Mecca (or Makkah) and Muhammad's life in summary

What kind of town was Mecca when Muhammad first came to live there (according to Ibn Khaldun, the 14th Century historian, it was originally called Bakkah and now many Arabs prefer to use the Romanisation Makkah or something like it)? It was the centre of a major and apparently annual Peninsula-wide poetry contest. Mecca itself did not produce many significant poets as it was a small settlement and certainly not as large as Medina which produced better poets. Poetry competitions had created over a little over a century a ‘competitive pressure’ for a relatively uniform Arabic language and the favoured dialect was centred on Mecca due to its preeminent competition. So Mecca was in a sense the centre of and springboard for a kind of early Arab nationalism.

Muhammad was born in 570 CE and began calling for a new emphasis in religion based upon what he believed were divine revelations to him in 610 CE when he was aged 40. He was forced to emigrate from Mecca (to Medina) in around August 622 CE. In the new lunar Islamic calendar developed about twenty-five years later (which is a few days shorter than our solar year in the West) this year came to be known as 1 AH (after hijra, hijra meaning emigration). Muhammad died in 632 CE (11 AH) thus ending the period of revelations.

So why did the emigration happen and what was Mecca’s religion that Muhammad wanted to reform? I’ve mentioned it was a trading centre and hub and it was on more than one caravan trade route. We know it held a major poetry competition. It was also served by a port near the modern-day port of Jeddah. There are several sea routes from the port to various parts of Africa and the Christian and Jewish faiths were known.

We also know at least three Goddesses were worshipped among other Gods and that Mecca was also associated with Abraham via a ‘miraculous’ and strong spring that is still apparently going strong today.

Abraham is traditionally the father of the Arabs (via his son Isma'il) and the association may well account for some of the prominence of Mecca as a major religious centre although there was also a tendency for all trading centres to also become religious centres in an otherwise rather lawless and ruthless part of Arabia (arguably for the sake of producing conditions conducive to trade). Trade was undertaken occasionally using the coinage of the northern Persian Sasanian and Byzantine Empires and of Egypt.

Traditionally Isma'il (or Ishmael), the son of Abraham and the first Arab, was able to create the spring as an infant (with Allah’s help) thus indicating today to many Muslims God’s favour bestowed on the Arabs and on Mecca. Only some of this tradition is actually contained in the Qur’an. Abraham and Ishmael are supposed to have built (or even re-built) the Ka’ba at Mecca, the latest version now being venerated in Islam as its most holy site.

Some of these events are re-enacted in the hajj period each year by millions of Muslims together. If possible, all Muslims are required to perform the pilgrimage at least once in their lives.

So Muhammad was dealing with a group of monotheisms that were all known of or practiced to some extent in or near Mecca as well as various polytheisms all occurring in one of the recognised homes of Abraham, a determined monotheist, and father of the Arabs. The major groups of monotheists in the area (especially in Yemen and in Medina, Khaybar and the so-called “Fertile Crescent” to the north), who may be expected to have disapproved of the rampant polytheism, included Jews, Christians and practitioners of an Ishmaelite version of Abrahamism, however it is possible that Allah or Yahweh (Jehovah) were more likely to be regarded as a chief rather than the sole God in Mecca itself.

Hence Muhammad's monotheistic teaching initially found more sympathy in Medina to which he fled in what is referred to as the hijra (there was an earlier Muslim hijra to the succour of Christian Ethiopia but Muhammad himself remained in Mecca on that occasion).

So Mecca was an ancient pilgrimage site but was not receptive of Muhammad's beliefs at first. Trade was good for the leaders of its great families, religion itself was profitable and Muhammad really wanted to rock that boat (and also address injustices that he saw (and saw God as asking him to address)). I'll discuss some of the details in the next post.