Arabia was endowed with wealth is no mystery. A large number of rare plants with high value grew throughout the area, including trees from which valuable resins were extracted. No one would buy the cargo directly, because there were enormous distances to travel, the horrible climate, and the fact that the local people had already set up a trade which was much more conveinant. At the time of the Assyrians and Persians, (8th - 4th BCE), this was done by the Southern Arabian tribe of Saba. During the time of Hellenism, the tribe of Mineans, (end of the 4th century through the 1st century BCE), controlled the trade.
The trails that the caravans took would depend on what the political situations were. As political factions changed, along with the empires that were in power, new areas would need to be supplied with products. There were a great deal of obstacles in the way, namely because you had to avoid the mountains, while still having enough food and water to feed the men and the beasts of burden. The only trail that fit this description was from Shabwa, the capital of the Hadramawt, it went through the desert, following the Yemenite mountain ridge to Timna, the capital of Qataban, from there via Marib, the capital of Saba, via Baraqish, past the Jabal al-Lawdh, to Najran. This track was level, there were no natural obstacles, and artificial irrigation made sure that there were food and water for the merchants. Thus most of the ancient capitals were along this trail, particularly where important valleys entered the plain. The Saba' controlled most of this region, together with the people under its rule, both its slaves and its other territories.
Political centralization played a key role in the Sabaean takeover. Saba appears to have been the most unified of the cultures, when compared to the other groups around the area. The covenant which the Saba used to show its unity was common worship, which may explain why the sanctuaries of all tribes were equally accessible, and why many of the temples were outside city gates. Central planning was also in effect, as some tribes had irrigation systems, along with a high number of public buildings. Karib II built several city walls and large scale irrigation projects.
Along with this centralization came another key factor, specialization and the acquisition of foreign techniques. Specialization in Southern Arabia needed to have a large urban population, much like today. In smaller and less grouped areas, "jack of all trades" are needed for precisely the opposite reason.
If we go back about a millenium before Islam had taken effect, an indigenous civilization with a good deal of prosperity had flourished in the soutwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula. The language they spoke was a seperate branch from the Semitic family, but it was distinct from Arabic, possessing an alphabet of its own. These people are known as the Axum (Aksum), which came about whenever Kush speaking people in Ethiopia migrating from the Sahara, and Semitic speaking people from southern Arabia (the Sabaeans) settled in the area known as the Abyssinian Plateau. This happened around 500 BCE. The two cultures came together and become one. This was a strategic position in the trade routes between Asia and Kush; affording easy access to Arabic trade routes and the Mediterranean via the Red Sea. Because of this, trade was possible through the Indian Ocean, and with Africa, (Abyssinia), which was opposite to it. This culture had a Greek and Hellenistic influence, as shown by coins in the area. This area was agriculturally well suited, politically defensible, and allowed the possibility of undisturbed cultural development. They spoke a Semitic language and wrote in a Semitic "alphabet".
We don't know too much about their early kingdom. Initially, it appears it was a feudal system, which had a single king, (the "Negus"), who ruled over princes. These princes would in turn pay him tribute. By the first century CE, the principle city was Axum, and the port city of Adulis became a major trading port that attracted Greek and Jewish traders and merchants. There was a great blending of a variety of cultures, Egyptian, Kushite, Sudanic, Arabic, and Indian. In the second century CE, Axum had made several tribute states on the Arabian Peninsula lying across the red Sea. It took over northern Ethiopia, and conquered Kush. This conquest gave Axum complete control over most of the major trade routes in the World.
The original religion of these people was polytheistic, one where the gods controlled the World. In the fourth century, King Ezana converted to Christianity and declared Axum to be a Christian state. The move to Christianity was especially beneficial because Rome was undergoing a similar conversion, and the capital was being relocated to Constantinople. Axum was defeated by Islam, but in a strange way. As Islam started taking over, and the Roman empire fell, trade routes had changed dramatically. Eventually, Axum fell out of play as a world power.
The Sabaeans were connected by two major trade routes, an ocean-trading route between India and Africa, and a land-based trade route that went up and down the coastline. However, there were dividing factions that would bring it down. However, by the end of the 3rd century CE, the trade between the Greco-Roman empire and India had collapsed. The trade at this time was controlled by the Ethiopians, and not the Arabians. Adulis became the primary port, located on the Ethiopian coast of the red sea. Although Southern Arabia was isolated from invasion by both the sea and the mountains, several political, religious, and cultural revolutions were taking effect.
Outside from the four earlier mentioned political powers in South Arabia, a fifth one came into being. This was known as the tribe of Himyar (‘Homerites’ in the Greek accounts). A Greek source of the 1st century CE states that in those days, there was a sort of dual monarchy of Saba (Sebe) and Himyar. Following that time, Himyar became more and more dominant in the Southern Arabian affairs. Christian Greek authors commonly refer to the people of southern Arabia as Homerites, and the Islamic authors apply the term Himyarite to all the pre-Islamic South Arabian antiquities.
Southern Arabia history was primarily a Sabaean expansion, and by the 5th and 6th century CE, the boundaries and kingdoms of the area had vanished, and it went under one unified political front. We don't really know how much of a hand that Himyar played in this, but we do know that Himyar was seen as the successor to the Sabaeans. After being isolated for a long time from its Northern Arabian and Mediterranean counterparts, the unified region started to play a larger roles in the political affairs of its neighbors.
Bernard Lewis, "The Middle East: 2000 Years Of History From The Rise Of Christianity To The Present Day", p.42
"The militant Christian monarchy which had emerged in Ethiopia developed a natural interest in the events on the other side of the Red Sea [Yemen]. Persians were, of course, always concerned to counter Roman or Christian - for them, the two were much the same - influence.
By this time even these remote outposts of Mediterranean civilization were influenced by the general economic decline of the ancient world.... At least part of the reason for this decline in Arabia must be sought in the loss of interest by both rival imperial powers. During the long period from 384 to 502 CE when Rome and Persia were at peace, neither was interested in Arabia or in the long, expensive and hazardous trade routes that passed through its deserts and oases. Trade routes were diverted elsewhere, subsidies ceased, caravan traffic came to an end, and towns were abandoned. Even settlers in the oases either migrated elsewhere or reverted to nomadism. The drying-up of trade and the reversion to nomadism lowered the standard of living and of culture generally, and left Arabia far more isolated from the civilized world than it had been for a long time. Even the more advanced southern part of Arabia also suffered, and many southern nomadic tribes migrated to the north in hope of better pasturage. Nomadism had always been an important element in Arabian society. It now became predominant. This is the period to which Muslims give the name Jahiliyya, the Age of Ignorance, meaning by that of course to contrast it with the Age of Light, Islam. It was a dark age not only in contrast with what followed, but also with what went before. And the advent of Islam in this, sense may be seen as a restoration and is indeed presented as such in the Qur'ān - as a restoration of the religion of Abraham.
Two developments in the first century of the Christian era were to prove damaging to the trade that had made southern Arabia prosper. Various scholars have noted that during the reign of Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54) a Roman ship by chance was blown from the Yemeni coast all the way to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). The Romans learned in this way that many of the goods they had imported from Arabia came, in fact, from lands to the east. When, in the following generation, a Roman discovered the pattern of the monsoon winds, Roman ships began to sail directly to India and the east, bypassing the South Arabian ports that had thrived as a result of this trade.
Roman encroachment on the trade routes coincided with the rise of the kingdom of Aksum (or Axum) in Ethiopia and with a long period of warfare in South Arabia. Although these events probably were involved in the ultimate decline of Arabia, their effect did not become clear for more than a century. South Arabia continued to enjoy prosperity until at least the beginning of the fourth century A.D. Indeed, it was only at the end of the third century A.D. and the assumption of power in Saba by the Himyarite tribe that South Arabia was unified for the first time under one ruler. Alleged descent from this ancient dynasty was one of the genealogical claims of the twentieth-century rulers of North Yemen to legitimate authority in all of Yemen.
Several events of the fourth century, combined with what had happened in the previous 200 years to Yemeni trade routes and tranquillity in South Arabia as a whole, helped bring to an end the independent Himyarite kingdom of Saba. The proclamation of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine in 323 was the death knell of South Arabia's frankincense market. The small demand for church ceremonies and medicine did not compensate for the vast quantities no longer consumed in funerary rites, now officially banned. Only four years after Constantine's proclamation, Ethiopia began to be converted to Christianity. Ethiopia occupied South Arabia for some 40 years. Although the Himyarites were able to throw off Ethiopian rule before the end of the fourth century, Stookey suggests that foreign occupation may have had at least two important effects on the subsequent political development of South Arabia. The success of the Ethiopian invasion damaged the credibility of the many tribal gods who had failed in their duty to ensure victory in battle and to safeguard the community, and the occupation by the newly Christianized Ethiopians may have "encouraged the innovative idea that the coercive propagation of particular forms of worship is an appropriate function of the state."
Early in the third decade of the 4th century the South Arabian king who is said to have professed Judaism pursued a policy of persecution of the Christians in his dominions. Najran was a Christian stronghold and Medina became a focal point of Jewish influence. This policy culminated at the massacre of the Christians in Najran (Nagran). This came as a shock to the Christian world with the consequent martyrological literature in Greek, Syriac and Ethiopic. Byzantium decided to seize the opportunity to incite the Christian king of Aksum in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to invade the southern Arabia. Invasion was successful, the persecutor was killed and a Christian puppet ruler was set up. But this puppet was dethroned by a native uprising which put Abraha in throne, who managed to maintain a precarious independence between the powers of Byzantium, Abyssinia/Ethiopia and Persia. Abraha made San’a a Christian pilgrimage centre which rivalled Mecca. Abraha sent a Christian expeditionary force to destroy Ka’ba. A few years after his death (possibly around 570 CE) his kingdom collapsed and southern Arabia was subjected to Persian occupation for some years and it never regained a unified independence. The closing years of the century brought the fragmentation of the kingdom of Ghassan……. and the decline of the power of Hira to the north. At the opening of the 7th century, Arabia was a mass of insignificant autonomies with no unifying center.
Northern Arabia:
In "The History of the Yemens:" Countries of the World by Sally Ann Baynard, we find that:
The first three known Arabian civilizations were coastal settlements. The oldest evidence of civilization in northern Arabia consists of artifacts found 90 kilometers north of Dhahran on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Dated to 5000 B.C., they are identical with those of the Al Ubaid culture of Mesopotamia, the first people to cultivate and settle the Fertile Crescent-the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, a crescent arching from present-day Kuwait to modern Israel-and the ancestors of the Sumerians, one of the first people to develop a high culture.
From about 4000 to 2000 B.C. the Dilmun civilization dominated about 400 kilometers of the eastern coast of Arabia from present-day Kuwait to Bahrain and extended 90 kilometers into the interior to the oasis of Hufuf in Saudi Arabia. At its zenith in 2000 B.C., Dilmun controlled the route to the Indies and was the trading link between the civilizations of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.
Arabia was only sparsely peopled in the interior. Until about 3000 B.C. inland Arabia was sufficiently verdant to support both cereal agriculturists and herding peoples in the north and hunting and gathering societies in the south. As climatic conditions changed and the desert slowly encroached on land that had formerly supported both animal and human life, the inhabitants were faced with three choices: to cling to the inland oases, to move to the coasts, or to leave Arabia entirely. Those who made the third choice and migrated to the north, northeast, and southwest are the only ones who left a historical record in this millennium.
The Northern Arabians were of one ethnic group, but made up of two distinct cultural groups, the nomadic and the sedentary Arabians. The environment around the Northern Arabian region was very rough, forcing a nomadic and small-tribal existence. There was no way to have agricultural developments, so instead, the nomadic Arabians known as the bedouins were pastoralists. They moved their herd and their families from place to place, looking for water and agriculture.
The sedentary Arabians were also Bedouin, only these were Bedouin who found oases that surrounded the edges of the Arabian desert. The control of oases meant that a tribe or group would have control over scarce resources, and they were invaded many times for control of this commodity. Because the oases were at the edge of where the Bedouin migrated, and because they were scarce, the Bedouin were unable to gain major control over these areas until their powerful neighbors, the Mesopotamians and the Sabaeans, became weaker and lost political control. The real establishment of sedentary Northern Arabian settlements didn't occur until the first millenium BCE. Because of this, the culture at the time of the formation of Islam was still very much like that of the other nomadic groups around North Arabia.
Another reason why control of these areas was becoming more important was because these intermediary positions afforded a trade route that would connect Africa and India with the Mediterranean, through Southern Arabia. In marking the assension of this group, there are three historical periods for the sedentary Northern Arabians before Islam. The first period of major importance is whenever the Greek Seleucids in the Middle East and the Southern Sabaeans lost control of the Middle East. With their declining power, the Northern Arabians went northward to Petra and South to Najran. Without the former significant military presense that was there, they had an easy time making the expansion. However, with this expansion, they ran into a problem. Rome was expanding east while the Arabians were expanding west.
Because of this Roman expansion, then the Byzantine expansion, and then the reunition of Sabaean power, we find the Northern Arabians in their second period. They had become tributary states which were under the control of their neighbors. The Byzantine empire was in the North, the Persians were in the East, and the Sabaeans were in the South. During this time, Judaism and Christianity were both very popular among the Arabians. The two main forms of Christianity throughout this time and area were Monophysite Christianity of Africa and Syria, and eastern Christianity of the Byzantine empire. Even among those who had not converted to Christianity or Judaism, the effects of it were seen throughout the culture.
The third period was whenever power was concentrated on inner Arabia, and the Bedouins started possessing a cultural and military power. In this period, classical Arabic, or al-Arabiyya, became the language of Arabic culture and poetry. There was also a widespread diffusion of Bedouin poetry and narratives.
In the proto-Bedouin time period, the tribes were becoming skilled traders, by seperating themselves from the oases agriculturalists, and going out into the desert. Towards the year 800 BCE, they are believed to have become vast hersman and have formed a distinct civil structure. This is whenever caravan commerce begins, which will be important two chapters later. The Bedouins travelled with their camels from oasis to oasis and sold goods. The Assyrians called these Bedouins Arubu, which means nomads, and from which we get "Arab".
Though the general name given to the Bedouins were Arabs, there were two important groups that were known to us as other names. The Sarrasins/Sarracens/Saraceni/Sarakenoi and the Nabataeans. Both Rome and Byzantium were worried about attacks and invasions from outside groups of nomads, whom we know as Saraceni or Sarakenoi. Until the 19th century CE, Sarrasin/Sarracen was the name the Europeans gave to the Arabians of the Middle East. The linguistics connection is that these are corruptions in Latin and Greek of the Arabic word Sharqiya. Sharqiya generally means, "those belonging to the East" or "Easterners".
These Easterners were pushing West, moving towards the Mediterranean Sea. One such group was an Arabian tribe whom we call the Nabataeans. They moved to southern Palestine and Jordan during the centuries preceding the Common Era. Jordan was first formed about 2000 BCE, when Semitic nomads entered the region. By about 1200 BCE, there were four groups of Semites farming and trading in the lands east of the Jordan River, the Ammonites, Amorites, Edomites, and Moabites. Moabites controlled the land at about 850 BCE, until it was usurped by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Persians invading and controlling the area. The Nabataeans came there in waves, it would appear, variously ranging from the 7th through the 4th century BCE. We do know that the architecture and art they had were strongly influenced by the Greeks, after about 331 BCE, when Alexander the Great conquered the area. After his death, the Seleucids ruled the northern part of Jordan, and the Nabataeans controlled the southern part.
The way that classic authors refer to them is as the "Nabatu", along the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula. Reportedly, they failed as pirates, so they made their way northward along the coast. They don't appear to be a single group, but rather, a mixture of nomads and semi-nomads. They reached Petra, the southern stronghold of the Edomites, and settled there during the Persian period of the 500-400 BCE. The Edomites moved westward to settle in southern Judah, forming a territory called Idumea. This caused them to became known as the "Idumaeans", while some remained in Edom. The two cultures merged, the Nabatu and the Edomites, forming the "Nabataeans". Relationships must have continued between the Idumaean and the Nabataeans, as Herod the Great had a father who was an Idumaean, and a mother who was a Nabataean. The Hasmonean dynasty conquered the Idumeans around the 100 BCE marker, and converted them to Judaism.
The name which the Nabataeans gave themselves was the yashaby sala (the meaning of this term is given as the ‘mountain dwellers’, or the ‘Arabs of the mountain’. However, the resemblence between the word ‘yashaby’ and the Arabic word ‘ashab-i’, meaning ‘those who are’, also has an effect on our interpretation of this.)
The Nabataeans established a desert kingdom that in the second century, that stretched from the Red Sea to Syria. They succeeded at monopolized the spice trade between Arabia and the Mediterranean. They were experts at conserving water, and became skilled potters, metalworkers, masons, and architects. Petra was chosen for the capital due to the fact that it was hard to launch an assault against. The Nabataeans used the Aramaic language, and became allies of Rome in the first century, which had then become the dominant power in the region. Around 60 BCE period, the Romans took control of Jordan. They built vast trading centers at Philadelphia (now Amman) and Gerasa (now Jarash). Whenever the Roman empire had split in the 300's CE, Jordan then became part of the Byzantine Empire.
The proper names of the Nabataeans are north-Arabic; even more importantly, they show a characteristic that is typical of the Arabs - the article al or el. In the majority of the Semitic languages, the article used was ha. They disseminated their article al or el and other characteristics of their language across the region, thus allowed the passing of Aramaic to Arabic. The Aramaic-speaking Nabataeans created a new writing form to add to those in use, which later evolved into the ‘Arabic’ writing that is still in use today. They succeeded, because they had a great impact in the area of culture. This cultural impact was based on their economic power.
The reason we're not certain when the Nabataeans came into power was because some scholars believe that they are the equivalent with the Nebaioth in the Bible, and the Nebayat of the Assyrian records in the 7th century BCE. These words were used as the names of many Arabian tribes, suggesting a conglomeration rather than a single homogenous tribe. We don't know much about their early migrations, but we do know in 312 BCE, 10 years after the death of Alexander the Great, that the Greek historian Siodorus Siculus mentions them. He writes that that they were attacked in their stronghold by the forces of Antigonus, ruler of Phrygia. We know that this attack failed, but the Phrygian army came away with 700 camels, which were vital to the Nabataeans who used them for commercial trade. We don't really know how the Nabataean power went out. They were an independant place until 106 CE, when the Roman emperor Trajan incorporated them into his new province of Arabia, with the capital at Bostra in Southern Arabia. The Nabataeans prospered under direct Roman rule, and their culture became Hellenized. This was during the second and third centuries.
Citizens in this province became a part of the Roman empire, sharing their legal system and identity. We know from Roman ruins in Jordan that the cities were linked to commercial centers, and through Roman roads, which had a security guarantee by the Roman army. After that, Petra became a Christian city and the seat of a bishop in the middle of the fifth century. In the sixth century, it was a rundown Byzantine town, and in the seventh century, it was deserted. They are not mentioned by the annals of Muslim invaders who went through the caravan routes. We know that some Nabataeans left the Roman territory and moved to Medina, amongst other places. We know this because they influenced the linguistics of Medina and the religion there.
Some of the Nabataeans probably reverted back to their nomadic way of life. As Phillip Hitti informs us in "The Arabs: A Short History":
"The rudiments of Semitic religion developed in the oases, rather than in the sandy land, and centered upon stones and springs, forerunners of the Black Stone and Zamzam Well in Islam and of Bethel in the Old Testament. But religion sits very lightly in the heart of the Bedouin. In the judgment of the Koran, 'the desert Arabians are most confirmed in unbelief and hypocrisy.' Even in our present day they pay little more than lip homage to the Prophet."
Another quote that will help us understand the rise of Islam:
"The clan organization is the basis of Bedouin society. Every tent represents a family; members of one encampment constitute a clan. A number of kindred clans grouped together make a tribe. All members of the same clan consider each other as of one blood, submit to the authority of but one chief-the senior member of the clan-and use one battle-cry. Blood relationship-real or fictitious (clan kinship may be acquired by sucking a few drops of a member's blood) furnishes the cohesive element in tribal organization."
Now, you might be asking, what does this have to do with our discussion? You will notice that all of the great empires of the Old World had fallen out of power, trade had collapsed between regions, and no one in Arabia was in control. Further, we know that swearing allegiance to a place often meant swearing allegiance to their gods, and we know that one of the most popular ways to unite a conglomeration of people was through either money or religion. This ties in very closely to how the religion of Islam was formed, a wide variety of factors had made Arabia fall out of power, and someone was needed to pull it back into the control of Arabians. As Patricia Crone noted for the discussion of the rise of Islam, "Clearly, we must concentrate on such factors as were common to Arabia, not on those that were peculiar to Mecca; the more unusual we consider Mecca to have been, the more irrelevant we make it to the explanation of the rise of Islam."
Romans, India, and Trade
By briefest mention only, I've discussed things between the Romans and the Arabians. A little more history might elaborate this further. Historian Karl Jaspers speak of the time period between 600 to 300 BCE as the "axial age" in human history, when various spiritual ideas in totally unrelated parts of the World started getting the same ideas. In actuality, it is more like the use of bows and arrows among many ancient people. Surprising to us modern people, various tribes of what we'd call "primitive" people figured out how to do complex things such as delicate crafting, advanced metallurgy, planting and harvesting, etc. Then they would completely abandon these ideas. Likewise, many ideas such as Confuscious, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Lao-Tse had brought forth weren't actually new at all, but the difference was at this time period, these ideas took hold. While in previous time periods, the amount of disciples they had were limited.
Arabia was important because of the East-West trade which put the Arabians in contact with China, India, Persia, Rome, Greece, and Egypt, all variously important, but each with their own unique contributions to science, math, and chemistry. Rome and Persia were both struggling for control of the trade industry, the spices from India or the silk from China. Unfortunately for Rome, they really didn't have anything with which they could trade other countries with, as Rome is pretty low on such natural resources, but they did have gold, which was gladly accepted World-Wide. Although Romans occasionally complained of the drain on their economy caused by this, overall, the Romans did just fine all things considered.
Rome invented various ways of getting into and through India and Persia without crossing over into Persian dominated territory, although the Persians were always willing to do anything to get recruits for destroying the Romans. There were two trade routes primarily used, one Northern and one Southern. Respectively, you'd either have to deal with the Turks or with the Arabians. It would seem then, that the best idea for any government was to use these people to their advantage. However, both the Persians and the Romans didn't see much good in doing that. Ammianus Marcellinus writes of the people that they were the fiercest warriors, and they are severely interested in martyrdom. That is to say, that the greatest glory was to die in combat. To summarize his, (and Roman), ideas on them, he simply states: "The Saracens.. whom we never found desireable as friends or as enemies."
To try and conquer such a war-like people would have been temporary, dangerous, and draining. Both the Persians and the Romans recognized this problem, so they instead decided to try and win temporary favor with whatever tribe they were talking too. They would send financial, military, and technical aid, along with various titles, awards, and trinkets to impress the locals. They would thus leave the people to have their own way, while still securing a trade-route through their territory.
We do know the Romans tried at least once to conquer the Arabs, (in saying this, I mean that though the Romans had many examples of minor scrimmages, there were no flat-out attempts to conquer the area), in 25 BCE. The Romans found the Nabatean capital, with its lucrative trade, in 65 BCE. Soon, they realized they had a good auxiliary zone which buffered them through outside influence until they could reach Southern Arabia. In 25 BE, the Roman emporer Augustus decided that he wanted to expand upon this, and he wanted to control the region. His experiment though was a total disaster, most of the Romans dying from thirst. The only good thing that really came of it was a better knowledge of the Arabian lands, but it was concluded after that conquering Arabia was risky and dangerous, not least of all because of the territory. (That will be important in a little bit.) The Nabatean capital was later captured by the Romans, but it was almost unnecessary.
Persia and Rome were losing interest in each other, and that meant that neither wanted to maintain their temporary favor with the Arabians by sending them gifts and goods. Further, new trade routes were discovered which gave Rome connections to the Indian trade. Worse than that, trade in general was dying off between the East and the West, with Roman gold coins in India being almost non-existent by the death of Caracalla in 217 CE. From this time period, the amount of trade in Arabia was pretty much nothing, and this is the "time of ignorance" which is best recorded in the Qur'an, though remarkably, this time period ended long before the Qur'an was written.
Towards the fifth century, the trade was revitalized, and Arabia came back into the picture. To the North, the Arabians helped the Romans make their Northern routes safe. However, the Southern areas were controlled by the Jews, (whether they are actually "Jews" in a historical sense, or Jews as in converts to the religion, is unknown), which tended to side with the Persians during disputes. The friendly relationship between Persia and the Jews made both the Greeks and the Romans very wary of the Jews in general. The Romans wanted to bring this area of the country under control so that they could have a Southern trade route for silk from China. The Romans won for a temporary time, but before long, the area went under due to the Persians taking over Yemen and having access to the Southern trade route.
However, the loss wasn't too important to the Romans. In 552 CE, two Nestorian monks smuggled silkworm eggs out of China. Within a few decades, silk was being made in Byzantine Rome. However, the Byzantines had their own disputes, while the Persians were simultaneously being weakened by inner disputes and problems, reminescent of Nihilism hitting it. The Arabians had now developed the use of arms and armour, including tactical training from the Romans. The Romans had trained the Arabians in cavalry fighting during the Saracen period. Emperor Valens led Arabian horsemen against the Goths, and from these and other times, the Arabians had developed extensive use of fighting techniques. In fact, the Arabians were such good fighters that during the Crusades, the Europeans took their fighting techniques from the Arabs, and not vice versa.
The Arabians had further progressed so far that they developed their own written language, and were the successors to the wisdom of the East and West, from Persia, Greece, Rome, and India. Therefore, unlike the German conquerors, they had quite a level of sophistication and learning present within them.
"History of the Art of War, Volume III: Medieval Warfare" by Hans Delbruck, p. 207 points out what happened whenever the Muslims conquered:
"Already a well-ordered political organization themselves, they (the Arabs) did not destroy the conquered civilized world to the same extent as the Germans. After a brief interrpution, economic life contiuned as usual, the countries did not sink completely into a barter economy, as in the west, and the new political system was based on the principle that the subjugated unbelievers paid taxes in order to main the dominent warrior class."
Beliefs before Muhammad
When we go to the works of prominent Arabian historians such as Ibn Hisham, Tabari, and others, we have a preserved record of ancient traditions of certain Arab tribes, particularly those of the northern and western parts of the country. What we find is what was documented by Hitti, the Arabians had a strong idea on family ties. These tribes agree with the statements of the Pentateuch, (first five books of the Old Testament), and the tribes leaders believed that they could trace their descent to Joktan (Arabic “Qahtan”), or to Ishmael, or to Abraham's children by Keturah. We find that the southern Arabians entered into the Islamic period with a sense of an ethnic distinction between themselves and all other Arabs to explain the differences of language, custom, and physiognomy. The popular belief was that although all Arabians are descended from a common ancestor, Sham ibn Nuh (Shem, son of Noah), the "pure" or southern Arab (Qahtani) is descended from Qahtan ibn Abir (Joktan ben Eber), or Hud, as he is often called, whereas the northern Arab (Adnani) is descended from Ismail (Ishmael) through Adnan.
Other Arab nationals, particularly those of tribal societies, know or think they know to which group they belong but are little concerned about it, but this split is a matter of importance to Yemenis, and many twentieth-century feuds can be traced back to it. The imams of Yemen claimed Qahtani descent as a consequence of their alleged descent from the Himyar, although they were in fact Adnanis if, as they did, they also claimed to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hassan. Author Manfred Wenner points out that both claims are possible as a result of intermarriage.
Even the people of the Arabic nations who had no claim to being a descendant of “Ishmael” did so in the time of the Muhammadan composition. The tribe of Muhammad, the Quraish, (Koreshite), made the claim as well, to be a descendant from Abraham through Ishmael. Though history leads us to doubt the existence of “Abraham” or “Ishmael”, the very fact that the Arabians were all claiming this fictional patriarchal lineage shows that the “Faith of Abraham” was a popular phrase to raise sympathy. In this self-same fashion, there is a passage in the Bible where the Jews boast of their lineage, because it is not traced to “Hagar” the Egyptian, but rather through pure bloodline. (If this type of ideology was applied in modern times, the Jews must be distraught that the Arabians have a 90% Semitic bloodline while Jews constitute less than 10% of that same bloodline). Because of this, we can be sure that any appeal to the family or ancestoral lines will bring forth national sympathy for a cause.
Early Succession of Women in Late Arabia
The original descendants of Arabic societies show heavy matrilineal influence, particularly in terms of moon worship. The ancients associated the female menstrual cycle with the moon, based upon the “28 day” cycle that they both possessed. Thus in many societies, moon worship was very prominent amongst the people. In fact, another form of Innanu worshipped by the Hittites was “Inaras”, who renewed her virginity each year to become the bride of the sacred king at the Purulli festival. The chosen man was isolated in a royal castle or tower and slain, so that his blood would help the Goddess fertilize the land. The heavy reliance upon matrilineal succession is abundantly evident in history.
Though this is contended by historians. There are basically three schools of thought in this matter:
The first one was that there never was a matrilineal succession. However, archeological evidence showed that there was, including written documentations from Egypt, Lydia, Europe, etc. This became unteniable for their position. The next theory that was proposed was the female minimalistic approach, that men were originally the “hunter/gatherers”, and thus the most prized possession for their strength. Afterwards, once agricultural societies became set up, the reliance of the societies upon lunar calendars, coupled with the amounts of societies based upon trading and sea tides, the people went to a matriarchal system. Once this passed, they became patriarchal. They claim that even in matriarchal times, it was only through the granting of the husbands that they were able to inherit the wealth and fortune of the land.
Next was that a sort of “balance” approach was reached, that societies all had their male/female Gods, and that they were viewed in “equal”, and in fact, several were hermaphroditic in nature. These contend that “female/male” societies never gained any major movements, it was only selected instances with which one society would “overturn” the other, and that one violent demonstration of such has left us in our current condition, particularly as relates to religion.
The last one proposed emerged once feminism began to gain major ground, that all the old societies were originally run by females, until what we refer to as the “Great Male Revolt” happened in various nations, where the men changed superstitions and realized their strength versus women’s, and fought for control of the land. After they won, they eradicated several indications of the Old female worship from the records.
Regardless of which side we take on this, it doesn’t matter. No one disputes anymore that at least in some points and time, females were very important in the succession of material possessions, and that is what we shall discuss for now. In particular, the Arabian societies have the most indisputable evidence of a matrilineal succession.
In asking the question, "How did Islam revolutionize the treatment of women?", we come across a tricky question. Why is this question so difficult? Namely, most of our information about the treatment of women comes from the Qur'an and Hadith, both of which are obviously propaganda literature, and are about as reliable as propaganda normally is. However, from what we know of the area before Muhammad, we can discern a few things.
Barbara Walker tells us that:
"The Annals of Ashurbanipal said Arabia was governed by queens for as long as anyone could remember... Mohammed's legends clearly gave him a matriarchal family background. His parents' marriage was matrilocal. His mother remained with her own family and received her husband as an occasional visitor. . . .
Pre-Islamic Arabia was dominated by the female-centered clans. Marriages were matrilocal, inheritance matrilineal. Polyandry - several husbands to one wife - was common. Men lived in their wives' homes. Divorce was initiated by the wife. If she turned her tent to face east for three nights in a row, the husband was dismissed and forbidden to enter the tent again.
Doctrines attributed to Mohammed simply reversed the ancient system in favor of men. A Moslem husband could dismiss his wife by saying 'I divorce thee' three times. As in Europe, the change from matriarchate to patriarchate came about only gradually and with much strife.
The Catholic Encyclopedia confirms this with:
"One deviation from the typical form of secular union which, however, is also called marriage, is polyandry, the union of several husbands with one wife. It has been practised at various times by a considerable number of people or tribes. It existed among the ancient Britons, the primitive Arabs, the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, the Aborigines of America, the Hottentots, the inhabitants of India, Ceylon, Thibet, Malabar, and New Zealand."
In speaking of how this was reversed, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us that in terms of polygomy,
"The principle peoples among whom the practice still exists are those under the sway of Mohammedanism, as those of Arabia, Turkey, and some of the peoples of India."
(Emphasis mine). Let's look at some sources so that we may get some more context to this argument. One curious factor is called "clitoridectomy", practiced in Islamic countries, though this procedure is not given in the Qur'an or Hadith. In finding where it originated, we look to the "New York State Journal of Medicine", Volume 77, Number 6: Pages 729-31:
"Since early Arabian writers do mention infibulation and clitoridectomy, it seems likely that infibulation originated in southern Arabia and from there spread to Africa. For hundreds of years these two regions, although separated by the Gulf of Aden, have had close contact so that the custom could have spread along well-established trade route. High mountains and an almost impenetrable desert would have prevented this strange procedure from spreading into northern Arabia and the Yemen....
Perhaps infibulation represents a primitive effort to prevent evil spirits from entering the woman's body her vagina. Belief in evil spirits is part of almost every religion, and infibulation may be an example of an ancient superstitution."
This is one charge which the Prophet is cleared from, he never had anything to do with this procedure.
Bukhari Volume 3, Book 43, Number 648:
"We, the people of quraish, used to have authority over women, but when we came to live with the ansar, we noticed that the ansari women had the upper hand over their men, so our women started acquiring the habits of the ansari women. Once I shouted at my wife and she paid me back in my coin and I disliked that she should answer me back."
I would recommend that anyone who wants to learn the nature of the prophet, (and this is accepted as one of the more reasonable Hadith, and is considered by Muslims to be authentic), read this for themselves. What this Hadith talks about is that Omar says that “Ansari women had the upper hand over their men”. We may take this to be an exaggeration, but even so, it would show that women in Medina had more rights than their Quraishy counterparts.
Medina was a more cosmopolitan city, with large groups of people like Jews and Christians living as inhabitants. Apparently, Omar and Muhammad's wives liked the fact that women there had rights, and started exercising their newfound freedom. Of course, newfound freedom didn't go well with Omar and Muhammad. This is a good starting point.
A second good starting point is that we may take it a priori that people generally complain about something that bothers them. This is demonstrateable in anything, watch the news. Whatever subject gets harped on the most is obviously an indication of something happening. Though we only hear about the burying of female infants in the sand once, we constantly hear Muhammad telling women to humble themselves to their man, to be obedient, to be celibant, that they may be beaten if they disobey, ad infinitum, clearly relays that the time period in Muhammad's time had women who were in power. We can therefore discern that women had more rights prior to the Islamic movement.
Phillip Hitti again comes to our aid with an answer:
"The Arabian in general and the Bedouin in particular is a born democrat. He meets his sheikh on equal footing. The society in which he lives levels everything down. The Arabian until recently never used the title malik (king) except in referring to foreign rulers. But the Arabian is also aristocratic as well as democratic. He looks upon himself as the embodiment of the consummate pattern of creation. To him the Arabian nation is the noblest of all nations. The civilized man, from the Bedouin's exalted point of view, is less happy and far inferior. In the purity of his blood, his eloquence and poetry, his sword and horse, and above all his noble ancestry, the Arabian takes infinite pride. He is fond of prodigious genealogies and often traces his lineage back to Adam.
The Bedouin woman, whether Islamic or preIslamic, enjoyed and still enjoys a measure of freedom denied to her sedentary sister. She lived in a polygamous family and under a baal system of marriage, in which the man was the master; nevertheless she was at liberty to choose a husband and leave him if ill-treated."
Khadijah, Muhammad's first wife, had a business of her own and had many men at her service. Muhammad was just an employee. After Islam took effect, are there any tales where women have that kind of power and are hiring men for their service? Let's also remember that the Bedouin give the most rights to their women, and yet, they have been the least influenced by Islam!
What we meanderingly call the "common people" are usually the last ones to abandon the faith of their old days. In "Legacy: The Search for Ancient Cultres" by Michael Wood, page 35, we find that:
"The mass of the people of Iraq, the poor farmers of the south who were descendants of the Aramaic-speaking population of pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, never forsook their ancient forms of worship even though their faith now focused on the seventh century martyrdoms of Hussayn and Ali... the Shiites carried the ancient Sumerian tradition of lamentation close to their hearts."
Before Islam took effect, we have knowledge that women were of high position. We know that they freely chose their husbands, had the right to divorce him, inherited the property, and if they were unhappy with their husband, they could return back to their tribe. Women could also propose marriage. They were obviously seen at least as equals. One woman in this era is known as Fukayha, famous for protecting a man seeking refuge in her tent while being pursued by the enemy. She saved his life by hiding him and preventing his pursuers from capturing him, until her brothers came to his defense. Women were poets at this time, and a hero's mother and sister were deemed most worthy of his mourning and praise, all of this giving proof that women had a high position in Arabia before Islam. (R.A. Nicholson, "A Literary History of The Arabs", p. 88) A proof of matriarchy may be obtained from the fact that certain clans prefixed their names with feminine names.
Nicholson gives us one good example of how women were regarded as inferior to men, in that female infants were buried in the sand by their fathers. Muslims are quite fond of citing this as proof of the better treatment of women under Islam, so let's have a look at it. Nicholson tells us that this was phrased as the "dispatch of daughters is a kindness" and "The burial of daughters is a noble deed." W. Robertson Smith tells us in "Kinship & Marriage in Early Arabia", p. 293, that the daughter was born with a grave right next to bed where she was born. However, we are informed that though this was once common throughout Arabia, it had faded out of existence by the time of Muhammad.
We can deduce two reasons for female infantcide, those being fear of death and fear of disgrace. Let's look at fear of death first. Among the Artic Inuit's, the reason that there was female infantcide was because the male population had a much higher mortality rate than females. In addition to this, the males were able to produce more work. Resources were scarce, and hardly an anthropologist will deny that the Inuit's wouldn't have survived without this practice. The terrain of Northern Arabia isn't that much different in terms of how hard it is to live on. Conditions are very tough, and male mortality rates were higher. We know that during times of extreme trouble, the young girls weren't the only ones buried, the males were also buried. The reason this changed whenever Muhammad was coming about was because there were the beginnings of centralization in place, which is a less harsh way of life, (excluding invasion). How do we confirm this fact? Girls were not the only buried during times of extreme harshness, infant boys were as well. Nicholson tells us though that women were generally the subject of praise based on physical attributes, rather than moral beauty, whatever that might be, an indication that women were the subjects of lust rather than respect. I find this strange, as poetry addressed to Goddesses often talked about their great beauty, but we can't disregard this as primary evidence that they were only considered phallic icons rather than objects of adoration.
Female infantcide was only practiced in Muhammad's time by a few tribes, most noteably, the Tamim. However, their reason for infantcide was different than most. The reason it was done by Qais Bin Assem, leader of the Tamim, was that he was afraid that he would be disgraced if his daughter was captured by an enemy in war. This was fairly common at the time. What happened to Qais was that his niece was captured in a raid, and she married the son of her captor. Qais came to ransom her, but she absolutely refused, and instead, wanted to stay married to her husband. Qais gets so upset that he kills every daughter he has. His wife gets fearful with their last daughter, so she tells her husband that her daughter is a still-born. The story doesn't tell how, but I'm assuming that the daughter was given to one of the neighbors or to her sister. Years later, the child comes back to visit her mother. When Qais see's his daughter, he says, "Who is this pretty girl?" The wife starts crying and says, "It's your daughter". Qais waits until his wife quits thinking that he will kill his daughter, and then he takes his daughter out to a grave he dug and laid her in it. The girl asks what her father is planning and he starts throwing dirt on her. Accordingly, he does this until he can't hear her screams anymore. For the first time after that, he feels remorseful.
Now, this story obviously contains some fantastic elements, for instance, the mother being so dultic that she would tell her husband who murdered all of her children due to something that happened with his sister's daughter that he was looking at his daughter. I could make the assumption that since men at this time seemed to be particularly privy to young girls, Qais comment, "Who is this pretty girl" might have had deeper sexual implications. However, it is most likely that this is not true. Regardless, according to tradition, Qais example of infantcide became so popular that every chief killed his daughters out of fear they might be shamed.
This example actually has somewhat of a precedant in the Hebrew Bible. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is "defiled" by a man who seems to love her dearly. Her brothers trick all of the men of the town and kill them (after first having them all circumcised), and then take their wives and children captive. Dinah's brothers have to justify the massacre of a town for the supposed rape of their sister. So they say: "Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?" To them, "defilement" is clearly a crime against the honor of men, rather than against a woman. Bible lovers will dismiss this as rape, yet the passage in Genesis 34:3 says:
That hardly sounds like any definition of rape I know. He then asks his father to find out how to get the girl's fathers permission to marry her. His father tells Jacob that he and his family can live with them, share their land, and that he'll give any amount of money that Jacob wants so that the two may be married. Jacob agrees, under the condition that all of the males are circumcized. He promises that the two groups will live in peace and become one family. The father is joyed, and the people of the city all get circumsized. When all the men are in pain from circumcision, the brothers of Dinah and Jacob slaughter all the men, take their wealth, and take their women for themselves. I'm not sure what the moral implications of this story are supposed to be, but it does give us a good idea of what the mentality of pastoralists at this time were where men were the dominant focus.
In both stories, Biblical and Hadith, we see a common element. A foreign man takes a bride, and this is somehow equateable to an insult. No mention is made anywhere of what the woman's feelings might be on the subject, and in fact, both cases demonstrate the feelings were mutual! So too we may find that the legendary Caribs, though they did raid the Taino islands, did so to take “brides.” On Guadeloupe, when Columbus’ men invaded the island, one party managed to get itself lost for days. The other parties were busy being manly, namely, they were seizing women that they found. These women were probably Caribbean women, but quite possibly they were “bride captured” Taino. However, these "rescued" women acted just like the other natives Columbus had captured. Whenever the ship was anchored off Espanola, they jumped overboard and swam. (See Chanca's letter in "Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages", J.M. Cohen, translator, p. 151). We can probably take this at face value that being "bride captured" wasn't considered the most horrible thing, or else Columbus' treatment of the women was less than honorable, such that death and being "bride captured" wouldn't have mattered too much.
The fact was that infantcide was nothing new is well documented, and it continued unto late times. Glenn Hausfater, et al, tell us in "Infantcide" p. 439, of examples where one group was paid more attention to than the other. Females only were in places such as: "The Chinese wanted many sons and few daughters and did not let some infants, particularly daughters survive. In India, many daughters were not allowed to live."
While in the field of generalized baby killing we are informed that,
"the ancient Greeks destroyed weak, deformed or unwanted children; Japanese farmers spoke of infanticide as "thinning out" as they did with their rice fields. Eskimos left babies out in the snow, while in the Brazilian jungle, undesired infants were left under the trees. In London, in the 1860s, dead infants were a common sight in parks and ditches. In 19th century Florence, children were abandoned or sent to wet nurses who neglected them, while during the same period in France, thousands of infants were sent to wet nurses in the countryside, never to return. In some parts of Africa and New Guinea, an infant is buried with its mother if the mother dies in childbirth or soon after." Hausfater notes that infantcide was, "the most widely used method of population control during much of human history."
Historically speaking, the rules and norms devaluing women and providing the motive for female infanticide stem from warfare which has always valued men more as fighters. However, there are some strong arguments against female infantcide in Arabia. First, In this marriage, the woman's family gave her away for a price, also called the dowry ("mahr"), which usually consisted of camels and horses. It replaced marriage by capture when the tribes began developing friendly relations, but it brought the woman practically into the same oppressive conditions as a captive wife. The emergence of this type of marriage perhaps contributed to the decline of female infanticide. Selling a daughter for a large dowry became much more profitable than burying her in the ground. (Azizah Al-Hibri, "A Study of Islamic Herstory: Or How Did We Ever Get Into This Mess?", p. 209) It was a point of honor not to give away a woman in an unequal match. "If you cannot find an equal match, the best marriage for them is the grave." (Smith, p. 97) The Arabs, therefore, were not inclined to sell their daughters too cheap, and required substantial compensation for their loss.
We find that one writer, Madelain Farah, states in "Marriage and Sexuality" p. 9-10: "Female infanticide (wa'd) was a common practice everywhere". Unfortunately, this positive assertion is not backed by any evidence from her. H. Lammens made a different declaration, in "Islam. Beliefs and Institutions", p. 21 where its stated that:
"There is nothing to prove that infanticide was prevalent in Arabia, except in the Tamim tribe, which appears to have practised it during severe famine. This imputation, too easily admitted by Orientalists, is based upon the disregard of the Bedouins for their female children."
Joseph Schacht states in "Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law" that:
"The relations of sexes in pre-Islamic Arabia were characterized not so much by polygamy, which certainly existed, as by frequency of divorce, loose unions, and promiscuity, which sometimes make it difficult to draw a line between marriage and prostitution...."
Abu Da’ūd, on the authority of Aishah, (one of Muhammad's most famous wives), in the "Book of Marriage", gives us an indication of what Joseph Schacht is talking about. He reports that there are four kinds of marriages in pre-Islamic Arabia. The first one was where a man gave his daughter to another man in exchange for an agreed upon dowry. (Goes with my theory of female infantcide going down.) In the second form of marriage, a man would send his wife to another man after her menstrual period, where she would have sex with him. After conception, the husband would have sex with her if he desired. The third method was where a group of men, less than ten of them, would have sex with one woman. Whenever she gave birth to a child, she would take the men back to the house and say: "You know what you have done. I have given birth to a child and it is your child’ (pointing to one of them). This man would have to accept the baby as his. The fourth way of marriage was where a woman would put a certain flag at their gates where anyone who wanted could come in an have sex with her. If she got pregnant, she would take the men inside her house who slept with her and call a seeress, who would tell whose child it belonged to. This man would then take the child and declare it his own.
We know of other types of marriage, or sex basically, as it translates. In Arabic poetry, the most frequent one is "secret cohabitation". This was your typical romance story, an early version of Romeo and Juliet, where a woman would occasionally receive visits from the man she loves, who was a member of a hostile tribe. We can still see a form of matriarchal focus here, as the man is visiting the woman. The secrecy wasn't a matter of shame or punishment for the woman, it was etiquette. Another thing which was common was "wife-swapping". A way of getting around that hefty dowry was that a man would exchange his wife or daughter for another man's. Wife-lending was another practice, which husband would let their wives get impregnated by nobility. The husband wouldn't have sex with his wife while she lived with this other man, but in the end, he would receive status quo and be considered the father of the noble offspring. Some tribes had other ways to deal with the service cost, sort of like Jacob and his wives. When a man couldn't pay the dowry, he would serve a girl's father or kin until he had worked off his bill. Another way was cohabitation for short periods. A man and a woman would live together and if they liked each other, they'd marry. Otherwise, there was no committment by either. (Taken from Hammudah Abd al Ati, "The Family Structure in Islam" p. 98-102)
Interestingly, this seems to be an admission of matriarchy, as women clearly possess the power in this situation of choosing a husband. William Robertson Smith there were three main aspects of marriages in the tribal societies of pre-Islamic Arabia, those being: endogamy, (marriage within a specific group as required by custom or law), exogamy, (marriage outside of a specific group especially as required by custom or law), and mixed marriages. You may wonder why the four types of marriage given by Abu Da'ud are so strange. It stems from an understanding of the word that was used for marriage in Arabic, which is nikah. The literal translation of this word is "to have sexual intercourse". Sometime after the advent of the patriarchal Islam, women were confined to their houses and subjected to the men's rule under the new given meaning of nikah.
Smith tells us that endogamous marriages were the most common, and they were in two distinct groups, Baal and Sadiqa marriages. The Baal marriages were ones where husbands basically owned the wife, and had absolute authority over her. The other marriages, the Sadiqa, were where women had more rights than the husband. Muhammad's mother and grandmother were of this sort, and apparently, Muhammad didn't like the idea of facing the problems his Dad had faced. When Muhammad was too weak to oppose this, he let it go on, but afterwards, he banned it and made marriage strictly Baal. We may assume that the Baal relationships were more predominate in Southern Arabia, where women appear to have been more subjected than in the nomadic lifestyles of the Bedouin.
As part of the festival at Mecca, a group of women known as the qiyan, (qayna in the singular), entertained pilgrims as well as the local population. Slave girls who were either captured or imported would sing, dance, and provide sexual services to the patrons. The Meccan nobility of the area, and the Kaaba's guardians, the Hums, were usually addicted to drinking, gambling, womanising, and music. Muhammad appears to have shared an insatiable sexual appetite, probably stemming from these settings. Time and again Muhammad purportedly has Allah intervene for him to make his sexual appetite okay. This stems especially from his marriage to Aisha. According to Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. 3, p. 221, The memorial shrine of Al-Uzza at Mecca was known for having women who offered themselves to holy pilgrims. Children born of these unions were considered divinely blessed. Girls and wives danced naked around the white stone pillar of Allat, according to Stephen Langdon's, "The Mythology of All Races", Vol V.
Israeli anthropologist Joseph Ginat informs us that there are some interesting things with concerns to polygamy. Israeli Bedouins continue to practice polygamy, though it is outlawed by the government. They cleverly trick the government so that it is possible. A Bedouin man might publicly divorce his first wife, but privately continue the marriage. There is no law saying a divorced woman cannot have children, and unmarried women are eligible for government rewards for childbearing, according to Ginat.
Ginat also tells us something revolutionary for us to observe, that polygamy is ``not a religious issue, it is power. The more children you have, the more power, and the more honor.'' Bedouins have a strong tribal tie, and Ginat tells us that one man was accused of murdering a member from a rival group. He was found innocent, but the man still insisted that he have more power to protect himself.
``I have six brothers,'' he told Ginat, ``I insist that they marry more wives so we will have more power in our extended family.''
The places where polygamy is practiced openly is in Jordan, Israel, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Muslim nations of North Africa, which include Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, and Algeria. The reason for this is that these countries are made of mostly agricultural communities, where women are responsible for working the fields, while men work with the cattle. According to Rev. Patrick Gaffney, an Islamicist at the University of Notre Dame, the number of wives is ``related to the amount of agricultural production a man can oversee. The more wives you have, the more productive the farm is.''
In the tribal societies, the tribe was the all, the main entity and focus of concern. As members of the tribe, men worked hard to earn their living, and supported their tribe by providing it with all the power that it needed. Marrying women, for the most part, had the purpose of increasing the number of the tribe's members and in turn, its power. This represents a dual aspect, one where family obviously had advantages, but where the family was overshadowed by the tribe. This meant that the family was left to personal discretion, unless it would hurt the tribe in one way or another. Because of this, marriage was a flexible, loose institution with no strict, uniformed rules.
An analysis of Ibn Saad's book by Gertrude Stern in her book, "Marriage in Early Islam", shows that "there was no fixed institution of marriage at all" in pre-Islamic Arabia. Fatima Mernissi in "Beyond the Veil", p. 67-68 talks about this as:
"According to Ibn Saad's biographical data, polygamy existed neither in Mecca, a sophisticated urban centre with trading relations reaching deep into the Byzantine world, nor in Medina, the basically agrarian community to which the Prophet emigrated."
Before this occured, we know that polylyndry was more popular, or else it was done through a means whereby a woman could have sex with men with no emotional attachments, known as mu'ta marriage. This short-term marriage was initiated by women, which was meant to be a legalization of extra-marital sex. It's because of this reason that polygamy wasn't done in these parts, there was frankly no need for it. If your sexual desires couldn't be fulfilled by your wife, you could get a short-term marriage, and if that didn't work, there were enough women to provide sexual pleasures for you at the temple.
Thus we have to wonder, why did Muhammad introduce polygamy to Medina and Mecca? Muhammad was being sneaky by doing two things. First, he was loosening the power of the female qiyan, which had strong ties to the old religions. By doing thus, his new religion would find new grounds for rooting. Second, he was getting rid of female power completely. Sex has long been known by sociologists and anthropologists to be a major weapon of the females against men. Quite frankly, men will do anything for sex. By legalizing polygamy, while outlawing zina, Muhammad ensured that men would be empowered. As Mernissi says on p. 66-67:
"According to my reading of the historical evidence, Islam banished all practices in which the sexual self-determination of women was asserted."
It would appear that Muhammad had learned from his great-grandmother, Salma from Medina. She would practice short-term marriages, or mu'ta, and would "only marry on condition that she should retain control of her own affairs. If she disliked a man, she left him." (Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, p. 59) Mernissi informs us on p. 58 that:
"Before Islam, zina was not considered a sin, a crime against religion. With Islam, it became a crime against God, His laws, and the established order."
We believe that though women obviously had lots of rights prior to Islam, they weren't the main source of inheritance. The reason was that the strength of the tribe depended upon its ability to fight, and because men were the obviously stronger fighters, they were the ones who inherited the wealth. (Hugh Kennedy, "The Prophet and the Age of Caliphates" p.18)
There may have been exceptions in the cases of minors and invalids. We can note here though that the people of this region were extremely "giving" so to speak. As Karen Armstrong informs us in p. 134 of "A History of God":
"To ensure the survival of the tribe, the sayyid (tribe leader) shared its wealth and possession equally and avenged the death of a single one of his people by killing a member of the murderer's tribe."
The reason for this was because life expectancy wasn't very long, therefore, tribal survival was more often emphasized than personal gain. As documented throughout, the people's all was to the tribe, personal inheritence didn't seem to matter much. In tribes where there were still traces of the matriarchal culture, a woman retained her inheritence as long as she married within the tribe. Smith relates to us on p. 122 that the reason why the Bedouins and nomads treated their women better was because the conditions of nomadic life,
"made the strict seclusion of women impossible, and so it allowed for the development of a more independent female character."
I think these sources, coupled with extra inscriptionary evidence studied in chapter 3, show that women were powerful in Arabia, and that the story of the "female infantcide" is probably more along the lines of mythical delusion or polemical propaganda that widely spread usage.
Let's now turn ourselves back to the dear Prophet Muhammad. We know that the Arabians married for sex, beauty, riches, alliances, and wisdom. What good would a doll-playing child do to a man, especially one in his later years of life? Despite the reinterpretation of pre-Islamic practices by Muhammadan followers, the basic fact was that in the older days, men married older women, not younger women.
These are, of course, some mighty bold claims by me. Let's look at some evidence. The Babylonians emulated the Sumerian customs on a larger scale. Babylonian prostitutes were called "ishtaritu", and they inhabited the temples of Ishtar. They would offer themselves to male worshippers, who would pay them for their services. Every Babylonian woman was expected to perform this rite at the temple. This was done with a stranger, at least once in a woman's life, and those who were not virgins earned more money, generally twice as much. In fact, the more experienced the woman was, the more money she was paid. Being a temple prostitute was nothing to be ashamed of, by contrast, it was seen as a sacred means of attaining divine union between man and goddess. Indeed, in the epic of Gilgamesh (written around 2,000 BCE) a Babylonian temple prostitute, (Shamhat) civilizes a wild man of the forest by sleeping with him, who then becomes Gilgamesh's best friend.
An entire Semitic culture, the "Horites" (Genesis 14:6), claimed descendence from the Goddess Hor, whose great holy mountain, Mount Hor (Numbers 20:23), stood as a maternal symbol of her life-nurturing female breasts, her magical pregnant abdomen, her round child-bearing hips, and her swollen life-giving vulva (which the Romans called the "Mound of Venus"). The name probably refers to their living in caves, symbolic of the vulva and the Goddess. We may find a relationship to where Muhammad goes "into the cave", a frequent euphamism employed by the Greeks to indicate the vulva.
The Horites were in fact yoni worshippers, whose Cult of the Vagina was banned by Judaism, though much later than is generally conceded. Today the Horites are variously referred to as "Hurrians," "Hittites," or "Hivites." The early Jews called them the Hori, a word that literally means "cave-dweller," or mystically speaking, "vulva worshippers."
Ancient cultures and civilizations practiced commercial and sacred prostitution, both necessary to the functioning and stability of patriarchal marriage (i.e., heterosexual monogamy) and of society itself. In ancient Egypt, whores were known as the "Ladies of the Hour," and in present day India, where prostitute-priestesses still dispense the grace of Goddess in Hindu temples, they are called "Devadasis." Traditionally, devadasis were highly respected; considered married to the gods, they were accorded special privileges (e.g., the right to an inheritance) denied to other women. Some were skilled and well educated, and these entertained only wealthy sponsors.
Early myths are rife with examples of the vital roles that whores once played in all human cultures. In Hindu mythology, sacred whores appear as the famed "Apsaras"; in Persian myth they are the celebrated "Peris", (Paris); and in Greek mythology they are known as the "Charites," or "Horae." In Roman myth they are referred to as the "Charis," or Three "Graces," a personification of the Great Triple Goddess (called Mari-Anna-Ishtar), whose sacred sign was the three-pointed star, a symbol of Goddess's magic (inverted) pubic triangle, out of which her procreative powers flow. This is also where the vulva sign of ICYTHS comes from, the fish shape was what happens when you draw the vulva out. Ancients associated the smell and the shape of a vagina to that of a fish. Even today, there's the joke, "if it smells like fish, make it a dish.."
Here we hit a nifty fact. As Rev. Tisdall states in "The Original Sources of the Qur'an":
"The idea of the Huris is derived from the ancient Persian legends about the Pairakas, called by the modern people of Iran Paris. These the Zoroastrians describe as female spirits living in the air and closely connected with the stars and light. So beautiful are they that they captivate men's hearts. The word Hur, by which these damsels of Paradise are spoken of in the Qur'an, is generally supposed to be of Arabic derivation, and to mean "black-eyed." This is quite possible. But it is perhaps more probably a Persian word, derived from the word which in Avestic is hvare, in Pahlavi hur, and in modern Persian khur, originally denoting "light," "brightness," "sunshine," and finally "the sun." When the Arabs borrowed the conception of these bright and "sunny" maidens from the Persians, they also perhaps borrowed the word which best described them."
This is a startling revelation which practically proves Muhammad had engaged in sexual congress with the temple prostitutes! His conception of heaven had sacred prostitutes in it! William Harwood tells us in "Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus", p. 248 that:
"Mohammed promised his followers seven heavens in which:
They are to cohabit with demure virgins...as beauteous as corals and rubies...full-breasted maidens for playmates...in the gardens of delight.... They're to lie face to face on jewelled couches, and be serviced by immortal youths...young boys, their personal property, as comely as virgin pearls.... We created the houris [sacred prostitutes] and made them virgins, carnal playmates for those on the right hand.... We are going to wed them to dark-eyed houris. [The Koran 55:56; 55:58; 78:33; 56:12; 52:16-17, 24; 56:35-38; 52:20]
Each Muslim man, in exchange for a lifetime of mindless obedience, was to be rewarded after death with an unspecified number of pretty boys to bugger, plus eight heavenly houris, each more phallus-raising than the others and each endowed with the capacity to grow a new hymen after each bout of sexual recreation. The male chauvinist Muslim could thus satisfy his virginity fetish by deflowering them over and over again, for eternity. When one compares Mohammed's gardens of delight with the Christian heaven of harps and celibacy, it becomes apparent why significant numbers of Christian men turn Muslim while conversions the other way are almost non-existent."
As we come to the end of this chapter, we may note some things. First, all of the old empires had fallen, Arabia was in a disharmonized state. Second, there seem to be clear indicators that women were in power instead of men. Muhammad's contempt for them seems to escalate with time. Third, there are influences throughout the area by Christians, Jews, and other religious groups.