A World Between Two Empires
In the sixth century, the known world was dominated by two exhausted giants. To the north-west, the Byzantine Empire held Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia; to the north-east, Sasanian Persia ruled Iraq and the Iranian plateau. For generations the two powers had bled one another in wars that devastated the Fertile Crescent, and each maintained Arab client kingdoms — the Ghassanids for Byzantium, the Lakhmids for Persia — as buffers against the desert.12
Between and beneath them stretched the Arabian Peninsula: a million square miles of steppe, lava field, and sand, penetrated by neither empire. Its people, the Arabs, traced their descent through Adnan to Ismāʿīl (Ishmael), son of Ibrāhīm (Abraham), and through Qahtan in the south. No king ruled them. Loyalty belonged to the tribe, protection came from kinship, and honour was defended by the sword and immortalised in verse — for poetry was the art of the Arabs, their archive and their newspaper, recited at fairs and hung, so tradition tells, in golden letters upon the Kaʿbah itself.23
Makkah and the Ancient House
In a barren valley of the Hijaz, at the crossing of the caravan routes that carried frankincense, leather, and silver from Yemen to Syria, stood Makkah. Its heart was the Kaʿbah — the cube-shaped House which, the Qur'an declares, Ibrāhīm and Ismāʿīl had raised for the worship of the One God: “And when Ibrāhīm was raising the foundations of the House, and Ismāʿīl with him: Our Lord, accept this from us.”4 Beside it welled the spring of Zamzam, which had made settlement possible in the waterless valley.35
Custodianship of the sanctuary belonged to the tribe of Quraysh, settled in Makkah by their ancestor Qusayy some five generations before the Prophet's birth. The months of pilgrimage were months of sacred truce, when raiding ceased and all Arabia came to Makkah — to worship, to trade, and to compete in poetry at the fairs of ʿUkāẓ and Dhū'l-Majāz. From this privileged position the Quraysh grew wealthy, sending the two great caravans of winter and summer that the Qur'an itself recalls.13
The Age of Ignorance
Yet the religion of Ibrāhīm had been buried under centuries of accretion. Tradition holds that ʿAmr ibn Luḥayy of Khuzāʿah first brought an idol — Hubal — from Syria; by the sixth century some three hundred and sixty idols crowded the Kaʿbah and its precincts, and every tribe had its patron deity. Chief among the goddesses were al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā, and Manāt, whom the Qur'an would later name and dismiss as “nothing but names which you have named, you and your fathers.”63
Muslims would remember this era as the Jāhiliyyah — the Age of Ignorance. Alongside its virtues of courage, generosity, and hospitality, it was an age of blood feud and slavery, of usury that ground the poor, and of the practice the Qur'an condemned with lasting horror: the burial of infant daughters alive — “And when the girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed.”72
Still, the older faith was not wholly forgotten. Scattered individuals known as ḥanīfs turned from the idols to seek the religion of Ibrāhīm — among them Zayd ibn ʿAmr ibn Nufayl, who would stand with his back to the Kaʿbah and say: “O Quraysh, by Him in whose hand is my soul, none of you follows the religion of Ibrāhīm but I.”8 Jewish tribes lived in the oases of Yathrib and Khaybar, and Christian communities in Najrān and on the empire's fringes; from them the Arabs had heard rumours of prophets, scriptures, and of one yet to come.23
A Fullness of Time
Historians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, have observed how singularly prepared the moment was. The two empires were spiritually weary and militarily spent; Arabia spoke one supple, powerful language; and Makkah stood at the junction of the trade routes, inviolable and independent. Into this world — proud, fractured, eloquent, and waiting — the Prophet of Islam would be born.123