Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

34 t CHAPTER TWO
Sea, already aglow with the spiritual goods of Middle Eastern
monotheism.
This, then, is the evidence before us: what the Arabs, now all
Muslims, thought, remembered, or imagined about the Mecca
into which Muhammad was born and out of which the Quran
emerged, this latter not as effect from cause but as a convinced
monotheistic interlocutor in dialogue with a pagan milieu the
Quran often echoes but whose own voices are no longer available.
The Quran’s remembered past may be biblical in the already explained
sense of that word, but the Muslim Scripture was in the
first instance addressed to the obdurate pagans of Muhammad’s
Mecca.
Mecca before the Prophet
Mecca, the town that no one had heard of, stands midway down
the western side of the Arabian Peninsula, between the Jordanian
border on the north and that of Yemen on the south, forty-five
miles inland from its Red Sea port of Jidda. If it was unknown or
ignored by contemporaries, later Muslim authors professed to
know a great deal about the history of the place where the Prophet
was born. They focused their attention on three areas. First was on
what might be called institutional Mecca, where the reports in
question describe the various municipal offices—far more than the
size of the place would seem to require—whereby Mecca was governed.
The offices were “municipal” only by courtesy, however,
since they were chiefly connected with the supervision of Mecca’s
shrine complex rather than with the town as a whole. The exception
was the dar al-nadwa, a kind of hotel de ville of pre-Islamic
Mecca where events both political and ceremonial took place, including
the meetings of the “council” of magnates who ran the
town. How they actually governed the settlement, we have very
little idea. More, for all their emphasis in the chroniclers, these
alleged organs of government are nearly invisible in the biographies
of Muhammad, where running the city occurs through informal
gatherings of Mecca’s most powerful clans. There can be no