While Arabs were principally pagan, thus polytheistic, there was no religious prejudice or persecution in the land, and monotheism was spreading rapidly. A large concentration of Jews, a remnant of the Babylonian captivity twelve centuries prior, lived unmolested in a town they had helped build, the thriving agricultural community of Yathrib, today’s Medina. Their number was thought to be around thirty thousand—a tremendous concentration of people considering the nature of the land they occupied.
Two hundred miles south of Yathrib lay Mecca. It was nestled in a narrow, dry, and stony valley a quarter of a mile wide and a mile and a half long. The mountains on either side were rugged and devoid of vegetation, naked. Unlike Yathrib, Mecca was sterile. There was too little water for agriculture. There were no trees and far too little grass for productive grazing. The village was comprised of mud huts. Neither hewn stones nor bricks, even hand-formed and sun-dried, were to be found anywhere. In this regard, Mecca lagged behind the developed world by three millennia.
There were no roofs in Mecca, as there was no timber. With no timber, there were no carpenters. Blistering winds and encroaching sands were the lot of rich and poor. No one escaped the elements. Every hut was open to the scorching heat of the day and chill of the desert night. And exposure was not without pain. There are few places as unappealing. If Jerusalem and Israel are the world’s heart and aorta, Mecca and Arabia are the dust between her toes. I do not say this to be disparaging, but to provide a point of reference, a necessary contrast, between the places and the claims made about them.
The stateliest “structure” in Mecca was the Ka’aba, a shrine of sorts that Allah, the moon god, shared with idols like Hubal. Their “House” consisted of four walls. It was an open, crude, and roofless cube in the sixth century, having nearly succumbed to gravity and flash floods. Constructed of local rock, totally un-hewn and un-mortared, it was as ignoble as the idols it housed—mostly stones. Hubal was the only graven image. Lord only knows how they distinguished between the gods and the “building.”
Glubb tells us, “It is interesting that most Arabian idols do not seem to have been modeled after human beings, as were those of Greece and Rome… Idolaters in all ages have denied that they worshipped an image made by hands, but have claimed that they prayed to the spirit which dwelt in it. The Arabic language has a word for a stone believed to be the abode of a deity. Many Arabs believed that a blessing could be obtained by kissing or rubbing such a stone.” As we shall discover, kissing and fondling Allah’s Black Stone was something Muhammad did with reverence and regularity.
Apart from the Ka’aba, Mecca was nothing. Isolated, the little burg of perhaps five thousand inhabitants made nothing, grew nothing. It was a long, hard ride to the civilizations of the Mediterranean. Ships passed to the west, caravans to the east. Mecca was controlled by a conniving lot, a tribe called the Quraysh, the clan of Muhammad. What we know about them is derived exclusively from Islamic Traditions, Muslim oral reports.
The Quraysh history, as best we can piece it together from the Islamic scripture, goes something like this: The Khuza’a tribe from the south ousted the Jurhum clan from a tent encampment called Mecca around 400 A.D. Tabari explains:** “The Jurhum acted badly, stealing sacrifices that had been presented to the Ka’aba.”** They were “oppressive.” Ishaq agrees: “The Jurhum were heavy-handed, guilty of taboos, and treated the Ka’aba gifts as their own. A battle ensued and the Khuza’a expelled the Jurhum from Mecca.” The Jurhum’s legacy was: “the two gazelles of the Ka’aba and the cornerstone which they buried in the well of Zamzam. They retreated to Yemen bitterly grieved at losing control of the Ka’aba.”
Why would losing control of a dilapidated rock shrine dedicated to rock gods grieve the dearly departed? The answer has far-reaching implications, implications that would ultimately topple a pair of towers on the other side of the world. The plot, as they say, is about to thicken.
