The Sanctuary in the Desert 15included Khalid ibn Sinan, called “a prophet lost by his people,” and
Qass ibn Sa’idah, known as “the sage of the Arabs.” It is impossible to
say how many Hanif converts there were in pre-Islamic Arabia, or
how large the movement had become. What seems evident, however,
is that there were many in the Arabian Peninsula who were actively
struggling to transform the vague henotheism of the pagan Arabs into
what Jonathan Fueck has termed “a national Arabian monotheism.”
But Hanifism seemed to have been more than just a primitive
Arab monotheistic movement. The traditions present the Hanifs as
preaching an active god who was intimately involved in the personal
lives of his creation, a god who did not need mediators to stand
between him and humanity. At the heart of the movement was a fer-
vent commitment to an absolute morality. It was not enough merely
to abstain from idol worship; the Hanifs believed one must strive to be
morally upright. “I serve my Lord the compassionate,” Zayd said,
“that the forgiving Lord may pardon my sin.”
The Hanifs also spoke in an abstract fashion about a future day of
reckoning when everyone would have to answer for his or her moral
choices. “Beware, O men, of what follows death!” Zayd warned his
fellow Meccans. “You can hide nothing from God.” This would have
been a wholly new concept for a people with no firm notion of an
afterlife, especially one based on human morality. And because Hanif-
ism was, like Christianity, a proselytizing faith, its ideology would
have spread throughout the Hijaz. Most sedentary Arabs would have
heard Hanif preachers; the Meccans would surely have been familiar
with Hanif ideology; and there can be little doubt that the Prophet
Muhammad would have been aware of both.
There exists a little-known tradition recounting an astonishing meet-
ing between Zayd, the Hanif, and a teen-aged Muhammad. The story
seems to have been originally reported by Yunus ibn Bukayr on the
authority of Muhammad’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq. And while it
appears to have been expunged from Ibn Hisham’s retelling of
Muhammad’s life, M. J. Kister has catalogued no fewer than eleven
other traditions that recount nearly identical versions of the story.
It was, the chroniclers say, “one of the hot days of Mecca” when