by Douglas Boin
14.2 The Social World of the Arabian Peninsula in the Sixth Century CE
As we left the reign of Emperor Justinian, we journeyed with Cosmas Indicopleustes on a voyage to the Indian Ocean. In addition to taking us far beyond the Mediterranean, allowing us to gain a view from the ground of people and customs in South and Central Asia, Cosmas sharpened our understanding of the world closer to his own home, too. During the sixth century, East Roman traders now felt comfortable sailing east through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden – in effect, bypassing Sasanian tax stations on the overland route. As a result, the southern Arabian peninsula became a crucial geographic pawn in the games played by these two empires.
The situation in the south peninsula must have been tense, especially as it was set against the backdrop of a fragile peace in the north. There, Arab‐Roman and Arab‐Sasanian allies had been enlisted to secure the borderlands. By 570 CE, the Sasanian King Khusrow II made a bold gamble: He invaded the territory of modern Yemen and installed a Sasanian governor to disrupt Roman traders. By 610, the two empires were locked in outright war. Virtually two entire dioceses, of the East and of Egypt, would be lost. Emperor Heraclius would respond to the challenge.
Inside the confines of the Arabian peninsula, boxed in by the hard and soft power plays of Sasanian and Roman leaders, another story was already in progress.
The interior of the Arabian peninsula held little interest to rulers of Rome or Persia. That, at least, would explain why each empire enlisted Arab families to police the northern borders and why the center of the peninsula was never a prized land‐grab for either state. The two empires’ stark political borders were not sealed cultural boundaries, however. For centuries, people of Arabia had been trading with their neighbors on all sides. Leather – for belts, tents, and military use – was a key commodity, valued by Romans and Sasanians alike. Values were another. The ability, indeed, the willingness of the local Jafnid and Nasrid families to work with the Roman and Sasanian government reveals a second, subtler kind of exchange. Certainly there were many local leaders who recognized the benefits of being politically, not just economically, engaged with people beyond the peninsula.
Daily life unfolded across the peninsula in many ways, and geographic and environmental factors played a critical role shaping this social world. Two places where we can detect the rhythms of sixth‐ and seventh‐century daily life the best are merchant oases and desert sanctuaries.
Merchant oases and desert sanctuaries
Blankets of sand cover a large portion of the peninsula, but there are significant respites. A rugged plateau called the Hijaz lines the western peninsula, along the Red Sea. The cities of Yathrib and Mecca are located here, and each in their own way is indicative of the kinds of cities one would find on the peninsula. Mecca was the center of an important sanctuary; Yathrib, a city whose name was later changed to Medina (meaning, “The City” [of the Prophet Muhammad]), the location of a vital oasis. Both shed light on daily life at the dawn of Islam.
Yathrib, in the west, was like sites as far away as the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Medina has changed quite dramatically from its appearance in the sixth century, but the fifteenth‐century city of Birkat al‐Mawz, in modern Oman, can provide a comparative, evocative example of what it might have looked like. Situated in the shadow of the mountains, Birkat al‐Mawz is a lush settlement of mud‐brick houses surrounded by green date palms and banana trees. Local springs ensured a steady agricultural harvest both for the oasis’s residents and for families in surrounding villages who were dependent on it.
Sixth‐century Yathrib would have fit this profile. Date groves flourished around the local springs, and the oasis as a whole benefited from its position at the base of the mountainous Hijaz region. We can even sketch a rough profile of its residents. Organized in tribes, as life was elsewhere throughout the peninsula, Yathrib’s residents were a diverse group, including many Jewish families who lived at the oasis and in its vicinity.
Mecca may not have been as verdant, but it was equally thriving. Unfortunately, archaeological information about life in the sixth‐ and seventh‐century town is slim, so we need to look elsewhere to create a mental picture of it. One site which might be useful in this regard is the location of a desert sanctuary that has been excavated in modern Yemen, at Ma’rib. The sanctuary of Almaqah at Ma’rib was an important pre‐Islamic religious site (Figure 14.2). Archaeological evidence suggests that it remained in use at least through the fourth century CE, if not later. Similar sites, focused on other gods, can be found across the Arabian peninsula.
Figure 14.2 Among the people living in the southwestern Arabian peninsula were the Sabaeans, who had come to power around the eighth century BCE. The Sabaeans built this sanctuary at Ma’rib, in modern Yemen. It was dedicated to Almaqah and received worshippers for more than a thousand years, until at least the third or fourth century CE. Sabaean architecture helps scholars visualize the landscape of the pre‐Islamic Arabian peninsula. These square‐shaped pillars formed part of the sanctuary’s entrance. Similar cuboid forms appear throughout Arabia, in part because of the long‐established custom there of artists working in stone (in contrast to the Roman world where pourable concrete inspired different forms). Managed by a local family, the Ma’rib sanctuary provided a safe space where individuals from different tribes or with competing interests might come together. Both in form and in its custom, the Ma’rib sanctuary evokes the social world of other sanctuaries on the pre‐Islamic Arabian peninsula, like Mecca.
Photo credit: Eric Lafforgue/Alamy Stock Photo (2006).
The deities worshipped at these shrines were diverse. Many were related to the stars, the sun, the moon, and the cosmos, like the god Almaqah, to whom the sanctuary at Ma’rib was dedicated. Sites like these, “cut off” from other places, were considered holy and were called in Arabic haram, a word for “sanctuary.” Apart from being places where people interacted with their gods, a haram also played a key role in daily human interactions on the peninsula. The space inside the boundaries of a haram offered a neutral ground where individuals, families, and tribes could come, meet, and resolve their differences. Violence here was socially forbidden; the local families in charge of maintaining the site ensured it.
This background is crucial for getting a feel of sixth‐century Mecca, site of the holiest sanctuary in Islam. Today, skyscrapers and other ambitious buildings rise from the desert. But at the turn of the seventh century, Mecca was a desert sanctuary town. Like Ma’rib, it was the site of an important local shrine, the Ka’ba, or “Cube,” which housed a sacred black stone. By the sixth century CE, one local family, the Quraysh, maintained and administered this holy site. They proved quite capable stewards, and their leadership drew a mixture of local families and traders to Mecca.
14.3 The Believers Movement
Muhammad (b. c.570 CE) grew up in this world of merchant oases and local shrines. That might be the extent of what we can safely say about his early life. The details of Muhammad’s birth, even the year, are not preserved in any sixth‐century documents. But the lack of precise information for one man born on the Arabian peninsula should hardly be surprising, especially given how little we know about the lives of Muhammad’s contemporaries – the historian Theophylact, for example – whose writings are important for understanding the seventh‐century Roman Empire.
Stories that were told about Muhammad’s early life cannot be dismissed so readily, however. These are signs of a rich biographical tradition that his followers passed down in the centuries after his death (632 CE). It developed for good reason. The movement that Muhammad founded, which we call “Islam,” toppled the status quo in Mecca at the sanctuary of the Ka’ba and radically transformed the social and political relationship between the Arabian peninsula and the Roman and Sasanian Empires. As we will see, the circumstances that led to this transformation was a series of relentless battles waged outside the peninsula.
The success of Muhammad’s
movement was also dependent on something else: the creation of a new sense of community. Their strong group identity sprang in large part from a seminal collection of Arabic texts, called the “Recitations,” or the “Qur’an.” According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad had received these revelations directly from a monotheistic deity, Allah. Then, they were written down in Arabic exactly as Allah had revealed them to him. Consisting of 114 chapters, subdivided into verses, the Qur’an remains the holiest text for Muslims today.
An essential starting point for thinking about the Arabian world of the sixth and seventh centuries is that neither the name “Islam” nor the word “Muslim” were ever used by Muhammad’s first followers in the way they have come to be used now. The text of the Qur’an makes this point abundantly clear, largely referring to the people of the earliest community as mu’minum, or the “Believers.” This Arabic word (singular, mu’min) is used almost a thousand times in the Qur’an; the word muslim, meaning “one who submits,” is used less than a hundred.
Of course, members of this community eventually did embrace the name “Muslim” as part of their identity. But the process by which that happened – the history of how the early “Believers” movement grew into a community of “Muslims” – is precisely what we’re studying. For that reason alone, it is crucial not to rush our story by starting to talk about the religion of “Islam” or seventh‐century “Muslims.” As with the followers of Jesus, who came to embrace their identity as “Christians” only about three generations after his death, so, too, would followers of Muhammad come to embrace their identity as “Muslims” only about a century after their prophet’s death.
How, when, and why that happened are historical questions. They cannot be passed over because we think we know how the story of Islam may have started. One text from the seventh century CE confirms the workings of this complicated process.
The Constitution of Medina
For the members of the earliest community, Muhammad’s companions, it was their identity as “Believers” which brought them together (Key Debates 14.1: Muhammad’s “House” and the Development of Early Mosque Architecture). The importance of this term of self‐identity is substantiated in a document, written in Arabic, that is not contained in the Qur’an. It was written around 622 CE, the year in which Muhammad left his home in Mecca to move north to the city of Yathrib. This text is known as the “Constitution of Medina,” also called the umma document.
Key Debates 14.1 Muhammad’s House andthe Development of Early Mosque Architecture
After the emigration, in 622 CE, Muhammad acquired land in Yathrib where he built a house and a worship space, or masjid, for his community. (Masjid is the Arabic word for “mosque.”) This famous story is recounted in many Arabic sources. It plays an important role in modern conversations about the development of Islamic architecture.
According to one of the prophet’s first biographers, Ibn Sa’d of Baghdad (d. 844 CE), Muhammad let his camel take the lead in choosing the site where the Believers would worship. This trusted animal wandered upon a local animal pen and threshing floor which belonged to two orphans. The prophet offered to pay the orphans so that he could build a masjid on their land, but the boys graciously declined, insisting that they give it to Muhammad as a gift. Muhammad paid them anyway (Ibn Sa’d, The Great Book of Generations, volume 1.2.65). This space became Muhammad’s house and the Believers’ first mosque.
A robust tradition developed about what it looked like. Ibn Sa’d himself gives detailed measurements for its size and the materials from which it was constructed. The building was 100 cubits long by 100 cubits wide and was enclosed by a wall made of palm trunks and branches. Muhammad lived in rooms constructed of mud brick, covered with palm branches; and three gates allowed access into and out of the courtyard. The qibla, or direction of prayer, was marked to the north, facing Jerusalem (Ibn Sa’d, The Great Book of Generations, volume 1.2.65–66).
This ground plan is remarkably similar to later mosques. The eighth‐century mosque in Damascus and the tenth‐century mosque in Cordoba, on the Iberian peninsula, share the same traits. This similarity has led some architectural historians to deduce that Muhammad’s property was “a house only incidentally” and that, from the beginning, it “was intended … to serve as a focal point for the new Islamic community” (Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 39). This claim – that Muhammad, in 622 CE, established the prototype for all later mosques – is provocative but not easy to evaluate. Arabic sources state that Muhammad’s “house” was destroyed during an extensive renovation in 638 CE, and no archaeological evidence exists which can confirm or refute Ibn Sa’d’s account.
Ibn Sa’d’s story has also now come under scrutiny. For the measurements he gives happen to be the same as the courtyard of Solomon’s First Temple in Jerusalem, as described in Jewish Scripture (Ezekiel 40.47). The broad outline of Ibn Sa’d’s narrative – Muhammad finds a threshing floor, offers money to transform it, is graciously refused, then pays for it anyway – also mirrors an episode in Jewish Scripture (2 Samuel 24.18–25) which describes how King David laid the foundations for the Jerusalem Temple. For these reasons, one scholar has characterized the Arabic history of Muhammad’s house as “an elaborate literary confection” (Jeremy Johns, “The ‘House of the Prophet’ and the Concept of the Mosque,” in Bayt al‐Maqdis, Jerusalem and Early Islam, ed. by Jeremy Johns [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 59–112, at p. 107).
What Muhammad’s property looked like in the seventh century CE will probably not be answered soon. Archaeological fieldwork is not currently permitted in Medina.
Unfortunately, no seventh‐century copy of this artifact has yet been discovered, but scholars are virtually certain it existed. The text is known from the reports of two later writers – one living in the mid‐eighth century CE, another in the ninth century CE. Although historians are naturally trained to be skeptical of documents attested in later authorities, scholars who have studied the text of the “Constitution of Medina” are virtually unanimous that it dates to the seventh century CE. For one, its language is filled with many archaic Arabic expressions dated to that time period. Secondly – and perhaps more significantly – it presents a view of Muhammad’s movement that departs in radical ways from the stories which later developed about early Islam.
The events that led to the birth of this document are important. Muhammad’s “emigration” to Yathrib in 622 CE, or hijra, would come to mark a crucial turning point for the Believers, largely because it was not a journey that happened under auspicious circumstances. Twelve years earlier in Mecca, in 610 CE – perhaps around the time he was forty, if his birth tradition can be accepted – Muhammad had begun to receive his revelations. Over the course of the next decade, he had brought this new, monotheistic message to the residents of his hometown. To the family in charge of the Ka’ba, people who had built a name for themselves and their city by successfully administering and growing their sanctuary, Muhammad’s teachings aroused suspicion and maybe even fear about whether he intended to upset the status quo. In 622 CE, as a result of disagreements with the Quraysh, the family in charge of the sanctuary, Muhammad and his companions sought refuge in Yathrib.
Muhammad’s “emigration” to Yathrib would prove foundational to his movement’s development. Shortly after Muhammad’s death, his followers would start to record time around their memory of that journey; the year of the emigration would now mark “year one” in their new community calendar. (Following the precedent for recording Christian time with “A.D.” [anno Domini, “year of our Lord”], this new method of telling Islamic time is now abbreviated “A.H.,” or anno Hegirae [“year of the hijra”].) The city of Yathrib itself would eventually come to be known by a different name, al‐medinat al‐nabi, “the city of the prophet,” or Medina, in Saudi Arabia.
The “Constitution of Medina” was written shortly after Muhammad and his companions arrived
in Yathrib. It outlines a settlement that was negotiated between Muhammad, his companions, and the leading families of Yathrib who were supporters of his movement. Throughout the text, the people who belong to Muhammad’s movement are called the “Believers.” The document as a whole articulates a plan for cooperation and mutual respect between participating parties, many of whom included local Jewish tribes living in this area of the Arabian peninsula:
Whoever follows us among the Jews shall have assistance and equitable treatment; they shall not be oppressed, nor shall [any of us] gang up against them. The peace of the Believers is indivisible. No Believer shall make a [separate] peace to the exclusion of … [another] Believer in fighting in the path of God, except on the basis of equity and justice among them. … The Jews of [the local tribe] Banu ‘Awf are a community [umma] with the Believers. (The “Constitution of Medina,” sections 16–17, 25, trans. by F. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010], pp. 227–232, based on the text from Ibn Ishaq [d. 767 CE])
The “Constitution of Medina” is an extraordinary source because it shows that Muhammad’s vision for his early seventh‐century community, or umma, was large enough to include other monotheists, like Yathrib’s local Jewish families.
The constitution itself carried with it the authority that came from Muhammad’s stature as an “apostle of God,” the one to whom Allah had made his revelations. As the document states, “God [Allah] supports whatever is most righteous and upright in this treaty.” This political allegiance – between Muhammad’s emigrant group and his supporters in Yathrib – established a coalition that would eventually wrestle control of the Ka’ba from Mecca’s leaders. It was also rooted in a shared commitment to the power and meaning of the prophet’s “Recitations.”
