The Sanctuary in the Desert 17Muhammad deeply involved in the religious customs of Mecca: cir-
cumambulating the Ka‘ba, making sacrifices, and going on pagan
devotional retreats called tahannuth. Indeed, when the pagan sanctu-
ary was torn down and rebuilt (it was enlarged and finally roofed),
Muhammad took an active part in its reconstruction.
All the same, the doctrine of Muhammad’s monotheistic integrity
is an important facet of the Muslim faith because it appears to support
the belief that the Revelation he received came from a divine source.
Admitting that Muhammad might have been influenced by someone
like Zayd is, for some Muslims, tantamount to denying the heavenly
inspiration of Muhammad’s message. But such beliefs are based on the
common yet erroneous assumption that religions are born in some
sort of cultural vacuum; they most certainly are not.
All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and
cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed.
It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, re-
formers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices
of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors
with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.
Indeed, it is most often the prophet’s successors who take upon them-
selves the responsibility of fashioning their master’s words and deeds
into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.
Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to
have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad’s
message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and
cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the
Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. “[God] has established for
you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on
Moses, and on Jesus,” the Quran says (42:13). It should not be surpris-
ing, therefore, that Muhammad would have been influenced as a
young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia. As
unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been,
its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious
society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed
him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have
been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately try-