The Sanctuary in the Desert 13Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), who fashioned the heavens and
earth, the night and the day, the light and the darkness. Like most
ancients, however, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as
being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an
ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu (“the
beneficent spirit”) and Angra Mainyu (“the hostile spirit”) were
responsible for good and evil, respectively. Although called the “twin
children” of Mazda, these two spirits were not gods, but only the spir-
itual embodiment of Truth and Falsehood.
By the time of the Sasanians, Zarathustra’s primitive monotheism
had transformed into a firmly dualistic system in which the two pri-
mordial spirits became two deities locked in an eternal battle for the
souls of humanity: Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), the God of Light, and
Ahriman, the God of Darkness and the archetype of the Christian
concept of Satan. Although a non-proselytizing and notoriously diffi-
cult religion to convert to—considering its rigid hierarchical social
structure and its almost fanatical obsession with ritual purity—the
Sasanian military presence in the Arabian Peninsula had nonetheless
resulted in a few tribal conversions to Zoroastrianism, particularly to
its more amenable sects, Mazdakism and Manichaeism.
The picture that emerges from this brief outline of the pre-Islamic
Arabian religious experience is that of an era in which Zoroastrianism,
Christianity, and Judaism intermingled in one of the last remaining
regions in the Near East still dominated by paganism, albeit a firmly
henotheistic paganism. The relative distance that these three major
religions enjoyed from their respective centers gave them the freedom
to develop their creeds and rituals into fresh, innovative ideologies.
Especially in Mecca, the center of the Jahiliyyah religious experience,
this vibrant pluralistic environment became a breeding ground for
bold new ideas and exciting religious experimentation, the most
important of which was an obscure Arab monotheistic movement
called Hanifism, which arose some time around the sixth century C.E.
and which, as far as anyone is aware, existed nowhere else except in
western Arabia, a region the Arabs called the Hijaz.
The legendary origins of Hanifism are recounted in the writings
of one of Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Hisham. One day,