pre-islamic arabia:poetry,tribal rivalry and heroism 3Qur"ànic versions, with some variations, the story continues to say
that God had provided them with water and bounties and the child
kept growing and became an archer, dwelling in the wilderness of
Par"an, in the valley of Makkah.
The rest of the story has a particular significance for the Islamic
movement and played an important role in the economy of Pre-
Islamic Arabia. In Islamic traditions, the source of water provided
by God was a spring under the feet of Ismàìl, which Hagar tried
with her hands to stop from going into the sand saying “zumm,
zumm” meaning stop and accumulate. The spring, which was to
become sacred, was called Zumm Zumm, a name that is still used
until the present day. When Prophet Ibràhìm eventually returned to
see them, he found Bedouins dwelling around the spring and with
the help of Ismàìl he built the Ka"aba as a temple to the True One
God. The Ka"aba and the Spring have constituted the focal base
for the sacred shrine of Makkah, to which pilgrims paid homage
before and after the rise of Islam. Pilgrimage has played a significant
role in the life of the Arabian Peninsula since then.
The Land and the PeopleIn a broad geographical sense, Arabia could be divided into three
distinctive parts, north, central and south. It is the whole of the
Arabian Peninsula which starts from the south of Palestine in the
north, stretches to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in the east
and the Red Sea in the west, and stops at the Indian Ocean in the
south. It is a vast land, as large as one fourth of Europe and one
third of the United States. The classification of the Peninsula into
three distinctive parts is dictated by the nature of land and the level
of civilizations that had developed in Ancient Arabia. The North
and the South enjoyed fertile lands, which allowed the development
of a viable economy and helped establish significant civilizations
(Della Vida, 1944). But the Central part, the land from which Islam
emerged and the home of the Arab stock that had lead the Islamic
conquests for centuries, was, apart from sporadic oases, entirely arid.
There is no evidence to suggest that there was a civilization in this
central part comparable to that of the North or the South.
But had Central Arabia always been arid? This is a question that
has been asked by historians in their attempt to establish a “theory”