Chapter 70. Before the Prophet: Arabia between Iran and Byzantium

Islam did not arise in a vacuum. In the early seventh century Arabia lay between two exhausted empires, Sasanian Iran and Byzantium, each with an imperial church and each watching an apocalyptic horizon. Inside Arabia, a commercial boom at Mecca had strained the old tribal ethic, and the Kaaba gathered the gods of many tribes under the guardianship of one, the Quraysh. This chapter sets out that double world. Mainstream scholarship (Armstrong, Duchesne-Guillemin, Shaked, Crone, Hoyland) is placed beside the library’s non-mainstream readings (Joseph, Tellinger, Keshe), and each is labelled as such.

Mecca, the Quraysh and the crisis of muruwah

Karen Armstrong opens her history in Ramadan 610, when “an Arab businessman had an experience that changed the history of the world”. Every year Muhammad retired to a cave on Mount Hira, “where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor”, troubled by “a crisis in Arab society”: the Quraysh “had become rich by trading”, and “in the aggressive stampede for wealth some of the old tribal values had been lost”. There was “spiritual restlessness” throughout the peninsula, and Jews and Christians “often taunted the Arabs for being left out of the divine plan” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “The Prophet (570-632)”].

In A History of God Armstrong names the ethic under strain: muruwah, an ideology that “fulfilled many of the functions of religion”. It demanded courage, endurance and “absolute dedication to the tribe”; the chief “shared its wealth and possessions equally”, and the vendetta was “the only way of ensuring a modicum of social security in a region where there was no central authority”. The Arabs “had no notion of an afterlife” and held that dahr, time or fate, was supreme. By the sixth century muruwah “was no longer able to answer the conditions of modernity”, and the jahiliyyah shows “widespread dissatisfaction and spiritual restlessness”. Muhammad saw the Quraysh “making a new religion out of money” [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999, ch. 5 “Unity: The God of Islam”]. Armstrong also stresses that Yemen “had become a mere province of Persia” and that the Bedouin knew “both the Persians and the Byzantines had used the religions of Judaism and Christianity to promote their imperial designs in the region” [Armstrong, #68999, ch. 5]. In her account, religion and empire were already a single instrument.

The Kaaba, its gods and the hanifs

The Kaaba was “the most important centre of worship in Arabia” and “extremely ancient even in Muhammad’s time”. Pilgrims circled it seven times and kissed the Black Stone, “probably a meteorite”, and the ban on violence in the sanctuary was “a key factor in the commercial success of the Quraysh”. “Officially, the shrine was dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and there were 360 idols arranged around the Kabah, probably representing the days of the year”, yet by Muhammad’s day it was venerated as the shrine of Allah, and Christian Arabs of the north made the hajj alongside pagans [Armstrong, #53062, “The Prophet”]. The Quran would ask Arabs to abandon “Manat, al-Lat and al-Uzzah” [Armstrong, #53062]. The reference shelf adds that Arabian polytheism “was not a single organized religion, but a range of local and regional cults”. Christian (mostly Miaphysite) and Jewish communities were substantial, and Persian rule aided “a limited spread of Zoroastrianism”, with “tentative evidence” of Manichaeism or Mazdakism [Wikipedia: Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia].

Monotheist seekers existed. Armstrong cites Ibn Ishaq for four Qurayshis who sought the hanifiyyah, “the true religion of Abraham”, among them Waraqa ibn Nawfal and Zayd ibn Amr, who prayed by the Kaaba: “O God, if I knew how you wish to be worshipped I would so worship you; but I do not know.” Some scholars call the sect “a pious fiction”; Armstrong judges that “it must have some factual basis” [Armstrong, #68999, ch. 5; Wikipedia: Monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia].

The non-mainstream authors read the shrine differently. Lawrence E. Joseph says that occupiers set their idols in the Kaaba until “someone had the brilliant idea of renting space in the shrine” to pilgrims. “Thus, a millennium before the appearance of Islam and four centuries before that of Christianity, Mecca became a centre of trade and pilgrimage”, and “360 idols” eventually gathered there [Joseph, Apocalipsa 2012: ce va fi după?, #16861, section 149; translated]. That chronology is Joseph’s own; the academic sources cited in this chapter do not give it. Michael Tellinger writes that the bedouin “were not excessively pious” but had to appease “spirits and demons”, and that “they were strongly influenced by the ‘astral religion’ of the ancient Semitic people”, which led them to recognise star-linked deities. The Meccans worshipped beside Allah the so-called “daughters of Allah” [Tellinger, Sclavii zeilor vol. 2, #17919, ch. 1; translated]. In his Anunnaki framework these are traces of “gods from the sky”; the thesis is Tellinger’s.

Sasanian Iran: state church, esotericism and Mihr

East of Arabia stood an empire with a state religion. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin writes that “according to the Denkart and other Pahlavi sources, the founder of the Sassanian dynasty, Artaxšēr [Ardashir], was also the founder of Mazdean orthodoxy”, and quotes Zaehner: “the Sassanian kings saw in Zoroastrianism the only answer to the rising dogmatisms of both Christianity and Manichaeanism” [Duchesne-Guillemin, The Religion of Ancient Iran, #38271].

Shaul Shaked’s collected studies are arranged in two parts, “Sasanian Zoroastrianism” and “From Iran to Islam”, the latter including “notes on some themes in transmission” [Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam, #60406, Contents]. In “Esoteric trends in Zoroastrianism” he finds a restricted priestly layer: Zand exegesis was “the speciality of ērbads”, and texts speak of the Creator’s “secret things”. He is cautious, however: any esoteric element “we cannot assume … to affect the open character of the religion as such” [Shaked, #60406, art. I, pp. 178, 205-209]. In “Mihr the judge” he gathers Pahlavi passages in which “the function of Mihr is to perform the judgement of the world in truth” (Bundahišn). He sets beside them Eznik’s myth in which Ohrmazd and Ahreman create the Sun, Mihr, “in default of another judge”, and traces such arbiters into the Arabic accounts of the Zurvaniyya by Shahrastani and ʿAbd al-Jabbar [Shaked, #60406, art. IV]. Mithra thus survived Sasanian orthodoxy as cosmic judge and reached Islamic-era writers. That transmission is a theme of later chapters.

Kavad, Mazdak and religious revolt

Patricia Crone notes that Mazdak “is generally believed to have been a communist active in the time of Kavad (488-96, 498-531)”, whose movement “plunged the Sasanid empire into chaos” until Khusrau Anoshirvan killed him and his followers. The sixth-century witnesses (Joshua the Stylite, Procopius, Agathias) place Kavad’s “communist phase” in his first reign and give it as the reason for his deposition, but none names Mazdak, whereas “practically all the Muslim sources” make Mazdak its moving force. Against Gaube’s suggestion that Mazdak was invented as a scapegoat, Crone separates the two. Kavad’s heresy derived from an earlier Zaradusht; Mazdak “only made his appearance after this phase” and raised a peasant revolt of “the poor, base, weak, and ignoble plebs”, who “would break into a man’s home and take his dwelling, his wives and his property”. She suggests the revolt “was triggered by a fiscal reform”, the shift to fixed cash taxes [Crone, Kavād’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt, #55004, pp. 21-23 and sections II-III]. Egalitarian doctrine, peasant mobilisation and royal repression form a pattern that recurs in the Iranian “heresies” under Islam.

Exhausted empires and the apocalyptic mood

Navid Fozi summarises the Sasanian collapse. The empire was weakened by quarrels over “the succession to the throne” and by “the exhaustive wars with Byzantium”. “As a result of the concentration of Iranian military forces on the frontiers, the Arabs did not find massive fortifications in the central part of the Empire”, and historians also blame “the overly confident Iranian Army and its disparaging image of the once-scattered Bedouin Arab” [Fozi, Reclaiming the Faravahar, #54976, ch. 1]. Modern Zoroastrians still commemorate the dead of “the Arab barbaric attack”, in a mobed’s words [Fozi, #54976, chs. 1-2].

Robert Hoyland frames the period through apocalyptic expectation: “already in the late sixth century there were many convinced ‘that the end of the present world is already near'”, and such speculation “was rife among all the communities of the Middle East”, fitting political events “into a transcendent scheme of meaning”. Christians would read Arab rule as testing before a “final peace”; Zoroastrians as “the age of adversity which closed the millennium of Zoroaster”, awaiting Wahram Warjawand “coming from India with an army and one thousand elephants” [Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, #55061, ch. 1 “Apocalypticism”, pp. 26-31]. It was not the plagues of the 540s, he notes, but “the Arabs’ active assertion of Islam” that unleashed a flood of apocalypses [Hoyland, #55061, p. 31].

Keshe’s reading: Zoroastrianism as the original religion

In Knowledge Seekers Workshop 437 (16 June 2022), Mehran Tavakoli Keshe was asked how Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Zoroastrianism differ. He answered: “Zoroastrianism is the original religion it came through Mithraism. The Jewish and Christianity, which is Jewish religion with the twist of … love in it. And Islam is a copy of the same. Muhammad learned from the Jews … Jews learned from Zoroastrians and Mithraism and created the Jewish religion.” He separates Mithra from religion (“Mitra is not a prophet, Mitra is the life of the Creator”) and recalls Iranian schools where “by law, one hour of religion” was taught with classes split: “The Muslims go and are taught by a Mullah. The Zoroastrians by their religious leader.” He urges his listeners to read “the true history – not history made by religions to rule” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 437, #378149, Q&A “Mitra is love of Creator” and “Find the true history”]. His view of Zoroastrian antiquity and influence broadly matches Duchesne-Guillemin and Shaked. It departs from them in deriving Zoroastrianism from Mithraism, where they treat Mihr as a deity within Zoroastrianism; Keshe cites no texts for the derivation. In the same workshop he adds that “Muhammad never allowed the Arabs to cross Iranian borders” and that “when he died for the wealth of Iran, they invaded Iran, to take the wealth” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 437, #378149].

Key points

• Armstrong places Muhammad’s Hira retreats against a Meccan crisis: commercial wealth eroding muruwah, and a sense that Arabs had no prophet or scripture of their own.
• The Kaaba was Hubal’s shrine with some 360 idols; al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat were popular; Jews, Christians, hanifs and Zoroastrian influence were present.
• Joseph (Mecca as a rented pilgrimage centre a millennium before Islam) and Tellinger (Semitic “astral religion”) offer non-mainstream readings.
• Duchesne-Guillemin, citing the Denkard and Zaehner, makes Ardashir founder of Mazdean orthodoxy against Christian and Manichaean dogma.
• Shaked finds an esoteric priestly layer and Mihr as cosmic judge in Sasanian Zoroastrianism, and traces themes “from Iran to Islam”.
• Crone separates Kavad’s communist heresy from Mazdak’s later, fiscally triggered peasant revolt, a precedent for later Iranian revolts.
• Fozi attributes Iran’s fall to succession quarrels, the Byzantine wars and an over-confident army; Hoyland documents an apocalyptic mood across all communities.
• Keshe teaches that Zoroastrianism came “through Mithraism” and that the Abrahamic faiths learned from it; he presents it as his teaching and cites no texts for it.