Trbners Oriental Series
ARABIA BEFORE MUHAMMAD
Trbners Oriental Series
ARABIC HISTORY AND CULTURE
In 6 Volumes
I | Arabian Medicine and its Influence on the Middle Ages Vol I
Donald Campbell |
II | Arabian Medicine and its Influence on the Middle Ages Vol II
Donald Campbell |
III | Studies: Indian and Islamic
S Khuda Bukhsh |
IV | A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate
De Lacy OLeary |
V | Arabia Before Muhammad
De Lacy OLeary |
VI | Arabic Thought and its Place in History
De Lacy OLeary |
ARABIA BEFORE MUHAMMAD
DE LACY OLEARY
First published in 1927 by
Routledge, Trench, Trbner & Co Ltd
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
First issued in paperback 2011
1927 De Lacy OLeary
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Arabia Before Muhammad
ISBN 978-0-415-24466-4 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-51084-4 (pbk)
Arabic History and Culture: 6 Volumes
ISBN 978-0-415-24285-1
Trbners Oriental Series
ISBN 978-0-415-23188-6
ARABIA BEFORE MUHAMMAD
BY
DE LACY OLEARY, D.D.
Author of Arabic Thought and its Place in History, A Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, etc.
With Three Maps
LONDON
ROUTLEDGE, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1927
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
T HE main purpose of the following pages is to show that Arabia, before the coming of Islam, was not a country secluded from the cultural influences of Western Asia, nor was it entirely cut off from contact with the political and social life of its neighbours in the Near East. The result of the ancient penetration of Arabia and the intercourse of the Arabs with their neighbours was that the religion of Islam, so far from taking its rise amongst secluded desert tribes, was a natural stage of development in the religious life of West Asia; and the Arabic language, though spared some of the alien influences brought to bear upon certain other of the Semitic dialects, was very considerably affected by foreign intercourse, even in the earliest stage of which we have written records.
ARABIA BEFORE MUHAMMAD
Describing the conditions of Western Asia Bevan says: Only part of each province counts. The rest is waste landthe desolation of the level desert, the desolation of the mountains the belts between mountain and desert, the banks of the great rivers, the lower hills near the sea, these are the lines of civilization (actual or potential) in Western Asia. The consequence of these conditions is that through all the history of Western Asia there runs the eternal distinction between the civilized cultivators of the plains and lower hills and the wild peoples of mountain and desert. The great monarchies which have arisen here have rarely been effective beyond the limits of civilization; mountain and desert are another world in which they can get, at best, only a precarious footing. And to the monarchical settled peoples the near neighbourhood of this unsubjugated world has been a perpetual menace. It is a chaotic region out of which may pour upon them at any weakening of the dam hordes of devastators. At the best of times it hampers the government by offering a refuge and recruiting ground to all the enemies of order, Between the royal governments and the free tribes the feud is secular. This is a just picture, within certain limitations. Its accuracy is mainly due to the fact that the civilization with which we are chiefly concerned in Western Asia is that known as the river-valley culture based on agriculture of an intensive kind which pre-supposes artificial irrigation fed by a river liable to periodical inundation. Such culture was necessarily limited to the levels to which the water of the river can be raised, and consequently that level becomes the line of demarcation between the settled country and the area of the nomadic tribes. Our earliest records in Western Asia were produced by people of this river-valley culture amongst whom, apparently, the art of writing was evolved. This river-valley culture of Mesopotamia and Egypt has played a very prominent part in history and is the lineal ancestor of western civilization to-day. Still the fact remains that it was but one of several cultural types. It is still unproved that all cultural forms trace back to one source, though the tendency of recent research points strongly in that direction. So far as Western Asia is concerned Bevans dictum holds good as applied to a continuous history which traces back to the social groups of the earlier river-valley culture. Its defect, at least in detail, is that it implies too sharp a line of demarcation between the cultured settlers in the lowlands and the wild denizens of the uplands. There was a constant drifting of the desert men into the settled area, sometimes by way of predatory incursion, but sometimes also by forming settlements where the invaders established homes side by side with the older cultivators and gradually assimilated their culture. One of the best-known instances of this appears in the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites, a confederate group of desert tribes, some of whom settled down to agriculture and formed alliances with kindred tribes who had been earlier invaders and with the older occupants of the country, in spite of warnings and exhortations by their prophets urging them to keep apart. In due course the pressure of Philistine aggression forced these invaders into a closer confederacy, though some of them, e.g. the Rechabite clan of the Kenites (cf. Jerem. xxxv) refused to settle down and remained pastoral nomads to a late period. This invasion appears to be fairly typical of Arab movements into the settled territory, movements which were already in progress at the dawn of recorded history and continue to the present day, sometimes on a small scale, sometimes on a larger one. It is not easy to estimate the physiological results of such invasions. In the case of Palestine there seems reason to believe that the majority of fellain of the present day are descendants of the earlier pre-Israelite and even of the pre-Semitic races. Possibly the moist climate has proved fatal to the majority of the desert invaders who have left their language and religion but have failed to leave a posterity.
