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Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān / Pre-Islamic Arabia and the Qurʾān

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Article Table of Contents

Definitions

The jāhiliyya in Muslim tradition

The Qurʾān and the jāhiliyya

Scholarship and the jāhiliyya

The Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia beyond the jāhiliyya

How far does the Qurʾān reflect the background of pre-Islamic Arabia?

Bibliography

Definitions

The Qurʾān itself does not contain any concept equivalent to those designated in ancient and modern times by the term Arabia. That name is generally given today to a region understood to be the ancestral home of the Arabic speaking peoples (see arabs). In the past the term has been applied to different geographical areas at different times, reflecting changing political and administrative divisions as well as changes of climate and settlement patterns. Currently it tends to be used predominantly with reference to the Arabian peninsula (jazīrat al-ʿarab), which, geographically, extends north into what is now usually called the Syrian desert. In classical and late antiquity, Arabia was a name given to one or more administrative divisions of the Roman empire situated east and south of Palestine. ¶

The extent to which the Qurʾān has the concept of a pre-Islamic era depends on how the expression al-jāhiliyya (see age of ignorance) is to be understood in it. Outside the Qurʾān the expression al-jāhiliyya is often used in Muslim tradition with reference to the way of life of the Arabs who lived in the northern and central Arabian peninsula before Islam (q.v.), a way of life from which they were delivered by the Prophet and the revelation (see revelation and inspiration; prophets and prophethood). Al-jāhiliyya thus functions as the conceptual opposite of Islam (al- islām) and in many contexts within Muslim tradition it approximates to our usage of the expression, “pre-Islamic Arabia.”

In the view of traditional and most modern scholars, the Qurʾān emerged in the first half of the seventh century c.e. in the western central region of the Arabian peninsula known as the Ḥijāz and the text is traditionally understood as containing many references and allusions to, or as presupposing, the practices and beliefs of the pre-Islamic inhabitants of the Ḥijāz and neighboring parts of Arabia such as Najd, Yamāma and Tihāma. To the extent that pre-Islamic Arabia is coterminous with the jāhiliyya, therefore, it is understood as the historical background to, and immediate point of reference for, the Qurʾān.

In contemporary usage, however, the expression pre-Islamic Arabia is used to refer to rather more than that covered by the traditional term al-jāhiliyya. It would include, for example, the development before Islam of the kingdoms and cultures of the southern, eastern and northern regions and extensions of the peninsula, and the interventions in Arabia by outside kingdoms and empires. Those aspects of pre-Islamic Arabian history are not usually included in traditional accounts of the jāhiliyya except for certain events (see below) understood as relating to the life of the Prophet and the rise of Islam.¶

The jāhiliyya in Muslim tradition

The view of the jāhiliyya that Muslim tradition presents is rather more complex than one might expect from the name itself, with its connotations of ignorance (q.v.) and barbarism. It is true that the salient features of the traditional reports about the way of life of the Arabs before Islam are their gross idolatry (see idolatry and idolaters), their violent way of life (see fighting; blood money; war), and their lack of sexual morality (see sex and sexuality). The tradition is replete with details about the idols of the Arabs (see idols and images), their sanctuaries, the tribes who worshipped them, and the families who ministered to them. On the other hand, this idolatry is sometimes presented as not being taken seriously by the Arabs: for example, an idol made of dates and butter might be eaten in a time of famine (q.v.), or another would lose the allegiance of a devotee when he saw it urinated upon by foxes. The tradition also provides much information about the feuds and battles (ayyām, lit. “days”) of the tribes before Islam and the chaotic and unregulated aspects of sexual relations, including prostitution, abuse of women, and lack of clarity in determining the paternity of children (q.v.). Unwanted female infants are said to have been disposed of by burial while still alive (see infanticide).

The negative image is, however, moderated by a number of things. The identification of the language of the Qurʾān as a language used in pre-Islamic Arabia (precisely which language is a question to which the tradition and modern scholarship offer variant answers) and the consequent high value put upon jāhilī poetry as a key to the understanding of the language is one such thing (see grammar and the qurʾān; poets and poetry). ¶ Another is the admiration evident for some of the actions and qualities that represented the ideal of behavior among the pre-Islamic Arabs, summarized in the concept of muruwwa, “manliness, virtue”: courage (q.v.), generosity, hospitality and support for the weaker members of one's tribe (see kinship; hospitality and courtesy; tribes and clans).

Equally important is the idea that Abraham (q.v.) had once introduced true monotheism to the Arabs and, although they had fallen away from it and had become immersed in the corruption of idolatry, remnants of that true monotheism still survived among them (see ḥanīf). One such remnant was the Kaʿba (q.v.), built by Abraham and his son Ishmael (q.v.). Another was the religion of Abraham himself (dīn ibrāhīm) which still survived among certain individuals known in the tradition as ḥanīfs. These individuals are portrayed as rejecting the pagan religion into which their fellow Arabs had sunk and as holding on to a non-Christian and non-Jewish form of monotheism which Abraham himself had professed (see christians and christianity; jews and judaism). This idea is related to q 3:67, which refers to Abraham as neither a Christian nor a Jew but a ḥanīf, a muslim (see religious pluralism and the qurʾān).

The Qurʾān and the jāhiliyya

The most important function of pre-Islamic Arabia (in its more limited sense as the locus of the jāhiliyya), so far as the traditional understanding of the Qurʾān is concerned, is that it is viewed as the milieu in which the revelation was given. Thus it can be used as an explanatory device for making sense of details and passages in the Qurʾān. ¶ There is a certain tension between the idea that the Qurʾān is a revelation relevant for and applicable to all peoples and all times, and the view that at least some of it was revealed with reference to a specific society and time and to particular incidents in which the Prophet was involved (see occasions of revelation).

In general the text is understood and analysed as composed in a form of the Arabic language existing in the jāhiliyya: its rhyming prose (sajʿ; see rhymed prose) and certain types of oaths (q.v.) which it contains are said to be related to the language used by the soothsayers (q.v.; kuhhān) of the jāhiliyya to deliver their oracles (see foretelling; divination); and its vocabulary and grammar is explained by reference to the poetry of the jāhiliyya, originally transmitted orally and preserved in much later Islamic literary texts.

The way in which details of the Qurʾān are explained and understood as allusions to the life of the jāhiliyya can be illustrated with reference to a wide range of verses. Such material figures frequently in the form of commentary known as asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions of revelation), which seeks to explain passages of scripture by situating them in a historical context or by associating them with features of pre-Islamic Arabian life. Many of these “occasions of revelation” reports refer to events in which the Prophet and his Companions were involved (see companions of the prophet).

Qurʾānic allusions to the practice of infanticide (q 6:137, 140, 151; 16:57-9; 81:8-9) are understood as directed against the custom of the pre-Islamic Arabs of disposing of surplus female children by burying them alive (waʾd). Outside the Qurʾān this practice (qatl al-mawʾūda) figures prominently in descriptions of life in the jāhiliyya. ¶ The difficult verse q 9:37 (see difficult passages), in which the nasīʾ is called “an excess of disbelief (kufr; see belief and unbelief)” and which then goes on, apparently, to attack the practice of certain opponents who interfere with the number of months (q.v.) which God has made sacred (ḥaram; see profane and sacred) is variously explained outside the Qurʾān as an attack on a custom of the pre-Islamic Arabs (or on the person responsible for putting the custom into practice). The practice involved prolonging certain years by intercalation in order to delay the onset of sacred months (see calendar). The injunction not to approach “the houses from their backs” (q 2:189) is again the subject of various explanations which have in common, however, the idea that it is an injunction against something which was a practice (religious or sexual) of the Arabs in the jāhiliyya.

Certain regulations in the area of marriage and divorce (q.v.), such as the insistence upon a “waiting period” (q.v.; ʿidda) before a woman whose sexual relationship with a man has been ended by divorce or death can begin another (q 65:1 f.), are explained as attempts to reform the sexual immorality and licentiousness of the pre-Islamic Arabs. The limited polygamy which Islamic law allows men (see law and the qurʾān; patriarchy) is understood to relate to q 4:3, “marry of the women who please you two or three or four.” That verse is generally understood as an intended amelioration of the pre-Islamic situation in which there were no limits on the number of women a man might marry, and more precisely as relating to the situation following the battle of Uḥud (see expeditions and battles) in 3/625 when the Muslim community in Medina (q.v.) was faced with a surplus of women over men.

The polytheism and idolatry of the pre-Islamic Arabs is understood to be the referent for the attacks in the Qurʾān against those who practice shirk, the sin of associating other things and beings with God as an object of worship (q.v.; see polytheism and atheism). ¶ The names of the three “daughters of God” (q 53:19-20) are explained as those of idols or goddesses worshipped in Mecca (q.v.) and elsewhere in the Ḥijāz before Islam, and the many qurʾānic passages that speak against those whom it accuses of practicing shirk are regularly understood to be directed against the Meccans or other Arab idolaters. Qurʾānic denigration of the prayer at the sanctuary of “those who disbelieve” as “mere whistling and hand clapping” (q 8:35) is explained as referring to the way in which the pre-Islamic Arabs behaved when they came to Mecca to visit the Kaʿba (q.v.), and q 7:31-2 in which people are commanded to “take care of your adornment” (khudhū zīnatakum) when at places of worship is explained (in different variants) as referring to a custom of the pre-Islamic association known as the Ḥums which controlled access to the Kaʿba. Various reports say that before Islam the Ḥums made some outsiders circumambulate the Kaʿba while naked. These are just examples of the many ways in which the traditional commentators relate the Qurʾān to the world of pre-Islamic Arabia.

Scholarship and the jāhiliyya

Most modern scholars have accepted the accounts of the jāhiliyya as reflections of a real historical situation and have agreed with the traditional scholars that the Qurʾān reflects in many places the society of pre-Islamic Arabia (see community and society in the qurʾān). Many modern scholars have tried to use some of the traditional information about the jāhiliyya to develop theories about the emergence of Islam in pre-Islamic Arabia.

The most influential such theory has been that an evolutionary process had led to the decline of traditional Arab paganism by the time of the Prophet, and that Islam was successful because it met the spiritual and moral needs of Arab, and especially Meccan, society around the beginning of the seventh century c.e. ¶ Reports about the lack of real respect for their idols by the pre-Islamic Arabs, and traditional material understood as evidence of monotheistic tendencies in the paganism of the jāhiliyya (such as the material on the ḥanīfs), have been interpreted according to evolutionary theories of religion. The moral injunctions of the Qurʾān towards charity (see almsgiving), honesty and protection of the weak (see oppressed on earth, the; oppression) are then often understood as reflecting the general and specific moral failings of the pre-Islamic Arabs.

Julius Wellhausen's Reste arabischen Heidentums, the first edition of which appeared in 1887, was influential in establishing this evolutionary interpretation, and elements of it have remained visible in works written late in the twentieth century. Sometimes the evolution of the pre-Islamic Arabs from idolatry and paganism to monotheism is presented as a natural development, one through which all societies pass in time; sometimes the influence on the Arabs of various types of monotheism from outside Arabia is mentioned as an explanatory factor; and sometimes the idea is postulated of a primitive Arab form of monotheism which had survived even though the Arabs generally had become polytheists.

The Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia beyond the jāhiliyya

Like the traditional scholars, modern scholarship on the rise of Islam has concentrated on the regions of Arabia associated with the concept of the jāhiliyya — in general the central and northwestern parts of the peninsula in the two or three hundred years before the Prophet. That does not include important areas of pre-Islamic Arabian history such as the Nabatean and Palmyrene kingdoms that flourished in the north of Arabia some centuries before Islam (see syria; geography and the qurʾān), or the various states, richly attested by inscriptions and archaeological remains, in the south. ¶ Since the late nineteenth century knowledge of and scholarship on those areas of pre-Islamic Arabia have increased significantly, and some scholars have sought to relate them to the Qurʾān and emerging Islam.

Muslim tradition itself reports in some detail certain events connected with the Yemen (q.v.) in the century before the Prophet, and because certain passages of the Qurʾān are often understood as alluding to them, they are narrated also in works of qurʾānic commentary (tafsīr; see exegesis of the qurʾān: classical and medieval).

Prominent among these are accounts of the persecution of Christians by Dhū Nuwās, a Yemeni ruler who had accepted Judaism; the resulting conquest of the Yemen by the Christian state of Abyssinia (q.v.) and the governorship of the region by the Abyssinian general Abraha (q.v.); the collapse of the dam at Maʾrib in the Yemen, which is said to have triggered tribal migrations northwards; and the eventual conquest of the Yemen by the Sasanid Persians, with whom the Muslim conquerors of the region came into contact.

The “men of the elephant” of q 105:1 are frequently understood as an allusion to an expedition reported in tradition as having been sent against Mecca by the Abyssinian Abraha, an expedition which involved one or more elephants and is recounted in some detail in Muslim literature outside the Qurʾān (see people of the elephant). The “people of the ditch” (q.v.; q 85:4) are often identified as the persecuted Christians of Najrān (q.v.), burned in a trench according to accounts found in Syriac and Arabic. The “violent flood” (sayl al-ʿarim, q 34:16) is often understood to refer to the collapse of the dam at Maʾrib (see al-ʿarim), an event that may be attested in a pre-Islamic inscription from Maʾrib. ¶ The traditional interpretations of such passages are not, however, unanimous, and the names of Abraha, Dhū Nuwās and Maʾrib do not occur in the Qurʾān itself.

In addition, the Qurʾān refers to peoples, and the prophets whom God had sent to them, who are understood to have lived in parts of Arabia before Islam: Ṣāliḥ (q.v.) and Thamūd (q.v.), Shuʿayb (q.v.) and Madyan (see midian), Hūd (q.v.) and ʿĀd (q.v.). Thamūd is known from pre-Islamic sources as the name of a people of northern Arabia.

Modern scholars have used epigraphic and other evidence that may relate to the events reported in Muslim tradition in attempting to establish chronology and motivation (see chronology and the qurʾān; epigraphy of the qurʾān). Divine and personal names found in the inscriptions have been linked with names found in the Qurʾān and Muslim tradition. The best-known example is probably the divine name RḤMNN that has been seen by some scholars as the source of the qurʾānic and Islamic al- Raḥmān (see god and his attributes). Since the inscriptions in which RḤMNN occurs are not easily identifiable as Jewish or Christian, some speculation about a “non-denominational form of monotheism” native to pre-Islamic Arabia arose which was linked with the reports about the ḥanīfs in the Muslim tradition (see also musaylima).

Some of the names found in non-monotheistic inscriptions that have been identified as those of deities have been linked by scholars with the idols or gods whose names are given in the Qurʾān (such as those of the five “gods of the people of Noah [q.v.]” in q 71:23), and knowledge of south Arabian polytheism has been used to put forward theories about the origins and nature of jāhilī polytheism (see south arabia, religion in pre-islamic). ¶

In general, scholars who connect the Qurʾān or Islam with evidence from pre-Islamic Arabia lying beyond the traditional scope of the jāhiliyya envisage that Muḥammad had contacts with and was influenced by the religious culture of those regions. For example, it has been suggested, on the basis of a small number of south Arabian inscriptions in which the root sh-r-k has been read, that both the qurʾānic word and the concept of shirk are derived from south Arabia. In the area of ritual, parallels have been drawn between some south Arabian practices regarding ritual purity (q.v.) and those of Islam. One problem with the attempts to explain qurʾānic and Islamic ideas, institutions and practices in this way is that south Arabia was itself part of the wider world of late antiquity and had contacts with the other Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions.

How far does the Qurʾān reflect the background of pre-Islamic Arabia?

The relationship between the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia summarized above — the view that the text was formed in the Ḥijāz and constantly refers to or presupposes features of the life of the pre-Islamic inhabitants of northwestern and central Arabia — is one that depends mainly on Islamic traditional texts other than the Qurʾān itself. Works such as commentaries on the Qurʾān and biographies of the Prophet (see sīra and the qurʾān) provide the reports that are the basis of that view. The scripture itself, with its characteristically allusive style, does not explicitly inform us when or where it originated, nor does it closely specify its addressees or referents (see language and style of the qurʾān; form and structure of the qurʾān).

It is clear that the text contains a significant number of references to features of life associated especially with Arabs. ¶ Sometimes that association is a common one as, for example, references to camels (see camel). There are ten references in the text to tribal or nomadic Arabs (aʿrāb; see bedouin) and the language of the Prophet and of the Qurʾān itself is called “Arabic” (ʿarabī; see arabic language; dialects). Furthermore, the names of the “daughters of God” (Allāt, al-ʿUzzā and Manāt: q 53:19-20), although widely attested in the ancient Middle East and around the Mediterranean, were especially associated with Arabia and the Arabs, and the list of the gods worshipped by the people of Noah (q 71:23) also contains some names which are attested in inscriptions and graffiti found in various parts of Arabia.

Apart from the name, Muḥammad (q.v.), which occurs four times (q 3:144; 33:40; 47:2; 48:29) and Aḥmad (q 61:6; see names of the prophet), the only Arab personal name (other than Arabic forms of biblical names; see scripture and the qurʾān) is that of Abū Lahab (q 111:1), whom tradition identifies as a leader of the pagan Meccans (see family of the prophet). The tribal name Quraysh (q.v.) is mentioned in q 106:1 in a context that associates it with the sanctuary.

As for the names of places or institutions associated with Arabia, there are several in the Qurʾān; most of them are attested only once or twice, and several of them are only known outside Islam because they occur in Muslim tradition or are related to Muslim religious practice. Thus al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa (q 2:158; see ṣafā and marwa), ʿArafāt (q.v.; q 2:198), and al- Kaʿba (q 5:95, 97) are all associated with the Muslim sanctuary at Mecca (makka). Much more common is al- masjid al-ḥarām (fifteen occurrences), the name given in Islam to the mosque (q.v.) at Mecca which contains the Kaʿba (see sacred precincts). The name makka itself appears once (q 48:24; bakka in q 3:96 is identified in traditional commentary as an alternative name for it or a part of it). Yathrib (q 33:13) is the only such place name in Arabia certainly attested in pre-Islamic sources (see medina). ¶

In other cases, the Qurʾān refers to features of Arab life known as such mainly from the traditional accounts of the jāhiliyya. In two passages (q 52:29-30; 69:40-2) it is denied that the Prophet is a soothsayer (kāhin) or poet (shāʿir), two professions which figure large in traditional accounts of pre-Islamic Arabian life. The use of divining arrows (azlām), a practice associated in Muslim tradition with pre-Islamic Arabs, is condemned twice (q 5:3, 90), and in the latter passage it is associated with other vices traditionally seen as characteristic of the jāhiliyya — drunkenness (see intoxicants; wine), gambling (q.v.; al- maysir) and idols (al- anṣāb).

There is certainly material in the text of the Qurʾān itself, then, to indicate that it — or significant parts of it — reflects an environment which might indeed be called Arabian, although the elasticity of that term and the presence of Arabs in various parts of the Middle East outside the peninsula before Islam has to be borne in mind. The somewhat denigrating comments in the Qurʾān regarding the aʿrāb seem to show that the Bedouin at least were regarded as outsiders.

Some of those things, however, that the tradition shows as characteristically Arab — recourse to soothsayers, gambling and drinking, idolatry — could, of course, apply to many other social groups. Intercalation (connected with the nasīʾ) may have been a feature of Arab calendar (q.v.) calculations in the jāhiliyya, but if so it was a feature shared by other groups outside Arabia (such as rabbinical Jews). “Killing children,” too, is an item of interreligious polemic that need not refer to a specific practice of the jāhilī Arabs.¶

In one case in particular the information provided in the tradition about the pre-Islamic Arabs and then used to explain the more allusive references in the Qurʾān actually seems to be at odds with the text. If one takes the material pertaining to idolatry and idolaters (shirk and the mushrikūn) in the Qurʾān and then compares it with what we are told about the idolatry of the pre-Islamic Arabs, there seems to be a significant disjunction. In the Qurʾān the idolaters appear to be people who would regard themselves as monotheists. From the perspective of the Qurʾān, that view of themselves is unjustified and their claimed monotheism is corrupt; it is thus justified to call them, polemically, idolaters (see polemic and polemical language). The imputation of idolatry is an item of inter-monotheist polemic widely attested outside the Qurʾān. In the traditional accounts of the jāhiliyya, on the other hand, the pre-Islamic Arabs are portrayed as immersed in a form of idolatry of the most literal and base kind, not simply an imperfect type of monotheism. The tradition seems to be attempting to impose an understanding of the religion of the mushrikūn that goes beyond the evidence of the Qurʾān itself, and it is possible to ask whether there is some distortion here and elsewhere in the traditional portrait of the jāhiliyya.

John Wansbrough suggested that the traditional focus on pre-Islamic Arabia in scholarship on the Qurʾān and early Islam should be understood as reflecting the ideas and preconceptions of the early Muslim scholars who wished to emphasize the connection of Islam with the Ḥijāz and the Arab prophet, Muḥammad (see ḥadīth and the qurʾān; post-enlightenment academic study of the qurʾān). Wansbrough and others have understood Islam to be the result of more extensive historical developments than the Muslim tradition itself suggests. Many of those developments would have occurred outside Arabia in the century and more following the Arab conquest of the Middle East. In that perspective pre-Islamic Arabia, traditionally understood as the jāhiliyya, is of debatable importance for the end result. ¶

Reaching a satisfactory evaluation is complicated by the fact that virtually all of our knowledge of the jāhiliyya (as distinct from pre-Islamic Arabia in the broader sense) depends on Muslim tradition found in texts the earliest of which date from more than a century after the death of the Prophet. Even the body of so-called jāhilī poetry is known only from those later texts and the question of its authenticity, therefore, has elicited a variety of responses. Furthermore, Wellhausen drew attention to the verbal and conceptual similarity of jāhiliyya in Islamic thought and the Greek word agnoia in Jewish and Christian usage. Both words have the basic connotation of ignorance in contrast with knowledge of the one, true God (see knowledge and learning; illiteracy). Both can be applied generally, without any specific historical reference, or they can be applied to a variety of specific historical situations. In Islamic usage, for example, jāhiliyya has been applied to the pre-Islamic history of Iran and to modern secular western society.

Given the limited amount of evidence and its problematic nature, it is possible to continue to question the traditional understanding and presentation of pre-Islamic Arabia as the jāhiliyya and the strong connection which the tradition makes between it and the Qurʾān.

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Cite this page

Hawting, Gerald R., “Pre-Islamic Arabia and the Qurʾān”, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Consulted online on 07 January 2017 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQCOM_00157>