This story of conquest, one of the most far-reaching and rapid in history, had its beginnings in Arabia in 622 when Mohammed began to unite the Arab tribes into a powerful fighting force through his preaching of a single god-though his activities went entirely unnoticed by the Byzantine and Persian empires, the great powers of the time.
Arabia, despite being largely barren and uninhabited, occupied an important position between Egypt, Abyssinia, Persia, Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, whose trade with one another relied to some considerable extent on the Arab caravans that carried their goods across the perilous wastes. Mecca stood at an important crossroads of this desert trade, and the authority of the Arab nomadic tribal sheikhs was in some measure supplanted at Mecca by a kind of oligarchy of ruling commercial families whose religious beliefs and practises transcended narrow tribal allegiances.
The Meccans ensured that their rock-shrine, the Kaaba, contained not one but several venerated tribal stones, each symbolising a local god, so that tribesmen visiting the market fairs could worship their favourite deity during their stay in the city. The Meccans also worshipped Manat, Uzza and Allat, goddesses of fertility and fate, who in turn were subordinate to a yet higher god called Allah.
Such material as we have about the early days of Islam comes mainly from the Koran and from the hadith, the oral traditions relating to the actions of Mohammed. Born in about 570, Mohammed was the son of a poor merchant of
Mecca who was nevertheless a member of the powerful Quraysh tribe, the hereditary guardians of the Kaaba. While working as a trader he was exposed not only to the flow of foreign goods but to the currents of Jewish and Christian ideas. In particular, through conversing with Jews and Christians he met in Mecca and elsewhere in Arabia, Mohammed had become acquainted with the stories of the Old and New Testaments, with the main elements of Jewish and Christian popular custom and belief, and above all with the concept of monotheism. Drawn into a life of religious contemplation, in about 610 he began to receive revelations via the angel Gabriel of the word of Allah, who announced himself to Mohammed as the one and only God. Other gods were mere inventions, announced the revelation, and their idols at the Kaaba were to be destroyed.
This message provoked a great deal of antagonism among the Meccans, but slowly Mohammed began making some converts among pilgrims from Yathrib, an agricultural community about 250 miles to the north which had a mixed population of Arabs, Jews and Judaised Arabs and was therefore already familiar with monotheism and other features of his teaching. In 622 the hostility of the pagan Meccans towards Mohammed reached such a pitch that he and his small band of followers accepted an invitation to settle in Yathrib. This migration, or Hegira, marked the beginning of the Muslim era, and in time Yathrib was renamed Medinat al-Nabi-‘City of the Prophet'-or Medina
For short.
Mohammed’s understanding of Jewish and Christian concepts led him to believe that they were basically identical to the revelations, known as the Koran, that he had received, and therefore he expected that Jews and Christians would agree with his teaching and recognise him as a prophet standing in the line of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and others. But whereas remnants of the heresy known as Arianism may have allowed Mohammed to believe that Christianity could dispense with the divinity of Jesus, the Jews were uncompromising: they told him that his revelations were a distortion and a misunderstanding of their tradition, and they drew attention to the numerous contradictions in his revelations on Old Testament themes.
Mohammed’s answer was to turn against the Jews, saying they had deliberately falsified their traditions, while he presented himself as the restorer of the religion of Abraham, whom he said was the founder of the Kaaba and its cult. He abandoned the Muslim fast corresponding to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the one day of the year when the High Priest at the Temple in Jerusalem entered the Holy of Holies where he made atonement for all the Jews in the world. In place of a day of fasting, Mohammed instituted the month-long fast of Ramadan. And at the same time, according to tradition, he instructed Muslims to pray towards the Kaaba in Mecca; until then Muslims had prayed towards Jerusalem.
But Mohammed’s most important act during his early years in Medina was to set down the revelation giving permission to his followers to go to war against those identified as their enemies. ‘Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those who are attacked, because they have been wronged. God has power to grant them victory: those who have been unjustly driven from their homes, only because they said: “Our Lord is God’” (Koran 22:39-40).
According to Muslim scholars this concept oiJihad, or holy war, can legitimately be applied against injustice and oppression, or against the rejectors of the truth, that is the truth of Islam, after it has been made evident to them. In the immediate circumstances it was used against the Meccans. After provoking several clashes with the Meccans, including raids on their caravans which provided the Muslims with considerable booty, Mohammed conquered Mecca in 629. Extending his wars against the Bedouin tribes, Mohammed gained control over the whole of Arabia the following year.
By the time of Mohammed’s death in 632 he had unified the Arabs under the banner of Islam, at once a religion, a social, legal and political institution, and a justification in the name of Allah for war and conquest-oras one historian has put it, arguing that Arab expansion was due to excessive population and lack of resources in Arabia, to free themselves ‘from the hot prison of the desert’. The first forays were in Mesopotamia (Iraq), to which the raiding Arabs were attracted by booty, ransom and abundant pasturage, and over the next ten years Mohammed’s successors, known as caliphs (from Khalifat rasul-Allah, Successor to the Apostle of God), destroyed Persia’s Sassanian empire, and in their jihad against the Byzantine Empire overran Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
World History
