The cube-shaped building called the Ka’ba marks the end of the Hajj for many Muslims. Located in the center of Mecca, the inside of the building contains little more than a few lamps, but it serves as a symbol of God’s divine presence.
Where does the word “Muslim” come from? Is it the same as “Moslem”?
Arabic is a Semitic language, as is its distant cousin Hebrew. Both languages are based on roots made up of three consonants. For example, many words can be derived from the root S-L-M (Sh-L-M in Hebrew). Keep your eye on the upper case letters to follow the root. A basic verb from that root, SaLiMa, means to be safe or whole. A related Arabic noun is salaam, meaning “peace” (like the Hebrew ShaLoM), is part of a standard greeting among Muslims. When Arabic speakers want to build further meanings on a particular root, they do so by modifying the root with either prefixes, infixes (modifying interior letters), or suffixes. For example, to convey the notion of “causing someone to be safe or at peace,” one modifies the root SaLiMa so that it becomes aSLaMa. In religious terms, to bring about a state of safety, peace, and wholeness, one has to get one’s relationship to God in perfect order. That means letting God be God and giving up all pretense at trying to do what only God can do—in short, surrendering to the supreme power. That state of surrender is called iSLaaM, and a person who acts in such a way as to cause that state is called a muSLiM. One of the first major non-Semitic languages early Muslim conquerors encountered was Persian, in which the “u” was pronounced as an “o,” and the “i” as an “e.” Hence the variation so common today, “Moslem.” Both mean exactly the same thing; the variations are entirely due to differences in pronunciation.
What was the religious tradition in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam?
At a little over fourteen hundred years old, Islam is one of the world’s younger major religious traditions. It began in the early seventh century near the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula in a city called Mecca, an important stop along the caravan route from Syria to the north to the Yemenite kingdoms of southwestern Arabia. Some Christian and Jewish families and tribes had long before taken up residence in various parts of Arabia, but the prevailing religious climate was a kind of animism sometimes called “polydaemonism,” the worship of “many spiritual beings” thought to inhabit natural phenomena. Features of landscape, such as stones and springs, could take on a numinous aura and gradually become the focus of a sacred place. Some sites developed as the centers of cultic worship and pilgrimage, with one of the several local deities (ilahat) rising to prominence as the chief among them (al-ilah, “the” god, elided into allah).
What were some of the most important things happening in the Mediterranean world and especially the Middle East and the environs of the Arabian Peninsula when Islam began?
In pre-Islamic times the Arabian Peninsula had rarely been at the center of Middle Eastern events. An immense coastline made the land accessible to and from the Red Sea on the west, the Persian Gulf on the east, and the Indian Ocean on the south, but the real estate of that vast, inhospitable ocean of sand held little strategic interest for the regional powers. Local kingdoms had ruled to the north, in Syria, and to the southwest, in Yemen. Although the Greeks and Romans knew about the place and liked its incense, they never set their sights on the territory. Soon after the Roman Empire divided into West and East in the fourth century, Byzantium began to consolidate its power in the Eastern Mediterranean, taking control of much of the central Middle East and North Africa. By the time Rome fell in 476, the Byzantine Empire was well established in its own right. Along its southeastern fringe, a line that ran northeast from southern Egypt through Syria and Iraq and across the Caucasus almost to the Caspian Sea, the Byzantines had developed a “buffer state” in the Monophysite Christian Arab tribe called the Ghassanids. Meanwhile, the Sasanian Persian Empire that ruled from eastern Iraq toward the east across what is now Iran also had its own buffer state in the Arab tribe called the unchurched Lakhmids. Through their Arab surrogates these two powerful “confessional empires” (Christian and Zoroastrian) struggled back and forth across the region to the north of the Arabian peninsula, an area covering much of present-day Syria and Iraq, engaged in a protracted tug-of-war over the Fertile Crescent with its enormous river systems.
Are there any important connections between ancient Middle East and European powers?
The Sasanian Persian empire had supplanted the last major Roman Middle Eastern successor state, the Parthians, in the early third century. Before the end of that century the Sasanians had reestablished Zoroastrianism as the creed of the realm. Just around the time of Muhammad’s birth both of the confessional empires reached the zenith of their powers, Byzantium under Emperor Justinian (527–565) and Sasanian Persia under Nushirvan (531–579). An important trade route ran up and down the western coastal region, a highway for exchange from Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Yemen, to Syria and points north by way of Mecca. And as the Muslim community was beginning to grow in size and strength, the Byzantine and Sasanian regimes were embroiled in a protracted war (603–628) via their Arab clients that would virtually exhaust the capability of both empires to project their control over the central Middle East. The resulting political vacuum set the stage for the emergence of the Muslim forces as a dominant power in the region. By the time Muhammad died, Byzantium and Persia had all but spent themselves into bankruptcy and had so worn each other down that neither would mount serious resistance when the Muslim tribes advanced out of Arabia in a conquering mood.
Was there anything like “monotheism” in Arabia at the origins of Islam?
At Muhammad’s time the Meccan cult revolved around a principal deity called Allah (“the” god, or simply God), whose three “daughters” (Allat, Manat, and Uzza) also figured in local piety. The Quraysh tribe had become the ruling authority over the city’s affairs and exercised considerable control over the Ka’ba. The Ka’ba and its stone had many meanings to the Meccans of Muhammad’s day, and they would play an important role, sometimes negative and sometimes more positive, in the Prophet’s life. According to one account, when the structure had to be rebuilt, the Meccans asked Muhammad the Trustworthy to replace the stone in its socket. Ever aware of the symbolic value of his public actions, and looking for ways to unify local factions, Muhammad placed the stone in the center of his cloak and had representatives of the chief interests lift it with him by grabbing a corner of the cloak. Some estimates date that event at around the year 604 C.E., prior to the beginning of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As the Quraysh came more and more to disapprove of his new preaching, they applied the ultimate social pressure, denying Muhammad access to the sacred precincts to pray. Eventually the Ka’ba would become the center of the world of Islam. In the classic Islamic interpretation of history, the birth of Islam marked the death of the “age of ignorance” (jahiliya).
Who was Muhammad? What is known about his early life?
Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 C.E. to a rather poor family of the clan of Hashim, one of the branches of the Quraysh tribe. His father died before Muhammad was born and the boy’s mother died when he was six years old. According to Arabian custom, the child was sent to be reared for a time among the Bedouin. Tradition names his nurse Halima. After his mother’s death, Muhammad grew up in the custody first of grandfather Abd al-Muttalib and later in the house of his uncle Abu Talib, whose son Ali would later become a major religious and political figure as well. Tradition has it that the young Muhammad travelled with his uncle on business. One story tells how in Syria they met an old Christian monk named Bahira, who discerned the marks of prophetic greatness in the boy.
Did Muhammad have any siblings?
He
