The Importance of Studying Accurate History: Debunking Myths about the Wealth and Crowds of the Hijaz in Pre-Islamic Times
For centuries, the dominant image of the Hijaz in pre-Islamic times was characterized by narratives of wealth and bustle. Mecca, the hometown of the Prophet Muhammad, is often depicted as a prosperous spice trade center, while Yathrib, next to Medina, is depicted as an oasis visited by pilgrims. However, in recent decades, modern historical research has critically examined these narratives and revealed a much different reality.
This article aims to present the latest findings from historical research on the Hijaz in late antiquity. Based on existing evidence, this article will dismantle the myths that have been circulating regarding the prosperity and bustle of the Hijaz in pre-Islamic times. Through this discussion, we will see that the historical reality of the Hijaz at that time was much more complex and different from the picture we have known so far.
Studying history accurately and critically is important for many reasons. First, a proper understanding of the past can help us to better understand the reality we face today. Second, dismantling the myths and biases that exist in history can pave the way for a more inclusive and objective understanding. Third, solid historical research can be a solid foundation for building a better future.
Therefore, this article invites readers to retrace the history of the Hijaz in the pre-Islamic era with a critical perspective and based on existing evidence. Through this process, we can gain a more accurate and holistic understanding of this important period in Islamic history.
The limited evidence available regarding the Hejaz region has largely hindered any attempt to critically investigate the history of Mecca and Yathrib in late antiquity. Yet at the same time, the almost complete absence of information about the center of the Hijaz in ancient sources speaks to its own story. Indeed, the near invisibility of this region in ancient sources seems a clear sign that it was isolated and insignificant to the wider world of late antiquity. Nevertheless, despite the scanty evidence obtained, some attempts have been made to reconstruct the society and economy of Mecca and Medina, although most of this research is less critical in its willingness to embrace the collective memory of the past of later Islamic traditions.
One influential study was Henri Lammens’s La Mecque À La Veille de l’Hégire, in which this priest-scholar almost single-handedly created the myth of Mecca as the rich financial center of a vast international spice trade network. There is, of course, considerable irony, that this notoriously hostile critic of Islam is the one most responsible for affirming what can only be considered some of the most dubious elements of the sacred history of the Islamic tradition in its traditional birthplace.
Lammens received much help in promoting this myth from Scottish historian Montgomery Watt, whose immensely popular and influential book on Muhammad in Mecca and Medina effectively became the foundation of knowledge for much subsequent research on early Islam, particularly in Anglophone contexts. Lammens and Watt created a vision of an ancient Mecca that was rich from the spice trade, based on this vision they then built the image of Muhammad as a “liberal” social reformer who fought for the poor against exploitation from rich capitalists, an early Islamic narrative whose work is very famous. Elsewhere, the author has discussed the implausibility and inspiration of this modern myth about Islam’s founding prophet, but today we focus on evaluating the foundations of an imagined economy, as established by Lammens and Watt. It is true, as can be seen, that the most likely reconstruction of social and economic conditions in Mecca and Yathrib in the early seventh century is not far removed from the rich and cosmopolitan financial capital suggested by Lammens and Watt.
Patricia Crone must be given credit for dispelling the myth of Mecca as a rich center of the international spice trade, which she thoroughly debunks in her careful study of the Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Despite initial resistance – some of it quite hostile and evento man – the legacy of this research is a definitive and final refutation of the myth of Mecca as the center of wealth from a vast trade network in luxury goods – especially spices. Other attempts to find a basis for Mecca’s prosperity all foundered due to various problematic issues, as Crone writes in his recent discussion of Mecca’s economy “Quraysh and the Roman Army:” There he introduces the possibility that the Roman army had an insatiable need for leather goods that could have caused prices to soar high enough that it theoretically made sense for some of the Meccans to travel to the Roman frontier to exchange their leather for a lower price. But at the same time he also notes – something that often escapes the attention of many early Islamic scholars – that this is only a hypothesis and a problematic one and involves a number of questionable assumptions. The Oasis of Yathrib, the future of Medina, at the beginning of the seventh century it was a small, quiet, isolated place, and had no economic or other importance to the outside world.
Mecca And The Myth Of The Spice Trade
According to Islamic tradition, Mecca’s trade mainly consisted of several types of trade. In fact, there are indications that Muhammad himself was an active trader in this trade. However, was Mecca really an important trading center in pre-Islamic times?
Modern historians have challenged traditional views of Meccan trade. According to the most recent reliable estimates, based on data from early Islamic traditions, Mecca was a very small village with a few hundred inhabitants. Maybe five hundred or so, with about 130 free adult males. Crone, one of the leading researchers in this field, ultimately determined that “Whether or not the Meccans traded outside of Mecca in pre-Islamic times is a question that cannot be answered at that time.”
Sufficient food to support its very small population, as also determined by Peters and Donner, can be inferred from local sources. Crone’s unsavory exposure to the fallacies of the spice trade initially elicited an indirect and hostile reaction from the Serjeant’s most prominent scientific guilds. However, in subsequent years, his correction of this Orientalist myth seems to have emerged as a new scientific consensus. Indeed, we can look to Peters’ book on Mecca as an example of the extent to which the Mecca Trade established statusquestions new to the Meccan economy, even among scholars who used a traditional approach to Islamic sources.
As Peters writes, “When we try to assemble the widespread and varied evidence about commercial activity in pre-Islamic Mecca into a coherent picture of the companies operating in that historic place, the results are often very mixed and perhaps less convincing than some.” Therefore, Mecca was not a major center for international trade, but rather a small and isolated village with a subsistence economy based on pastoralism.
Mecca’s location is in fact so remote, that it is difficult to imagine that the city was ever a viable transit point. Although this proposal remains uncertain, it is one possible explanation for reports of Mecca’s trade with Syria in the Islamic historical tradition. Too frequent references in this research suggest that in this article Crone proved the existence of long-distance leather goods trade in Mecca, even though he did no such thing.
Mining In Pre-Islamic Arabia: Fool’s Gold
Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have worked to find other commodities that could potentially replace spices from the East and still provide a strong and rich economy for Mecca and the Hijaz. However, despite recent trends making gold and silver trade a new cornerstone of a prosperous Meccan economy, the alleged trade in precious metals has proven to be a mirage compared to the spice trade of the past.
In this case, the hypothesis seems quite reasonable, and is true in fact. Archaeological evidence indicates active mining in the region in the late Umayyad period, beginning in the early decades of the eighth century. Relating to the sixth and seventh centuries, as well as several centuries before, there has been no archaeological evidence of any mining activity at any of these sites for more than a thousand years before the eighth century AD.
According to Heck,tailing this provides strong evidence of gold mining activity there in the pre-Islamic period, a claim he also repeated in his monograph on the precious metals of West Arabia. Of course,tailing This itself does not produce anything like that, because based on the numbers given by Heck,tailing It can easily be dated to 700 AD as well as to 500 AD. Likewise, archaeological surveys of mining sites in western Arabia, including Mahd adh-Dhahab, firmly establish that the only evidence of mining activity in the region comes from more than from a thousand years before Muhammad was born or a hundred years after his death.
The vast range spans almost a full millennium—it is virtually impossible for gold mining to have occurred at this site during the sixth and seventh centuries, as there is no other reliable evidence to suggest this. This is especially true when all other evidence suggests that such mining only began in the late Umayyad period and was active mainly during the Abbasid reign. However, if you look at the official USGS report, of which Schmidt is the lead author, there is no evidence of gold mining at the site at this time. According to official reports, all radiocarbon dates for sites relevant to the early Islamic period yield dates ranging widely between AD 700 and 725.
There are no radiocarbon dates in this report that could indicate any activity in the seventh or sixth century or earlier, other than the first millennium BC. On the same page, the report also mentions evidence of copper mining near Jabal Mokhyat which dates it to AD 660, the same date also indicated by Ackermann. Although Ackerman here refers generally to evidence of “mining activity” near Mokhtar, the clear implication from the immediate context in his article is that he is referring to gold mining, not copper. However, it should be noted that these data, even with the latest calibration, confirm Shanti’s clear finding that there is no evidence of pre-Islamic mining activity at this site.
It is also worth noting that according to the US Geological Survey report for this site, these charcoal samples were dated to AD 700 and 725, a finding that was also repeated in subsequent research at this site. Therefore, given the clear evidence to the contrary, it is surprising that Ackermann cites the same dates as if the data provide “confirmation of mining in the fifth and sixth centuries” at Samrah. The author fails to see how such a conclusion can be justified based on this evidence, and this only adds confusion to an already very messy discussion on this topic. Although there is a lot of logical ancient evidence regarding copper mining during the late Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, in reality there is no clear evidence indicating the existence of a pre-Islamic period.
Tailing from the copper mine near Jabal Mokhtar mentioned above has a calibrated radiocarbon date of between AD 229 and 1222, which is nearly identical to another copper mine in Jabal ash Shizm dated between AD 248 and 1228. However, in both cases, once again a wide date span of nearly a thousand years, such as that of Mahd adh-Dhahab, hardly lends credence to the assertion that the sites were actively mined in the sixth and seventh centuries. Therefore, considering the lack of evidence to support Heck’s claim that the precious metal was mined in the Hijaz during the time of Muhammad, we can only note that it is unfortunate that misinterpretation of the data has led many recent scholars to assert that the importance of the gold trade in Mecca in the 19th century -6 and 7, even though in fact there is no such evidence.
This is a classic case where a claim is made to confirm what scholars expected and found, so the claim is accepted. At the same time, even if evidence were to emerge that could verify Heck’s claims, this must be taken into consideration how little impact it would have on the understanding of the Meccan economy in the sixth and early seventh centuries.
Instead, as Power explains, the silver was transported from the mines along heavily guarded roads to the south, then exported from the port of Aden. It is true, as many studies of early Islamic mining note, that literary sources from the ninth and tenth centuries sometimes provide the extraordinary wealth of gold mines in the region in the pre-Islamic period. Given the notoriously unreliable nature of the early Islamic historical tradition in terms of knowledge of ancient Arabia as a whole, these reports are best dismissed for lack of corroborating evidence. Moreover, as Crone has demonstrated with powerful force, the accounts of the seventh-century Meccan economy found in later Islamic historical traditions have no basis at all in the historical reality of the early seventh-century Hijaz.
Likewise, in connection with later reports regarding the abundance of gold in particular, Crone draws attention to another literary tradition that suggests, to the contrary, the scarcity of gold and silver in the world. The plants they use to tan the leather they trade.
Mecca Temple
There is one more factor to consider in evaluating the economy and society of ancient Mecca, namely the alleged impact of the so-called holy sites. Therefore, scholars often state that Mecca regularly hosted countless visitors who traveled from all over Arabia to worship the holy site, and brought their trade with them.
Apart from that, on the same basis, scholars also often state that Mecca itself is a holy place or a place that cannot be violated and that violence or bloodshed cannot occur. The annual pilgrimage traffic to Mecca not only brought great wealth to the city, as is generally thought, but the status of the holy city also encouraged people to settle there and bring in visitors throughout the year, due to the security the building provided. cannot be contested. However, it turns out that the image of Mecca in much modern scholarship and early Islamic tradition as both a major pilgrimage center and holy place is also a scientific fantasy, compared with the spice trade in Mecca with which these ideas have become so closely tied. Crone for having dispelled this erroneous assumption with relative ease, simply by reviving the arguments that had been made in the late 19th century by Julius Wellhausen, an interesting analysis that had been forgotten and continued to be ignored by many subsequent scholars.
There are reports of annual pilgrimage fairs held near Mecca, but none mentions specifically the pilgrimage to Mecca itself or any associated pilgrimage fairs. Therefore, as Crone observes, in the case of science fiction about Mecca hosting an annual pilgrimage fair, just as “as in the case of the spice trade in Mecca, the axiomatic truths of secondary literature have only a tangential relationship to history. ” Evidence presented in sources. However, it was probably at one of these nearby pilgrimage markets, which unlike Mecca was an inviolable sacred or sacred place, that the ancient Meccans traded various goods from their pastoral economy for foodstuffs and other supplies they needed. In fact, there was not a single organized settlement, but rather “an oasis consisting of a collection of looser fragments of scattered settlements” located around the area as water sources that also allowed for the cultivation of dates and perhaps also grain in limited quantities.
As Montgomery Watt explained about Yathrib during Muhammad’s time, “Yatsrib was not a city, but Yatsrib was a collection of hamlets, agricultural land, and forts spread across an oasis surrounded by hills, rocks, and stony soil-all of which could not be cultivated. .” The total population of Yathrib appears to have been larger than that of Mecca, although not dramatically. One might surmise that there may have been around a thousand inhabitants spread across the oasis which covered approximately 20 square miles. There were more than a dozen small settlements in the oasis, none of which, by any stretch of the imagination, would have been as large as Mecca, and none of the other settlements had a population of more than a hundred people.
Conclusion
Debunking myths about the wealth and bustle of the Hejaz in pre-Islamic times through critical historical research provides a more accurate and holistic understanding of this period. No longer a busy spice trade center or holy place, the Hijaz at that time was depicted as a remote geographical region with a simple society dependent on animal husbandry and agriculture.
This research not only revises the historical picture of the Hijaz, but also has broader implications. First, this research emphasizes the importance of a critical approach to historical narratives, especially those that have the potential to contain bias and myth. Second, this research reminds us that religions such as Islam can take root and develop, not only in affluent communities, but also in simple environments that may be considered marginal.
Studying the history of the Hijaz in the pre-Islamic period critically and accurately is not only useful for correcting perceptions, but also enriches our understanding of the context behind the birth of Islam and paves the way for more comprehensive and inclusive historical exploration.
by : M. Miftah Choiril Anwar & Ahmad Zakki Musyarrof
Stephen J. Shoemaker, Creating the Qur’an; a Historical-Critical Study, (California: University of California Press, 2022), 113-133.
