The Arabs and their peoples before Islam

The author of al-Rahiq al-Makhtum opens his biography with a chapter on the Arabs before Islam, because for him the picture of the message is not complete without comparing its background with its effects. ¹ He sets out the meaning of the word "Arab", the boundaries and position of the Peninsula, and the division of Arab historians into the vanished, the pure, and the Arabized, together with the migrations of the tribes and their spread across the Peninsula. ^{1 2}

In language, "arab" means the deserts, wastes, and parched lands without water or vegetation, and the word has been applied since ancient times both to the Arabian Peninsula and to the people who lived in it. ¹ The Red Sea and the Sinai peninsula bound it to the west, the Arabian Gulf and a large part of southern Iraq to the east, the Arabian Sea to the south, and Syria and part of Iraq to the north. There is disagreement about some of these boundaries, and its area is estimated at between one million and one million three hundred thousand square miles. ¹

The author holds that the deserts and sands surrounding the Peninsula made it a fortress that foreigners could not easily occupy, so its inhabitants remained free even though they bordered two great empires. ^{1 2} As for its external position, the Peninsula lies between the continents of the ancient world: its north-western side is a gateway to Africa, its north-eastern side is the key to Europe, and its eastern side opens onto Persia, the Middle East, and the Near East, leading to India and China. For this reason its north and south became a place where peoples came down and a centre for the exchange of trade, culture, religion, and the arts. ²

Historians divided the Arab peoples by lineage into three divisions: the vanished Arabs, who were the ancient peoples whose history is not known in enough detail, such as 'Ad, Thamud, Tasm, Jadis, and 'Amaliq; the pure Arabs, descended from Ya'rib ibn Yashjub ibn Qahtan, and called the Qahtanites; and the Arabized Arabs, descended from the line of Isma'il, and called the Adnanites. ²

The cradle of the pure Arabs was the land of Yemen, and among its tribes the best known were Himyar and Kahlan. The branches of Kahlan left Yemen, most probably shortly before the flood of al-Arim, when their trade failed under Roman pressure on the sea route and the Romans damaged the land route after occupying Egypt and Syria. ^{2 3} The author divides the emigrants from Kahlan into four groups: al-Azd, Lakhm and Judham, Tayy, and Kinda, and he adds Qudaa' from Himyar, though its descent is disputed. ^{4 5} He notes in a footnote that the historical sources differ greatly on the dates and causes of these migrations. ⁴

The highest ancestor of the Arabized Arabs is Ibrahim, who came from the town of Ur on the western bank of the Euphrates near Kufa, and from there migrated to Harran and then to Palestine. ^{6 7} From his son Isma'il, whom he settled with his mother Hajar in Mecca, descended Adnan, and then his son Ma'add, and from him the Adnanite Arabs preserved their genealogies. ⁸ The details are in the settlement of Hajar and Isma'il, Ibrahim's visits to Mecca, and Adnan.

When the descendants of Adnan multiplied, they scattered, moving toward places with pasture and water. The tribes of 'Abd al-Qays and sections of Bakr ibn Wa'il and Tamim settled in Bahrain, and Banu Hanifa in al-Yamama. The rest of Bakr ibn Wa'il lived between al-Yamama, Bahrain, Kazima, the sea, and the edges of the Iraqi lands. Taghlib held the Euphrates region of the Jazira, and Tamim the desert of Basra. ^{9 10 11} Banu Sulaym settled near Medina from Wadi al-Qura to Khaybar and to al-Harra; Thaqif in al-Ta'if; Hawazin east of Mecca in the area of Awtas; Banu Asad east of Tayma and west of Kufa; and Dhubyan near Tayma as far as Hawran. ¹⁰ In Tihama the sections of Kinana remained, and in Mecca and its surroundings the sections of Quraysh lived scattered, with no single bond uniting them, until Qusayy ibn Kilab emerged among them and gathered them. ^{10 11}

This chapter relies on modern works (al-Khudari, Fu'ad Hamza, al-Mawdudi, Sulayman al-Nadawi) and on Ibn Hisham and al-Bukhari. It does not yet include the view of modern academic studies on the origins of the Arabs and their division, which is a subject of wide disagreement.