Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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THE PAST REMEMBERED t 33<br />
Greco-Roman imperialist-entrepreneurs <strong>and</strong> the equally literate<br />
<strong>and</strong> historically minded Christian missionaries. No contemporary<br />
was in<strong>for</strong>med or interested enough to write a history of Muhammad’s<br />
hometown or even to make note of its existence.<br />
The remembered past of this region of pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic Arabia is preserved<br />
only in local oral traditions that, even after the coming of<br />
<strong>Islam</strong>, still recollected <strong>and</strong> savored the old genealogies, the tribesmen’s<br />
poetry of love <strong>and</strong> war, <strong>and</strong> even, it would appear, some dim<br />
memories of other gods worshiped in the times the Muslims called<br />
“the age of barbarism” (al-jahiliyya). The later biographers of the<br />
Prophet <strong>and</strong> historians of Mecca drew upon these memories to<br />
piece together Arabia’s history as Muhammad doubtless understood<br />
it, but as the Quran never spells out: how the Holy House<br />
<strong>and</strong> the town of the biblical patriarch <strong>and</strong> his son passed into the<br />
h<strong>and</strong>s of this or that Arab tribe <strong>and</strong> finally into those of the Quraysh,<br />
Muhammad’s own ancestors; <strong>and</strong> how that passage of<br />
power was accompanied by a lapse into polytheism <strong>and</strong> idol worship.<br />
That was the gist of the great historical triptych composed by<br />
Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) more than a century after Muhammad’s death<br />
in 632. The work is lost, but it was later pared down to a simple<br />
biography of the Prophet that is available to us in the version of<br />
Ibn Hisham (d. 833), <strong>and</strong> it was later used with profit in its unabridged<br />
<strong>for</strong>m by the historian al-Tabari (d. 923) <strong>and</strong> others. This<br />
is one strain of tradition, the political-historical one. The other is<br />
the repertory of in<strong>for</strong>mation collected <strong>and</strong> topically arranged by<br />
Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (d. 819) in his sacred anthropology called The<br />
Book of Idols, the most substantial treatment we possess of the<br />
religious practices of pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic Arabia.<br />
Finally, there is whatever we can glean from the Quran, which<br />
polemicizes against the still flourishing paganism of Muhammad’s<br />
day <strong>and</strong> at the same time incorporates some aspects of Meccan<br />
ritual—notably the hajj, or pilgrimage—into the emerging picture<br />
of <strong>Islam</strong>. One can also always attempt to work back to pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic<br />
origins from the Quran’s religious vocabulary, an undisputed reflection<br />
of the religious life of western Arabia, which was, on the<br />
evidence of the Quran’s loanwords from the lexica of the Aramaic<br />
Syrians of the Fertile Crescent <strong>and</strong> the Ethiopians across the Red