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A History of Arabia
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Ira M. Lapidus |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 With vast stretches of desert but potential wealth through oil, Arabia is a land of contradictions. It has gone through enormous transition and turmoil, but is the state in which the prophet Muhammad was born and raised. In this feature Ira M. Lapidus, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, looks at the history of Arabia from the twelfth century B.C. He compares the characteristics of ancient Arabia--which was predominantly pastoral, pagan, politically fragmented, and full of migratory clans--to those of the imperial world of the Middle East--which was agricultural, monotheistic, and politically organised. |
 n the eve of the Islamic era, Arabia stood on the periphery of the Middle Eastern imperial societies, in a state of development equivalent to the ancient rather than the evolved condition of the rest of the region. Here the primary communities remained especially powerful, while urban, religious, and royal institutions, though not absent, were less developed. Whereas the imperial world was predominantly agricultural, Arabia was primarily pastoral. While the imperial world was citied, Arabia was the home of camps and oases. Whereas the imperial peoples were committed to the monotheistic religions, Arabia was largely pagan. While the imperial world was politically organized, Arabia was politically fragmented. |
 At the same time, Arabia was always in close contact with and strongly under the influence of the imperial regions. There were no physical boundaries between Arabia and the Middle East proper. No rigid ethnic or demographic frontier isolated Arabia from the rest of the region; nor did great walls or political boundaries. Arabian peoples migrated slowly into the Middle East and made up much of the population of the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. Arabs in the fertile crescent region shared political forms, religious beliefs, economic connections, and physical space with the societies around them. Arabia was further connected to the rest of the region by itinerant preachers, who introduced monotheism into the largely pagan peninsula; by merchants who brought textiles, jewelry, and foodstuffs such as grain and wine into Arabia and stimulated the taste for the good things of life; and by the agents of the imperial powers who intervened diplomatically and politically to extend their trading privileges, protect sympathetic religious populations, and advance their strategic interests. The Byzantines and the Sasanians disputed control of Yemen, and both were active in creating spheres of influence in North Arabia. They also exported military technique to the Arabs. From the Romans and the Persians the Arabs obtained new arms, and learned how to use armor. They learned new tactics, and the importance of discipline. This seepage of military technique came through the enrollment of Arabs as auxiliaries in the Roman or Persian armies, and sometimes through the unhappy experience of being repulsed by superior forces on the frontiers of the empires. |
Thus the civilization of the Middle Eastern empires was seeping into Arabia as happened everywhere where developed empires maintained frontiers with politically and culturally less organized societies. These influences and the need to mobilize the power and resources required to maintain political autonomy, or to carry on trade with empires, stimulated in less developed societies the same processes of stratification, specialization, and of community and identity formation by which the empires had themselves come into being. They generated in peripheral areas just those conditions that allowed for the eventual amalgamation of empire and outside areas into a single society. By the late sixth century, however, these inducements to evolutionary change had not gone so far as to absorb Arabia into the general civilization of the Middle East, or to inspire in it the birth of a new civilization. |
From the beginning of camel domestication and the occupation of the central Arabian desert in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC until the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the balance between parochial elements and the unifying forces of religion and empire lay heavily on the side of small, relatively isolated communities. Families and clans, often pastoralists and camel herders, and the confederations built upon them, were the basic units of society. The bedouins raised camels and migrated seasonally in search of pasturage. They also provided caravans with animals, guides, and guards. They passed the winter in desert reserves, migrating to seek spring pasturage at the first signs of rain. In the summer they usually camped near villages or oases, where they exchanged animal products for grain, dates, utensils, weapons, and cloth. |
The migratory peoples lived in tight-knit kinship groups, patriarchal families formed of a father, his sons, and their families. These families were further grouped into clans of several hundred tents, which migrated together, owned pasturage in common, and fought as one in battle. Each clan was fundamentally an independent unit. All loyalties were absorbed by the group, which acted as a collectivity to defend its individual members and to meet their responsibilities. If a member was harmed, the clan would avenge him. If he did harm, it would stand responsible with him. As a consequence of this group solidarity, called 'asabiya, the bedouin clan regarded itself as a complete polity and recognized no external authority. Each clan was led by a shaykh (chief), who was usually selected by the clan elders from one of the prominent families and who always acted in accordance with their counsel. He settled internal disputes according to the group's traditions, but he could not legislate or command. The shaykh had to be wealthy and show generosity to the needy and to his supporters; he had to be a man of exquisite tact and prudence--forbearing, resolute, and practical. Above all, he had to have the good judgment to avoid antagonizing his sensitive followers. |
The clan defined the mental universe of the bedouin. Poetry expressed a fundamental devotion to the prestige and security of the group; without the clan, the individual had no place in the world, no life of his own. The language of the bedouins offered no way to express the concept of individuality or personality. The term wajh (face), although applied to the chief, was really a concept designating the persona of the group rather than the individuality of the shaykh as a person. In certain conditions the bedouins could be integrated into more inclusive, often stratified, bodies. At the points of contact between the fertile parts of Arabia and the desert, at oases in Yemen, and in the northern margins where the Arabian desert touches the fertile crescent, confederations organized caravans and trade. The formation of a haram, a common sanctuary, also allowed for worship of the same gods, economic exchange, sociability, and political bargaining. |
Monarchies and kingdoms took shape on the peripheries. In South Arabia, royal authority was first established about 1000 BC and lasted until the Muslim era. By the fifth century BC, Yemen was organized into kingdoms encompassing agricultural, trading, and pastoral peoples, with monarchs, landed elites, a religious pantheon, and organized temple worship of the gods. The political elite was drawn from aristocratic tribes and controlled extensive landed estates. Temples also had substantial holdings, while the commoners were organized into clans that were obliged to provide agricultural and military services to the elites. Tributary and vassal tribes extended the power of the Yemeni kingdoms well into the interior of Arabia. In the north, kingdoms were less fully institutionalized. The Nabatean kingdom (sixth century BC-AD 106) was ruled by a king but really depended on a supporting coalition of clan and tribal chiefs. From 85 BC, the Nabateans, with their capital at Petra, controlled much of Jordan and Syria, and traded with Yemen, Egypt, Damascus, and the coastal cities of Palestine until it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 106. Palmyra succeeded Petra, extending monarchical control over the deserts and surrounding border areas. An urban capital, elaborate temples, wide commercial networks, and a strong Hellenistic culture marked Palmyran supremacy. These kingdoms maintained economic and political order throughout the peninsula by bringing the bedouins of the desert interiors into the political, commercial, and cultural frameworks of the periphery. |
The balance of power between the clans of the desert interior and the large-scale societies of the periphery was historically variable. From about 1000 BC until about AD 300 Yemen, the Hijaz, and the northern periphery successfully organized the interior of the peninsula and kept bedouin life subordinate to the agricultural and commercial economies of the settled kingdoms, but the opening of sea routes for international trade in the first century BC brought financial and political disaster to Yemen. Political power in the south further weakened with the failure of overland routes; bedouins interfered in internal conflicts, pushed in against agricultural areas, and cut off Yemeni influence in the Hijaz and in central Arabia. In AD 328, Imru al-Qays b. 'Amr, king of the Arabs, took control of Najran. In the north, Palmyra was destroyed in AD 271--the victim, as were the Nabateans, of Roman efforts to incorporate northern Arabia directly into the empire. By the end of the third century, the peripheral kingdoms had lost control of the center of the peninsula. |
From the early fourth century to the end of the sixth century, there were several efforts to reestablish the dominance of peripheral kingdoms, restore order in the desert, and protect trade and oasis cultivation. In Yemen, the Himyarite kingdom was reestablished, and its influence, mediated by the tribal confederation of Kinda, extended over the bedouins of the Hijaz and central Arabia. After the destruction of Petra and Palmyra, the Romans attempted to defend these provinces by recruiting Arab confederates to guard them against other Arabs and the Sasanians. At the end of the fifth century the Ghassan, an Arab-Christian people, defended Syria and Palestine against the bedouins and the Persians. The Sasanian empire also maintained a buffer state--the kingdom of Lakhm, a coalition of Aramean and Christian tribes along the border between Iraq and the desert, organized under the leadership of the Lakhm family whose capital was at al-Hira, on the lower reaches of the Euphrates. The new peripheral regimes, however, were less powerful than their predecessors, and in the course of the sixth century they all disintegrated. The South Arabian economy crumbled, and political unity was completely lost. In the North, the Romans and Persians removed their vassals and attempted to partition north Arabia and absorb it into their respective empires. In the early seventh century the Byzantine and Sasanian empires engaged in mutually exhausting wars. Thus, the middle period confederations had been destroyed by outside powers who could not replace even their limited contributions to political and economic order. |
In the sixth century, only Mecca stood against the trend towards political and social fragmentation. A religious sanctuary whose shrine, the Ka'ba, attracted pilgrims from all over Arabia, Mecca became the repository of the various idols and tribal gods of the peninsula, and the destination of an annual pilgrimage. The pilgrimage also entailed a period of truce, which served not only for religious worship, but also for the arbitration of disputes, the settlement of claims and debts, and, of course, trade. The Meccan fairs gave the Arabian tribes a common identity and gave Mecca moral primacy in much of western and central Arabia. |
These fairs were the origin of Mecca's commercial interests. The people called the Quraysh, who took control of Mecca in the fifth century, became a skilled retailing population. In the sixth century they found a place in the spice trade as well, as difficulties with other international trade routes diverted traffic to the overland Arabian route. Byzantine sea power in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean was on the decline; piracy was endemic in the Red Sea. At the same time, the Persian Gulf--Tigris--Euphrates route was harassed by Sasanian exploitation, and was frequently disrupted by Lakhm, Ghassan, and Persian--Roman wars. By the mid-sixth century, as heir to Petra and Palmyra, Mecca became one of the important caravan cities of the Middle East. The Meccans carried spices, leather, drugs, cloth, and slaves which had come from Africa or the Far East to Syria, and returned money, weapons, cereals, and wine to Arabia. The trade required treaties with Byzantine officials and with the bedouins to assure safe passage of the caravans, protection of water and pasture rights, and guides and scouts. Such arrangements eventually gave Mecca a sphere of political as well as commercial influence among the nomads and created a confederation of client tribes. In association with the Tamim tribes, a loose Meccan diplomatic hegemony was established in the desert. With the decline of Abyssinia, Ghassan, and Lakhm, Meccan influence was about the only integrative political force in late sixth-century Arabia. |
In most of Arabia, however, the failure of the border powers led to bedouinization. As bedouin communities were set free of the political and commercial controls once exerted by the border kingdoms, violent conflicts between clans and tribes became more frequent. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, bedouin marauders harassed the caravan trade, and bedouin migrations converted marginal regions in Yemen and on the borders of Iraq and Syria back to pasturage. The bedouinization of Arabia did not, of course, occur all at once. It was a gradual and cumulative process, shifting the ever-delicate balance between organized polities and clan societies in favor of the latter. |
In the late sixth century, the confrontation between strengthened small communities and trading and religious confederacy was reflected in the cultural as well as the political life of Arabia. Just as the political realm was beset by the tension among different types of political and economic organization, cultural life was beset by incompatible visions of human life, human society, and conflicting concepts of the cosmos and the gods. |
The poetic and religious culture of the clans remained a fundamental element in bedouin life. The Arabian bedouin was an animist and a polytheist who believed that all natural objects and events were living spirits who could be either helpful or harmful to man. The universe of the Arabs was peopled with jinn (demons), who had to be propitiated or controlled and defeated by magic. By magical practices, the bedouin might determine his fate or coerce these forces, but he had no sympathetic relation with them. They were another tribe, not his own. The bedouins also worshiped ancestors, moon and star gods, and gods in the form of stones or trees placed in protective sanctuaries. Otherwise, their religion did not entail a philosophic vision of the universe, though it expressed their sense of the sacred as vested mysteriously in the plethora of forces that dominated the natural world and the being of man. |
The religions of the politically more complex confederations and kingdoms were also polytheistic, but they expressed a more differentiated concept of the divine, the natural, and the human worlds. The tribal harams and the temples of archaic kingdoms were devoted to regularized cultic worship. The Meccan Ka'ba, for example, the center of a pilgrimage, was the sanctuary of numerous gods arranged in a hierarchy. These gods were no longer simply identified with nature; they were defined as distinct persons separate from the natural forces that, as willful beings, they controlled. Such gods had to be propitiated by sacrifices; one could communicate with them as persons. |
In an environment of shared sanctuaries, new conceptions of collective identity emerged. The annual trade and religious fairs at Mecca and other places of pilgrimage brought the numerous families and tribes of the peninsula together, focused the worship of tribal peoples upon common cults, allowed them to observe each other's mores, and standardized the language and customs by which they dealt with each other. Awareness of common religious beliefs and lifestyles, recognition of aristocratic tribes and families, agreed institutions regulating pasturage, warfare, commerce, alliance and arbitration procedures, and a poetic koine used by reciters of poems throughout Arabia marked the development of a collective identity transcending the individual clan. |
Still, there was a profound similarity between the cultic confederation of Mecca and the fragmented life of the bedouin clans. The bedouin mentality and Meccan polytheism both held the same view of the person, society, and the universe. This view afforded no coherent conception of the human being as an entity. In ancient Arabic there was no single word meaning the person. Qalb (heart), ruh (spirit), nafs (soul), and wajh (face) were several terms in use, none of which corresponds to the concept of an integrated personality. The plurality of the gods reflected and symbolized a fragmented view of the nature of man, of society, and of the forces that governed the cosmos. In the pagan view the self was without a center, society without wholeness, and the universe without overall meaning. |
The monotheistic religions stood for something other. They were introduced into Arabia by foreign influences: Jewish and Christian settlements, traveling preachers and merchants, and the political pressure of the Byzantine empire and Abyssinia. By the sixth century, monotheism already had a certain vogue. Many non-believers understood the monotheistic religions; others, called hanif in the Quran, were believers in one God but not adherents of any particular faith. Christians settled in Yemen, in small oases, and in the border regions of the north; they were a minority but were profoundly influential and, to many people, deeply appealing, both by the force of their teaching and by force of representing what was felt to be a more powerful, more sophisticated, and more profound civilization. These new religions taught that there was a single God who created the moral and spiritual order of the world; a God who made men individually responsible for their actions and faith; a God who made all men brethren, whatever their race or clan; and a God who made their salvation possible. |
Thus, the monotheists differed profoundly from the polytheists in their sense of the unity of the universe and the meaningfulness of personal experience. Whereas the polytheists could see only a fragmented world, composed of numerous, disorderly, and arbitrary powers, the monotheists saw the universe as a totality grounded in, and created and governed by, a single being who was the source of both material and spiritual order. Whereas the polytheists envisaged a society in which people were divided by clan and locality, each with its own community and its own gods, the monotheists imagined a society in which common faith made men brothers in the quest for salvation. Whereas in the polytheistic view the human being was a concatenation of diverse forces without any moral or psychic center, a product of the fates, in the monotheistic view he was a moral, purposive creature whose ultimate objective was redemption. In the view of the monotheistic religions, God, the universe, man, and society were part of a single, meaningful whole. |
Nowhere was this confrontation of world-views more important than in Mecca. Mecca was one of the most complex and heterogeneous places in Arabia. Here society had grown beyond the limitations of the clan and tribe to afford some complexity of political and economic ties. Mecca had a council of clans (mala), although it held only a moral authority, with non-independent powers of enforcement. Mecca was also one of the few places in Arabia to have a floating, non-tribal population of individual exiles, refugees, outlaws, and foreign merchants. The very presence of different peoples and clans--people belonging to no clan, foreigners, people with diverse religious convictions, differing views of life's purposes and values--moved Meccans away from the old tribal religions and moral conceptions. New conceptions of personal worth and social status and new social relationships were fostered in this more complex society. On the positive side, the imperatives of commercial activity, and Arabia-wide contacts and identifications set individuals free from the traditions of their clans and allowed for the flourishing of selfconscious, critical spirits, who were capable of experimenting with new values, and who might conceive a universal God and universal ethics. On the negative side, society suffered from economic competition, social conflict, and moral confusion. Commercial activities brought in their wake social stratification on the basis of wealth, and morally inassimilable discrepancies between individual situations and the imperatives of clan loyalty. The Quran would condemn the displacement of tribal virtues by the ambition, greed, arrogance, and hedonism of the new rich. Mecca, which had begun to give Arabia some measure of political and commercial order, was losing its moral and social identity. |
Arabia was in ferment: a society in the midst of constructive political experiments was endangered by anarchy; strong clan and tribal powers threatened to overwhelm the fragile forces of agricultural stability, commercial activity, and political cohesion. It was a society touched by imperial influences but without a central government; marked by the monotheistic religions but without an established church; susceptible to Middle Eastern ideas but not permeated by them. Arabia had yet to find its place in the Middle Eastern world. Here Muhammad was born, was vouchsafed the Quran, and he became the Prophet of Islam. |
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