|
We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
No god but God:
The Origins, Evolution, and Future of
Islam
by Reza Aslan
Random House - March
2005
1.
The Sanctuary in the Desert
PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
Arabia. The Sixth Century C.E.
In the arid, desolate basin of Mecca,
surrounded on all sides by the bare
mountains of the Arabian desert, stands a
small, nondescript sanctuary that the
ancient Arabs refer to as the Kaaba: the
Cube. The Kaaba is a squat, roofless
edifice made of unmortared stones and sunk
into a valley of sand. Its four walls --
so low it is said a young goat can leap
over them -- are swathed in strips of
heavy cloth. At its base, two small doors
are chiseled into the gray stone, allowing
entry into the inner sanctum. It is here,
inside the cramped interior of the
sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic
Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of
the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess
the Egyptians knew as Isis and the Greeks
called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataean
god of writing and divination; Jesus, the
incarnate god of the Christians, and his
holy mother, Mary.
In all, there are said to be three
hundred sixty idols housed in and around
the Kaaba, representing every god
recognized in the Arabian Peninsula.
During the holy months, when the desert
fairs and the great markets envelop the
city of Mecca, pilgrims from all over the
Peninsula make their way to this barren
land to visit their tribal deities. They
sing songs of worship and dance in front
of the gods; they make sacrifices and pray
for health. Then, in a remarkable ritual
-- the origins of which are a mystery --
the pilgrims gather as a group and rotate
around the Kaaba seven times, some pausing
to kiss each corner of the sanctuary
before being captured and swept away again
by the current of bodies.
The pagan Arabs gathered around the
Kaaba believe their sanctuary to have been
founded by Adam, the first man. They
believe that Adam's original edifice was
destroyed by the Great Flood, then rebuilt
by Noah. They believe that after Noah, the
Kaaba was forgotten for centuries until
Abraham rediscovered it while visiting his
firstborn son, Ismail, and his concubine,
Hagar, both of whom had been banished to
this wilderness at the behest of Abraham's
wife, Sarah. And they believe it was at
this very spot that Abraham nearly
sacrificed Ismail before being stopped by
the promise that, like his younger
brother, Isaac, Ismail would also sire a
great nation, the descendants of whom now
spin over the sandy Meccan valley like a
desert whirlwind.
Of course, these are just stories
intended to convey what the Kaaba means,
not where it came from. The truth is that
no one knows who built the Kaaba, or how
long it has been here. It is likely that
the sanctuary was not even the original
reason for the sanctity of this place.
Near the Kaaba is a well called Zamzam,
fed by a bountiful underground spring,
which tradition claims had been placed
there to nourish Hagar and Ismail. It
requires no stretch of the imagination to
recognize how a spring situated in the
middle of the desert could become a sacred
place for the wandering Bedouin tribes of
Arabia. The Kaaba itself may have been
erected many years later, not as some sort
of Arab pantheon, but as a secure place to
store the consecrated objects used in the
rituals that had evolved around Zamzam.
Indeed, the earliest traditions concerning
the Kaaba claim that inside its walls was
a pit, dug into the sand, which contained
"treasures" magically guarded by a
snake.
It is also possible that the original
sanctuary held some cosmological
significance for the ancient Arabs. Not
only were many of the idols in the Kaaba
associated with the planets and stars, but
the legend that they totaled three hundred
sixty in number suggests astral
connotations. The seven circumambulations
of the Kaaba -- called tawaf in Arabic and
still the primary ritual of the annual
Hajj pilgrimage -- may have been intended
to mimic the motion of the heavenly
bodies. It was, after all, a common belief
among ancient peoples that their temples
and sanctuaries were terrestrial replicas
of the cosmic mountain from which creation
sprang. The Kaaba, like the Pyramids in
Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have
been constructed as an axis mundi,
sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred
space around which the universe revolves,
the link between the earth and the solid
dome of heaven. That would explain why
there was once a nail driven into the
floor of the Kaaba that the ancient Arabs
referred to as "the navel of the world."
As G. R. Hawting has shown, the ancient
pilgrims would sometimes enter the
sanctuary, tear off their clothes, and
place their own navels over the nail,
thereby merging with the cosmos.
Alas, as with so many things about the
Kaaba, its origins are mere speculation.
The only thing scholars can say with any
certainty is that by the sixth century
C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and
stone had become the center of religious
life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that
intriguing yet ill-defined era of paganism
that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah --
"the Time of Ignorance."
Traditonally, the Jahiliyyah has been
defined by Muslims as an era of moral
depravity and religious discord: a time
when the sons of Ismail had obscured
belief in the one true God and plunged the
Arabian Peninsula into the darkness of
idolatry. But then, like the rising of the
dawn, the Prophet Muhammad emerged in
Mecca at the beginning of the seventh
century, preaching a message of absolute
monotheism and uncompromising morality.
Through the miraculous revelations he
received from God, Muhammad put an end to
the paganism of the Arabs and replaced the
"Time of Ignorance" with the universal
religion of Islam.
In actuality, the religious experience
of the pre-Islamic Arabs was far more
complex than this tradition suggests. It
is true that before the rise of Islam the
Arabian Peninsula was dominated by
paganism. But, like "Hinduism," "paganism"
is a meaningless and somewhat derogatory
catchall term created by those outside the
tradition to categorize what is in reality
an almost unlimited variety of beliefs and
practices. The word paganus means "a
rustic villager" or "a boor," and was
originally used by Christians as a term of
abuse to describe those who followed any
religion but theirs. In some ways, this is
an appropriate designation. Unlike
Christianity, paganism is not so much a
unified system of beliefs and practices as
it is a religious perspective, one that is
receptive to a multitude of influences and
interpretations. Often, though not always,
polytheistic, paganism strives for neither
universalism nor moral absolutism. There
is no such thing as a pagan creed or a
pagan canon. Nothing exists that could
properly be termed "pagan orthodoxy" or
"pagan heterodoxy."
What is more, when referring to the
paganism of the pre-Islamic Arabs, it is
important to make a distinction between
the nomadic Bedouin religious experience
and the experience of those sedentary
tribes that had settled in major
population centers like Mecca. Bedouin
paganism in sixth-century Arabia may have
encompassed a range of beliefs and
practices -- from fetishism to totemism to
manism (ancestor cults) -- but it was not
as concerned with the more metaphysical
questions that were cultivated in the
larger sedentary societies of Arabia,
particularly with regard to issues like
the afterlife. This is not to say that the
Bedouin practiced nothing more than a
primitive idolatry. On the contrary, there
is every reason to believe that the
Bedouin of pre-Islamic Arabia enjoyed a
rich and diverse religious tradition.
However, the nomadic lifestyle is one that
requires a religion to address immediate
concerns: Which god can lead us to water?
Which god can heal our illnesses?
In contrast, paganism among the
sedentary societies of Arabia had
developed from its earlier and simpler
manifestations into a complex form of
neo-animism, providing a host of divine
and semi-divine intermediaries who stood
between the creator god and his creation.
This creator god was called Allah, which
is not a proper name but a contraction of
the word al-ilah, meaning simply "the
god." Like his Greek counterpart, Zeus,
Allah was originally an ancient rain/sky
deity who had been elevated into the role
of the supreme god of the pre-Islamic
Arabs. Though a powerful deity to swear
by, Allah's eminent status in the Arab
pantheon rendered him, like most High
Gods, beyond the supplications of ordinary
people. Only in times of great peril would
anyone bother consulting him. Otherwise,
it was far more expedient to turn to the
lesser, more accessible gods who acted as
Allah's intercessors, the most powerful of
whom were his three daughters, Allat ("the
goddess"), al-Uzza ("the mighty"), and
Manat (the goddess of fate, whose name is
probably derived from the Hebrew word
mana, meaning "portion" or "share"). These
divine mediators were not only represented
in the Kaaba, they had their own
individual shrines throughout the Arabian
Peninsula: Allat in the city of Ta'if;
al-Uzza in Nakhlah; and Manat in Qudayd.
It was to them that the Arabs prayed when
they needed rain, when their children were
ill, when they entered into battle or
embarked on a journey deep into the
treacherous desert abodes of the Jinn --
those intelligent, imperceptible, and
salvable beings made of smokeless flame
who are called "genies" in the West and
who function as the nymphs and fairies of
Arabian mythology.
There were no priests and no pagan
scriptures in pre-Islamic Arabia, but that
does not mean the gods remained silent.
They regularly revealed themselves through
the ecstatic utterances of a group of
cultic officials known as the Kahins. The
Kahins were poets who functioned primarily
as soothsayers and who, for a fee, would
fall into a trance in which they would
reveal divine messages through rhyming
couplets. Poets already had an important
role in pre-Islamic society as bards,
tribal historians, social commentators,
dispensers of moral philosophy, and, on
occasion, administrators of justice. But
the Kahins represented a more spiritual
function of the poet. Emerging from every
social and economic stratum, and including
a number of women, the Kahins interpreted
dreams, cleared up crimes, found lost
animals, settled disputes, and expounded
upon ethics. As with their Pythian
counterparts at Delphi, however, the
Kahins' oracles were vague and
deliberately imprecise; it was the
supplicant's responsibility to figure out
what the gods actually meant.
Although considered the link between
humanity and the divine, the Kahins did
not communicate directly with the gods but
rather accessed them through the Jinn and
other spirits who were such an integral
part of the Jahiliyyah religious
experience. Even so, neither the Kahins,
nor anyone else for that matter, had
access to Allah. In fact, the god who had
created the heavens and the earth, who had
fashioned human beings in his own image,
was the only god in the whole of the Hijaz
not represented by an idol in the Kaaba.
Although called "the King of the Gods" and
"the Lord of the House," Allah was not the
central deity in the Kaaba. That honor
belonged to Hubal, the Syrian god who had
been brought to Mecca centuries before the
rise of Islam.
Despite Allah's minimal role in the
religious cult of pre-Islamic Arabia, his
eminent position in the Arab pantheon is a
clear indication of just how far paganism
in the Arabian Peninsula had evolved from
its simple animistic roots. Perhaps the
most striking example of this development
can be seen in the processional chant that
tradition claims the pilgrims sang as they
approached the Kaaba:
- Here I am, O Allah, here I am.
- You have no partner,
- Except such a partner as you
have.
- You possess him and all that is
his.
This remarkable proclamation, with its
obvious resemblance to the Muslim
profession of faith -- "There is no god
but God" -- may reveal the earliest traces
in pre-Islamic Arabia of what the German
philologist Max Muller termed henotheism:
the belief in a single High God, without
necessarily rejecting the existence of
other, subordinate gods. The earliest
evidence of henotheism in Arabia can be
traced back to a tribe called the Amir,
who lived near modern-day Yemen in the
second century B.C.E., and who worshipped
a High God they called dhu-Samawi, "The
Lord of the Heavens." While the details of
the Amirs' religion have been lost to
history, most scholars are convinced that
by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had
become the standard belief of the vast
majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only
accepted Allah as their High God, but
insisted that he was the same god as
Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
The Jewish presence in the Arabian
Peninsula can, in theory, be traced to the
Babylonian Exile a thousand years earlier,
though subsequent migrations may have
taken place in 70 C.E., after Rome's
sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem, and
again in 132 C.E., after the messianic
uprising of Simon Bar Kochba. For the most
part, the Jews were a thriving and highly
influential diaspora whose culture and
traditions had been thoroughly integrated
into the social and religious milieu of
pre-Islamic Arabia. Whether Arab converts
or immigrants from Palestine, the Jews
participated in every level of Arab
society. According to Gordon Newby,
throughout the Peninsula there were Jewish
merchants, Jewish Bedouin, Jewish farmers,
Jewish poets, and Jewish warriors. Jewish
men took Arab names and Jewish women wore
Arab headdresses. And while some of these
Jews may have spoken Aramaic (or at least
a corrupted version of it), their primary
language was Arabic.
Although in contact with major Jewish
centers throughout the Near East, Judaism
in Arabia had developed its own variations
on traditional Jewish beliefs and
practices. The Jews shared many of the
same religious ideals as their pagan Arab
counterparts, especially with regard to
what is sometimes referred to as "popular
religion": belief in magic, the use of
talismans and divination, and the like.
For example, while there is evidence of a
small yet formal rabbinical presence in
some regions of the Arabian Peninsula,
there also existed a group of Jewish
soothsayers called the Kohens who, while
maintaining a far more priestly function
in their communities, nevertheless
resembled the pagan Kahins in that they
too dealt in divinely inspired
oracles.
The relationship between the Jews and
pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only
were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the
Arabs were also significantly influenced
by Jewish beliefs and practices. One need
look no further for evidence of this
influence than to the Kaaba itself, whose
origin myths indicate that it was a
Semitic sanctuary (haram in Arabic) with
its roots dug deeply in Jewish tradition.
Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were
all in one way or another associated with
the Kaaba long before the rise of Islam,
and the mysterious Black Stone that to
this day is fixed to the southeast corner
of the sanctuary seems to have been
originally associated with the same stone
upon which Jacob rested his head during
his famous dream of the ladder.
Copyright
© 2005 by Reza Aslan. Excerpted by
permission of Random House, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No
part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing
from the publisher.
|
