12 No god but God
which version of Christianity was taking hold in Arabia. According to
the traditions, the image of Jesus residing in the sanctuary had been
placed there by a Coptic (i.e., Alexandrian Monophysite) Christian
named Baqura. If true, then Jesus’ presence in the Ka‘ba may be con-
sidered an affirmation of the Monophysite belief in the Christ as a
fully divine god-man—a Christology that would have been perfectly
acceptable to the pagan Arabs.
Christianity’s presence in the Arabian Peninsula—in both its
orthodox and heterodox incarnations—must have had a significant
effect on the pagan Arabs. It has often been noted that the biblical sto-
ries recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply
a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith.
There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic
descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise
awaiting those who have been saved. These similarities do not contra-
dict the Muslim belief that the Quran was divinely revealed, but they
do indicate that the Quranic vision of the Last Days may have been
revealed to the pagan Arabs through a set of symbols and metaphors
with which they were already familiar, thanks in some part to the wide
spread of Christianity in the region.
While the Ghassanids protected the borders of the Byzantine
Empire, another Arab tribe, the Lakhmids, provided the same service
for the other great kingdom of the time, the Sasanians. As the imperial
inheritors of the ancient Iranian kingdom of Cyrus the Great, which
had dominated Central Asia for nearly a millennium, the Sasanians
were Zoroastrians: followers of the seminal faith initiated by the Ira-
nian prophet Zarathustra nearly fifteen hundred years earlier, whose
cosmogony, cosmology, and eschatology had a formidable influence
on the development of the other religions in the region, especially
Judaism and Christianity.
More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached
the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection,
the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously
born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle
that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of
good and the demonic forces of evil. At the center of Zarathustra’s
theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god,