LECTURE SIX
MUHAMMAD AND
A LAND WITHOUT A PAST
All we have on the subject of Muhammad, his life and his times, is what we
can extract from the Quran, which is very little indeed, and what later Muslims
thought they remembered. The Quran is interested in history, but it is the history
of God’s prophets, their message and their fate, and not of Arabia, or Mecca, or
Muhammad, names that only very, very rarely enter its pages. The Muslim tradi-
tion, on the other hand, thought it knew, or remembered, a great deal about
Muhammad and Mecca. But their recollections are from long after the fact, at a
time, the eighth century, and a place, chiefly Baghdad, when and where he and
his life and his enterprise had passed into the stuff of legend.
Historians are still trying to disentangle the facts from the legend but with
only very partial success since there is no independent background material
like that which Josephus provides for the lifetime of Jesus and no archeology
of either Mecca or Medina of the type that has taken the measure of most of
Palestine. Western Arabia of the seventh century is a land without a past.
At best we can imagine, or guess, Mecca began as a settlement because of
the presence of a spring (now called Zamzam). This may have had some sort
of religious significance because soon there was a shrine next to it and a
sacred area around it. The sacred enclosure is called the Haram, which
means “taboo” in Arabic, and the shrine building the Ka’ba, which in Arabic
means “cube” from the shape of this stone building. The Ka’ba was already
known to Muhammad’s contemporaries as the Bayt Allah, the “House of
God,” and Muhammad and Muslims continue to regard it as such, particularly
since the Quran informs them that the original was built by Abraham and his
son Ishmael.
Today, Haram has been much extended and surrounded by an enormous,
multi-storied portico to accommodate the large number of annual pilgrims.
The Ka’ba is closer to its original form, though it too has been rebuilt. And
today, as in
Muhammad's day,
the interior is as
empty as the Holy
of Holies in the
Jerusalem temple.
Muslims, like the
Jews, are anicon-
ic, that is, they do
not believe God
can be represent-
ed by images.© http://www.clipart.comTraditional site near
Mecca of
Muhammad’s first
revelation.