28 No god but God
seventh-century Arabia, is a complete fabrication created by Arab sto-
rytellers in the eighth and ninth centuries—a fiction containing not
one kernel of sound historical evidence.
The truth is probably somewhere between Watt’s “center of inter-
national commerce” theory and Crone’s “fictional Muhammad” solu-
tion. The non-Arabic texts clearly disprove the notion that Mecca was
the hub of an international trading zone. However, the overwhelming
Arabic evidence to the contrary indicates that there was at least some
measure of trade taking place in Mecca long before the rise of Islam.
Even if the size and scope of this trade have been overstated by the
Arabic sources, whose authors may have wanted to exaggerate the
commercial expertise of their ancestors, it seems clear that the Mec-
cans were engaged in what F. E. Peters calls an “internal trade-barter
system,” which was supplemented by a modest trading zone along the
frontiers of the Syrian and Iraqi borders and which relied almost
exclusively on the cycle of commercial fairs that, by design, coincided
with the pilgrimage season in Mecca.
The point is that this trade, modest as it may have been, was
wholly dependent on the Ka‘ba; there was simply no other reason to
be in Mecca. This was a desert wasteland that produced nothing. As
Richard Bulliet notes in his wonderful book The Camel and the Wheel,
“the only reason for Mecca to grow into a great trading center was
that it was able somehow to force the trade under its control.” Indeed,
that is precisely what Mecca had managed to do. By inextricably link-
ing the religious and economic life of the city, Qusayy and his descen-
dants had developed an innovative religio-economic system that
relied on control of the Ka‘ba and its pilgrimage rites—rites in which
nearly the whole of the Hijaz participated—to guarantee the economic,
religious, and political supremacy of a single tribe, the Quraysh.
That is why the Abyssinians tried to destroy the Ka‘ba in the Year
of the Elephant. Having constructed their own pilgrimage center
in Sana‘, near the prosperous commercial ports of Yemen, the Abys-
sinians set out to eliminate Mecca’s sanctuary, not because the Ka‘ba
was a religious threat, but because it was an economic rival. Like the
leaders of Ta’if, Mina, Ukaz, and nearly every other neighboring
region, the Abyssinians would have loved to replicate Mecca’s religio-
economic system in their own territories and under their own author-