Muslims consider the pre-Islamic age as the
Jahiliyah, or “Age of Ignorance”—that is, the time before the revelations of Allah (al-Lah, “the god”) to his prophet Muhammad. The Arabs were Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula who spoke a language closely related to the languages of the Palestinian and Mesopotamian Semites, including, of course, the Hebrews. Arab culture, like that of the early Hebrews, would have been centered in kinship, clans, and tribes. Their presence as organized groups in the peninsula has been dated as early as 1200b.c.e. The Queen of Saba's visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem would have been early in the first millennium
b.c.e. Sabaeans are listed in Assyrian documents by the eighth century
b.c.e. Inscriptions describe an outpost in Ethiopia in the fifth century
b.c.e., and Sabaeans are mentioned by classical writers beginning in the fourth century
b.c.e. The fertile land of the southern peninsula, known in ancient times as Arabia Felix, in what is now Yemen, gave rise to several centers of commerce, trade, and culture in addition to Saba, which gradually gained ascendancy over the other centers. These were city-states ruled by priest-kings (
mukarribs) or kings (
maliks). Among the more important states were Ma'in, Qataban, and Hadhramat.
Intertribal warfare and religions with many idols would have been characteristic of the earliest history of the Arabs. The Bedouin tribes of the mid-peninsula—around the regions of Hijaz (containing Mecca and Medina) and Najd (containing Riyhad)—were constantly at war. But even early on there appears to have been a sense of pan-Arabism, as indicated by a tradition of annual gatherings of tribes for poetry competitions—a kind of poetic Olympic Games—and the development of a common way of life based on the concept of
muruwah.
Muruwah obligated a man to obey his overlord, or
sayyid, and to accept the communal ideal of the blood feud, in which revenge for murder could be taken on any member of the murderer's tribe as a substitute for the murderer himself. In general,
muruwah also provided a sense of the importance of community as opposed to the individual, of generosity as opposed to material need. All of these concepts would be important to the later emergence of Islam.
By the time of Muhammad, Arabia had long been taken advantage of by various powers. Persians from an early date had controlled the area around Saba. Although there had been Arab kingdoms as far north as Syria and Iraq—one was led by Queen Zenobia—they were annexed by the Romans in the second and third centuries
c.e. Later Byzantine Christians would establish Christian Arab kingdoms in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Not long before Muhammad's birth, Christian Abyssinians had come up from Yemen and invaded Mecca.
Pre-Islamic Arabia—before it was influenced through various conquests by Judaism, Christianity, and perhaps Zoroastrianism— was polytheistic in its religion. Jinn (spirits) were worshipped, and various tribal groups worshipped their own, often astral, deities. Cult centers were marked by temples and by holy stones (
baetyls) representing these and other tribal deities. Also, sacred trees could serve as cult centers. Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh, for instance, worshipped a great tree called the
Dhat Anwat on the road between Mecca and Medina.
Given the nomadic nature of many of the tribes, objects—especially stones—in any given place could be invested temporarily with the sacred and used as a focus of worship. An ancient, permanent sacred stone cult center for the tribes of the Hijaz (western Arabia), the land of Muhammad's tribe, as well as of other Arabs, was the Ka'bah in Mecca, with its mysterious Black Stone. Even in pre-Islamic times the Ka'bah was a pilgrimage center and sanctuary surrounded by some 360 idols, but there are indications that some Meccans even before the time of Muhammad were moving toward a concept of a single divine power,
al-ilah or
al-lah (“the god”), a supreme divinity behind the tribal gods of Arabia, such as Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr in southern Arabia—several of whom, according to the
Qur'an (71:23), were worshipped in the days of Nuh (Noah). Some Meccans had perhaps even worshipped Allah as their high god. Scholars have pointed out that when Muhammad began his preaching, the Quraysh already believed in al-Lah and that many “believed him to be the God worshipped by the Jews and Christians,” with whom they had frequent contacts. These Meccans apparently believed that the Ka'bah had, in the beginning, been dedicated to this deity, in spite of the supreme presence there of the Nabatean warrior rain god Hubal, the tutelary deity of Mecca.
Goddesses played an important role in pre- Islamic Arabian religion and mythology. Manat, Allat (al-Lat, the “Goddess”), and al-Uzza are all mentioned in the
Qur'an (53:19–22). Manat was worshipped in Qudayd, near Mecca, and in northern Arabia. She was a goddess of rain, health, victory, and destiny and was particularly honored during the pre-Islamic pilgrimages to the Ka'bah. Allat was popular in Taif, also close to Mecca. There she was represented by a large, flat stone and smaller precious stones kept in a wooden box. Called the Mother of the Gods and Mother of the Sun, she protected travelers. Al-Uzza was the primary goddess of the Quraysh. She seems to have been a love goddess whose worship took place in a sanctuary made up of three trees, a fact that associates her with the Canaanite-Hebrew Asherah. Together these Arabic goddesses were the banat
al-Lah (the “Daughters of God”) and were much revered by the Meccans at various stone shrines.