The Keeper of the Keys 27Recently, however, a number of scholars have questioned this
view, primarily because not a single non-Arabic source has been dis-
covered to corroborate the theory of Mecca as the hub of an interna-
tional trade zone. “Of Quraysh and their trading center there is no
mention at all, be it in the Greek, Latin, Syrian, Aramaic, Coptic, or
other literature composed outside Arabia before the conquests,”
Patricia Crone writes in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. “This
silence is striking and significant.”
Crone and others have argued that unlike the case in other firmly
established trading centers like Petra and Palmyra, there are no tangi-
ble signs of amassed capital in pre-Islamic Mecca. And, despite the
claims of the Arabic sources, both historical evidence and basic geo-
graphical sense clearly indicate that Mecca was not situated on any
known trading route in the Arabian Peninsula. “Why should caravans
have made a deep descent to the barren valley of Mecca when they
could have stopped at Ta’if ?” asks Crone.
Crone is correct. There was no reason either to travel to Mecca
or, for that matter, to settle there. No reason, that is, but the Ka‘ba.
There is no question that Mecca was out of the way. The natural
trade route in the Hijaz lay east of the city; a stop in Mecca would have
required a significant detour between Yemen and Syria, the primary
transit for international trade in pre-Islamic Arabia. Certainly, Ta’if,
which was situated near the trade route and which also had a sanctuary
(dedicated to Allat), would have been a more natural stop along the
way. But the city of Mecca was endowed with a special sanctity that
went beyond the Ka‘ba itself, by virtue of the presence of the sanctu-
ary and the gods housed inside.
Unlike the other sanctuaries dotting the desert landscape of the
Hijaz—each dedicated to a local deity—the Ka‘ba was unique in that
it claimed to be a universal shrine. Every god in pre-Islamic Arabia
was said to reside in this single sanctuary, which meant that regardless
of their tribal beliefs, all peoples of the Arabian Peninsula felt a deep
spiritual obligation not only to the Ka‘ba, but also to the city that
housed it and the tribe that preserved it. Crone’s solution to the dis-
crepancies between the Arabic and non-Arabic texts is to conclude
that everything we know about the pre-Islamic Ka‘ba, indeed every-
thing we know about the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of Islam in