From: Tyagi@HouseOfKaos.Abyss.com
Subject: Islam2:Arabia
Date: Fri,  7 Jan 94 15:25:09 PST

940107

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Assalam alaikum, my kin.

This is part 2 in a continuing series on Islam and Sufism.

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On religion on the Arabian Peninsula prior to Muhammed, 
John Noss writes,

"The religion of pre-Islamic Arabia was a development out of the
primitive Semitic desert-faith....  In some parts of Arabia that 
developement had gone pretty far in one or another direction.  In
South Arabia, for example, a rather advanced astral cult (known
as Sabaeanism) prevailed, centered in the moon god, and reflected
Babylonian and Zoroastrian influences.  In other regions where Jews
and Christians had secured a foothold (which was in most of the
commercial centers of Arabia), the native converts to these faiths
abandoned their primitive beliefs and espoused monotheism.  But
the great majority of Arabs, both in the towns and on the steppes,
worshped local gods and goddesses.  Some of these deities were
strictly tribal; others presided over certain geographic areas,
and obliged all who entered their domains to worship them, like
Hubal at Mecca and Dshara at Petra.  There was also widespread
veneration of certain astral deities.  Some of these had names
which were obviously foreign, Babylonian for the most part, and
were readily identified by Greek and Roman visitors as local forms
of Jupiter, Mercury, Canopus, and other deities.  In Mecca three
almost indistinguishable goddesses were adored, Al-Lat, a mother-
goddess (perhaps the sun), Al-Manah, the goddess of fate, and Al-'Uzza,
the morning star, a pale sort of Venus; their idols being the center
of a phallic worship much like that accorded across the frontiers
in olden times to Ishtar and Isis.  They were reckoned to be 'the
daughters of Allah' - Allah {Note: Meaning 'the deity,' like the 
Hebrew El and the Babylonian Bel.} being vaguely conceived as a
creator, a far-off high-god, venerated by Muhammad's tribe, the
Quraysh.

"In addition to these beings of the rank of high divinity, there
were lesser spirits, scarcely less honored - namely, angels, fairies,
and demonic jinn.  It is interesting to mark the differneces in character
which seem to have existed between these lesser spirits.  The angels
were, of course, morally irreproachable and of a uniformly beneficent
nature. {Note: It is likely that this concept was derived from Jewish
and Zoroastrian sources, through the currency in Arabia of the stories
of the Old Testement and the Avesta.}  The fairies rivaled them in
kindliness, but were not moral beings in the true sense, having no
interest in morality as such; in fact, they were in all essentials
children, living in a playworld of their own, without evil.  In contrast,
the desert-ranging jinn, a predominantly demonic group, struck terror
to Arab hearts as active agents of evil, yet they too could be bent to
good uses; for anyone who could control their movements might convert
them into helpful agents to the attainment of beneficial ends, like
finding treasure, building palaces, or whirling young men away on the
wings of the wind to far away places and new fortunes.  Among the
demonic beings who were always evil were ghouls, who lay in wait where
men were destined to perish, that they might satisfy their depraved
appetite for corrupt human flesh, or who robbed graves of their bodies
to furnish the main dish for their midnight orgies.  The ever-active
imagination of the Arabs, which came to such colorful expression in
afterimes in the tales of _The Thousand and One Nights_, whiled away
the hours, weaving innumerable stories out of these concepts.

"Particularly among the bedouin, but in every part of Arabia, naive
animism (and even animatism) existed.  Pillar-like stones, and
noteworthy rocks, caves, springs, and wells were held in great respect.
In some districts there were sacred palm trees on which offerings of
weapons and cloth were hung.  Totemism may have been involved in
the reverence paid to the gazelle, the eagle, the vulture, and the
camel."

_Man's Religions_, 1963, The Macmillan Company, (originally published
 in 1949); pages 716-8.


On Mecca, Noss writes:

"Mecca offered the most conspicuous instance of veneration given to
a stone - that offered to the meteorite built into the corner of the
Ka'bah, {Note: Literally, 'the cube,' for it was a cubelike structure
with no exterior ornament.  To enhance its appearance, it was later
covered with a tissue of black cloth.}  the holiest shrine in Arabia.
The Roman historian, Diodorus Siculus (ca. 60 b.c.) already refers to
it.  In some far past the people of that part of Arabia had been startled
by the rush of a meteor, which quenched its heaven-fire in Mecca's sandy
glen.  Afterwards the awed inhabitants worshiped it, calling it 'the
black stone which fell from heaven in the days of Adam.'  From far and
near across the desert the tribes of Arabia, year after year, came on a
*hajj* (pilgrimage) to offer sacrifices of sheep and camels and to run
the circuit of the stone seven times and kiss it, in the hope of heaven's
blessing on them.  In the course of years the cube-shaped Ka'bah was
erected in honor of the stone and to give lodgement to the gods
associated with it by the pilgrims.  The holy stone was placed in the
southeast corner at a height which permitted it to be kissed by those
who made the seven-fold circuit.  Images of local and distant deities
were placed in the dark interior.  Borrowing from the stories of the
Hebrews, the Meccans declared that the great patriarch Abraham,
while on a visit to his son Ishmael, had built the Ka'bah and imbedded
the Black Stone in it. {Note: Tradition was not content with this legend,
however: it asserted that the *first* Ka'bah was built by Adam from a
celestial prototype, and was *rebuilt* by Abraham and Ishmael.}

"Only a few steps away from the Ka'bah was the holy well of Zamzam,
whose water was sacred to the pilgrims who ran the circuit of the shrine.
Meccan tradition endowed it with a curious history.  In the 3rd century A.D.,
when the men of the Beni-Jurhum tribe were driven from Mecca by the
Bani-Khuza'ah, their sheikh, so it was said, before giving up the town,
threw down into the well some suits of armor, several swords, and two
gazelles of gold; and then coered all up with tamped-down earth and
sand so that, when when the captors of the city entered it, the location
of the well was not known to them.  After the Quraysh came into control
of Mecca, Muhammed's grandfather, 'Abd-al-Muttaib, the leading chief,
relocated the well and restored its flow.  The Meccans could not thank
him enough; for they had an old tradition [{Note: The Arabs learned this
story also from the Hebrews.}] that after Hagar was expelled from
Abraham's tent... she came with her little son Ishmael to the future site
of their city, at that time a barren valley;  and because her child was
dying of thirst, she left him lying on the hot earth while she searched
despairingly for water; behind her the child, in a tantrum, kicked his
heels into the ground, and the waters of the Zamzam welled up into the
depression and saved his life!  In recognition of this supposed event,
it was considered meritorious for pilgrims to add to the circling of
the Ka'bah an exercise called the 'Lesser Pilgrimage,' which involved
a rapid pacing back and forth seven times between two hills near the
Ka'bah in imitation of Hagar's anguished search.  And since Ishmael
was declared to be the founder of the city, it was thought well to
extend this exercise ito something more arduous, called the 'Greater
Pilgrimage.'  This was performed during the holy month Dhu-al-Hijja,
and included, besides the exercises of the lesser pilgrimage, a tour
of the hills east of Mecca taking several days, and including in its
scope visits to places celebrated for great events in Arabian history.

"Within the Ka'bah itself a large number of idols were ranged around
Hubal, chief male deity.  Next in importance to him were the three
goddesses, Al-Lat, al-Manah, and Al-'Uzza.  Together with their
associates, including the far-off Allah, who was imageless, these
deities constituted a sort of pantheon for Arabia, designed to draw
to Mecca the people of every region.  So holy did Mecca become, in fact,
that the city and its immediate environs were declared sacred territory,
and pilgrims were obliged to disarm when entering it.

"By agreement four months were reserved out of each year for pilgrimage
and trade; during them no violence or warfare was permitted; and Mecca,
along with many other places, profited by the fairs and markets which
then sprang up....

"Economically, the fortunes of Mecca steadily declined after the Arab
monopoly in the spice trade was broken by the re-opening of the old
Egyptian maritime route through the Red Sea.  This was a serious blow
not only to the Al-Hejaz transport towns but to South Arabia as well,
for it forced down prices by bringing India and Somaliland into play
as trade rivals.  In the subsequent decline of Arab commerce, some hill
towns had to fall back on agriculture for survival; but barren Mecca
could have recourse to no such expedient and had mainly to rely for
survival on her power to attract pilgrims to her Black Stone....

"Of course Mecca had been getting used to economic stringency through
the years; what made her more unhappy was the civic tension between
her rival factions.  Civic peace was of that hair-trigger variety
dependent on the precarious balance maintained by the law of vendetta.
Exactly like the free-roaming bedouin tribes, the rival clans which
camped together within the city's limits subscribed to the ancient
principle that the murder of any member of one's own clan called for
the answering death of a member of the murderer's clan.  If the murder
was done *within* a clan, the murderer would be without defence, if
he was caught he was put to death, and if he escaped he became an
outlaw, a member of no clan, with every man's hand against him.  But
when a member of a clan was murdered by an *outsider*, his whole clan
rose up to avenge him.  The principal deterrent to violent crime in
Arabia and also the guarantee of civic order was, it is clear, the
fear of blood vengeance.

"At the time of Muhammad the two chief tribes that contended for
mastery in Mecca were the Quraysh and Khuza'ah, the former having
risen to dominance about the middle of the 5th century.  But the
Quraysh tribe was itself inwardly at tension between the Hashimite
and Ummayad families or clans.  Their rivalry for the prerogatives
of civil and religious power was a competitive struggle of great
consequence for the future of Islam."

Ibid, pages 718-21.

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Part 2 in a continuing series.


Assalam alaikum, my kin.
Love is the law, love under will.

Haramullah (Allah's Woman)
Tyagi@HouseofKaos.Abyss.com