10 No god but God
stone upon which Jacob rested his head during his famous dream of
the ladder.
The pagan Arab connection to Judaism makes perfect sense when
one recalls that, like the Jews, the Arabs considered themselves
descendants of Abraham, whom they credited not only with rediscov-
ering the Ka‘ba, but also with creating the pilgrimage rites that took
place there. So revered was Abraham in Arabia that he was given his
own idol inside the Ka‘ba, where he was depicted in traditional pagan
fashion as a shaman casting divining rods. That Abraham was neither
a god nor a pagan was as inconsequential to the Arabs as the associa-
tion of their god, Allah, with the Jewish god, Yahweh. In sixth-century
Arabia, Jewish monotheism was in no way anathema to Arab paganism,
which, as mentioned, could easily absorb a cornucopia of disparate
religious ideologies. The pagan Arabs would likely have perceived
Judaism as just another way of expressing what they considered to be
similar religious sentiments.
The same could be said with regard to Arab perceptions of Chris-
tianity, which, like Judaism, had an influential presence in the Arabian
Peninsula. The Arab tribes were surrounded by Christians: from the
Syrians in the northwest, to the Mesopotamian Christians in the
northeast, to the Abyssinians in the south. In fact, by the sixth century
C.E., Yemen had become the seat of Christian aspirations in Arabia;
the city of Najran was widely considered to be the hub of Arab Chris-
tianity, while in Sana‘, a massive church had been constructed that, for
a time, vied with Mecca as the primary pilgrimage site in the region.
As a proselytizing faith, however, Christianity was not content to
remain at the borders of the Arab lands. Thanks to a concerted effort
to spread the gospel throughout the Peninsula, a number of Arab
tribes had converted en masse to Christianity. The largest of these
tribes was the Ghassanids, who straddled the border between the
Roman and Arab worlds, acting as a buffer between the Christian
Byzantine Kingdom and the “uncivilized” Bedouin. The Ghassanids
actively supported missionary efforts in Arabia, while at the same time
the Byzantine emperors sent their bishops deep into the deserts to
bring the rest of the pagan Arabs into their fold. And yet, the Ghas-
sanids and the Byzantines were preaching two very different Chris-
tianities.