Monotheism in the time of Muhammad

Muhammad
By Michael Cook

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Introduction
The Muslim world extends continuously from Senegal to Pakistan, and discontinuously eastwards to the Philippines. In 1977 there were some 720 million Muslims, just over a sixth of the world's population. The proportion might have been a great deal higher if the Muslims of Spain had applied themselves more energetically to the conquest of Europe in the eighth century, if the sudden death of Timur in 1405 had not averted a Muslim invasion of China, or if Muslims had played a more prominent role in the modern settlement of the New World and the Antipodes. But they have remained the major religious group in the heart of the Old World. In terms of sheer numbers they are outdone by the Christians, and arguably also by the Marxists. On the other hand, they are considerably less affected by sectarian divisions than either of these rivals: the overwhelming majority of Muslims belong to the Sunni mainstream of Islam.

There are many Muslims at the present day whose ancestors were infidels a thousand years ago; this is true by and large of the Turks, the Indonesians, and sizeable Muslim populations in India and Africa. The processes by which these peoples entered Islam were varied, and reflect a phase of Islamic history when different parts of the Muslim world had gone their separate ways. Yet the core of the Islamic community owes its existence to an earlier and more unitary historical context. Between the seventh and ninth centuries the Middle East and much of North Africa were ruled by the Caliphate, a Muslim state more or less coextensive with the Muslim world of its day. This empire in turn was the product of the conquests undertaken by the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the middle decades of the seventh century.

The men who effected these conquests were the followers of a certain Muhammad, an Arab merchant turned prophet and politician who in the 620s established a theocratic state among the tribes of western Arabia.

I Background

Monotheism

Muhammad was a monotheist prophet. Monotheism is the belief that there is one God, and only one. It is a simple idea; and like many simple ideas, it is not entirely obvious.

Over the last few thousand years it has probably been the general consensus of human societies that there are numerous gods (though men have certainly held very different views as to who these gods are and what they do). The oldest societies to have left us written records, and hence direct evidence of their religious beliefs, were polytheistic some five thousand years ago; by the first millennium BC there is enough evidence to indicate that polytheism was the religious norm right across the Old World.

It did not, however, remain unchallenged. In the same millennium ideas of a rather different stamp were appearing among the intellectual élites of the more advanced cultures. In Greece, Babylonia, India and China there emerged a variety of styles of thought which were noticeably more akin to our own abstract and impersonal manner of looking at the world. The tendency was to see the universe in terms of grand unified theories, rather than as the reflection of the illcoordinated activities of a plurality of personal gods. Such ways of thinking rarely led to denial of the actual existence of the gods, but they tended to tidy them up in the interests of coherence and system, or to reduce them to a certain triviality. (Consider, for example, the view of some Buddhist sects that the gods are unable to attain enlightenment owing to the distracting behaviour of the goddesses.) What they did not do was to pick out from the polytheistic heritage a single personal god, and discard the rest.

This development was to be the contribution of a conceptually less sophisticated people of the ancient Near East, the Israelites. Like other peoples of their world, the Israelites possessed a national god who was closely identified with their political and military fortunes. Like others, they experienced the desolation of defeat and exile at the hands of more powerful enemies. Their distinctive reaction to this history was to develop an exclusive cult of their national god, eventually proclaimed as the only god in existence -- in a word, as God.

Had monotheism remained a peculiarity of the Israelites (or as we can now call them, the Jews), it would not have ranked as more than a curiosity in the history of the world at large. As it happened, this situation was drastically changed by a minor Jewish heresy which became a world religion: Christianity. Its primary spread was within the Roman Empire. By the fourth century after Christ it had been adopted as the state religion; by the sixth century the Roman Empire was more or less solidly Christian. At the same time Christianity had spread unevenly in several directions beyond the imperial frontiers. There were, for example, Christian kingdoms in Armenia and Ethiopia; and although the Persian Empire held fast to its ancestral Zoroastrian faith, it contained within its borders a significant Christian minority, particularly in Mesopotamia. West of India, no major society was unshaken by the rise of monotheism, and only the Persians stood out against it.
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Arabia
South of the Roman and Persian Empires lay the world's largest desert. This area is divided into two unequal portions by the Red Sea: to the west lies the Sahara, and to the east Arabia. The Arabian peninsula is a vast rectangle, some 1,300 miles long and 750 wide, stretching south-east from the Fertile Crescent (i.e. Syria and Mesopotamia). Its predominant feature is its aridity. This is slightly offset in the north, where desert gives way to semi-desert and even to steppe, and still more in the south, where a mountainous terrain receives a measure of summer rain. But between these marginal zones lies the bulk of Arabia, and for the most part it is desert relieved only by scattered oases.

In comparison with the Fertile Crescent, Arabia was accordingly a land of deprivation. Agriculture, the basic economic activity of mankind between the neolithic and industrial revolutions, was largely confined to the oases; and even the rainfall agriculture of the Yemen was derisory by comparison with what could be achieved across the Red Sea in Ethiopia. Much of Arabia was fit only for pastoralism, and a nomadic pastoralism at that.

These conditions did much to shape the character of Arabian society. Civilisation, with its cities, temples, bureaucracies, aristocracies, priesthoods, regular armies, and elaborate cultural heritages, requires a substantial agricultural base. With the partial exception of the Yemen, such an edifice could not be built in Arabia. Arabian society was tribal, in the oases as much as in the desert. There were pariah groups excluded from tribal society, and 'kings' who were almost but not quite above it; but by the standards of the Fertile Crescent, Arabian society was egalitarian and anarchic. By the same standards the culture of Arabia was simple, if not threadbare; its principal legacy is its poetry.

The isolating peninsular geography of Arabia, and the mobility of pastoralists within it, contributed to another significant feature of Arabian society, its homogeneity. To a surprising extent, the Arabian desert was the land of a single people, the Arabs, speaking a single language, Arabic. This cannot always have been so. The Arabs do not appear by name before the ninth century BC, and were not the first nomadic pastoralists of the area; but by the time of Muhammad, any earlier diversity had been obliterated north of the Yemen.

Although Arabian society was very different from the settled societies, of the Fertile Crescent and beyond, it was by no means deprived of contact with the outside world. Yet these contacts, though ancient, had wrought no transformation on either side; their effects were most pronounced in the border areas where the two patterns interacted.

We may begin by looking at the military and political aspect of this relationship. A nomadic tribal society is warlike and highly mobile; but it is also allergic to large-scale organisation. As raiders, the tribesmen of Arabia were accordingly a persistent nuisance to the settled world; but they were rarely a serious military threat. The Nabatean Arabs built up a kingdom on the edge of the desert which in 85 BC occupied Damascus, and an Arab queen of the later fourth century invaded Palestine; but such events were exceptional. They might lead to the creation of Arab statelets, and encourage penetration by Arab settlers, but they initiated no massive and enduring conquests. A state governing a settled society, by contrast, is capable of organised military effort on a large scale, and may adopt a more or less forward policy of frontier defence against nomadic raiders. It has, however, neither the means nor the motive for conquering a desert. An eccentric Babylonian king had once spent several years in the western Arabian oases, and a Roman expedition had blundered through the Arabian desert on its way to the Yemen; but again such episodes were exceptional. Under normal conditions, the political influence of outside powers was confined to frontier areas, where it might lead to the formation of Arab client principalities and the use of their troops as auxiliaries. It is true that a certain departure from this pattern seems to have arisen from the imperial rivalries of the centuries preceding the career of Muhammad. In this period the Persians established a hegemony over the Arabs on an unprecedented scale. They were entrenched in the east and south, and even had some presence in the oases of central Arabia. But it is hard to imagine this yoke as a heavy one in inner Arabia, least of all in the west, and it scarcely appears in the story of Muhammad's life.
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Another significant form of contact with the outside world was trade. The Islamic sources remember a trade in silver to Persia from south and central Arabia, in close connection with the Persian political hegemony. In the west they describe an Arab trade with southern Syria of which the staple commodity would seem to have been leather. By the standards of the international trade of the day, both the silver and, still more, the leather trades were doubtless rather trivial. Frankincense, the great Arabian export of antiquity, had long ago lost its market in the Roman Empire; and coffee, the only other Arabian export of consequence before the arrival of oil, had not yet appeared. At the same time the bulk of the peninsula played no part in international transit trade; it was naturally cheaper to ship goods round the peninsula than to transport them across it. But such trade as there was sufficed to ensure that a knowledge of the civilised world and its proceedings existed far into Arabia.

Arabia and monotheism
The Arabs were polytheists. The pattern of their religion was simple -- the Arabs did not, for example, provide their gods with expensive housing such as was standard in the Fertile Crescent, and so far as we know they developed little in the way of a religious mythology. But simple as it was, such indications as we have suggest that it had been remarkably stable over a long period; thus Allat, a goddess prominent in the time of Muhammad, is already attested by Herodotus in the fifth century BC. In the centuries preceding the life of Muhammad, however, external influences were beginning to disturb this ancient polytheism. Predominantly, this influence was monotheist; despite the Persian hegemony, the impact of Zoroastrianism seems to have been slight outside the north-east.

As might be expected, the Arabs were affected by the rise of Christianity, and more particularly by the sects which came to predominate among their settled neighbours. In Syria, the prevailing doctrine from the fifth century was that of the Monophysites; this sect achieved a considerable following among the Arab tribes of the northern desert. In the Persian Empire the Christian population was mainly Nestorian, and to a lesser extent this sect held an analogous position among the neighbouring Arabs. It was also active along the Arab side of what in political terms was very much the Persian Gulf. In the Yemen we hear most of Monophysites, matching as it happened the form of Christianity which prevailed in Ethiopia.

There was also a considerable, and probably much older, Jewish presence in western Arabia. The Islamic tradition describes substantial Jewish populations in several of the western oases, in the region known as the Hijaz, and this has some confirmation from archaeology. In the Yemen a Jewish presence is likewise attested. There is evidence that it was in contact with the Jews of Palestine, and it seems to have achieved some local influence; in the early sixth century a Yemeni king martyred Christians in the name of Judaism.

Despite this Christian and Jewish penetration, Arabian society was still predominantly pagan; but an awareness of monotheism in one or other of its forms must have been widespread.

If we imagine ourselves for a moment in sixth-century Arabia, what long-term expectations could we reasonably have entertained? First, that if the Arabs had never in the past been a serious military threat to the outside world, they were unlikely to become one now. Second, that the escalating rivalry between the leading foreign powers, the Romans and the Persians, would lead if anything to a tightening of their grip on whatever was worth controlling in Arabia. And third, that despite the persistence of paganism and the presence of Judaism, it was only a matter of time before Arabia became more or less Christian. In the event, the triumph of monotheism in Arabia took a form which rendered each of these plausible expectations false.

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