Arabia before Islam (Political, Economic, Social, Religious and Educational Condition)

In writing the history of Islam, it is customary to begin with a survey of the political, economic, social and
religious conditions of Arabia on the eve of the Proclamation by Muhammad (may God bless him and his
Ahlul-Bait) of his mission as Messenger of God. The review briefly discusses the general conditions in
Arabia in the late sixth and early seventh century A.D.
Political Conditions in Arabia
The most remarkable feature of the political life of Arabia before Islam was the total absence of political
organization in any form. With the exception of Yemen in the south-west, no part of the Arabian
Peninsula had any government at any time, and the Arabs never acknowledged any authority other than
the authority of the chiefs of their tribes. The authority of the tribal chiefs, however, rested, in most cases,
on their character and personality, and was moral rather than political.

The modern student of history finds it incredible that the Arabs lived, generation after generation, century
after century, without a government of any kind. Since there was no government, there was no law and no
order. The only law of the land was lawlessness. In the event a crime was committed, the injured party
took law in its own hands, and tried to administer “justice” to the offender. This system led very frequently
to acts of horrendous cruelty. If the Arab ever exercised any modicum of restraint, it was not because of
any susceptibility he had to questions of right or wrong but because of the fear of provoking reprisals and
vendetta. Vendetta consumed whole generations of Arabs. Since there were no such things as police,
courts or judges, the only protection a man could find from his enemies, was in his own tribe. The tribe
had an obligation to protect its members even if they had committed crimes. Tribalism or „asabiyya (the
clan spirit) took precedence over ethics. A tribe that failed to protect its members from their enemies,
exposed itself to ridicule, obloquy and contempt. Ethics, of course, did not enter the picture anywhere.

Since Arabia did not have a government, and since the Arabs were anarchists by instinct, they were locked
up in ceaseless warfare. War was a permanent institution of the Arabian society. The desert could support
only a limited number of people, and the state of inter-tribal war maintained a rigid control over the
growth of population. But the Arabs themselves did not see war in this light. To them, war was a pastime
or rather a dangerous sport, or a species of tribal drama, waged by professionals, according to old and
gallant codes, while the “audience” cheered. Eternal peace held no appeal for them, and war provided an
escape from drudgery and from the monotony of life in the desert.

All Arabs were notorious for certain characteristics such as arrogance, conceit, boastfulness, vindictiveness
and excessive love of plunder. Their arrogance was partly responsible for their failure to establish a state of
their own. They lacked political discipline, and until the rise of Islam, never acknowledged any authority
as paramount in Arabia.

Economic Conditions
Economically, the Jews were the leaders of Arabia. They were the owners of the best arable lands in
Hejaz, and they were the best farmers in the country. They were also the entrepreneurs of such industries
as existed in Arabia in those days, and they enjoyed a monopoly of the armaments industry. Slavery was
an economic institution of the Arabs. Male and female slaves were sold and bought like animals, and they
formed the most depressed class of the Arabian society. The most powerful class of the Arabs was made up
by the capitalists and money-lenders. The rates of interest which they charged on loans were exorbitant,
and were especially designed to make them richer and richer, and the borrowers poorer and poorer.

Page 1 of 5
The most important urban centers of Arabia were Makkah and Yathrib, both in Hejaz. The citizens of
Makkah were mostly merchants, traders and money-lenders. Their caravans traveled in summer to Syria
and in winter to Yemen. They also traveled to Bahrain in the east and to Iraq in the northeast. The caravan
trade was basic to the economy of Makkah, and its organization called for considerable skill, experience
and ability. On the eve of Islam the most complex and advanced human aggregate of the Arabian
Peninsula lived in the city of the Quraysh. The Arabs and the Jews both practiced usury. Many among
them were professional usurers; they lived on the interest they charged on their loans.

Social Conditions
Arabia was a male-dominated society. Women had no status of any kind other than as sex objects. The
number of women a man could marry was not fixed. When a man died, his son “inherited” all his wives
except his own mother. A savage custom of the Arabs was to bury their female infants alive. Even if an
Arab did not wish to bury his daughter alive, he still had to uphold this “honorable” tradition, being
unable to resist social pressures.
Drunkenness was a common vice of the Arabs. With drunkenness went their gambling. They were
compulsive drinkers and compulsive gamblers. The relations of the sexes were extremely loose. Many
women sold sex to make their living since there was little else they could do. These women flew flags on
their houses, and were called “ladies of the flags” (dhat-er-rayyat).

Marriage in the Jahiliyah was of four types:

1. One was the marriage of people as it is today, where a man betroths his ward or his daughter to another
man, and the latter assigns a dower (bride wealth) to her and then marries her.
2. Another type was where a man said to his wife when she was purified from her menses, „Send to N and
ask to have intercourse with him;' her husband then stays away from her and does not touch her at all until
it is clear that she is pregnant from that (other) man with whom she sought intercourse.

When it is clear that she is pregnant, her husband has intercourse with her if he wants. He acts thus simply
from the desire for a noble child. This type of marriage was known as nikah al-istibda, the marriage of
seeking intercourse.

3. Another type was when a group (raht) of less than ten men used to visit the same woman and all of
them had to have intercourse with her. If she became pregnant and bore a child, when some nights had
passed after the birth she sent for them, and not a man of them might refuse.

When they had come together in her presence, she would say to them, „You (pl.) know the result of your
acts; I have borne a child and he is your (sing.) child, N.' – naming whoever she will by his name. Her
child is attached to him, and the man may not refuse.

4. The fourth type is when many men frequent a woman, and she does not keep herself from any who
comes to her. These women are prostitutes. They used to set up at their doors banners forming a sign.
Whoever wanted them went in to them. If one of them conceived and bore a child, they gathered together
to her and summoned the physiognomists.

Then they attached her child to the man whom they thought (the father), and the child remained attached
to him and was called his son, no objection to this course being possible. When Muhammad (God bless
and preserve him) came preaching the truth, he destroyed all the types of marriage of the Jahiliya except
that which people practice today.

Page 2 of 5
The State of Religion in Pre-Islamic Arabia
The period in the Arabian history which preceded the birth of Islam is known as the Times of Ignorance.
Judging by the beliefs and the practices of the pagan Arabs, it appears that it was a most appropriate name.
The Arabs were the devotees of a variety of “religions” which can be classified into the following
categories.

1. Idol-worshippers or polytheists. Most of the Arabs were idolaters. They worshipped numerous idols
and each tribe had its own idol or idols and fetishes. They had turned the Kaaba in Makkah, which
according to tradition, had been built by the Prophet Abraham and his son, Ismael, and was dedicated by
them to the service of One God, into a heathen pantheon housing 360 idols of stone and wood.

2. Atheists This group was composed of the materialists and believed that the world was eternal.

3. Zindiqs They were influenced by the Persian doctrine of dualism in nature. They believed that there
were two gods representing the twin forces of good and evil or light and darkness, and both were locked up
in an unending struggle for supremacy.

4. Sabines. They worshipped the stars.

5. Jews When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and drove the Jews out of Palestine and Syria,
many of them found new homes in Hejaz in Arabia. Under their influence, many Arabs also became
converts to Judaism. Their strong centers were the towns of Yathrib, Khayber, Fadak and Umm-ul-Qura.

6. Christians. The Romans had converted the north Arabian tribe of Ghassan to Christianity. Some clans
of Ghassan had migrated to and had settled in Hejaz. In the south, there were many Christians in Yemen
where the creed was originally brought by the Ethiopian invaders. Their strong center was the town of
Najran.

7. Monotheists There was a small group of monotheists present in Arabia on the eve of the rise of Islam.
Its members did not worship idols, and they were the followers of the Prophet Abraham. The members of
the families of Muhammad, the future prophet, and Ali ibn Abi Talib, the future caliph, and most
members of their clan – the Banu Hashim – belonged to this group.

Education among the Arabs before Islam

Among the Arabs there were extremely few individuals who could read and write. Most of them were not
very eager to learn these arts. Some historians are of the opinion that the culture of the period was almost
entirely oral. The Jews and the Christians were the custodians of such knowledge as Arabia had.

The greatest intellectual accomplishment of the pagan Arabs was their poetry. They claimed that God had
bestowed the most remarkable qualities of the head upon the Greeks (its proof is their science and
philosophy); of hand upon the Chinese (its proof is their craftsmanship); and of the tongue upon the Arabs
(its proof is their eloquence). Their greatest pride, both before and after Islam, was their eloquence and
poetry. The importance of poetry to them can be gauged by the following testimony:
In nomad Arabia, the poets were part of the war equipment of the tribe; they defended their own, and
damaged hostile tribes by the employment of a force which was supposed indeed to work mysteriously, but
which in fact consisted in composing dexterous phrases of a sort that would attract notice, and would
consequently be diffused and remembered widely. (Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, 1931)

Page 3 of 5
Most of the information on the economic conditions, social regime and mores of the Arabs in the fifth and
sixth centuries A.D., comes from ancient Arabic or pre-Islamic poetry, known for its „photographic
faithfulness' to all phases of Arabian tribal life and its environment. Specialists, therefore, accept this poetry
as the „most important and authoritative source for describing the Arab people and their customs' in this
period (Arabs, Islam and the Arab Caliphatein the Early Middle Ages, 1969)

Arabic poetry was rich in eloquence and imagery but it was limited in range, and was lacking in
profundity. Its content might be interesting but it was stereotyped. The masterpieces of their poetry follow
almost exactly the same sequence of ideas and images. It was, nevertheless, a faithful mirror of life in
ancient Arabia. Also, in cultivating the art of poetry, the Arab poets were, unconsciously, developing one
of the greatest artifacts of mankind, the Arabic language.

The greatest compositions of the pagan Arabs were the so-called “Golden Odes,” a collection of seven
poems, supposedly of unsurpassed excellence in spontaneity, power and eloquence. They were suspended
in Kaaba as a challenge to any aspiring genius to excel or to match them. Sir William Muir writes about
these poems as follows:

The Seven Suspended Poems still survive from a period anterior even to Mohammed, a wondrous
specimen of artless eloquence. The beauty of the language and wild richness of the imagery are
acknowledged by the European reader; but the subject of the poet was limited, and the beaten track seldom
deviated from. (The Life of Mohammed, 1877)

The greatest “composition” of Islam was Al-Qur‟an al-Majid, the Scripture of Islam, and it was in prose.
Muslims believe that Qur‟an was “composed” in Heaven before it was revealed to Muhammad, the
Messenger of God. They believe that human genius can never produce anything that can match its style or
contents. For the last fifty generations, it has been, for them, a model of literary, philosophical, theological,
legal, metaphysical and mystical thought.

An attempt has been made in the foregoing pages to portray the general state of Arabia and the lifestyle of
the Arabs before Islam. This “portrait” is authentic as it has been drawn from the “archives” of the pre-
Islamic Arabs themselves.

Judging by this portrait, it appears that Arabia before Islam was without social amenity or historical depth,
and the Arabs lived in moral bankruptcy and spiritual servitude. Life for them was devoid of meaning,
purpose and direction. The human spirit was in chains, and was awaiting, as it were, a signal, to make a
titanic struggle, to break loose and to become free.

The signal was given in A.D. 610 by Muhammad, the son of Abdullah, in the city of Makkah, when he
proclaimed his mission of prophethood, and launched the movement called Islam on its world-girdling
career. Islam was the greatest blessing for mankind ever. It set men and women free, through obedience to
their Creator, from slavery in all its manifestations. Muhammad, the Messenger of God, was the supreme
emancipator of mankind. He extricated man from the “pits of life.” The Arabian Peninsula was
geographically peripheral and politically terra incognito until the early seventh century A.D. It was then
that Muhammad put it on the political map of the world by making it the theater of momentous events of
history.

Before Islam, the Arabs had played only a marginal role in the history of the Middle East, and they would
have remained forever a nation of animists and shepherds if Muhammad (may God bless him and his

Page 4 of 5
Ahlul-Bait) had not provided them the focus and the stimulus that welded their scattered nomadic tribes
into a purposeful driving force.

He molded a “nation” out of a rough mass without basic structure. He invested the Arabs with a new
dynamism, idealism and explosive creativity, and they changed the course of history. He created an
entirely new mental and psychological ecology, and his work placed an emphatic period in world history;
it was the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Writing about this watershed in history, Francesco Gabrieli says in his book, The Arabs – A Compact
History, (1963):

Thus terminated the pagan prelude in the history of the Arabian people. Whoever compares it with what followed,
which gave the Arabs a primary role on the stage of world, and inspired high thoughts and high works, not only to an
exceptional man emerged from their bosom, but to an entire elite which for several generations gathered and promoted
his word, cannot but notice the leap that the destinies of this people assume here.

The rhythm of its life, until then, weak and dispersed, was to find a unity, a propulsive center, a goal; and all this under
the sign of religious faith. No romantic love for the primitive can make us fail to recognize that without Mohammed and
Islam they would have probably remained vegetating for centuries in the desert, destroying themselves in the bloodletting
of their internecine wars, looking at Byzantium, at Ctesiphon and even at Axum as distant beacons of civilization
completely out of their reach.

Page 5 of 5