Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PAST REMEMBERED t 49
tion on the biblical background of the Quran, from among the
Yemeni Jews, like the semilegendary Kab called “the Rabbi” (al-
Ahbar), who was reportedly converted to Islam in 638 c.e. and
who seems to stand behind so many of the Israelite tales that filled
in the later Muslims’ knowledge of the Bible.
Little of this rich background, which was known to the later
(eighth- and ninth-century) biographers of Muhammad, appears
in the Quran, which makes what does appear to be a single,
oblique reference to an attack by Abraha (?) against Mecca (sura
105). The Quran does betray some Yemeni, possibly Jewish, influence
in its early references to the god Rahman, “the Merciful
One,” who shows up often in the South Arabian inscriptions.
Though at first the quranic Rahman does not seem to be identical
with Allah, soon the two are harmonized (cf. sura 17:110), and
rahman eventually took its place as a simple title or attribute of the
High God of Islam.
Turning northward from Mecca, we encounter the other already
noted Jewish communities in the oases of northwestern Arabia.
Epigraphical evidence, the Quran and the Talmud, as well as the
later Arab historical tradition, all attest to their existence, though
not very certainly to their beliefs and practices. We cannot say how
they got there, although likely it was by emigration from the north,
nor precisely when. But if they were ethnic outsiders, the Jews of
the Hejaz oases were fairly acculturated, though by no means assimilated,
to the Arab ways of their neighbors. Muhammad encountered
Jews in the oasis of Medina when he arrived in 622, but
there is no evidence of a fixed or identifiable Jewish community at
Mecca, which was not, like the other Jewish settlement sites, an
oasis but a shrine center with closely linked trade and commercial
ambitions. It is not unlikely, however, that before and during Muhammad’s
lifetime there were Jews in his native town as transient
merchants perhaps, and the Meccans’ obvious familiarity with the
Quran’s frequent biblical allusions promotes the likelihood of
some kind of pre-Islamic Jewish presence at Mecca to a strong
probability.