Christianity was in the ascendant in late sixth-century Arabia. The Arab clients of the Roman and Sasanian Empires, who occupied the northern fringes of the Arabian Peninsula, were Christian, as was the southern kingdom of Himyar. Christianity was spreading along the coast of the Persian Gulf and was the religion of Ethiopia, across the Red Sea to the west. Faced with the appearance of a different monotheism in Mecca - a remote settlement in the desiccated uplands of the Hijaz, halfway up the western side of the peninsula - Orientalists have approached the phenomenon in one of two ways: either the Hijaz was such a remote pagan desert that Islam cannot have originated there in any form resembling what is known from sources that date from the eighth and ninth centuries - in which case the traditional narrative of Islam’s origins requires significant revision - or the Hijaz was already in some ways part of the late antique (that is, the monotheist) world - in which case we have at least the beginnings of an explanation of its origins. The former interpretation depends primarily on the argument that the Arabic sources preserve little evidence for the seventh-century nature of Islam, and that even the Qur’an itself was produced not in seventh-century Arabia but in Mesopotamia during the eighth and ninth centuries. The literary analysis of Islamic scripture undertaken by John Wansbrough implies exactly that (Wansbrough 1978, 2004), and the historical implications have been taken up by scholars such as Suliman Bashear (Bashear 1997).
The revisionists’ position has significant merits. The narrative of the origins of Islam is indeed extant only in very late sources (from the ninth and tenth centuries). Revisionist scholarship corrects the impression, conveyed by much of this later Islamic historical tradition, that ‘‘Islam’’ appeared in a fully developed, ‘‘classical’’ form in the seventh century. Complete rejection of the traditional narrative is, however, no longer tenable. Above all, there is mounting evidence that the Qur’an was indeed a product of early seventh-century Arabia (Donner 1998: 35-63): there is early (albeit fragmentary) documentary evidence for parts of it (Hoyland 1997: 687-703), and echoes of it are found in the demonstrably early ‘‘Constitution of Medina’’ (Serjeant 1978). Indeed, aspects of the Qur’an were obscure to many of its later interpreters (Crone 1994b), while, unlike the Bible, variant readings of the text are conspicuous by their absence. All this points to the Qur’an’s formation as scripture during the early seventh century.
The Qur’an is religious prescription, not narrative history; but, as a text contemporaneous with the life of Muhammad, it provides evidence about the polemical religious environment in which he was preaching. With that context in mind, we must beware of mistaking rhetoric for reality and reconstructing history from it too literally (Hawting 1999). Furthermore, the exegesis that we might try to use to interpret it was produced over a century later in a milieu far removed from that of the Qur’an’s origins. Nonetheless, it is evident from the Qur’an that Muhammad was engaged in polemical argument with Jews and Christians, among others, and that he saw himself as a reformer, in the tradition of the Jewish prophets and of Jesus. Muhammad’s teaching was part of the religious tradition of the late antique world.
Exactly how Mecca and Medina fitted into that world is a problem that has yet to be solved satisfactorily. Apart from the Qur’an, and fragments of pre-Islamic poetry, our sources are late. The archaeology of Mecca and Medina is likely to remain unexplored for the foreseeable future (King 1995: 185, 187). However, the excavation of the town of Qariyat al-Faw has confirmed the existence of centers of mercantile activity, of the sort that Mecca and Medina are traditionally thought to have been (al-Ansary 1982). Qariyat al-Faw (fl. third to fifth centuries) undermined the revisionist notion that urbanism and long-distance trade could not have flourished in the more remote parts of the peninsula (Crone 1987). Indeed, a wider Arabian urban tradition can now be postulated (King 1995; Whitcomb 1996). It was suggested fifty years ago that the mercantile activity of the Hijaz might have been crucial to the emergence of Islam (Watt 1953), and this new archaeological evidence makes this an attractive proposition again. More recently, it has been suggested that the West Arabian economy may have been expanding in the sixth century, tying Mecca and Medina more closely into the wider late antique world (Conrad 2000: 696; Heck 2003). The presence of Persian terms for luxury goods in the Qur’an has long been recognized as evidence for connections with Sasanian Iran (Jeffery 1938; Montgomery 1995). Syriac loan words also suggest wider horizons (Luxenberg 2000). It is time to reconsider the mercantile language in which many of the Qur’an’s key concepts are couched (Torrey 1892).
That Islam appeared after a century of intensifying imperial involvement in the Arabian Peninsula is unlikely to have been merely coincidental (Crone 1987: 245-50). Roman and Persian intervention undermined the dominance of the south Arabian kingdom of Himyar. That, and the decline of the great powers’ clients in the north, may have left something of a power vacuum in the peninsula (Retso 1993: 39-41). Two decades of war between Rome and Iran contributed to an apocalyptic atmosphere at the time of Muhammad’s preaching, and the centrality of Jerusalem in the Islamic conquests is striking in the context of its prominence in the Roman-Persian war (Kister 1962; Drijvers 2002: 186-90). The Hijaz, on the margins of the two empires, lay outside their direct control, but was nevertheless connected to them culturally and economically. There had been a monotheist presence there for centuries: some Jews, during the diaspora that followed the destruction of the Second Temple, seem to have settled there (Stillman in Bearman et al. 1954-, xi: 239). In such a marginal zone, a holy man could preach unhindered by the established churches or state interference. As a result, the movement inspired by him could gain greater momentum there than was usual in groups inspired by desert eremites.
After the initial failure of his message in his home town of Mecca, Muhammad is said to have fled to Medina in ad 622, where a more receptive audience became the first Muslim community. The preservation in later sources of treaties between the members of that first Medinan community - the so-called ‘‘Constitution of Medina’’ - reveals that Muhammad deployed the traditional resources of West Arabian politics in founding a ‘‘theocratic community’’ (umma), in which he was to be the arbiter of disputes. Its language, and the language of Qur’anic verses that are related to it, echo earlier, pre-Islamic treaties (Serjeant 1978). In Muhammad’s new polity, however, the stakes were raised by his monotheist message: salvation was the exclusive privilege of those who were members of the correct political community under a single leader (Crone 2004: 21-2).
That religious message gave a unity to the new polity without which its subsequent conquests are inexplicable. The notion of holy war in the Qur’an both fueled and explained the conquests, just as similar ideas had united Christian Armenians against Iran in the Roman-Persian war (Howard-Johnston 1999: 39-40; Robinson 2003: 126-7, 133). Of course, other factors were also critical to Muslim success: an Arabia linked to the wider world by trade may have benefited, like Viking Scandinavia, from crucial intelligence about when and where to strike; the two empires were weakened by decades of warfare; provincial populations were quick to make terms rather than fight; and the very success of the Arabs may have contributed to an apocalyptic sense that their success was inevitable (Hoyland 1997: 524). The sine qua non, however, was role of religion in binding together previously disparate tribes engaged in constant feuding and warfare (Donner 1981: 51-82). The religion that the tribesmen brought with them out of the desert exerted a determinative influence on how the inheritance of the two conquered empires was used.
World History
