Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

42 t CHAPTER TWO
sonably clear is that in the more recent Arabian past sacred stones
were increasingly being shaped into human likenesses, rough or
fine, perhaps, it has been surmised, because of the extension of
Hellenistic styles into the peninsula.
However the devotees thought of it, Arabian cultus was highly
volatile, the deities often sharing characteristics, being harmonized
into families, or passing now into the possession of this tribe and
now of that. There is a distinctly tribal notion to the Arabs’ worship
of the gods. On the basis of the South Arabian evidence, with
which the more meager Arab tradition concurs, each tribe or tribal
confederation had a divine patron whose cult gave the group a
focus for its solidarity. In a practice that points directly to what
was occurring at Mecca, each of these “federal deities” was the
“lord” of a shrine that served as the federation’s cult center.
The Bedouin, who normally lived on the grazing steppe in wellestablished
(though at times contested) transhumance zones, came
into the towns to worship at the fixed shrines of the gods there.
The incentive may have been principally commercial—fairs are a
consistent feature of such urban shrines—and there was undoubtedly
conscious policy at work. The movement of the effigy of a
popular god into a town shrine meant that its worshipers would
eventually follow—cult followed cult objects—if certain conditions
could be guaranteed. The chief of those was security. Like
highly territorial animals, Bedouin were ill at ease in very close
quarters. A vividly remembered network of tribal vendettas and
blood feuds incurred from collisions on the steppe made any tribal
encounter potentially dangerous. The solution was the usual one
of the “truce of God,” sacred months when hands and weapons
were restrained by divine injunction. Under such security tribes
came together, worshiped and traded, and then returned to their
other, more routine ways. Sacred shrine, sacred truce, worship,
and trade is a combination with a venerable history. Small wonder
since it worked to everyone’s advantage, and not least to that of
the guardians of the shrine, the Quraysh at Mecca, for example.
We can approach the religious beliefs and practices of Muhammad’s
Mecca only through a series of approximations that converge
on, but do not yet adequately describe, the exact religious