Old
Wine in New Bottles – The Genesis of Islam
"Eschatological piety and fear of hellfire recall Syriac
monastic preaching. The role of the prophet, the significance of written
revelation, obedience of God's commands, and stress on communal
life as the context of religious fulfillment all parallel
Judaic ideas."
– Ira Lapidus (A History of Islamic Societies, p25)
For
centuries the Arabian peninsula had been entangled in the politics
of Byzantium,
Persian and Axum. Textiles and finished goods, weapons and
techniques, superstitions and ideas, all came from outside. Among
the Arabs,
tribal organisation was everything, engendering fierce loyalties
and equally fierce enmities. Like the Irish tribes of the same
period, nothing encouraged a 'national' unity or government,
there was no higher authority than the tribal sheikh.
Although the Hejaz (western
Arabia) itself was never colonised it had been affected by the
migrations of peoples and the vagaries of the caravan trade.
With the rise of maritime trade and the decline of Arabia's overland
caravan traffic, tribes that had settled in the oases either
migrated elsewhere or reverted to nomadism. The towns themselves
were
abandoned.
By the 6th
century the ancient southern and northern kingdoms of the peninsular
were well into decline, with many of their clans migrating to
the border lands of Byzantium and Persia.
Though weakened
by war and pestilence, and with their frontier provinces wrecked,
neither Persia nor Byzantium perceived the fragmented tribes
of Arabia as any threat and hired the new arrivals as 'frontier
guards' and mercenaries.
Justinian's
Legacy
Part
of the ruinous legacy of the Christian monarch Justinian (527-565)
directly favoured the rise of Islam.
The
Persian wars had disrupted the 'Silk Road' from Hamadan to Antioch
and Justinian's plan was to re-route Asian trade north
of the Caspian Sea (he sent emissaries to the Turks
of Transoxia), but the arrival of Avars from central Asia
scuttled that idea.
Justinian,
pre-occupied with the reconquest of the west, withdrew Roman
shipping from the Red Sea. To keep the trade route open he relied
upon diplomatic pressure on the Ethiopians. Unfortunately, what
remained of maritime trade was catastrophically affected by plague
rats arriving from East Africa.
War
in Mesopotamia and the decline of Red Sea shipping once again
gave a fillip to the caravan route along the Hejaz. Only one
caravan town was in a position to respond to
the opportunity: Mecca.
'The
Days of Ignorance'
Mecca, dominated
by the Koresh tribe, was the one Arabian town enjoying any sort
of prosperity in the 6th century. The sanctuary of the Kaaba,
centre of an annual pilgrimage and pan-tribal market, benefitted
from
a lively livestock and slave trade, as well as the multi-faith
shrine itself. But it was a wild 'frontier' town, rife with alcoholism,
prostitution, profiteering
and idol-worship. Muhammad
ibn Abdallah ('an original and superior genius'
– Gibbon),
born into the Koresh Banu
Hashim clan,
became an affluent but disaffected urban merchant who saw virtue
in the puritanical tribal values of the desert nomads.
Though orphaned
when a boy Muhammad had the good fortune to be raised by
a grandfather who happened to be head of the ruling clan of Mecca.
As a young man he worked the caravan trade and married his employer,
a wealthy widow. Doubly blessed, Muhammad had the leisure time
to ponder the nature of the gods and plan his career.
"From his earliest
youth Mahomet was addicted to religious contemplation; each
year, during the month of Ramadan ... in a cave of Hera,
three miles
from Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm,
whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the
prophet." (Gibbon)
Periodically
entering a state of trance (wahi), probably as a consequence
of meditative experiments, Muhammad inevitably saw 'visions'
and heard 'voices'.
His devoted wife Khadeejah was there to reassure him not only
of his sanity but of a divine appointment.
The delusion was nothing less than 'final cosmic messenger' of
God himself, a conviction
enthusiastically endorsed by an entourage which included 'Salmân
the Persian', an ex-Zoroastrian, and Warraqa ibn Nawfal,
the cousin/uncle of the Muhammad's wife Khadeejah and a Christian.
Temporal lobe epilepsy?
Daily contact with sheep might explain a lot about "mystical
encounters".
I am advised by a practicing physician that
the trances experienced
by
Muhammad and
described
in
the
a'hadith (narrations about the life of the
Prophet) correspond to a classic case of "tonic-clonic
epilepsy with a temporal start".
Ovine
tuberculosis is a problem even today and raged unchecked
in earlier
times. This type of tuberculosis
can
be
transmitted to humans and when a human is infected
the disease travels directly to the brain where it forms
a calcified
cavity.
This
calcified
mass causes a great deal of irritation and brings on
epilepsy.
Now
the
Prophet, we are told, heard ringing in his ears, his
heart
beat rapidly, his face
turned red and his breathing laboured. Falling to
the ground, he would shake with his eyes
wide open and his lips trembling.
He would drool or sweat profusely and would sometimes
make a sound like a snoring camel. And, of course,
he
saw and heard things no one else saw or heard.
As
a victim of such convulsions there is little doubt
that Muhammad himself was convinced God (or
Gabriel) was
speaking
to him. Centuries later the same "mystical experience"
was shared by that pastoral maid of Orleans Joan of
Arc
– who
also
was raised
in close contact with sheep. |
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In
mid-life, this
ordinary Arab merchant assumed the mantle of cultic leader
and self-styled prophet. Not surprisingly, the wider population
of Mecca either ignored or
derided his prophetic pretensions.
Frustrated and yet fortified by the rejection, Muhammad and
some of his loyal cult members retreated to the rival town of
Yathrib (Medina). Others crossed the Red Sea to take up residence
in
the Christian
kingdom
of Axum.
In Yathrib
fierce inter-tribal warfare allowed 'Muhammad the holy man' to
take on a role of 'arbitrator.'
Emerging from the conflict as a prominent religious leader
Muhammad could now formulate serious political ambition and
a reckoning with the Meccan establishment. Combining in his own
person both religious and military
leadership he could now strike back at
the skeptics and rejectors of his prophetic status by deploying
a private army and singling
out critics for assassination or execution.
From his base
at Medina, several years of banditry
won Muhammad a
large following. For eight
years, until
630,
he raided the Meccan caravans and imposed an alms tax ('zakat') on
the tribes. Ultimately, he would plunder the pagan riches of the
shrine at Mecca.
'The
Prophet': Caesar AND Pope
Mohammad's
'Islam' was eclectic and opportunistic. The religious influences
upon 7th century Arabia were myriad. All represented a higher
civilization than Arabia's tribal society which must have distressed
the zealot.
Maintaining
that, over the course of twenty two years, he communed with an
angel, Muhammad borrowed freely from the older faiths to fashion
a monotheistic religion adapted for the tribal
society of Arabia fused with an ideology of divinely
sanctioned conquest.
In Muhammad's
day Judaism and Christianity had
been long established among the Arabs,
the Jews for centuries and in considerable numbers after the
Roman wars, and the Christians from the mid-2nd century. Missionaries
and proselytisers, they had converted whole tribes of Arabs to
their cause. As with the German tribes of Europe, faith was not
an article of individual conviction but a tribal allegiance and
by the 6th century there were Jewish tribes and Christian tribes.
In Medina, Muhammad lived among Jews and had an intimate acquaintance
with Judaism. He also either encountered or received at second
hand knowledge of diverse and heretical Christian sects.
When Mohammad
failed to convince the Jews of Medina that he was the latest
(and last) prophet he turned against them, maintaining that they
had
distorted
their own Bible. In 624 Muslim prayer mats were turned
from facing Jerusalem to facing Mecca. Two Jewish tribes were driven out
and a third decimated. The plunder helped
recruit
Bedouin
tribes
to
his cause. Eventually
Meccan resistance collapsed, particular after Muhammad enshrined
the old pagan pilgrimage to Mecca as a pillar of the new faith.
Yet for all
his successes the confederation inspired by Muhammad's charismatic
personality – he
welded together an unlikely coalition of ex-merchants, desert
nomads, and agriculturalists – did
not survive his death. Most Arabs, particularly the nomadic
and semi-nomadic Bedouin, remained at heart polytheistic pagans
and Muhammad's successor Abr Bakr (632-634) immediately had to
crush a rival alliance of tribes in eastern Arabia, and even
rival
'prophets'.
Islam has
been riven by sectarianism ever since.
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