Patricia Crone. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Princeton
University Press. 1987. Beginning with pg. 231.
THE RISE OF ISLAM
Having unlearnt most of what we knew about Meccan trade, do we find
ourselves deprived of our capacity to explain the rise of Islam? If we take
it that trade is the crucial factor behind the appearance of a prophet in
Arabia, the spread of his message there, and the Arab conquest of the
Middle East, then the answer is evidently yes. But, in fact, Meccan
trade cannot be said ever to have provided a convincing explanation for
any of these events.
The view that Meccan trade is the ultimate cause of the rise of Islam is
Watt's. The reader may begin to feel that there has been enough polemic
against Watt in this book, and this is a view which its author shares. But
to disagree with the conventional account is of necessity to disagree with
thefons and origo of this account: throughout the present work the reader
can treat the name of Watt as a shorthand for "early Islamic historians in
general" and take polemical attention as a backhanded compliment to
him. It is thanks to the enormous influence exercised by his work that a
general appraisal of the theories that dominate the field takes us back to
Watt for a final round.
According to Watt, the Qurashi transition to a mercantile economy
undermined the traditional order in Mecca, generating a social and
moral malaise to which Muhammad's preaching was the response.I This
hypothesis is clearly weakened by the discovery that the Meccan traded
in humble products rather than luxury goods, but it is not necessarily
inv-alidated thereby. Even so, however, there are other reasons why it
should be discarded.
In the first place, it is unlikely that so brief a period of commercial
the nineteenth century, for example, the town of Ha'il enjoyed a meteoric rise to
commercial importance, comparable to that described for
Mecca, without there being any indication of a correspondingly swift
breakdown of traditional norms. Why should there have been? It takes
considerably more than a century of commercial success to undermine
the tribal order of a population that has been neither uprooted nor forced
to adopt a different organization in connection with its economic activi-
ties. Caravan trade is not capitalist in any real sense of that word, and
Watt's vision of the Meccans as financiers dedicated to a ruthless pursuit
of profit occasionaly suggests that he envisages them as having made a
transition to the twentieth century .
In the second place, the evidence for a general malaise in Mecca is inadequate.
According to Watt, the Qur'an testifies to an increasing
awareness of the difference between rich and poor and a diminishing
concern on the part of the rich for the poor and weak even among their
own kin, orphans in particular being ill-treated; further, the Qur'anic
stress on acts of generosity implies that the old ideal of generosity had
broken down to the point that the conduct of the rich would have been
looked upon as shameful in the desert, while at the same time the
Qur'anic emphasis on man's dependence on God suggests that the Meccans had come
to worship a new ideal, "the supereminence of wealth."
But the Qur'an does not testify to an increasing awareness of social dif-
ferentiation or distress: in the absence of pre-Qur'anic evidence on the
subject, the book cannot be adduced as evidence of change. And charges
of excessive attachment to wealth and neglect of others, especially the
poor and the weak, are standard items in the repertoire of monotheist
preachers, as is the theme of man's dependence on God: how different
would Muhammad's preaching have been, one wonders, if he had begun
his career in Medina, or for that matter elsewhere? It is not very likely
that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between the objective
factors that led to the appearance of a prophet in Arabia and Muhammad's subjective
perception of his mission: prophets are heirs to a prophetical tradition, not to a
sociological habit of viewing their society from outside.
Leaving aside the Qur'an, then, to what extent does the tradition corroborate Watt's
diagnosis? Viewed as pagan enemies of Islam, the Meccans are accused of neglect of
kinship ties and other protective relationships, as well as a tendency for the strong to
"eat" the weak. But viewed
as proto-Muslims, they are praised for their harmonious relations. The
conduct of trade in particular is supposed to have been characterized by
cooperation between rich and poor; indeed, by the time of the rise of IsIam there no
longer were any poor. Both claims, of course, merely illustrate the point that what the
tradition offers is religious interpretation
rather than historical fact. If we go by the overall picture suggested by
this tradition, there is, however, no doubt that Watt's diagnosis is
wrong. In social terms, the protection that Muhammad is said to have
enjoyed from his own kin, first as an orphan and next as a prophet,
would indicate the tribal system to have been intact, as Watt himself
concedes, adding that the confederate status of foreigners in Mecca
would indicate the same. It was, as Abu Sufyan said, Muhammad who
disrupted traditional kinship ties with his preaching. From the point of
view of morality, traditional tribal virtues such as generosity were both
esteemed and practised: wealthy Meccans such as 'Abdallah b. Jud'an
would have been astonished to learn that their conduct would have been
looked upon as dishonourable in the desert.
l
In religious terms, the Meccans are depicted as zealots on behalf of
their pagan shrine as well as devotees of a string of other deities by
whom they swore, after whom they named their children, and whom
they took with them in battle against the Muslims. Watt interprets the
violations of the haram during the ars of Fijar as "probably a sign of
declining belief." But obviously ho]y places and months were violated
from time to time: Muhammad himelf is supposed to have violated a
holy month without having lost belief in it and if the Meccans had
come to regard such violations as unobjectionable, they would hardly
have referred to the wars in question as huru-b al-ija-r, "the sinful wars. "
The fact that the Meccans carried their pagan deities with them into battle does not
mean that "the remnants of pagan belief in Arabia were now
at the the level of magic'' we are hardly to take it that the remnants of
Islam were similarly at the level of magic by the time of the battle of Siffin, in which the
soldiers are said to have carried Qur'ans with them; or
that Christians who wear crosses are mere fetishists. Watt concedes that
"in view of the opposition to Muhammad at Mecca it is conceivable that
some small groups there -- perhaps those specially concerned with certain religious
ceremonies -- had a slightly higher degree of belief." But
a slightly higher degree of belief among small groups with possibly special functions
scarcely provides an adequate explanation for the magnitude of this opposition.
The fact is that the tradition knows of no malaise in Mecca, be it religious, social,
political, or moral. On the contrary, the Meccans are described as eminently successful;
and Watt's impression that their success
led to cynicism arises from his otherwise commendable attempt to see
Islamic history through Muslim eyes. The reason why the Meccans
come across as morally bankrupt in the sources is not that their traditional way of life
had broken down, but that it functioned too well: the
Meccans preferred their traditional way of life to Islam. It is for this that
they are penalized in the sources; and the more committed a man was to
this way of life, the more cynical, amoral, or hypocritical he will sound
to us: Abu Sufyan cannot swear by a pagan deity without the reader
feeling an instinctive aversion to him, because the reader knows with his
sources that somebody who swears by a false deity is somebody who believes in
nothing at all.
In the third place, the Watt thesis fails to account for the fact that it
was in Medina rather than in Mecca that Muhammad's message was accepted. In
Mecca, Muhammad was only a would-be prophet, and if he
had stayed in Mecca, that is what he would have remained. This makes
sense, given the general absence of evidence for a crisis in Mecca: if Muhammad
himself had conceived his monotheism as a blueprint for social
and moral reform in Mecca, he must soon have changed it into something else. It was
outside Mecca, first in Medina and then elsewhere in
Arabia, that there was a market for his monotheism: the Meccans had to
be conquered before they converted. It follows that the problems to
which Muhammad's message offered a solution must have been problems shared by
the Medinese and other Arabs to the exclusion of the
Meccans. In short, they were problems that had nothing to do with
Meccan trade.
Is this surprising? Ultimately, the Watt thesis boils down to the proposition that a city in
a remote corner of Arabia had some social problems
to which a preacher responded by founding a world religion. It sounds
like an overreaction. Why should a blueprint for social reform in Mecca
have caused the entire peninsula to explode? 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.
Watt is not, of course, unaware of the need to explain the success of
Muhammad's message outside Mecca. But having linked its genesis with
Meccan trade, he is forced to identify a second set of problems to account for its
success in Medina; and having opted for problems arising
from a transition to a settled life in Medina, he needs a third set of problems to account
for its spread in Arabia at large, this time opting for a
general spiritual crisis: "there was a growing awareness of the existence
of the individual in separateness from the tribe, with the consequent
problem of the cessation of his individual existence at death. What was
the ultimate destiny of man? Was death the end?''
The changes and transitions in question would, however, seem to be
largely of Watt's own making. As regards the feuds with which the
Medinese had to cope, they did not arise from a transition to settled life,
but simply from settled life in general. It is a mistake to regard tribal organization as
peculiar to nomads and sedentarization as necessarily leading to alternative forms of
organizations, norms, and beliefs. The settled people of pre-oil Arabia were tribally
organized, like the Bedouin,
and they subscribed to much the same norms and beliefs; both settled
and nomadic life was typically life under conditions of statelessness.
Watt is right that sedentarization created a greater need for authority,
but the material resources required for the creation and maintenance of
stable state structures simply were not available. Accordingly, Arabian
settlements were usually plagued by feuds; those characteristic of Medina in the sixth
century would appear to have been no different from
those characteristic of most Arabian settlements, including Medina, in
the nineteenth. The feuds to which Muhammad offered a solution
were a constant of Arabian history, not a result of change. It was only
the solution that was new. The novelty of the solution lay in the idea of
divinely validated state structures; and it was Muhammad's state, not
his supposed blueprint for social reform, which had such powerful effect on the rest of
Arabia.
As for the spiritual crisis, there does not appear to have been any such
thing in sixth-century Arabia, in the sense normally understood. There
is no feeling in Muhammad's biography of burning questions and long-
debated issues finally resolved. Instead, there is a strong sense of ethnogenesis. The
message of this biography is that the Arabs had been in
the peninsula for a long time, in fact since Abraham, and that they had
finally been united in a state. Muhammad was neither a social reformer
nor a resolver of spiritual doubts: he was the creator of a people.
The impulse behind Watt's attempt to identify social changes and
spiritual crises in Arabia comes from his conception of religion as a set
of ultimate truths concerning the nature and meaning of life: what is the
destiny of man? Is death the end? When religion is thus conceived, it
usually takes a fundamental change in people's way of life and outlook
to make them abandon their beliefs, and the process tends to be accompanied by
pangs of conscience and spiritual pain. If we assume that the
pre-Islamic Arabs shared this conception of religion, it follows from the
rapid spread of Islam in the peninsula that there must have been a fundamental change
-- which to most of us conjures up an image of socio-
economic change -- with accompanying spiritual crisis. All we need to
do then is to identify the nature of this crisis. The immense appeal of
Watt's work on the rise of Islam rests on the fact that he thought along
these very intelligible lines and came up with a socioeconomic change of
the requisite kind: the Meccans were making a transition to a capitalist
economy and losing their faith in the process. How very familiar; the
Meccans were just like us. But an explanation that credits our own experience to a
simple society is unlikely to be right. What sort of socio-
economic change and spiritual crisis preceded the Israelite adoption of
Yahweh? How much thought about the ultimate destiny of man went
into the Icelandic adoption of Christianity by vote of parliament? None,
apparently. Similarly in the case of Islam. Islam originated in a tribal
society, and any attempt to explain its appearance must take this fact as
its starting point.
What, then, was the nature of religion in tribal Arabia? The basic point
to note here is that tribal gods were ultimate sources of phenomena observable in this
world, not ultimate truths regarding the nature and
meaning of life. More precisely, they were ultimate sources of all those
phenomena that are of great importance in human society, but beyond
direct human control: rain, fertility, disease, the knowledge of soothsayers. the nature
of social roups, and so forth. They were worshipped for
the practical services they could render in respect of these phenomena.
As Wellhausen noted, they differed from more spirits only in that they
had names and cults devoted to them; without a name a deity could not
be invoked and manipulated, and he very object of the cult was to make
the deity exercise its power on behalf of its devotees. "Ilaha, regard the
tribe of Rubat (with benevolence)," as a third-century inscription says.
This being so, tribal gods neither required nor received emotional
commitment, love, or loyalty from their devotees. Thus a famous story
informs us that "in the days of paganism Banu Han-lfa had a deity made
of dates mixed with clarified butter. They worshipped it for a long time.
Then they were hit by a famine, so they ate it.'' In much the same
pragmatic spirit a modern Bedouin vowed half of whatever he might
shoot to God. Having shot some game, he ate half, left the other half for
God and departed; but feeling hungry still, he crept back and successfully stole God's
part, and ate it, boasting that "God was unable to keep
his share, I have eaten his half as well as mine.'' Now if hunger could
make a tribesman eat or cheat his god without remorse, then it is obvious
that practical needs could likewise make him renounce or exchange this
god for another without compunction. "We came to Sa'd so that he
might get us together, but Sa'd dispersed us; so we have nothing to do
with Sa'd," as a pre-Islamic tribesman is supposed to have said in disgust when his idol
scared his camels away . In much the same fashion a
whole tribe abandoned its native gods for Christianity when its chief
was cured of childlessness by a Christian monk. And the numerous
other Arabs who found the medical facilities of the Christian God suffi ficiently
impressive to adopt Him as their own are unlikely to have
found the act of conversion any more difficult. A god was, after all, no
more than a powerful being, and the point of serving him was that he
could be expected to respond by using his power in favour of his servants. A modern
Tiyaha tribesman who was being swept away by a
flood screamed in great rage at God, "I am a Tihi! I am a Tihi! God, if
you don't believe it, look at the brand on my camels." Obviously, if a
deity was so inefficient as to unleash floods against his own followers, or
so weak as to be unable to protect them from famine, or to keep his own
share of some game, or to work miraculous cures, then there was reason
to eat, cheat, abuse, denounce, or abandon him. "What were two little
words?" as Doughty was asked on one of the numerous occasions on
which attempts were made to convert him, "pronounce them with us
and it shall do thee no hurt." The idea that a believer might be personally committed to
a deity, having vested the ultimate meaning of his life
in it, did not occur to any of these men. Those who tried to convert
Doughty were evidently thoroughly committed to Islam, but not to Islam as a saving
truth of deep significance to them as individuals. Convert, settle, and we will give you
palm trees, as they told Doughty; in
other words, be one of ours. Allah was a source communal identity to
them, not an answer to questions about the hereafter. And the numerous people who
tried to convert him or to penalize him for his Christianity on other occasions were
likewise people who neither knew nor
cared much about Islam as a saving truth, but who were outraged by his
open denial of the God who validated their society.
Now, just as tribal gods did not articulate great spiritual truths, so
also they were not deeply entrenched in everyday life. Pre-Islamic (or
for that matter pre-modern) Arabia was strikingly poor in mythology,
ceremonial, ritual, and festivals. Religious life was reduced to periodic
visits to holy places, stones, and trees, to sacrifice and consultation of
diviners; most Bedouin managed with even less than that; and these
practices were not closely associated with belief in specific gods. The
great annual pilgrimage was apparently not conducted in the name of
any one deity, and the remaining practices could effortlessly be
switched from one deity to another; all survived into modern times,
among Muslim and Christian tribesmen alike. Renouncing one god for
another thus did not require any change in either outlook or behaviour,
unless the new deity carried with him a behavioural programme anti-
thetical to tribal norms. In principle, the Christian deity did carry with
him such a programme, though in practice the holy men active in Arabia
were in no position to ensure that ccnversion amounted to more than
two little words. But the Muslim deity did not. On the contrary, he en-
dorsed and ennobled such fundamental tribal characteristics as mili-
tance and ethnic pride. Despite the Qur'anic suspicion of Bedouin, it
was only on the development of classical Islam in the Fertile Crescent
that the celebrated antithesis between muruwwa and dm, manliness and
religiosity, emerged.
It is thus clear that the mass conversion of Arabia to Islam does not
testify to any spiritual crisis, religious decadence, or decline of pagan belief. Indeed, in
behavioural terms, the better part of Arabia was still
pagan in the nineteenth century. What the mass conversions show is
that Muhammad's God had something very attractive to offer here and
now. When Sa'd, the pre-Islamic deity, scared away the camels of his
devotees, the latter concluded that "Sa'd is just a rock": the power that
he was supposed to have exercised had proved unreal. But when Muhammad
established himself, they concluded that "Allah is great." The
Arabs converted to Islam because Allah was a greater power than any
other spirit endowed with a name and a cult so far known in Arabia, and
the problem is not the ease with which they could convert, but the inducement. What
was it that Allah had to offer?
What he had to offer was a programme of Arab state formation and
conquest: the creation of an umma, the initiation of jihad. Muhammad
was a prophet with a political mission, not, as is so often asserted, a
prophet who merely happened to become involved with politics. His
monotheism amounted to a political programme, as is clear not only
from non-Muslim accounts of his career, but also from Ibn Ishaq.
Thus Ibn Ishaq informs us that the turning point of Muhammad's career as a prophet
came when he began openly to attack the ancestral gods
of Quraysh and to denounce his own ancestors. This was a turning
point because in so doing, he attacked the very foundations of his own
tribe; and it was for this that he would have been outlawed or killed if
his own kinsmen had not heroically continued to protect him -- not for
the threat that his monotheist preaching allegedly posed to the pagan
sanctuary or Meccan trade. He was, after all, no more than a local eccentric at the time,
and Quraysh were quite willing to tolerate his oddities, including his minor following, as
long as he confined his teaching
to abstract truths about this world and the next. But they were not willing to tolerate an
attack on their ancestors. By his they were outraged,and quite rightly so: a man who
tries to destroy the very foundation of
his own community is commonly known as a traitor. But Muhammad
would scarcely have turned traitor without some vision of an alternative
community. In denouncing his own ancestors, he had demonstrated
that his God was incompatible with tribal divisions as they existed; and
this incompatibility arose from the fact that his God, unlike that of the
Christians, was both a monotheist and an ancestral deity. Allah was the
one and only God of Abraham, the ancestor of the Arabs; and it was
around ancestral deities that tribal groups were traditionally formed. It
follows that it was around Allah, and Allah alone, that the Arabs should
be grouped, all the ancestral deities that sanctioned current divisions
being false. If we accept the traditional account of Muhammad's life,
Muhammad was thus a political agitator already in Mecca, and it was as
such that he offered himself to other tribes. "If we give allegiance to you
and God gives you victory over your opponents, will we have authority
after you?" an 'Amin is supposed to have asked, fully aware that ac-
ceptance of Muhammad was acceptance of a ruler with ambitious
plans. It was also as such, not merely as an otherworldly arbitrator,
that he was accepted in Medina.
Assuming that Medinese society was rent by feuds, as opposed to
united by proto-kings, it is not difficult to explain why the Medinese
should have been willing to experiment with Muh. ammad's political programme; but
given that Arabia had never been politically united before,
and was never to be so again, it is certainly extraordinary that he and his
successors should have succeeded in bringing this unification into effect.
Why did the Arabs in Muhammad's time find the vision of state structures and
unification so attractive?
It is customary to invoke Meccan trade in answer to this question.
Quraysh, we are told, had in effect united most of Arabia already, numerous tribes
having acquired an interest in the conduct of Meccan
trade as well as in the maintenance of the sanctuary; inasmuch as the interests of
Mecca and Arabia at large had come to coincide, Muhammad's
conquest of Mecca amounted to a conquest of most of Arabia, though
the process of unification was only to be completed on the suppression
of the ridda. But though it is true that the suppression of the ridda completed the
process, this is not an entirely persuasive explanation. If the
interests of Mecca and the Arabs at large had come to coincide, why did
the Arabs fail to come to Mecca's assistance during its protracted struggle against
Muhammad? Had they done so, Muhammad's statelet in
Medina could have been nipped in the bud. Conversely, if they were
happy to leave Mecca to its own fate, why should they have hastened to
convert when it fell? In fact, the idea of Meccan unification of Arabia
rests largely on Ibn al-Kalbl's tl-tradition, a storyteller's yarn. No
doubt there was a sense of unity in Arabia, and this is an important
point; but the unity was ethnic and cultural, not economic, and it owed
nothing to Meccan trade.40 Muhammad's success evidently had something to do with
the fact that he preached both state formation and conquest: without conquest, first in
Arabia and next in the Fertile Crescent,
the unification of Arabia would not have been achieved. And there is
no shred of evidence that commercial interests contributed to the decision, on the part
of the ruling elite, to adopt a policy of conquest; on
the contrary, the sources present conquest as an alternative to trade, the
reward of conquest being an effortless life as rulers of the earth as opposed to one as
plodding merchants. Nor is there any evidence that the
collapse of Meccan trade caused an "economic recession" that contributed to the
enthusiasm with which the tribesmen at large adopted this
policy.44 It is, of course, legitimate to conjecture that trade may have
played a role, but there is no need for such conjecture. Tribal states must
conquer to survive, and the predatory tribesmen who make up their
members are in general more inclined to fight than to abstain. "How
many a lord and mighty chief have our horses trampled under foot . . .
we march forth to war, the ever renewed, whenso it threatens," one pre-
Islamic poet boasts. "We slew in requital for our slain an equal number
lof them], and [carried away an uncountable number of fettered prisoners . . . the days
have thus raised us to be foremost with our battles in
warfare after warfare; men find in us nothing at which to point their finger of scorn,"
another brags. "When I thrust in my sword it bends almost double, I kill my opponent
with a sharp Mashrafi sword, and I
yearn for death like a camel overful with milk," a convert to Islam announced. Given
that men of this kind constituted Muhammad's following, we do not need to postulate
any deterioration in the material environment of Arabia to explain why they found a
policy of conquest to
their taste. Having begun to conquer in their tribal homeland, both
they and their leaders were unlikely to stop on reaching the fertile lands:
this was, after all, where they could find the resources which they
needed to keep going and of which they had availed themselves before.
Muhammad's God endorsed a policy of conquest, instructing his believers to fight
against unbelievers wherever they might be found; and if we
accept the testimony of non-Muslim sources, he specifically told them
to fight the unbelievers in Syria, Syria being the land to which Jews and
Arabs had a joint right by virtue of their common Abrahamic descent.
In short, Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer,
and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?
The reason why additional motives are so often adduced is that holy
war is assumed to have been a covr for more tangible objectives. It is
felt that religious and material interests must have been two quite different things --an
eminently Christian notion; and this notion underlies the
interminable debate whether the conquerors were motivated more by
religious enthusiasm than by material interests, or the other way round.
But holy war was not a cover for material interests; on the contrary, it
was an open proclamation of them. "God says . . . 'my righteous servants shall inherit
the earth'; now this is your inheritance and what your
Lord has promised you . . . ," Arab soldiers were told on the eve of the
battle of Qadisiyya, with reference to Iraq; "if you hold out . . . then
their property, their women, their children, and their country will be
yours." God could scarcely have been more explicit. He told the Arabs
that they had a right to despoil others of their women, children, and
land, or indeed that they had a duty to do so: holy war consisted in obeying.
Muhammad's God thus elevated tribal militance and rapaciousness
into supreme religious virtues: the material interests were those inherent
in tribal society, and we need not compound the problem by conjectu
ing that others were at work. It is precisely because the material interests
of Allah and the tribesmen coincided that the latter obeyed him with
such enthusiasm.
The fit between Muhammad's message and tribal interests is, in fact,
so close that there is a case for the view that his programme might have
succeeded at any point in Arabian history. The potential for Arab state
formation and conquest had long been there, and once Muhammad had
had the idea of putting monotheism to political use, it was exploited time
and again, if never on the same pan-Arabian scale. Had earlier adherents
of Din Ibrahim seen the political implications of their own beliefs, might
they not similarly have united Arabia for conquest? If Muhammad had
not done so, can it be argued that a later prophet might well have taken
his role? The conquests, it could be argued, turn on the simple fact that
somebody had an idea, and it is largely or wholly accidental that somebody did so in
the seventh century rather than the fifth, the tenth, or not
at all.
But the fact that it was only in the seventh century that the Arabs
united for conquest on a pan-Arabian scale suggests that this argument
is wrong. If we choose to argue otherwise, we must look for factors
which were unique to Arabia at that particular time, not constants such
as the feuds of Medina, and which affected the entire peninsula, not just
a single city such as Mecca. Given the fit between Muhammad's message and tribal
interests, the factors in question should also be such as to accentuate the perennial
interests of tribal society rather than to undermine them in the style of Meccan trade as
conventionally seen. There is
only one development which meets all three specifications, and that is
the foreign penetration characteristic of sixth- and early seventh-century
Arabia.
As mentioned already, the Persians had colonies throughout eastern
Arabia, in Najd, and in the Yemen, as well as a general sphere of influence extending
from the Syrian desert to the Hijaz. The Byzantines had
no colonists to the south of Tabuk, but their sphere of influence was felt
throughout western Arabia from the Syrian desert where they had
client kings to the Yemen where their Ethiopian allies ruled until they
were ousted by the Persians. Muhammad's Arabia had thus been subjected to foreign
rule on a scale unparalleled even in modern times:
where the Persians had colonists and fire-temples, the British merely
had Philby. The scale on which Muhammad's Arabia exploded is
equally unparalleled, the nearest equivalent being that of the Ikhwan. It
seems unlikely that the two phenomena were unrelated.
If so, how? One model can be eliminated at once. It is well known that
empires tend to generate state structures among their barbarian neighbours thanks to
the ideas that they provide, the material sources that
they pass on, and the resentment that their dominance engenders; and
having generated such state structures, they will usually become targets
of conquest, too. This is the pattern known from Central Asia and Europe; but it is not
the pattern to which Arabia conforms. There was no
incipient growth of state structures at the expense of tribal ties in Arabia, not even in
Mecca. Muhammad's state in Medina-was formed by
a prophet, not a secular statesman, by recourse to religious authority,
not material power, and the conquests were effected by a fusion of tribal
society, not by its disintegation. If the imperial powers contributed to
the rise of Islam, they must have done so in a different way.
An alternative hypothesis would be that Islam originated as a nativist
movement, or in other words as a primitive reaction to alien domination
of the same type as those which the Arab conquerors were themselves to
provoke in North Africa and Iran, and which European colonists were
later to provoke throughout the Third World. If we accept the testimony of the
non-Muslim sources on the nature of Muhammad's teaching, this interpretation fits
extremely well.
Nativist movements are primitive in the sense that those who engage
in them are people without political organization. Either they are members of societies
that never had much political organization, as is true of
Muhammad's Arabia,.or they are drawn from these strata of society that
lack this organization, as is true of the villagers who provided the syncretic prophets of
Iran. They invariably take a religious form. The leaders usually claim to be prophets or
God Himself, and they usually formulate their message in the same religious language
as that of the
foreigners against whom it is directed, but in such a way as to reaffirm
their native identity and values. The movements are almost always
millenarian, frequently messianic, and they always lead to some political organization
and action, however embryonic; the initial action is usually militant, the object of the
movement being the expulsion of the foreigners in question. The extent to which
Muhammad's movement
conforms to this description can be illustrated with reference to a Maori
prophet of the 1860s who practically invented Islam for himself. He reputedly saw
himself as a new Moses (as did Muhammad), pronounced
Maoris and Jews to be descended from the same father (as were the Jews
and their Ishmaelite brothers), and asserted that Gabriel had taught him
a new religion which (like that taught to Muhammad combined belief
in the supreme God of the foreigners with native elements (sacred
dances as opposed to pilgrimage). He proclaimed, or was taken to proclaim, the Day of
Judgment to be at hand (as did Muhammad). On that
day, he said or was taken by his followers to say, the British would be
expelled from New Zealand (as would the Byzantines from Syria), and
all the Jews would come to New Zealand to live in peace and harmony
with their Maori brothers (as Jews and Arabs expected to do in Syria).
This, at least, is how his message was reported by contemporary, if frequently hostile,
observers.8 And though he may in fact have been a pacifist, his followers were not.
Unlike the followers of Muhammad, howcver, they fought against impossible odds.
Like the Maori prophet, Muhammad mobilized theJewish version of
monotheism against that of dominant Christianity and used it for the
self-assertion, both ideological and military, of his own people. It is odd
that what appears to have been the first hostilc reaction to alien domination, and
certainly the most successful, should have come in an area
subject to Byzantine rather than Persian influence, that of the Persians
being more extensive. But Jewish-Arab symbiosis in northwest Arabia
could perhaps account for this: according to Sebeos, the Byzantine victimization of
Jews played a crucial role in the birth of Muhammad's
movement. In any case, Muhammad was not the only prophet in seventh-century
Arabia, and two of his competitors, Musaylima and Aswad, were active in areas subject
to Persian influence, the Yamama and
the Yemen, respectively, while a third, Sajah, was sponsored by tribes
known to have participated in the celebrated battle against the Persians
at Dhu Qar. The fact that the resistance to Islam in Arabia was led by
imitators of Muhammad rather than by representatives of traditional paganism is thus
unlikely to mean that traditional beliefs and values had
lost force in Arabia; on the contrary, Muhammad would seem to have
hit upon a powerful formula for the vindication of those values. And
this formula was, of course, likely to be used against Muhammad himself when he
began his subjection of Arabia.
A more serious objection would be that the foreign presence is unlikely to have affected
thc majority of Arabs very deepl!. Unlike the
Maoris, who were losing their land to the British, they certainly cannot
have felt that their entire way of life was under threat; and unlike the
Berbers, they were not exposed to forced conversion. Nor are expressions of
dissatisfaction with foriegn domination very common in the
sources. There is, admittedly, no lack of anti-Persian feeling in the poetry triggered by
the battle of Dhu Qar, which the Prophet supposedly
described as the first occasion on which the Arabs obtained revenge
from the Persians, the conquests (by implication) being the second.
But in historical fact this battle may not have represented more than a
short-term disagreement between the Persians and their Arab subjects. Still, there were
some who felt that "the Arabs were confined between the lions of Persia and
Byzantium," as Qatada said in a passage
contrasting the ignominious state of the Arabs in theJahiliyya with the
grandeur achieved on the coming of Islam. "Other men trampled us
beneath their feet while we trampled no one. Then God sent a prophet
from among us . . . and one of his promises was that w e should conquer
and overcome these lands," as Mughlra b. Shu'ba is supposed to have
explained to a Persian commander. In general it is acknowledged that
the Arab conquests were nothing if not "an outburst of Arab nationality."
To what extent, if at all, the nativist model can be applied to the rise
of Islam is for future research to decide; no doubt there are other ways
in which the interaction between Arabs and foreigners could be envisaged. But it is at
all events the impact of Byzantium and Persia on Arabia
that ought to be at the forefront of research on the rise of the new religion, not .leccan
trade. Meccan trade may w ell turn out to throw some
light on the mechanics behind the spread of the new religion; but it cannot explain why
a new religion appeared at all in Arabia or why it had
such massive political effect.
Source:
This text is part of the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection
of public domain and copy-permitted texts related to medieval and Byzantine history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational
purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No
permission is granted for commercial use.
Paul Halsall, May 2023