Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

48 t CHAPTER TWO
near, I answer the call of the caller when he calls. So let them respond
to Me and believe in Me. O may they go straight!”
The Jews of Arabia
We know too little to speak of “Arabian Judaism” on the eve of
Islam. We know only that there was in the sixth century a considerable
Jewish presence in the once prosperous land of the Yemen
and that there were other tribes, often the paramount tribes, who
were identifiably Jewish to their Arab contemporaries and who
dwelled in the oases strung like a necklace from Medina 275 miles
north-northeast of Mecca all the way north to the present border
between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Yemen was a settled land
with a literate people—South Arabian, with its linear script, is well
preserved and related to the Ethiopic of the peoples across the
narrow straits of the Red Sea—and so we are somewhat better
informed about them than we are of the northern oasis dwellers.
Two pieces of information are pertinent here. In the sixth century
Jewish monotheism is on prominent display in the preserved
South Arabian inscriptions, and in the same era a Jewish royal
house, probably indigenous, came to rule in the Yemen. This rise
to prominence brought Jews into direct conflict with a growing
Christian presence that had originated with missionaries from
Christian Abyssinia and was supplemented and augmented by an
actual Abyssinian colonial force in the Yemen. By the early sixth
century Jews and Christians there were locked into a cycle of mutual
persecution that came to a head in a slaughter of Christians at
various towns in the Yemen, followed by an Abyssinian intervention
and the death of the notorious Dhu Nuwas, the last Jewish
king of South Arabia. Most of the Abyssinian invaders eventually
went home, but they left behind one of their generals, Abraha,
who soon declared his independence and ruled the Yemen, a Christian-dominated
Yemen, in his own name. The Jews there had lost
their political power but they were neither annihilated nor expelled.
Not too long afterward Islam was drawing some of its most
illustrious converts, and the source of much of their later informa-