The Arabs who lived beyond the frontiers of the Sasanid Empire seldom interested the Sasanid rulers. But it was precisely in the interior of Arabia, far from the gaze and political reach of the Sasanid and Byzantine Empires, that the religion of Islam took form and inspired a movement that would humble the proud emperors.
Throughout history more people living on the Arabian peninsula have lived in settled communities than as pastoral nomads. The highlands of Yemen, fertile and abundantly watered by the spring monsoon, and the interior mountains farther east in southern Arabia have supported farming and village life. Small inlets along the southern coast favored occasional fishing or trading communities. However, the enormous sea of sand known as the “Empty Quarter” isolated these southern regions from the Arabian interior. In the seventh century, most people in southern Arabia knew more about Africa, India, and the Persian Gulf (see Chapter 8, Diversity and Dominance: Travel Accounts of Africa and India) than about the forbidding interior and the scattered camel - and sheep-herding nomads who lived there.
Exceptions to this pattern mostly involved caravan trading. Several kingdoms rose and fell in Yemen, leaving stone ruins and stone-cut inscriptions to testify to their bygone prosperity. From these commercial entrepots came the aromatic resins frankincense and myrrh. Nomads derived income from providing camels, guides, and safe passage to merchants wanting to transport incense northward, where the fragrant substances had long been burned in religious rituals. Return caravans brought manufactured products from Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.
Just as the Silk Road enabled small towns in Central Asia to become major trading centers, so the trans-Arabian trade gave rise to desert caravan cities. The earliest and most prosperous, Petra in southern Jordan and Palmyra in northern Syria, were swallowed up by Rome. This, coupled with an early Christian distaste for incense, which seemed too much a feature of pagan worship, contributed to a slackening of trade in Sasanid times. Nevertheless, trade across the desert did not lapse altogether. Camels, leather, and gold and other minerals mined in the mountains of western Arabia took the place of frankincense and myrrh as exports. This reduced trade kept alive the relations between the Arabs and the settled farming regions to the north, and it familiarized the Arabs who accompanied the caravans with the cultures and lifestyles of the Sasanid and Byzantine Empires.
In the desert, Semitic polytheism, with its worship of natural forces and celestial bodies, began to encounter other religions. Christianity, as practiced by Arabs in Jordan and southern Mesopotamia, and Judaism, possibly carried by refugees from the Roman expulsion of the Jews from their homeland in the first century c. e., made inroads on polytheism.
Mecca, a late-blooming caravan city, lies in a barren mountain valley halfway between Yemen and Syria and a short way inland from the Red Sea coast of Arabia (see Map 9.1). A nomadic kin group known as the Quraysh° settled in Mecca in the fifth century and assumed control of trade. Mecca rapidly achieved a measure of prosperity, partly because it was too far from Byzantine Syria, Sasanid Iraq, and Ethiopian-controlled Yemen for them to attack it.
A cubical shrine called the Ka’ba°, containing idols, a holy well called Zamzam, and a sacred precinct surrounding the two wherein killing was prohibited contributed to the emergence of Mecca as a pilgrimage site. Some Meccans associated the shrine with stories known to Jews and Christians. They regarded Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) as the builder of the Ka’ba, and they identified a site outside Mecca as the location where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. The son was not Isaac (Ishaq in Arabic), the son of Sarah, but Ishmael (Isma’il in Arabic), the son of Hagar, cited in the Bible as the forefather of the Arabs.
Born in Mecca in 570, Muhammad grew up an orphan in the house of his uncle. He engaged in trade and married a Quraysh widow named Khadija°, whose caravan interests he
Quraysh (koo-RAYSH) Ka'ba (KAH-buh) Khadija (kah-DEE-juh)
Map 9.1 Early Expansion of Muslim Rule Arab conquests of the first Islamic century brought vast territory under Muslim rule, but conversion to Islam proceeded slowly. In most areas outside the Arabian peninsula, the only region where Arabic was then spoken, conversion did not accelerate until the third century after the conquest.
Superintended. Their son died in childhood, but several daughters survived. Around 610 Muhammad began meditating at night in the mountainous terrain around Mecca. During one night vigil, known to later tradition as the “Night of Power and Excellence,” a being whom Muhammad later understood to be the angel Gabriel (Jibra’il in Arabic) spoke to him:
Proclaim! In the name of your Lord who created.
Created man from a clot of congealed blood.
Proclaim! And your Lord is the Most Bountiful.
He who has taught by the pen.
Taught man that which he knew not.1
For three years he shared this and subsequent revelations only with close friends and family members. This period culminated in Muhammad’s conviction that he was hearing the words of God (Allah° in Arabic). Khadija, his uncle’s son Ali, his friend Abu Bakr°, and others close to him shared this conviction. The revelations continued until Muhammad’s death in 632.
Like most people of the time, including Christians and Jews, the Arabs believed in unseen spirits: gods, desert spirits called jinns, demonic shaitans, and others. They further believed that certain individuals had contact with the spirit world, notably seers and poets, who were thought to be possessed by jinns. Therefore, when Muhammad began to recite his rhymed revelations in public, many people believed he was inspired by an unseen spirit even if it was not, as Muhammad asserted, the one true god.
Muhammad’s earliest revelations called on people to witness that one god had created the universe and everything in it, including themselves. At the end of time, their souls would be judged, their sins balanced against
The Formation of the Umma
Their good deeds. The blameless would go to paradise; the sinful would taste hellfire:
By the night as it conceals the light;
By the day as it appears in glory;
By the mystery of the creation of male and female;
Verily, the ends ye strive for are diverse.
So he who gives in charity and fears God,
And in all sincerity testifies to the best,
We will indeed make smooth for him the path to Bliss.
But he who is a greedy miser and thinks himself self-sufficient,
And gives the lie to the best,
We will indeed make smooth for him the path to misery.12
The revelation called all people to submit to God and accept Muhammad as the last of his messengers. Doing so made one a muslim, meaning one who makes “submission,” Islam, to the will of God.
Because earlier messengers mentioned in the revelations included Noah, Moses, and Jesus, Muhammad’s hearers felt that his message resembled the Judaism and Christianity they were already somewhat familiar with. Yet his revelations charged the Jews and Christians with being negligent in preserving God’s revealed word. Thus, even though they identified Abraham/Ibrahim, whom Muslims consider the first Muslim, as the builder of the Ka’ba, which superseded Jerusalem as the focus of Muslim prayer in 624, Muhammad’s followers considered his revelation more perfect than the Bible because it had not gone through an editing process.
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Primary Source: The Constitution of Medina:
Muslims and Jews at the Dawn of Islam
Some non-Muslim scholars maintain that Muhammad’s revelations appealed especially to people distressed over wealth replacing kinship as the most important aspect of social relations. They see verses criticizing taking pride in money and neglecting obligations to orphans and other powerless people as conveying a message of social reform. Other scholars, along with most Muslims, put less emphasis on a social message and stress the power and beauty of Muhammad’s revelations. Forceful rhetoric and poetic vision, coming in the Muslim view directly from God, go far to explain Muhammad’s early success.
And persecuted the weakest of his followers. Stymied by this hostility, Muhammad and his followers fled Mecca in 622 to take up residence in the agricultural community of Medina 215 miles (346 kilometers) to the north. This hijra° marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.
Prior to the hijra, Medinan representatives had met with Muhammad and agreed to accept and protect him and his followers because they saw him as an inspired leader who could calm their perpetual feuding. Together, the Meccan migrants and major groups in Medina bound themselves into a single umma°, a community defined solely by acceptance of Islam and of Muhammad as the “Messenger of God,” his most common title. Three Jewish kin groups chose to retain their own faith, thus contributing to the Muslims’ changing the direction of their prayer toward the Ka’ba, now thought of as the “House of God.”
During the last decade of his life, Muhammad took active responsibility for his umma. Having left their Meccan kin groups, the immigrants in Medina felt vulnerable. Fresh revelations provided a framework for regulating social and legal affairs and stirred the Muslims to fight against the still-unbelieving city of Mecca. Sporadic war, largely conducted by raiding and negotiation with desert nomads, sapped Mecca’s strength and convinced many Meccans that God favored Muhammad. In 630 Mecca surrendered. Muhammad and his followers made the pilgrimage to the Ka’ba unhindered.
Muhammad did not return to Mecca again. Medina had grown into a bustling city-state. He had charged the Jewish kin groups with disloyalty at various points during the war and had expelled or eliminated them. Delegations from all over Arabia came to meet Muhammad, and he sent emissaries back with them to teach about Islam and collect their alms. Muhammad’s mission to bring God’s message to humanity had brought him unchallenged control of a state that was coming to dominate the Arabian peninsula. But the supremacy of the Medinan state, unlike preceding short-lived nomadic kingdoms, depended not on kinship but on a common faith in a single god.
In 632, after a brief illness, Muhammad died. Within twenty-four hours a group of Medinan leaders, along with three of Muhammad’s close friends, determined that Abu Bakr, one of the earliest believers and the father of Muhammad’s favorite wife A’isha°, should succeed him. They called him the khalifa°, or “successor,” the English version of which is caliph. But calling Abu Bakr a successor did not clarify his powers. Everyone knew that neither
Hijra (HlJ-ruh) umma (UM-muh) A'isha (AH-ee-shah) khalifa (kah-LEE-fuh)
Abu Bakr nor anyone else could receive revelations, and they likewise knew that Muhammad’s revelations made no provision for succession or for any government purpose beyond maintaining the umma. Indeed, some people thought the world would soon end because God’s last messenger was dead.
Abu Bakr continued and confirmed Muhammad’s religious practices, notably the so-called Five Pillars of Islam: (1) avowal that there is only one god and Muhammad is his messenger, (2) prayer five times a day, (3) fasting during the lunar month of Ramadan, (4) paying alms, and (5) making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during one’s lifetime. He also reestablished and expanded Muslim authority over Arabia’s nomadic and settled communities. After Muhammad’s death, some had abandoned their allegiance to Medina or followed various would-be prophets. Muslim armies fought hard to confirm the authority of the newborn caliphate. In the process, some fighting spilled over into non-Arab areas in Iraq.
Abu Bakr ordered those who had acted as secretaries for Muhammad to organize the Prophet’s revelations into a book. Hitherto written haphazardly on pieces of leather or bone, the verses of revelation became a single document gathered into chapters. This resulting book, which Muslims believe acquired its final form around the year 650, was called the Quran", or the Recitation. Muslims regard it not as the words of Muhammad but as the unalterable word of God. As such, it compares not so much to the Bible, a book written by many hands over many centuries, as to the person of Jesus Christ, whom Christians consider a human manifestation of God.
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Primary Source: The Quran
Though united in its acceptance of God’s will, the umma soon disagreed over the succession to the caliphate. The first civil war in Islam followed the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman", in 656. To succeed him, his assassins, rebels from the army, nominated Ali, Muhammad’s first cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatima. Ali had been passed over three times previously, even though many people considered him to be the Prophet’s natural heir. Ali and his supporters felt that Muhammad had indicated as much at a place named Ghadir al-Khumm" when in the course of a dispute over distributing booty he took Ali’s hand and declared: “Am I not nearer to the believers than their own selves? Whomever I am nearest to, so likewise is Ali. O God, be the friend of him who is his friend, and the foe of him who is his foe.”
When Ali accepted the nomination to be caliph, two of Muhammad’s close companions and his favorite wife A’isha challenged him. Ali defeated them in the Battle of the Camel (656), so called because the fighting raged around the camel on which A’isha was seated in an enclosed woman’s saddle.
After the battle, the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya", a kinsman of the slain Uthman from the Umayya clan of the Quraysh, renewed the challenge. Inconclusive battle gave way to arbitration. The arbitrators decided that Uthman, whom his assassins considered corrupt, had not deserved death and that Ali had erred in accepting the nomination. Ali rejected the arbitrators’ findings, but before he could resume fighting, one of his own supporters killed him for agreeing to the arbitration. Mu’awiya then offered Ali’s son Hasan a dignified retirement and thus emerged as caliph in 661.
Mu’awiya chose his own son, Yazid, to succeed him, thereby instituting the Umayyad" Caliphate. When Hasan’s brother Husayn revolted in 680 to reestablish the right of Ali’s family to rule, Yazid ordered Husayn and his family killed. Sympathy for Husayn’s martyrdom has since characterized the religious sect called Shi’ism, whose followers are called Shi’ites".
Several variations in Shi’ite belief developed, but Shi’ites have always agreed that Ali was the rightful successor to Muhammad and that God’s choice as Imam, leader of the Muslim community, has always been one or another of Ali’s descendants. They see the office of caliph as more secular than religious. Because the Shi’ites seldom held power, their religious feelings came to focus on outpourings of sympathy for Husayn and other martyrs and on messianic dreams that one of their Imams would someday triumph.
Those Muslims who supported the first three caliphs gradually came to be called “People of Tradition and Community”—in Arabic, Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama’a, Sunnis for short. Sunnis" consider the caliphs to be Imams. As for Ali’s followers who had abhorred his acceptance of arbitration, they evolved into small and rebellious Khari-jite sects (from kharaja meaning “to secede or rebel”) claiming righteousness for themselves alone. These three divisions of Islam, the last now quite minor, still survive. Today the umma numbers more than a billion people.
World History
