Koran Curious - A Guide for Infidels and Believers (3 page)

The country that is Saudi Arabia today looks pretty much how it was 1,500 years ago: dry, arid and sparsely populated. Geographically, the Arabian Peninsula is approximately one-third the size of the continental United States. Before the birth of the prophet Muhammad, the interior was dotted only with the occasional oasis, which offered the nomadic tribes a life source of food and water not found in nine-tenths of the waterless and vegetation-less wastelands. These scattered palm-fringed villages, built around their respective waterholes, were centers of commerce for the nomadic Bedouins, who would be driven from place to place in their search for life sustaining pastures for their flocks.

During this century, the Codex Sinaiticus, the first full collection of the Old and New Testament manuscripts (estimated to have been written in the century prior) was handed down. This was significant, because now Christianity, having been decriminalized in the fourth century, also had its own book. It had joined Judaism as a ‘bookish’ religion, standing the two faiths of Abraham apart from the pagan faiths of that time.

Christianity was now the bona fide faith of the Roman Empire and Team Jesus was quick to disparage and harass people of other faiths. After a few more ecumenical councils (conference of head bishops of the whole Christian Church to discuss and settle matters of Christian doctrine and practice), the Codex Sinaiticus became the Holy Bible and the faithful turned it loose on the world, with mass conversions occurring across the entire Empire.

With the Gospel John’s charge of deicide laid against the Jews included in the New Testament, the people of Bible Version One, the Jews, fled to all corners of the Arabian Peninsula to escape Christian persecution. Effectively, this period and these events marked the end of the Period of Enlightenment and the commencement of the Dark Ages. Christianity had fired its opening salvos in what would be a long murderous rampage against any persons who disbelieved that a Palestinian Jew from a town no one had ever heard of at that time, Nazareth, had died for mankind’s sins on the cross.

With the Middle East a battlefield between the Roman and Persian Empires; and internal battles within Christianity between the Church of the East (Nestoria) and the Church in Rome; among all this social and political upheaval there was, in fact, an oasis of sorts, a place where Christians weren’t slaughtering Jews, and Jews weren’t committing reprisal attacks against the new spin-off version of Judaism, Christianity. This place was a series of towns and cities along a trade route that still exists to this day, cris-crossing what is largely Saudi Arabia today. Starting at one end at the Mediterranean, extending right down to the Yellow Sea at the other, some of these towns include cities we know now, including Mecca, Medina, and Taif. Of these cities, Mecca was the largest and most important for commerce. It was here that Muhammad, a Bedouin, was born.

Mecca stood at the centre of the Arabian caravan trade and was, more importantly to the Bedouins, the spiritual capital of the peninsular. So who were, or still are, the Bedouins?

Well, the Bedouins are a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group with a history that goes as far back as the ancient Hebrews. In fact, the Arabic word
Bedu
, from which the name Bedouin is derived, is a somewhat simplistic nickname, meaning “inhabitant of the desert”, and refers generally to the nomads of Arabia, the Negev, and the Sinai.

Whenever I close my eyes and conjure an image of a Bedouin tribesman, I evoke images of men in flowing robes, walking the crests of windswept sand dunes. Or when Samantha hits on that wealthy Arab dude in ‘Sex In the City 2’. But I digress.

There’s a famous Bedouin saying that goes
“Me against my brother, My brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and me against strangers.”
This illustrates perfectly the hierarchy of loyalties within a tribe or nuclear family. Even today, disputes are settled and justice maintained by this framework. You will see later what importance Muhammad placed on preserving the tribal system, through creating a just community for all its players.

Each individual family unit (known as a tent) typically consisted of four adults (a married couple plus his and/or parents) and several children. A community would form when several of these tents would link and travel together (known as goum). These groupings were often linked together by patriarchal lineage and eventually became bigger as children were born, and new acquaintances with needed skill sets attached themselves to the tribe. Each tribe was led by a Sheikh (elder). Karen Armstrong in her book,
A History of God
, says of tribal dynamics:

“To ensure the survival of the tribe, the sayyid shared its wealth and possessions equally and avenged the death of a single one its people by killing a member of the murderer’s tribe. It is here we see the communal ethic most clearly: there was no duty to punish the killer because an individual could vanish without trace in a society like pre-Islamic Arabia. Instead, one member of the enemy tribe was equivalent to another for such purposes. The vendetta or blood feud was the only way of ensuring a modicum of social security in a region where there was no central authority, where every tribal group was a law upon itself and where there was nothing comparable to a police force. If a chief failed to retaliate, his tribe would lose respect and others would feel free to kill its members with impunity.”

Ok, so back to the storyline – Muhammad was born to a Bedouin tribe and, more specifically, to the Quraysh clan of Mecca. But more on that later!

The Bedouins were highly religious but lacked a unifying religious system, although Mecca remained the centre of their orb when it came to religious matters. In fact, Mecca was home to a litany of pagan gods, as many as three hundred and sixty different idols of worship; an overwhelming majority of these idols were rock god deities. These pagan gods met all kinds of natural phenomenon the spirit world potentially threw their way, representing desert winds, rainfall, soil, mountain peaks, sunshine, water springs, and fertility. These respective deities were represented at the shrine in Mecca, the Kaaba, as unshaped god stones.

This now brings us to the Kaaba itself, which remains the central shrine of Muslim worship today, the place where these rock deities were worshipped. The Meccans believed touching these rocks brought them closer to the gods. As far as the Kaaba itself is concerned, it is a box-like temple, which sits smack bang in the centre of the ritual space. Specifically, it’s a large masonry structure in the shape of a cube. Made of granite, it stands upon a 10-inch marble base and is an impressive 43 feet height, with sides measuring 36 feet.

In her book,
Islam: A Short History
, Karen Armstrong writes:

Now, if you were to time travel back to Mecca at the start of the sixth century, a Meccan may tell you the Kaaba was built by Abraham of the Old Testament, as there were many Jews and Christians who resided in the city in that period. Another local may tell you that the three hundred and sixty rock gods represented each of the respective Arabian tribes. A third may tell you that it fell from the sky. Essentially, the Kaaba was whatever you wanted it to be and everyone at that time was cool with that. Today, however, Muslims believe Abraham of the Old Testament placed it there. The black stone is located in the eastern corner of the Kaaba and is approximately 12 inches in diameter and is surrounded by a silver frame. As far as the origin of this black stone is concerned, Muslims believe it fell from the heavens in the form of a meteorite, but that’s yet to be confirmed.

Of all the rock god deities, two became the most prominent. The most popular became the moon goddess Allat. As a matter of fact, she’s still worshipped in Wicca today. The second most important deity was Al-Uzza, a god believed to be responsible for good fortune. Although, bear in mind that the worship of Al-Uzza involved throwing a virgin into the fire as a form of human sacrifice, so it wasn’t much lucky for her. However, the supreme all-powerful paternal god who looked over all other rock gods was Al-Lah, or Allah, which simply means ‘the God’.

Inside the Kaaba, the holy of holies, where all kinds of sacred objects were held, represented the varying religions of the day. Some scholars hold that the holy of holies even contained an icon of the Virgin Mary and a portrait of monotheism’s granddaddy, Abraham.

Similar to the religious beliefs held by the majority of their neighbors in the north, and just as the Old Testament told of the ancient Israelites carrying the Ark of the Covenant onto the battlefield as a source of procuring Yahweh’s military power, the Meccans did likewise with their most revered rocks.

Now, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, as we know today via Islamic tradition, began as an annual pagan ritual. Tribes from all over Arabia would travel to Mecca for a month long religious celebration. Mecca would be a buzz of activity for this period, held every autumn, and all forms of vendettas, blood feuds, and warfare would be suspended for the duration of the pilgrimage. In fact, worshippers at the Kaaba, so as to demonstrate they weren’t packing heat, would strip their clothes off and offer their prayers in the buff. What is even more interesting is we know that Christians who lived within these Arabic communities would also participate in the pilgrimage.

It’s an interesting exercise to compare the pagan pilgrimage to Mecca in the pre-Islam era with the practice of the religion today. Prior to the success and conquest of the prophet Muhammad, the pagans would pray towards the shrine in Mecca several times per day. They would also make the pilgrimage to the city, run around the Kaaba seven times and throw stones at the devil. They fasted for one month, which began with the appearance of the crescent moon and ended when the crescent moon reappeared. Also remembering the supreme fatherly god was Al-Lah, who was a moon god.

Now if we examine Islam today we find that Muslims bow in prayer towards Mecca; they make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and walk around the Kaaba seven times while throwing stones at the devil, and the fasting of Ramadan begins and ends with the start and finish of then crescent moon.

Mind = blown? Ok, let’s carry on.

So without an organized and centralized religious authority, with pagans, Jews, and Christians living side-by-side in worship of their respective gods, who were the powerbrokers of Mecca at this time? Well, it was the Quraysh, who were the most wealthy and influential tribe of Bedouins in Mecca. The Quraysh organized themselves into syndicates of merchants and businessmen. Significantly, they held financially lucrative trade agreements with envoys of the neighboring Byzantine and Persian Empires. Moreover, because the pilgrimage to Mecca brought an enormous amount of religious tourism trade to the city, the equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce had charged the Quraysh with protecting the religious shrine, the Kaaba. More significantly, it was to the Quraysh the infant Muhammad was born.

It was the year 570 CE, the “year of the Elephant”, which is claimed by Islamic scholars to denote the invasion by Yemeni forces responsible for partly smashing the Kaaba, that a young Quraysh woman, Aminah, announced to her husband, Abdallah, she was bearing child. Sadly, Abdallah would pass away six months prior to the birth of his son; the cause of his death is unknown. Without a husband, Aminah knew she’d struggle to support herself, let alone a newborn, and she sought out family members who were in want of an additional child. None were forthcoming, however, but it didn’t take long for word to reach a recently out of work wet nurse. For many Bedouin women living in Mecca, the employment of wet nursing offered a comparatively good income, as the wealthier Quraysh often fostered out their children for the first two years of their lives, so as they could tend to the never ending cycle of pregnancy and child rearing without the rigorous burden of tending to the very young of their families. At the same time Muhammad’s mother was in search of a foster mother, a wet nurse by the name of Halimah was without a foster child and, by definition, unemployed.

Halimah, however, was reluctant to take the responsibility of this particular newborn as she had learned of the passing of Aminah’s husband, and therefore knew the financial reward would be minimal. Halimah said she’d discuss the offer with her husband, who later agreed to take care of baby Muhammad, telling his wife, “Perhaps he will be a blessing to us.” In the days soon after taking delivery of their newborn baby project, they packed up their possessions and rejoined their Bedouin tribe, the Beni Saad, on their caravan journey north.

The first six years of Muhammad’s life were spent in the desert under the care of his foster mother and her family. Like all nomadic tribes of southern Arabia, Halimah and her family would move their livestock in search of new pastures. Once found, the families’ tent would be pitched among the tribe’s tents, usually 50-100 feet apart, and in clusters of no more than a dozen. Within each tent it was customary for the women and children to share one half of the center divide, while the men occupied the other. There were no shortage of children, and Muhammad would develop close bonds with his numerous step-cousins in the wonderment of the desert wilderness.