LEASING CORFICOLOMBIANA S.A. COMPAÑÍA DE FINANCIAMIENTO

Before we turn to the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, to be able to see the Prophet’s originality we need to picture some defining structures and mark out the framework within which he lived. For this, however, we have to go back a long way. How far? To the beginning of human history? In their early enthusiasm

to see a development, ethnologists wanted to go straight back to the very first beginnings of religion. But they have now abandoned the search for a primal religion, whether animistic or monotheistic. Why? Because they simply do not have the necessary sources for a historical explanation of the origin of religion; contemporary nature-peoples have by no means remained pure ‘primal peoples’, as was once thought. They too have a long, if unwritten, history.1

What about the Bible? Christian theologians should openly concede that the Bible contains no historical information about the beginnings of religion. Given their literary genre, stories in the book of Genesis about a paradisal primal state of human beings and their subsequent fall do not set out to be ‘remembrances of primal times’, historical accounts; they contain a poetic mes- sage, in religious garb, about the greatness of the one God and Creator and the fundamental goodness of his creation, and about human freedom, responsibil- ity and guilt. Present-day Christian theology has therefore lost its early interest in a ‘primal monotheism’: it has no difficulties in accepting an evolution of the world and of human beings from lower organisms, and does not try to make a synthesis between biblical testimony and ethnological evidence. It is enough to know that in the thousands of years of human history no people and no tribe have so far been found that have no characteristics of religion (in the broadest sense of the word, which includes magic).

Arabia on the periphery of the great empires

We are relatively well informed about the earliest high cultures, because they are the first cultures with writing. Although the discussion about where the first human being (homo sapiens) appeared, whether in Africa or elsewhere, is still in full swing, the discussion about the first early historical high cultures and high religions which arose around five thousand years ago has long since settled down. The earliest high culture developed long before the Indus culture in the Indus valley, the Shang culture in the valley of the Yellow River and probably before the Egyptian culture in the Nile Delta—in southern Mesopotamia, in the flood plains of the Euphrates and the Tigris; and this culture had offshoots as far as Arabia.

What would Arabia have been without the inventions made in the temple cities of Sumeria: of the wheel, the potter’s wheel, the wagon, the oldest system of calculation (used for the temple economy and to establish an order of gods in the cosmic system)? What would Arabia have been without the invention of writing: in Sumer first of all a pictorial script scratched on clay tablets (of a kind invented almost contemporaneously in Egypt), from which cuneiform and finally a syllabic script came into being?2 _{Without writing, administrative}

distances—prerequisites for the organization of large populations and for retaining learning for later generations.

Historical research shows that from the earliest times to the time of Islam a micro-structure and a contrary macrostructure influenced Near Eastern society.

– The fundamental microstructure, which had been shaped by small groups, was held together by kinship and neighbourliness. Families, clans and tribes were responsible for marriages and bringing up children; they settled disputes and formed a common defensive front against the outside world.

– Over above and this, and running contrary to it, was a macrostructure formed on the one hand by religion and on the other by empires which con- stantly increased in number and replaced one another. This structure was capa- ble of integrating clans, villages and tribes into a single society, leading to great cultural achievements from the invention of writing, through the creation of important works of myth, religion and poetry, to masterpieces of architecture and sculpture.

The gigantic Arabian peninsula, between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, lay on the periphery of the first great cultural sphere, which had developed into a great semicircle, the ‘Fertile Crescent’.3_{The name of its inhabitants, ‘Aribi’,}

appears for the first time in the ninth century bce, in a cuneiform account of the battle of Qarqar (853 bce) by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III; there is some dispute as to precisely what lies behind this name (ethnically or geographi- cally).4_{By the first millennium bce, Semites from the north had advanced into}

the south of the peninsula. In the oasis regions of the rainy south-western tri- angle, well protected by the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea and the great desert within Arabia, they built several city-states with great temples, monuments and irrigation systems. In addition to the northern Semitic civilization of the Fertile Crescent, here was a southern Semitic civilization—an outpost (the ‘Phoenicia of the south’)—with the longest trade routes in the world at that time. These were the people of Ma‘in, Saba’, Qataban and Hadramaut, who are usually called Sabaeans, later Himyarites (Homerites), but today also Yemenites. For long centuries this southern Arabia dominated—because of its favourable climate (proximity to the monsoon), its lucrative monopoly in incense, and above all its geographical situation, which in antiquity was outstanding for trade between east (India) and west (Egypt, the Mediterranean countries, Mesopotamia). With good reason, southern Arabia, with its harbours of Aden and Qana’, has been called Arabia felix.

Northern Arabia was fundamentally different from this rich and ‘fortunate Arabia’, a producer and importer of luxury goods, but without leaving any great