Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PAST REMEMBERED t 41
of Mecca. In this instance there were markers, sacred stones that,
like the Greek hermes, were both boundary signs and objects of
veneration; from very early times they defined the sacred territory
of Mecca.
There are indications that the entire territory of Mecca constituted
a haram, the “secure sanctuary” of the Quran (28:57). The
sacred stones at its limits have already been remarked; and within
it no trees or shrubs were to be cut down, no wild animals hunted,
no blood spilled in violence. Indeed, no profane soil should be
mixed with that of the haram. As for access, the city-territory of
Mecca, which today is marked by large signs in Arabic and English
on the Saudi thruways banning entry to all non-Muslims, shows
no evidence of having been so restricted in late paganism or early
Islam.
Meccan Paganism
The Muslim Arab authorities were not at all certain who was first
or chiefly responsible for turning Ishmael’s holy place into a pagan
city. More, their version of the degradation of the Meccan cultus
has to do primarily with the cult of idols, though we are assured by
somewhat wider evidence that who was being worshiped in Arabia,
how, and why, were much broader questions than our eighthand
ninth century sources were willing to allow. The inhabitants of
Arabia assuredly had a religious tradition before Islam, and although
we are not particularly well informed about it, it appears
to have been quite complex, as we would expect to discover in
societies that were splintered into tribes and clans of widely varying
sizes, some sedentary and some nomadic, with a number of the
latter ranging seasonally over enormously broad terrains.
The inhabitants of the Hejaz worshiped the way they lived: the
small settled population visited fixed shrines in oases, whereas the
Bedouin carried their gods with them. The objects worshiped were
principally stones, trees, and heavenly bodies, or rather, the gods
thought to reside in them, or possibly—and here we begin to enter
a world we do not fully understand—represented by them. Rea-