The Handy Islam Answer Book. John Renard
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the cult of many spiritual powers (called polydaemonism). The Ka’ba remained an important symbol, as did the practice of pilgrimage, but Muhammad appropriated those aspects of tradition by underscoring their association with Abraham and Ishmael especially.
Why is Mecca a holy city for Muslims?
Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, is the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad (c. 570) and was his home until the year 622, when those who opposed him forced him to flee to Medina (a city about 200 miles north of Mecca). Muhammad later returned to Mecca and died there in 632. Mecca is also the site of the Great Mosque, which is situated in the heart of the city. The outside of the mosque is an arcade, made up of a series of arches enclosing a courtyard. In that courtyard is the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Ka’ba, a small stone building that contains the Black Stone, which Muslims believe was sent from heaven by Allah (God). When Muslims pray (five times a day, according to the Five Pillars of Faith), they face the Ka’ba. It is also the destination of the hajj, or pilgrimage.
What is the Ka’ba and why is it important?
According to tradition, Abraham and his son Ishmael built (or perhaps rebuilt) a simple cube-like structure in what came to be the center of the city of Mecca. During Muhammad’s time the Ka’ba was a relatively small structure, about fifteen feet tall, with a black stone, the size of a bowling ball, of (perhaps) meteoric origin built into one of its corners. Rebuilt several times since Muhammad’s day, the Ka’ba now stands about forty-three feet high, with irregular sides ranging from thirty-six to forty-three feet. During Muhammad’s lifetime, the building is said to have housed some 360 idols. In 630, Muhammad cleansed the Ka’ba, and it has since remained empty except for some lamps. Its holiness as a symbol of divine presence derives largely from its associations with the lives of Abraham and Muhammad.
Why did Mecca stand out as a religious center?
By the late sixth century, Mecca had achieved the status of the principal cultic center, attracting large numbers of traders and pilgrims to its regular religious and cultural festivities. At the heart of the city was—and still is—the Ka’ba, which in Muhammad’s time was a simple, nearly cube structure of dark stone. In one of its four corners was set a black stone, an ovoid somewhat larger than a bowling ball, now fractured into seven pieces and framed in a collar of silver. Such stones had long been part of local religious centers not only in the Arabian Peninsula, but throughout the greater Middle East. In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone pillars had been both signs of contention, when they were at the center of idolatrous cults, and altogether acceptable symbols of help and witness. When Joshua, for example, gathered the people of Israel together to renew their special relationship with God, he set up a stone and called upon it to witness in its mute integrity how the people had reaffirmed the covenant (Joshua 24). Popular tradition has it that the Ka’ba’s black stone has likewise been taking note of momentous events—the rise and fall of the powerful, the making and breaking of oaths—since the very dawn of Creation. At the appropriate moment, it will reveal all.
The cube-shaped building called the Ka’ba marks the end of the Hajj for many Muslims. Located in the center of Mecca, the inside of the building contains little more than a few lamps, but it serves as a symbol of God’s divine presence.
Where does the word “Muslim” come from? Is it the same as “Moslem”?
Arabic is a Semitic language, as is its distant cousin Hebrew. Both languages are based on roots made up of three consonants. For example, many words can be derived from the root S-L-M (Sh-L-M in Hebrew). Keep your eye on the upper case letters to follow the root. A basic verb from that root, SaLiMa, means to be safe or whole. A related Arabic noun is salaam, meaning “peace” (like the Hebrew ShaLoM), is part of a standard greeting among Muslims. When Arabic speakers want to build further meanings on a particular root, they do so by modifying the root with either prefixes, infixes (modifying interior letters), or suffixes. For example, to convey the notion of “causing someone to be safe or at peace,” one modifies the root SaLiMa so that it becomes aSLaMa. In religious terms, to bring about a state of safety, peace, and wholeness, one has to get one’s relationship to God in perfect order. That means letting God be God and giving up all pretense at trying to do what only God can do—in short, surrendering to the supreme power. That state of surrender is called iSLaaM, and a person who acts in such a way as to cause that state is called a muSLiM. One of the first major non-Semitic languages early Muslim conquerors encountered was Persian, in which the “u” was pronounced as an “o,” and the “i” as an “e.” Hence the variation so common today, “Moslem.” Both mean exactly the same thing; the variations are entirely due to differences in pronunciation.
What was the religious tradition in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam?
At a little over fourteen hundred years old, Islam is one of the world’s younger major religious traditions. It began in the early seventh century near the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula in a city called Mecca, an important stop along the caravan route from Syria to the north to the Yemenite kingdoms of southwestern Arabia. Some Christian and Jewish families and tribes had long before taken up residence in various parts of Arabia, but the prevailing religious climate was a kind of animism sometimes called “polydaemonism,” the worship of “many spiritual beings” thought to inhabit natural phenomena. Features of landscape, such as stones and springs, could take on a numinous aura and gradually become the focus of a sacred place. Some sites developed as the centers of cultic worship and pilgrimage, with one of the several local deities (ilahat) rising to prominence as the chief among them (al-ilah, “the” god, elided into allah).
What were some of the most important things happening in the Mediterranean world and especially the Middle East and the environs of the Arabian Peninsula when Islam began?
In pre-Islamic times the Arabian Peninsula had rarely been at the center of Middle Eastern events. An immense coastline made the land accessible to and from the Red Sea on the west, the Persian Gulf on the east, and the Indian Ocean on the south, but the real estate of that vast, inhospitable ocean of sand held little strategic interest for the regional powers. Local kingdoms had ruled to the north, in Syria, and to the southwest, in Yemen. Although the Greeks and Romans knew about the place and liked its incense, they never set their sights on the territory. Soon after the Roman Empire divided into West and East in the fourth century, Byzantium began to consolidate its power in the Eastern Mediterranean, taking control of much of the central Middle East and North Africa. By the time Rome fell in 476, the Byzantine Empire was well established in its own right. Along its southeastern fringe, a line that ran northeast from southern Egypt through Syria and Iraq and across the Caucasus almost to the Caspian Sea, the Byzantines had developed a “buffer state” in the Monophysite Christian Arab tribe called the Ghassanids. Meanwhile, the Sasanian Persian Empire that ruled from eastern Iraq toward the east across what is now Iran also had its own buffer state in the Arab tribe called the unchurched Lakhmids. Through their Arab surrogates these two powerful “confessional empires” (Christian and Zoroastrian) struggled back and forth across the region to the north of the Arabian peninsula, an area covering much of present-day Syria and Iraq, engaged in a protracted tug-of-war over the Fertile Crescent with its enormous river systems.
Are there any important connections between ancient Middle East and European powers?
The Sasanian Persian empire had supplanted the last major Roman Middle Eastern successor state, the Parthians, in the early third century. Before the end of that century the Sasanians had reestablished Zoroastrianism as the creed of the realm. Just around the time of Muhammad’s birth both of the confessional empires reached the zenith of their powers, Byzantium under Emperor Justinian (527–565) and Sasanian Persia under Nushirvan (531–579). An important trade route ran up and down the western coastal region, a highway for exchange from Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Yemen, to Syria and points north by way of Mecca. And as the Muslim community was beginning to grow in size and strength, the Byzantine and Sasanian regimes were embroiled in a protracted war (603–628)