Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

32 t CHAPTER TWO
tapestry of information that tells us what it was to be a Jew in
Judaea or Galilee in the first century of the common era. It doesn’t
answer all the questions about Jesus, but it certainly puts that elusive
messiah in context.
Behind the Quran there is nothing. It rises without warning like
a mysterious continent from an Arabian sea. There is no Josephus
to give us our bearings, no Scrolls, no archaeology. For this Book’s
setting we must turn elsewhere, and the prospect does not excite
optimism. The northern and southern regions of western Arabia,
that is, the Syro-Palestinian frontier in the north and the Yemen to
the south, have preserved archaeological and even literary traces of
their pre-Islamic religious past; the physical remains of shrines,
inscriptions, the interested observations of Greco-Roman authors,
the information collected by church historians or remembered by
Christian missionaries, and the experiences of holy men who fecklessly
wandered the frontiers of the Bedouin lands all help construct
at least an outline of the forms, modes, and vagaries of pre-
Islamic worship and belief in those regions. For the central stretch
of western Arabia, however—the Red Sea’s Arabian coastal areas
and their steppe and mountain uplands between Madain Salih
in the north and Najran in the south—the very birthplace of Islam,
no such resources are available.
What the Arabs Thought, Remembered, or Imagined
This was the nomads’ terrain, remote, rocky, and inhospitable,
supporting a meager settled population in a few scattered oases
like Yathrib—later Medina—and Khaibar, an occasional stretch
of fertile garden land like the Wadi Fatima or Taif, and, of course,
the shrine settlement of Mecca set down uncertainly in its parched
arroyo. Oasis dwellers and Bedouin alike were illiterate—or
nearly so. Various Arab peoples have left their scrawled traces
throughout almost all of western Arabia from about 500 b.c.e.
well into the Roman era. But none of these graffiti, which all date
from Mecca’s remote past, is in the language of Muhammad and
the Quran, and the Hejaz was just beyond the eager reach of both