26 No god but God
enter the sacred city. As Keeper of the Keys, Qusayy also maintained a
monopoly over the buying and selling of goods and services to the pil-
grims, which he in turn paid for by taxing the city’s inhabitants and
keeping the surplus for himself. In a few short years, Qusayy’s system
had made him, and those ruling clans of Quraysh who had managed to
connect their fortunes with his, enormously wealthy.
But there was even more profit to be made in Mecca.
Like all Semitic sanctuaries, the Ka‘ba transformed the entire sur-
rounding area into sacred ground, making the city of Mecca a neutral
zone where fighting among tribes was prohibited and weapons were
not allowed. The pilgrims who traveled to Mecca during the pilgrim-
age season were encouraged to take advantage of the peace and pros-
perity of the city by bringing with them merchandise to trade. To
facilitate this, the great commercial fairs of the Hijaz coincided with
the pilgrimage cycle, and the rules for one complemented those for
the other. Whether it was Qusayy’s idea to begin collecting a tax on
this trade is difficult to know. At this point, it is likely that the Quraysh
acted only as stewards of the trade that took place in and around
Mecca, collecting a small fee for assuring the safety of the caravans in
what was a dangerous and unpatrolled region of the desert. What
seems clear, however, is that a few generations after Qusayy, under the
directive of his grandson and Muhammad’s great-grandfather,
Hashim, the Quraysh had managed to create a modest but lucrative
trading zone in Mecca, one which relied almost entirely on the Ka‘ba’s
pilgrimage cycle for its subsistence.
How expansive the trade in Mecca was is a matter of fierce debate
among scholars. For years it was axiomatic to think of Mecca as the
nexus of an international trade route that imported gold, silver, and
spices from the southern ports of Yemen, then exported them to the
Byzantine and Sasanian empires for a hefty profit. According to this
view, which is confirmed by an overwhelming number of Arabic
sources, the Quraysh presided over what would have been a natural
trading outpost between southern and northern Arabia, a region
whose prestige would have been greatly enhanced by the presence of
the Ka‘ba. Thus, Mecca was the financial center of the Hijaz, accord-
ing to Montgomery Watt, and trade was Mecca’s raison d’être, in the
words of Muhammad Shaban.