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Religions In Pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabia
Nabataean Trade Routes In Pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabia refers to the Arabian Peninsula prior to the rise of Islam in the 630s. Some of the settled communities developed into distinctive civilizations. Sources for these civilizations are not extensive, and are limited to archaeological evidence, accounts written outside of Arabia and Arab oral traditions later recorded by #Islamic scholars. Among the most prominent civilizations were the Thamud which arose around 3000 BCE and lasted to about 300 AD, and Dilmun which arose around the end of the fourth millennium and lasted to about 600 AD.
Additionally, from the beginning of the first millennium BC, Southern Arabia was the home to a number of kingdoms such as the Sabaeans and the coastal areas of Eastern Arabia were controlled by the Iranian Parthians and Sassanians from 300 BC.
Pre-Islamic religion in Arabia consisted of indigenous polytheistic beliefs, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Nestorian Christianity was the dominant religion in Eastern Arabia prior to the advent of Islam. In the latter stages of the pre-Islamic era, Christianity gained converts with some unorthodox sects, such as the gnostics, having a presence.
Polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorianism, et. al.
Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia was a mix of polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, and Iranian religions. Arab polytheism, the dominant form of religion in pre-Islamic Arabia, was based on veneration of deities and other rituals. Gods and goddesses, including Hubal and the goddesses Al-lāt, Al-‘Uzzá and Manāt, were worshipped at local shrines, such as the Ka’aba in Mecca. Some scholars postulate that Allah may have been dedicated although it seems he had little relevance in the religion. Many of the physical descriptions of the pre-Islamic gods are traced to idols, especially near the Ka’aba, which is said to have contained up to 360 of them.
Other religions were represented to varying, lesser degrees. The influence of the adjacent Roman, Axumite (trading nation in the area of Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia) and Sassanian (dynasty of ancient Persia) empires resulted in Christian communities in the northwest, northeast and south of Arabia. Christianity made a lesser impact, but secured some conversions, in the remainder of the peninsula. With the exception of Nestorianism (relating to the doctrine ascribed to Nestorius and ecclesiastically condemned in 431 that divine and human persons remained separate in the incarnate Christ) in the northeast and the Persian Gulf, the dominant form of Christianity was Monophysitism (holding the doctrine that Christ has a single inseparable nature that is at once divine and human rather than having two distinct but unified natures). The peninsula had been subject to Jewish migration since Roman times, which had resulted in a diaspora community supplemented by local converts. Additionally, the influence of the Sasanian Empire resulted in Iranian religions being present in the peninsula. Zoroastrianism (Persian religion founded in the sixth century b.c. by the prophet Zoroaster) existed in the east and south whilst there is evidence of Manichaeism (believer in a syncretistic religious dualism originating in Persia in the third century a.d. and teaching the release of the spirit from matter through asceticism) or possibly Mazdakism (dualistic religion that rose to prominence in the late 5th century in Iran from obscure origins) being practiced in Mecca.
Until about the 4th century A.D, almost all Arabs practiced polytheistic religions. Although significant Jewish and Christian minorities developed, polytheism remained the dominant belief system in pre-Islamic Arabia. The religious beliefs and practices of the nomadic bedouin were distinct from those of the settled tribes of towns such as Mecca. Nomadic religious belief systems and practices are believed to have included fetishism (a need or desire for an object, body part, or activity for sexual excitement), totemism (belief in kinship with or a mystical relationship between a group or an individual and a totem) and ancestor worship but were connected principally with immediate concerns and problems and did not consider larger philosophical questions such as the afterlife. Settled urban Arabs, on the other hand, are thought to have believed in a more complex pantheon of deities. While the Meccans and the other settled inhabitants of the Hejaz (Al-Hejaz, also Hijaz is a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia, bordered on the west by the Red Sea) worshipped their gods at permanent shrines in towns and oases, the bedouin practiced their religion on the move. Historians have debated whether these belief systems were derived from indigenous Semitic religious traditions or were a “degenerate” offshoot of the more sophisticated mythologies of the nearby Fertile Crescent.
The contemporary sources of information regarding the pre-Islamic pantheon include a small number of inscriptions and carvings, remnants of stone idol-worship, references in the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arab poet Zuhair and pre-Islamic personal names.
Nevertheless, information is limited and while scholars believe that the dominant traditions of the pre-Islamic Arabia were polytheistic, there is little certainty about the nature of pre-Islamic polytheism and considerable debate. According to F.E. Peters, “one of the characteristics of Arab paganism as it has come down to us is the absence of a mythology, narratives that might serve to explain the origin or history of the gods.”
The majority of our information about Mecca during the rise of Islam and earlier times comes from the text of the Qur’an itself and later Muslim sources such as the sīra literature dealing with the biography of the prophet Muhammad and the 8th century Book of Idols. Alternative sources are so fragmentary and specialized that writing a convincing history of this period based on them alone is impossible. Several scholars hold that the sīra literature is not independent of the Qur’an but has been fabricated to explain the verses of the Qur’an. There is evidence to support the contention that some reports of the sīras are of dubious validity, but there is also evidence to support the contention that the sīra narratives originated independently of the Qur’an. Compounding the problem is the fact that the earliest extant Muslim historical works, including the sīras, were composed in their definitive form more than a century after the beginning of the Islamic era. Some of these works were based on subsequently lost earlier texts, which in their turn recorded a fluid oral tradition. Scholars do not agree as to the time when such oral accounts began to be systematically collected and written down, and they differ greatly in their assessment of the historical reliability of the available texts.
Allah
Some scholars postulate that in pre-Islamic Arabia, including in Mecca, Allah was considered to be a deity, possibly a creator god or a supreme deity in a polytheistic pantheon. The word Allah (from the Arabic al-ilah meaning “the god”) may have been used as a title rather than a name. The concept of Allah may have been vague in the Meccan religion, and some scholars postulate based on Qur’anic verse that he may have had sons and daughters who were also divinities. However, according to F.E. Peters (Professor Emeritus of History, Religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University), in these verses, the Qur’an is actually here refuting the idea that Allah had any children and asserts that if he had any offspring then they would surely be sons.
Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic inscriptions. Pre-Islamic Christians, Jews and the monotheistic Arabs called Hanifs used the term Bismillah (“in the name of Allah”) and the name Allah to refer to their supreme deity in Arabic stone inscriptions centuries before Islam. Muhammad’s father’s name was ʿAbd-Allāh meaning “the servant of Allāh.”
Mecca
The Ka’aba, whose environs were regarded as sacred (haram), became a national shrine under the custodianship of the Quraysh (a mercantile Arab tribe that historically inhabited and controlled Mecca and its Ka’aba, the chief tribe of Mecca, which made the Hejaz the most important religious area in north Arabia. Its role was solidified by a confrontation with the Christian king Abraha, who controlled much of Arabia from a seat of power in Yemen in the middle of the sixth century. Abraha had recently constructed a splendid church in Sana’a, and he wanted to make that city a major center of pilgrimage, but Mecca’s Ka’aba presented a challenge to his plan. Abraha found a pretext, presented by different sources alternatively as pollution of the church by a tribe allied to the Meccans or as an attack on Abraha’s grandson in Najran by a Meccan party. The defeat of the army he assembled to conquer Mecca is recounted with miraculous details by the Islamic tradition and is also alluded to in the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry. After the battle, which probably occurred around 565, the Quraysh became a dominant force in western Arabia, receiving the title “God’s people” (ahl Allah) according to Islamic sources, and formed the cult association of ḥums, which tied members of many tribes in western Arabia to the Ka’aba.
According to tradition, the Ka’aba was a cube-like, originally roofless structure housing a black stone venerated as a fetish. The sanctuary was dedicated to Hubal, who, according to some sources, was worshiped as the greatest of the 360 idols the Ka’aba contained, which probably represented the days of the year. Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Al-Kalbi both report that the human-shaped idol of Hubal made of precious stone came into possession of the Quraysh with its right hand broken off and that the Quraysh made a hand of gold to replace it. A soothsayer performed divination in the shrine by drawing ritual arrows, and vows and sacrifices were made to assure success. Marshall Hodgson argues that relations with deities and fetishes in pre-Islamic Mecca were maintained chiefly on the basis of bargaining, where favors were expected in return for offerings. A deity’s or oracle’s failure to provide the desired response was sometimes met with anger.
Allāt or Al-lāt was worshipped throughout the ancient Near East with various associations. Herodotus identifies Alilat as the Arabic name for Aphrodite (and, in another passage, for Urania), which is strong evidence for worship of Allāt in Arabia at that early date. According to The Book of Idols, her idol and shrine stood in Ta’if. Al-‘Uzzá “The Mightiest” was a fertility goddess or possibly a goddess of love. Her principal shrine #was in Nakhla, a day’s journey from Mecca. Manāt was the goddess of fate. According to The Book of Idols, an idol of Manāt was erected on the seashore between Medina and Mecca. Inhabitants of several areas venerated Manāt, performing sacrifices before her idol, and pilgrimages of some were not considered completed until they visited Manāt and shaved their heads.
Manaf was another Meccan god who is thought by some scholars to be a sun-god. His idol was caressed by women. Menstruating women were forbidden from coming near his idol. The Meccans were accustomed to name their children Abd Manaf. Muhammad’s great-great-grandfather’s name was Abd Manaf which means “slave of Manaf.”
The pantheon of the Quraysh was not identical with that of the tribes who entered into various cult and commercial associations with them, especially that of the hums. Christian Julien Robin (a French scientific researcher) argues that the former was composed principally of idols that were in the sanctuary of Mecca, including Hubal and Manaf, while the pantheon of the associations was superimposed on it, and its principal deities included the three goddesses, who had neither idols nor a shrine in that city.
Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in Meccan religion. According to one hypothesis, which goes back to Julius Wellhausen (a German biblical scholar and orientalist). /I Allah (the supreme deity of the tribal federation around Quraysh) was a designation that consecrated the superiority of Hubal (the supreme deity of Quraysh) over the other gods. However, there is also evidence that Allah and Hubal were two distinct deities. According to that hypothesis, the Ka’aba was first consecrated to a supreme deity named Allah and then hosted the pantheon of Quraysh after their conquest of Mecca, about a century before the time of Muhammad. Some inscriptions seem to indicate the use of Allah as a name of a polytheist deity centuries earlier, but we know nothing precise about this use. Some scholars have suggested that Allah may have represented a remote creator god who was gradually eclipsed by more particularized local deities. There is disagreement on whether Allah played a major role in the Meccan religious cult. No iconic representation of Allah is known to have existed.
The second half of the sixth century was a period of political disorder in Arabia and communication routes were no longer secure. Religious divisions were an important cause of the crisis. Judaism became the dominant religion in Yemen while Christianity took root in the Arab-Persian Gulf. In line with the broader trends of the ancient world, Arabia yearned for a more spiritual form of religion and began believing in afterlife, while the choice of religion increasingly became a personal rather than communal choice. While many were reluctant to convert to a foreign faith, those faiths provided intellectual and spiritual reference points, and the old pagan vocabulary of Arabic began to be replaced by Jewish and Christian loanwords from Aramaic everywhere, including Mecca. The distribution of pagan temples supports Gerald Hawting’s (a British historian and Islamicist) argument that Arabian polytheism was marginalized in the region and already dying in Mecca on the eve of Islam. The practice of polytheistic cults was increasingly limited to the steppe and the desert, and in Yathrib, which included two tribes with polytheistic majority, the absence of a public pagan temple in the town or its immediate neighborhood indicates that polytheism was confined to the private sphere. Looking at the text of the Qur’an itself, Hawting has also argued that the criticism of idolators and polytheists contained in the Qur’an is in fact a hyperbolic reference to other monotheists, in particular the Arab Jews and Arab Christians, whose religious beliefs were considered imperfect. According to some traditions, the Ka’aba contained no statues, but its interior was decorated with images of Mary and Jesus, of prophets, angels, and trees.
To counter the effects of anarchy, the institution of sacred months during which every act of violence was prohibited, was reestablished. During those months, it was possible to participate in pilgrimages and fairs without danger. The Quraysh upheld the principle of two annual truces, one of one month and the second of three months, which conferred a sacred character to the Meccan sanctuary. The cult association of hums, in which individuals and groups partook in the same rites, was primarily religious, but it also had important economic consequences. Although, Mecca could not compare with the great centers of caravan trade on the eve of Islam, it was probably one of the most prosperous and secure cities of the peninsula, since, unlike many of them, it did not have surrounding walls. Pilgrimage to Mecca was a popular custom. Some Islamic rituals, including processions around the Ka’aba and between the hills of al-Safa and Marwa, as well as the salutation “we are here, O Allah, we are here” repeated on approaching the Ka’aba are believed to have antedated Islam. Spring water had acquired the status of being sacred in Arabia early on and Islamic sources state that the well of Zamzam became holy long before the Islamic era.
South Arabia
The civilizations of south Arabia had the most developed pantheonyyuuu’o/ in the Arabian peninsula. Evidence from surviving inscriptions suggests that each of the southern kingdoms of Qataban, Saba, Hadhramaut, Ma’in and Himyar had its own pantheon of three to five deities, the major deity always bring5 a god. For example, the pantheon of Saba comprised Almaqah, the major deity, together with Athtar, Haubas, Himyam, and Dhat-Badan. The main god in Ma’in and Himyar was Athtar, in Qataban it was Amm, and in Hadhramaut it was Sayin. Amm was a moon god and was associated with the weather, especially lightning.
Each kingdom’s central temple was the focus of worship for the main god and would be the destination for an annual pilgrimage, with regional temples dedicated to a local manifestation of the main god. Other beings worshipped included local deities or deities dedicated to specific functions as well as deified ancestors.
Other deities included:Dhu’l-Halasa or Dhul Khalasa was an oracular god in Yemen worshipped by the Bajila and Khatham tribes. He was venerated in the form of a white stone. His sanctuary known by the same name was called the Ka’aba of Yemen and rivaled the Ka’aba of Mecca.
- Ta’lab was a god worshipped in southern Arabia, particularly in Saba and also a moon god. His oracle was consulted for advice. A shrine dedicated to him existed in Riyam.
- Basamum, who is mentioned by an ancient text to have healed two wild goats or ibexes.
- Shams/Shamsum was a female solar deity, possibly related to the Canaanite Shapash and the broader middle-eastern Shamash. She was the dominant goddess of the Himyarite Kingdom, and possibly still revered in some form by the Bedouin for several centuries afterward.
- Kahl, the patron god of the Kindah kingdom whose capital was Qaryat al-Faw. The town was called Dhat Kahl after him. His name appears in the form of many inscriptions and rock engravings on the slopes of the Tuwayq, on the walls of the souk of the village, in the residential houses and on the incense burners.
- Nasr, the god of time who was worshipped in South Arabia and mentioned in Quran.
- Wadd was a moon deity in Ma’in. His name is interpreted to mean “love.” Snakes were associated with him. The Minaean colonists living in Deran (modern day Al-`Ula) during the rule of Lihyanites worshipped Wadd as well. A temple of Wadd evidently existed in Dedan. There is evidence from Minaean inscriptions of the presence of Levites in the temple of Wadd who according to some scholars were either priests or cult servants who could later be promoted to higher positions. The tribe of Banu Kalb worshipped Wadd in the form of a male and is said to have represented heaven.
Nabataeans
The main deity of the Nabataeans in northern Arabia was Dushara. He was the only god known for certain to have been worshipped throughout Nabatea and was associated with the Greek gods Zeus and Dionysus. The meaning of his name is not clear as there are no definite interpretations of it. John Healey, an English translator, speculated his name to mean, “The lord of Shara[t] mountain range.” Dushara was represented in the form of a stone cube or more generally in the form of cuboid architecture which can be seen throughout the remains of the Nabateans’ principal city, Petra. Warwick Ball (an Australian-born near-eastern archeologist) has noted a possible connection with the Kaaba and has commented that, as a result, “the Islamic abstract concept of deity certainly owes a debt to Nabatean religion.” There is evidence that Dushara was connected to A’ra, the local god of Bosra
Al-ʿUzzá was worshipped in Nabataea where she had been adopted alongside Dushara as the presiding goddess at Petra, the Nabataean capital, where she assumed attributes of Isis, Tyche, and Aphrodite. She was the protectress of the city and also of love and immortality. Despite the same name shared between the al-ʿUzzá of Nabataea and that of Mecca and other places, it is unclear whether there is any continuity of worship or identity between them.
The Sabaens
Sabeans were an ancient people speaking an Old South Arabian language.
The Sabean kingdom of Saba is generally identified with the biblical land of Sheba, a trading state that flourished for over a thousand years in modern-day Yemen.
The view that the biblical kingdom of Sheba was the ancient Semitic civilization of Saba in Southern Arabia is controversial. One theory is that the Sabaean kingdom began to flourish only from the eighth century BC onward and that the story of Solomon and Sheba is an anachronistic seventh-century set piece meant to legitimize the participation of Judah in the lucrative Arabian trade. The British Museum states that there is no archaeological evidence for such a queen but that the kingdom described as hers was Saba, the oldest and most important of the South Arabian kingdoms. British Bible scholar and Ancient Near Eastern historian, Kenneth Kitchen, dates the kingdom to between 1200 BC until 275 BC with its capital Marib. The Kingdom fell after a long but sporadic civil war between several Yemenite dynasties claiming kingship, resulting in the rise of the late Himyarite Kingdom. Sabaeans are mentioned in the biblical books of Job, Joel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, and in ayat 2:62, 5:69, and 22:17 of the Qur’an.
History
The ancient Sabaean kingdom probably arose sometime in the 2nd millennium` BC. It was conquered, in the 1st century BC, by the Himyarites. After the disintegration of the first Himyarite Kingdom of the Kings of Saba’ and Dhū Raydān, the Middle Sabaean Kingdom reappeared in the early 2nd century. The Sabaean kingdom was finally conquered by the Ḥimyarites in the late 3rd century and at that time the capital was Ma’rib. It was located along the strip of desert called Sayhad by medieval Arab geographers, which is now named Ramlat al-sad`atayn.
The Sabaean people were South Arabian people. Each of these had regional kingdoms in ancient Yemen, with the Minaeans in the north in Wādī al-Jawf, the Sabeans on the south western tip, stretching from the highlands to the sea, the Qatabānians to the east of them and the Ḥaḑramites east of them.
The Sabaeans, like the other Yemenite kingdoms of the same period, were involved in the extremely lucrative spice trade, especially frankincense and myrrh.
They left behind many inscriptions in the monumental Musnad (Old South Arabian) alphabet, as well as numerous documents in the cursive Zabūr script. The Book of Job mentions the Sabaens for slaying his livestock and servants.
In the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Augustus claims that: By my command and under my auspices two armies were led at about the same time into Ethiopia and into Arabia, which is called the Blessed. Great forces of each enemy people were slain in battle and several towns captured. In Ethiopia the advance reached the town of Nabata, which is close to Meroe; in Arabia the army penetrated as far as the territory of the Sabaeans and the town of Ma’rib.
Religious Practices
Muslim writer Muhammad Shukri al-Alusi compares their religious practices to Islam in his Bulugh al-‘Arab fi Ahwal al-‘Arab: “The Arabs during the pre-Islamic period used to practice certain things that were included in the Islamic Shari’a. They, for example, did not marry both a mother and her daughter. They considered marrying two sisters simultaneously to be a most heinous crime. They also censured anyone who married his stepmother, and called him dhaizan. They made the major [hajj] and the minor [umra] pilgrimage to the Ka’ba, performed the circumambulation around the Ka’ba [tawaf], ran seven times between Mounts Safa and Marwa [sa’y], threw rocks and washed themselves after intercourse. They also gargled, sniffed water up into their noses, clipped their fingernails, plucked their hair from their armpits, shaved their pubic hair and performed the rite of circumcision. Likewise, they cut off the right hand of a thief.
A late Arabic writer wrote of the Sabaeans that they had seven temples dedicated to the seven planets, which they considered as intermediaries employed in their relation to God. Each of these temples had a characteristic geometric shape, a characteristic color, and an image made of one of the seven metals. They had two sects, star and idol worshippers, and the former doctrine was similar to one that come from Hermes Trismegistus (the purported author of the]~ Hermetic Corpus, a series of sacred texts that are the basis of Hermeticism; a representation of the syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth).
Qur’an
The Sabaeans were mentioned in the Qur’an twice as people of Saba. The Qur’an mentions the kingdom of the Saba in the 34th Chapter. The Qur’anic narrative, from sura 27 (An-Naml), has Suleiman (Solomon) getting reports from the Hoopoe bird about the kingdom of Saba, ruled by a queen whose people worship the sun instead of God. Suleiman (Solomon) sends a letter inviting her to submit fully to the One God, Allah, Lord of the Worlds according to the Islamic text. The Queen of Saba is unsure how to respond and asks her advisors for counsel. They reply by reminding her that they are “of great toughness” in a reference to their willingness to go to war should she choose to. She replies that she fears if they were to lose, Suleiman may behave as any other king would: ‘entering a country, despoiling it and making the most honorable of its people its lowest.’ She decides to meet with Suleiman in order to find out more. Suleiman receives her response to meet him and asks if anyone can bring him her throne before she arrives. A jinn under the control of Suleiman proposed that he will bring it before Suleiman rises from his seat. One who had knowledge of the “Book” proposed to bring him the throne of Bilqis ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ and accomplished that immediately. The queen arrives at his court, is shown her throne and asked: does your throne look like this? She replied: (It is) as though it were it. When she enters his crystal palace she accepts Abrahamic monotheism and the worship of one God alone, Allah.
Dushara, National Museum of Damascus
Al-Qaum or Shay’ Al-Quam (he who accompanies/leads the people), another Nabatean god was the guardian of caravans. He was the only truly nomadic god of the Nabataean religion. According to Nabataean inscription, he did not drink wine.
Manat was another Nabatean goddess and was identified with the Greek goddess Nemesis. She was the goddess of fate and justice. Within the Nabataean kingdom, the place she is most often mentioned is Hegra, however there is no direct portrayal of her. In some of the inscriptions, she is linked with Dushara in cursing and fining those who violate the terms of use of the tombs and do not observe the rules, respectively. In two of these inscriptions she is linked with her Qaysha which according to various interpretations might be referring to another deity or an object.
Al-lat was another Nabatean goddess who was probably identified with Athena and Tyche. An image of her containing elements of both human and block form exists at ‘Ain Shellaleh in er-Rumm along with an inscription which describes her as the goddess of Bosra. Three inscriptions mentioning her exist in Salkhad, a city in southern Syria. However, her name isn’t recorded anywhere in Bosra or Petra. Only a single bust of her near the Arched Gate of Petra testifies her existence in the capital. An inscription in Hegra on a tomb mentions her as cursing those who violate the terms of its use.
In the same inscription where Al-lat is mentioned, a deity named Hubul is also mentioned, possibly a god of divination. This is the only place outside South Arabia where a name similar to that of Hubal is mentioned. Some suggest that the Meccan god Hubal may have been of Nabataean origin.
Petra has many “sacred high places” which include altars that have usually been interpreted as places of human sacrifice, although, since the 1960s, an alternative theory that they are “exposure platforms” for placing the corpses of the deceased as part of a funerary ritual has been put forward. However, there is, in fact, little evidence for either proposition.
Worship Of Yahweh?
Religious worship amongst the Qedarites, an ancient tribal confederation that was probably subsumed into Nabatea around the 2nd century AD, was centered around a polytheistic system in which women rose to prominence. Divine images of the gods and goddesses worshipped by Qedarite Arabs, as noted in Assyrian inscriptions, included representations of Atarsamain, Nuha, Ruda, Dai, Abirillu and Atarquruma. The female guardian of these idols, usually the reigning queen, served as a priestess (apkallatu, in Assyrian texts) who communed with the other world. Inscriptions in a North Arabian dialect in the region of Najd referring to Nuha describe emotions as a gift from him. In addition, they also refer to Ruda being responsible for all things good and bad. There is also evidence that the Qedar worshipped Al-lāt to whom the inscription on a silver bowl from a king of Qedar is dedicated. In the Babylonian Talmud, which was passed down orally for centuries before being transcribed c. 500 AD, in tractate Taanis, it is said that most Qedarites worshiped pagan gods.
The Midianites, a people referred to in the Book of Genesis and located in north-western Arabia, may have worshipped Yahweh. Indeed, some scholars believe that Yahweh was originally a Midianite god and that he was subsequently adopted by the Israelites. An Egyptian temple of Hathor continued to be used during the Midianite occupation of the site, although images of Hathor were defaced suggesting Midianite opposition. They transformed it into a desert tent-shrine set up with a copper sculpture of a snake.
Eastern Arabia
The Dilmun civilization, which existed along the Gulf Coast and Bahrain until the 6th century BC, worshipped a pair of deities, Inzak and Meskilak. It is not known whether these were the only deities in the pantheon or whether there were others. The discovery of wells at the sites of a Dilmun temple and a shrine suggests that sweet water played an important part in religious practices.
In the subsequent Greco-Roman period, there is evidence that the worship of non-indigenous deities was brought to the region by merchants and visitors. These included Bel, a god popular in the Syrian city of Palmyra, the Mesopotamian deities Nabu and Shamash, the Greek gods Poseidon and Artemis as well as the west Arabian deities Kahl and Manat.
Bedouins
The Bedouin were introduced to Meccan ritualistic practices as they frequented settled towns of the Hejaz during the four months of the “holy truce,” the first three of which were devoted to religious observance, while the fourth was set aside for trade. Bedouin poetry infers that the gods, even Allah, were less important to the Bedouins than Fate. They seem to have had little trust in rituals and pilgrimages as means of propitiating Fate, but had recourse to divination and soothsayers (kahins). The Bedouins regarded some trees, wells, caves and stones as sacred objects, either as fetishes or as means of reaching a deity. They created sanctuaries where people could worship fetishes.
The Bedouins had a code of honor which Fazlur Rahman Malik, a well known Islamic scholar, states may be regarded as their religious ethics. This code encompassed women, bravery, hospitality, honoring one’s promises and pacts, and vengeance. They believed that the ghost of a slain person would cry out from the grave until their thirst for blood was quenched. Practices such as killing of infant girls were often regarded as having religious sanction. Numerous mentions of jinn (Also Romanized as djinn or Anglicized as genies are supernatural creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology. Jinn are not a strictly Islamic concept, rather they may be various pagan beings integrated into Islam. Since jinn are not inevitably evil, Islam was able to adapt spirits from other religions during its expansion.) in the Qur’an and testimony of both pre-Islamic and Islamic literature indicate that the belief in spirits was prominent in pre-Islamic Bedouin religion. However, there is evidence that the word jinn is derived from Aramaic, where it was used by Christians to designate pagan gods reduced to the status of a titanium demons, and was introduced into Arabic folklore only late in the pre-Islamic era. Julius Wellhausen, a German biblical scholar, has observed that such spirits were thought to inhabit desolate, dingy and dark places and that they were feared. One had to protect oneself from them, but they were not the objects of a true cult
Bedouin religious experience also included an apparently indigenous cult of ancestors. The dead were not regarded as powerful, but rather as deprived of protection and needing charity of the living as a continuation of social obligations beyond the grave. Only certain ancestors, especially heroes from which the tribe was said to derive its name, seem to have been objects of real veneration.
Judaism
A thriving community of Jewish tribes existed in pre-Islamic Arabia and included both sedentary and nomadic communities. Jews had migrated into Arabia from Roman times onwards. Arabian Jews spoke Arabic as well as Hebrew and Aramaic and had contact with Jewish religious centers in Babylonia and Palestine. The Yemeni Himyarites converted to Judaism in the 4th century, and some of the Kindah, a tribe in central Arabia who were their vassals, were also converted in the 4th/5th century. There is evidence that Jewish converts in the Hejaz were regarded as Jews by other Jews and non-Jews alike and have sought advice from Babylonian rabbis on matters of attire and kosher food. In at least one case, it is known that an Arab tribe agreed to adopting Judaism as a condition for settling in a town dominated by Jewish inhabitants. Some Arab women in Yathrib/Medina are said to have vowed making their child a Jew if the child survived, since they considered the Jews to be people “of knowledge and the book” (`ilmin wa-kitābin). Philip Hitti, a Lebanese American scholar and authority on Arab and Middle Eastern history, Islam, and Semitic languages (he is also responsible for helping to create the discipline of Arabic Studies in the U.S.; my own interest in Islamic Studies – which goes back to the early 1970s – can also be attributed to his works), infers from proper names and agricultural vocabulary that the Jewish tribes of Yathrib consisted mostly of Judaized clans of Arabian and Aramaean origin.
The key role played by Jews in the trade and markets of the Hejaz meant that market day for the week was the day preceding the Jewish Sabbath. This day, which was called aruba in Arabic, also provided occasion for legal proceedings and entertainment, which in turn may have influenced the choice of Friday as the day of Muslim congregational prayer. Toward the end of the sixth century, the Jewish communities in the Hejaz were in a state of economic and political decline, but they continued to flourish culturally in and beyond the region. They had developed their distinctive beliefs and practices, with a pronounced mystical and eschatological dimension. In the Islamic tradition, based on a phrase in the Qur’an, Arabic Jews are said to have referred to Uzair as the son of Allah, although historical accuracy of this assertion has been disputed.
Christianity
The main areas of Christian influence in Arabia were on the north eastern and north western borders and in what was to become Yemen in the south. The north west was under the influence of Christian missionary activity from the Roman Empire where the Ghassanids, a client kingdom of the Romans, were converted to Christianity. In the south, particularly at Najran, a center of Christianity developed as a result of the influence of the Christian Kingdom of Axum based on the other side of the Red Sea in Ethiopia. Both the Ghassanids and the Christians in the south adopted Monophysitism (Monophysitism is the Christological position that, after the union of the divine and the human in the historical incarnation, Jesus Christ, as the incarnation of the eternal Son or Word of God, had only a single “nature” which was either divine or a synthesis of divine and human. Monophysitism is contrasted to dyophysitism which maintains that Christ maintained two natures, one divine and one human, after the incarnation.).
Jubail Church In Eastern Saudi Arabia
The 4th century remains are thought to be one of the oldest surviving church buildings in the world.
The third area of Christian influence was on the north eastern borders where the Lakhmids, a client tribe of the Sassanians, adopted Nestorianism, being the form of Christianity having the most influence in the Sassanian Empire. As the Persian Gulf region of Arabia increasingly fell under the influence of the Sasanians from the early third century, many of the inhabitants were exposed to Christianity following the eastward dispersal of the religion by Mesopotamian Christians. However, it was not until the fourth century that Christianity gained popularity in the region with the establishment of monasteries and a diocesan structure. In 1986, the remains of a church thought to date to the 4th century were discovered in Jubail in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Beth Qatraye which translates “region of the Qataris” in Syriac was the Christian name used for the region encompassing north-eastern Arabia. It included Bahrain, Tarout Island, Al-Khatt, Al-Hasa, and Qatar. Oman and the United Arab Emirates comprised the diocese known as Beth Mazunaye. The name was derived from ‘Mazun,’ the Persian name for Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Sohar was the central city of the diocese.
In Nejd, in the centre of the peninsula, there is evidence of members of two tribes, Kindah and Taghlib, converting to Christianity in the 6th century. However, in the Hejaz in the west, while there is evidence of the presence of Christianity, it is not thought to have been significant among the indigenous population of the area.
Arabicized Christian names were fairly common among pre-Islamic Arabians, which has been attributed to the influence that Syrianized Christian Arabs had on bedouins of the peninsula for several centuries before the rise of Islam.
Based on verses in the Qur’an, it is believed that some Arab Christians may have held unorthodox beliefs such as the worshipping of a divine triad of God the father, Jesus the Son and Mary the Mother. Furthermore, there is evidence that unorthodox groups such as the Collyridians, whose adherents worshiped Mary, were present in Arabia, and it has been proposed that the Qur’an refers to their beliefs.
Iranian Religions
Iranian religions existed in pre-Islamic Arabia on account of Sasanian military presence along the Persian Gulf and South Arabia and on account of trade routes between the Hejaz and Iraq. Some Arabs in northeast of the peninsula converted to Zoroastrianism and several Zoroastrian temples were constructed in Najd. Some of the members from the tribe of Banu Tamim had converted to the religion. There is also evidence of existence of Manichaeism in Arabia as several early sources indicate a presence of “zandaqas” in Mecca, although the term could also be interpreted as referring to Mazdakism. There is evidence for the circulation of Iranian religious ideas in the form of Persian loan words in Qur’an such as firdaws (paradise).
Zorastrianism was introduced in the Eastern Arabia including modern-day Bahrain during the rule of Persian empires in the region starting from 250 BC. The religion was mainly practiced in Bahrain by Persian settlers. Zorastrianism was also practiced in the Persian-ruled area of modern-day Oman. The religion also existed in Persian-ruled area of modern Yemen. The descendants of Abna, the Persian conquerors of Yemen were followers of Zorastrianism.
Religions In Pre-Islamic Arabiac
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https://discerning-Islam.org
Last Update: 04/2021
