Pre islamic Arabia & the age of Jahiliya

This is a term used extensively in Muslim Arab terminology which actually means “time of ignorance”; that is, ignorance of a revealed book, and hence the revelation of the unity and oneness of God. Before the advent of Muhammad, the Arabians had religious and social traditions that were later almost completely incorporated by him into Muhammadan theology with minimum if any modifications. Unlike the South Arabians who were a more urban group, the North Arabians of Najd and Al Hijaz, were mostly nomadic.
The sedentary populations of the above developed no ancient culture of their own. They had no system of writing and the only information about them comes from oral traditions, proverbs, legends and mostly poems that were orally transmitted down the decades. Most of these were later committed to writing two to three hundred years later (822/922 CE), that is two to four hundred years after the events that they were supposed to represent. It is a recorded historical fact that the North Arabians did not develop a system of writing until after the death of Muhammad c.635CE.
Arabs before Islam…

The Arab tribes of the Jazeerah (Peninsula) – Christian, Pagan or ‘Jewish’ – fought each other over the acquisition of water resources, over blood feuds and over supremacy. Each individual Arab was known and identified by the name of the tribe to which he belonged.

Although all the people of the peninsula were Arab, there was no such thing as a sense of unity or nationalism. Each tribe was a separate and independent entity, with different dialects and religious beliefs and had no feeling of affinity or loyalty to any other except in terms of mutually beneficial and convenient alliances. The sense of the ‘Umma al Arabia’, the nation and people of Arabia, was achieved only after all of Arabia was subjugated and united under Muhammad.

Social structure…

The Bedouin tribe (Qabilah) was organized in clans. The nucleus of the tribe was the tent (Khaymah) which represented a family; an encampment of tents formed a (Hayy). Members of one (Hayy) constituted a clan (Qawm). A number of kindred clans grouped together formed a tribe (Qabilah). The members of each clan are invariably blood-related.

The Bedouins are very democratic as far as their leadership is concerned. Only the wisest and most experienced of the clan members is elected leader (Sheikh); they are not hereditary. The leader is only primus inter pares; one among equals. His tenure in office lasted during the good will of his constituency. The name of each clan starts with the prefix Banu-, which means the children or descendants of. Tribal members share in common all pasturage, water and cultivable land; only the tent and its contents belong to the individual.

The Muslim state made full use of the tribal system for its military conquests and settlements purposes. The army was divided into divisions based on tribal affiliations to keep their cohesion and loyalty. The conquered territories were settled by tribes that treated the new converts from among the subjugated peoples as ‘clients’ (Mawali).

Religion…

In general, the pagan Arabs – the majority in Arabia – had a very primitive and simple astral and animistic religion of at least 360 gods and goddesses. Among the gods of the pagan Arabs, Allah was one of the most important. In Mecca, Allah was the principal though not the only deity. He had three daughters: Al Lat (Crescent); Al Uzzah (Venus) and Al Manah (Fate) (53:19/20). Besides the Ka’ba of Mecca, caves, trees, waterholes, wells, etc., were also venerated especially in a bleak, arid and desolate land as theirs. There were other ‘holy’ sites also called Ka’ba besides the one in Mecca, such as the ones in Petra, Sana’ and Najran.

The sun too was worshiped but not to the same level of importance as the moon. After all, Moon worship in general implies a nomadic and pastoral society, whereas Sun worship is invariably associated with an agricultural one. Most important of all is that in the scorching furnace heat of the Arabian Desert, the Sun is actually an enemy of the nomads depriving them of pasture, shade and water. On the other hand, the moon is their friend and ally providing them with light, coolness of the night, dew and shade; and this is reflected in its greater importance as a deity for them.

The pagan Arabs built no temples or special structures for their gods, unlike all the surrounding civilizations. They developed no elaborate mythology, no structured theology and no cosmogony comparable to that of any of their neighbours.

The pagan Ka’ba was a special but very simple cube-like building that housed a fallen black meteorite, which was venerated as a fetish. Because of its holiness, the area surrounding it was pronounced prohibited/sacred (Haram). Even before ‘Islam’, it was an object of annual pilgrimage and sacrifice.

Most of the ‘holy’ places of their other divinities were trees, wells, caves or fallen meteors. The pagan Arabs made sacrifices – both human and animal – to ‘Venus’ (Al Uzzah) and it is recorded that Muhammad participated in giving sacrifices to this goddess as a young man. The Bedouins also believed that the desert was full of living creatures/spirits called Jinn whose purpose was to blight their lives with mischief and difficulties. Since nomadic people bury their dead on the move and hence have no special resting-places such as graveyards, they subsequently had no special reverence for their dead nor any concept of an afterlife, of resurrection, a day of judgment or heaven and hell; these came with ‘Islam’.

The pagan Arabian calendar was a lunar one. The first three months of its Spring season coincided with the period of ‘peace’: dhu-al-Qa’dah; dhu-al-Hijjah and Muharram. These were the months of ‘Holy Truce’ when the usually warring tribes laid aside their hatreds and warfare and concentrated on offering sacrifices to their pagan gods and visiting their ‘holy’ sites. The Ukaz Fair in this period was used to trade and recite poetry. In pre-Islamic days, the annual fairs of North Arabia were followed by a pilgrimage in dhu-al-Hijjah to the Ka’ba and mount Arafat. Almost every one of those primarily pagan rituals, fetishes and traditions was later – out of desperation and for convenience – incorporated by Muhammad in his own version of ‘Islam’.

The Arabian Peninsula harboured, besides the indigenous tribes who followed the traditions of the Jews and the Christians, were the Sabeans and the ‘Hanifs’ who were believers in the One and Only God of Abraham; these latter must have been off-shoots from either the ‘Jews’ or the Christians or both.

Culture…

Contrary to all of Arab propaganda and historical falsifications, there was no Arab civilization to speak of where Muhammad grew up. Civilization requires a central government, administrative personnel and documentation, cities, art, sculpture, temples and priesthood, an army, etc. These were totally lacking in his days. The Arabs of Mecca and Medina did not have any of these attributes; they left posterity no monuments or temples and no records of their achievements. They had absolutely nothing remotely resembling either the Byzantine or Persian civilizations.

Tribes on the move can never bring about a civilization, neither can an extremely hostile and impoverished land.

The Arabs of Al Jahilyah (before Muhammad), left almost nothing in writing. No national epic was ever developed by the Arabians and no dramatic work of first-class importance. This is in unfavourable contrast to the Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians or the Egyptians who had a much more advanced literary, written and oral traditions; the Arabs on the other hand had mostly their oral one. They were the least literate among the peoples of the Middle East. Their language was their greatest legacy.

The Bedouins’ love of poetry was their only cultural asset and legacy. Their poets were held with great esteem and were extremely influential because of their mastery of the spoken word. They acted as the historians, propagandists and spokesmen of their tribes. They were in fact the equivalent of the modern news media reporters.

Although poetry reigned supreme among the Arabs of Al Hijaz and Al Najd (north-western and northern Arabia), prose was not well represented in the Jahiliyah literature since no system of writing had yet been fully developed and there is no trustworthy record of any Arabic literature before the Quran. This evolution started to occur just after the death of Muhammad as it was propelled by the imperative necessity to write down as much of the Quran as possible before all those who had memorised it had died of old age or killed in the battles of the civil wars that followed his death.

Despite all attempts by Muhammadan theologians to pervert the historical record, it is very clear that Muhammad did not get his ‘inspirations’ and the Quran in a vacuum; he was surrounded by all types of cultural influences: religious, material and intellectual emanating from Persian, Byzantine, Aramaean and the ‘People of the Book’, especially in the part of the peninsula (al Hijaz) where he grew up.

Most of the important stories in the Quran show that they were derived from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. His wife Khadija, after all, was a Hanif associated to a Christian tribe – as mentioned by Arab historians in many sources – since her cousin Waraqa, was a Christian.

Muhammad did not invent, create or discover the concept of the One and Only God because it was the effect of all these external influences that inspired Muhammad to create for his pagan Arabs, a scripture similar to that of the People of the Book.

The Scene…

Current wisdom, among historians, states that the conditions in the Arabian Peninsula were perfectly suited for a drastic change; a change to greater cohesion and uniformity and that Muhammad turned out to be the man for that moment in history.

The above is neither correct nor true, since Muhammad did not unite the Arabs of the Peninsula through dialogue, persuasion and debate – wherein he failed miserably in the first 13 years in Mecca – but because he succeeded in ‘uniting’ the Arabs only through the application of force, terror, assassination and ruthlessness as fully described in both the Quran and Ahadith.

It is a historical fact that many of the same Arabs who had earlier falsely ’submitted’ to him, apostatized the moment he died and was not there anymore to terrorize them. Once more, they had to be brought into ‘Islam’ by the application of the sword on a massive scale (Wars of Apostasy/ Huroub al Ridda) during the Caliphate of Abu Bakr.

http://www.islam-watch.org/Rassooli/


This is as dispassionate , logical an account of whatever I understand pre Islamic Arab history. This no way takes away anything from Mohd for the great task he achieved. He left a blue print for his successors to create an Arab Empire with allegiance to none except Arabia.

Sometimes in the greater good, one has to spill blood. He gave a poor, eneducated, uncultured , desert race a Global empire in legacy .

Geography , Islam & western domination of India

European colonialists reinforced as a tool for the imposition of their own will in colonized lands such as India. It is also very much akin to the "Kabila" model that Islamic empires have employed for expansion and governance throughout their history.
 
The essential similarities between Western feudalism (transplanted to colonized countries in the colonial era) and Islamic "Kabila" imply that it is not only the "West" which has been a colonial entity as far as societies like ours are concerned... Islam itself is equally a foreign colonialist entity in our subcontinent, as fundamentally alien and predatory to our land, our culture and our way of life as the British or Portuguese or Dutch ever were. The atavistic howls issuing from their minarets five times a day are, indeed, cries of triumph and domination in a foreign language... the language of the colonizer shouting down the colonized.
 
Ramana has written extensively on the "Kabila" model... it roughly translates to "government as armed camp." Essentially there is a sultan who, with his generals and their troops, constitutes the ultimate fount of power in the political hierarchy. This is unwaveringly typical of the manner in which various political groups and dynasties have consolidated power in West and Central Asia, and North Africa, since the very advent of Islam.
 
The "Kabila" worked very well in the lands where Islam originated, and where it spread in the early centuries of its expansion. Why? Because the lands themselves were amenable to being governed in this form. In the deserts of West Asia, the arid mountains of Persia and the steppes to the North, the circumstances of nature favour a form of political dominance which relies on armament, maneuverability and mobility. This is because resources are scarce and concentrated in a few areas... an oasis here, a valley there. With a strong group of highly mobile armed men on horseback, you can easily forge an empire in such places. All you have to do is seize control of the few well-defined supply centers, the market centers (city states) and the trade routes between them. Most of the land is junk anyway. Once you're able to do this, and especially to destroy any civilizational affinity to pre-Islamic forms in the market centers (hence the Islamic obsession with temple breaking and idol smashing) you have, effectively, an empire. It doesn't matter if the thousands of useless square miles in between are physically under your domination or not; as long as you have no challengers in these particular small foci of power, you're an unchallenged monarch.
 
"Kabila" differs from European feudalism because of the emphasis on mobility... horsemen and artillery could be moved to engage a challenger in very short order. A necessary corollary of the Kabila model is un-rootedness. If you have to move fast you cannot afford to be tied down. Therefore, you do not invest in the land or the people, you see them only as objects to be controlled and squeezed for every drop of utility against the hard anvil of history. You position mullahs in population centers to be your spies, propagandists and social monitors... weeding out unorthodoxy and rebellion at the stage of ideation before it becomes necessary to smack down an armed rebellion. But ultimately you, and your apparatus of mullahs, constitute an extraordinarily parasitic, locust-like and virulent form of colonialism. This is something that Western studies of post-colonialism (with their essentially Euro-centric historiography) entirely ignore... they see the Islamic virus as something that was indigenous somehow to the lands they conquered. They do not realize that it was merely a more rapacious and less invested form of colonial imperialism.
 
Indeed, the more invested Muslim rulers became in their territories, the less "Islamic" they became, of necessity taking on the administrative, social and traditional trappings of pre-Islamic statehood. This made them vulnerable to "purer", mobile and less-invested Islamic conquerors. Hence the Delhi sultanate was prime fodder for Timur and Babar... Baghdad for the Mongols... and Mughal Delhi, again, for Nadir Shah. In each case the less-civilized, more predatory and more essentially savage Kabila prevailed over the more "settled" and "urbanized" Muslim state. When you do not carry the baggage of civilization or of feeling responsibility for the people you rule, you have much more maneuverability and ruthlessness at your disposal. Taking advantage of the Kabila's inherent strengths, the West was able to lead roving bands of armed Arabs in a devastatingly effective rebellion against the settled Ottomans during the 1st World War.
 
Why do I bring all this up with relevance to Pakistan?
 
As I said before... the "Kabila" system worked very well to dominate places where resources were scarce and concentrated in well-defined locations. However, it never worked quite as well in India.
 
That is because our Bharatvarsha is quite unlike those lands where Islam originated and expanded in the early centuries of its being. In Bharatvarsha, the land is almost never inhospitable or forbidding. In Arabia, a band of people displaced from an oasis had two choices: submit to the peaceful orthodoxy of a triumphant Muslim conqueror, or go out into the desert and die. In India, not so. A displaced people had only to go fifty or a hundred or two hundred kilometres in any direction... and mother Bharat in her generous embrace would provide fertile lands, rich orchards, abundant and plentiful fields. How many generations and what huge extents of such flights were supported by the bounty of Bharatvarsha become apparent if you study the migration of the Saraswats, originally from Kashmir... one branch traveled from there south of the Vindhyas, to Goa, and then again uprooted themselves in the face of Portuguese onslaught and proceeded to what is Dakshin Kannada in Karnataka today.
 
This had two effects: first, it made Indians in general indifferent to the fact of an Islamic conquest. If they took away our old fields and seized our city... well, we would just move over a little bit and build a new city, cultivate new fields. Our Gods and families are safe, let the Turk or Afghan have the old land, because there is enough for everybody if we simply adjust our location a little bit: this was how our forefathers dealt with Islamic expansion.
 
The second effect, of course, is that Hindu society survived, largely unscathed, as an essentially Indian identity. In Mesopotamia or Egypt, the Muslim idol-smashers and temple-breakers could effectively carry out cultural genocide because their targets were all in one place and immobile... where could you build another Baghdad or Luxor? The inheritors of the old culture had no choice but to surrender before the savagery of Islam's harbingers, and participate willingly in the extinction of their pre-Islamic cultural identities, if they wished to survive at all. In India, we would take our Gods, our families and our few possessions and head out a few more miles into the vast green hinterland and endless bounty of Bharat-mata, who would provide lovingly for us to begin our lives over again as Hindus.
 
This is essentially why we were saved from being extinguished by the onslaught of Islamic colonialism... Bharatvarsha herself sheltered her children and empowered them to preserve their way of life.
 
Now what you have in Pakistan today is the continuance of the Kabila system. The West realized soon enough that without the depredations of Islamic colonialism that denuded the civilizational wealth of the East for nearly ten centuries, sapping the power of the old Asiatic states and erasing their very identities... without this, the West would have had a much harder time pursuing their own colonial expansions. In fact, Islamic colonialism prepares the ground for Western colonialism... a fact that remains as true today as it was before the Battle of Plassey. Hence, everyone from Olaf Caroe to Zbignew Brzezinski sees a utility for the West in maintaining Islamic Kabilas even when the armies and viceroys of the West have gone home. The Kabilas will never construct a state of sufficient power to threaten the West; but they will keep Asia weak for the day that the West might want to return, in one form or another.
 
THIS is why the West was so determined to see a Pakistan constructed out of a large portion of Bharatvarsha. It is also why the West has been careful to destroy any alternative sense of nationhood or state-based form of governance in the Muslim world, other than Kabila. It is why the Arab nationalists of Ba'ath Egypt (Nasser) and Iraq (Saddam) had to be deposed, and the last scion of Ba'athism, Syria's Assad, is being systematically marked for elimination today. This is the reason why Gaddaffi in Libya was ousted, and why Iran is now at the head of the list of Western targets. Meanwhile the Kabila-state of Saudi Arabia is raised to paramountcy; while in smaller GCC nations... which are essentially city-states or market-centers like the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain... the US itself has taken on the role of Kabila.
 
In Pakistan that role has been given to the Kabila known as the Pakistan Army. However, let's remember... the land which the Pakistan Army Kabila seeks to dominate is not an arid expanse with tightly localized resource concentrations, as in the territories where the Kabila model has a natural advantage. No, the land of Pakistan is the land of Bharatvarsha... all-embracing and hospitable. It is much harder for a Kabila to control and dominate this "Pakistan" than a Persia or an Iraq.
 
Meanwhile, to the northwest of Pakistan is Afghanistan... a prime Kabila land, where a mobile and savage army unencumbered by investment in the people can always prevail over the forces of a more settled kingdom.
 
What happened over the last ten years is instructive. The Kabila (Pakistan Army) deputed by the West to control and enervate Western Bharatvarsha for colonial exploitation, has failed in its task. It has succumbed to the temptations of the land it occupies... Bharatvarsha... and become more "settled" than a Kabila has any right to be. It has become invested in private enterprise, legitimate ones like textiles and agriculture as well as illegal ones such as heroin supply. The Pakistan Army remains a true Kabila in that it still does not give a damn for the people in its charge; but it has become "softer" in the style of the Lodhi who was overwhelmed by Babar, or the Abbasid Caliph who was smashed by Genghis Khan. To compensate for its softness, the Pakistan Army has overemphasized the role traditionally played by Mullahs in the Kabila system, and set up a huge, hypertrophied apparatus of highly empowered political agents to subdue the population in the name of Islam... including all our favourite Tanzeems.
 
The big mistake that the Soft Kabila of the Pakistan Army made was to create another Kabila... the Taliban... in an attempt to colonize and subdue the people of Afghanistan. Taliban Kabila, being a classic, mobile, hard Kabila, was able to gain control over the prime Kabila-land of Afghanistan in record time back in 1996. However, with the force of historic inevitability... they have utterly lost regard and affinity for the soft, settled Kabila of the TSPA. They see no reason why they should take orders from this decadent, less-pure Sultanate; they have enjoyed repeated military successes over the TSPA over the past ten years; and worst of all, they have seen the TSPA do the bidding of the Kaffir by comfortably abetting the slaughter of Momin perpetuated by the Americans since 2001.
 
As a result, not only the Taliban, but many sections of the Kabila-apparatchik mullahs (who would ordinarily remain loyal to a strong, hard-Kabila) have turned against the soft and decadent Kabila of the TSPA.
 
Perhaps the most curious thing is how the TSPA and the Paki elite have responded to this state of affairs. Being themselves of Bharatvarsha... they have begun to do the classic Hindoo thing! "Fine", they say, "let the fundoos have FATA/KP, after all we have much more productive land".... "fine, let them have a presence in Karachi/Quetta/Peshawar, not a blade of grass grows there"... "fine, let them expand into southern Punjab, after all we should keep them close so we can keep an eye on them." Rationalization after rationalization is articulated by these Pakis while their circle of influence shrinks; so far will our bounteous mother Bharat let them retreat into the welcoming folds of her sari that they blindfold themselves ever more tightly with her pallu and convince themselves that all is well.


A post by a fellow blogger -Rudradev