Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PAST REMEMBERED t 33
Greco-Roman imperialist-entrepreneurs and the equally literate
and historically minded Christian missionaries. No contemporary
was informed or interested enough to write a history of Muhammad’s
hometown or even to make note of its existence.
The remembered past of this region of pre-Islamic Arabia is preserved
only in local oral traditions that, even after the coming of
Islam, still recollected and savored the old genealogies, the tribesmen’s
poetry of love and war, and even, it would appear, some dim
memories of other gods worshiped in the times the Muslims called
“the age of barbarism” (al-jahiliyya). The later biographers of the
Prophet and historians of Mecca drew upon these memories to
piece together Arabia’s history as Muhammad doubtless understood
it, but as the Quran never spells out: how the Holy House
and the town of the biblical patriarch and his son passed into the
hands of this or that Arab tribe and finally into those of the Quraysh,
Muhammad’s own ancestors; and how that passage of
power was accompanied by a lapse into polytheism and idol worship.
That was the gist of the great historical triptych composed by
Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) more than a century after Muhammad’s death
in 632. The work is lost, but it was later pared down to a simple
biography of the Prophet that is available to us in the version of
Ibn Hisham (d. 833), and it was later used with profit in its unabridged
form by the historian al-Tabari (d. 923) and others. This
is one strain of tradition, the political-historical one. The other is
the repertory of information collected and topically arranged by
Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (d. 819) in his sacred anthropology called The
Book of Idols, the most substantial treatment we possess of the
religious practices of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Finally, there is whatever we can glean from the Quran, which
polemicizes against the still flourishing paganism of Muhammad’s
day and at the same time incorporates some aspects of Meccan
ritual—notably the hajj, or pilgrimage—into the emerging picture
of Islam. One can also always attempt to work back to pre-Islamic
origins from the Quran’s religious vocabulary, an undisputed reflection
of the religious life of western Arabia, which was, on the
evidence of the Quran’s loanwords from the lexica of the Aramaic
Syrians of the Fertile Crescent and the Ethiopians across the Red