There was widespread spiritual restlessness. The settled Arabs, who lived in the towns and agricultural communities of the Hijaz, had developed a different kind of religious vision. They were more interested in gods than the Bedouin, but their rudimentary theism had no strong roots in Arabia. Very few mythical stories were told about the various deities. Allah was the most important god, and was revered as the lord of the Kabah, but he was a remote figure and had very little influence on the people’s daily lives. Like the other “high gods” or “sky gods” who were a common feature of ancient religion, he had no developed cult and was never depicted in effigy.22 Everybody knew that Allah had created the world; that he quickened each human embryo in the womb; and that he was the giver of rain. But these remained abstract beliefs. Arabs would sometimes pray to Allah in an emergency, but once the danger had passed they forgot all about him.23 Indeed, Allah seemed like an irresponsible, absentee father; after he had brought men and women into being, he took no interest in them and abandoned them to their fate.24
The Quraysh also worshipped other gods. There was Hubal, a deity represented by a large, reddish stone which stood inside the Kabah.25 There were three goddesses—Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat—who were often called the “daughters of Allah” (banat Allah) and were very popular in the settled communities. Represented by large standing stones, their shrines in Ta’if, Nakhlah, and Qudhayd were roughly similar to the Meccan Haram. Although they were of lesser rank than Allah, they were often called his “companions” or “partners” and compared to the beautiful cranes (gharaniq) which flew higher than any other bird. Even though they had no shrine in Mecca, the Quraysh loved these goddesses and begged them to mediate on their behalf with the inaccessible Allah. As they jogged around the Kabah, they would often chant this invocation: “Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other. Indeed these are the exalted gharaniq; let us hope for their intercession.”26
This idol worship was a relatively new religious enthusiasm, which had been imported from Syria by one of the Meccan elders who believed that they could bring rain, but we have no idea why, for example, the goddesses were said to be Allah’s daughters—especially since Arabs regarded the birth of a daughter as a misfortune and often killed female infants at birth. The gods of Arabia gave their worshippers no moral guidance; even though they found the rituals spiritually satisfying, some of the Quraysh were beginning to find these stone effigies inadequate symbols of divinity.27
But what was the alternative? Arabs knew about the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity. Jews had probably lived in Arabia for over a millennium, migrating there after the Babylonian and Roman invasions of Palestine. Jews had been the first to settle in the agricultural colonies of Yathrib and Khaybar in the north; there were Jewish merchants in the towns and Jewish nomads in the steppes. They had retained their religion, formed their own tribes but had intermarried with the local people, and were now practically indistinguishable from Arabs. They spoke Arabic, had Arab names, and organized their society in the same way as their Arab neighbors. Some of the Arabs had become Christians: there were important Christian communities in Yemen and along the frontier with Byzantium. The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab (“the People of the Book”). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language.
But at this time, Arabs did not see Judaism and Christianity as exclusive traditions that were fundamentally different from their own. Indeed, the term “Jew” or “Christian” usually referred to tribal affiliation rather than to religious orientation.28 These faiths were an accepted part of the spiritual landscape of the peninsula and considered quite compatible with Arab spirituality. Because no imperial power was seeking to impose any form of religious orthodoxy, Arabs felt free to adapt what they understood about these traditions to their own needs. Allah, they believed, was the God worshipped by Jews and Christians, so Christian Arabs made the hajj to the Kabah, the house of Allah, alongside the pagans. It was said that Adam had built the Kabah after his expulsion from Eden and that Noah had rebuilt it after the devastation of the Flood. The Quraysh knew that in the Bible the Arabs were said to be the sons of Ishmael, Abraham’s oldest son, and that God had commanded Abraham to abandon him with his mother Hagar in the wilderness, promising that he would make their descendants a great people.29 Later Abraham had visited Hagar and Ishmael in the desert and had rediscovered the shrine. He and Ishmael had rebuilt it yet again and designed the rites of the hajj.
Everybody knew that Arabs and Jews were kin. As the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c.100 CE) explained, Arabs circumcised their sons at the age of thirteen “because Ishmael, the founder of their nation, who was born to Abraham of the concubine “Hagar”, was circumcised at that age.”30 Arabs did not feel it necessary to convert to Judaism or Christianity, because they believed that they were already members of the Abrahamic family; in fact, the idea of conversion from one faith to another was alien to the Quraysh, whose vision of religion was essentially pluralistic.31 Each tribe came to Mecca to worship its own god, which stood in the Haram alongside the house of Allah. Arabs did not understand the idea of a closed system of beliefs, nor would they have seen monotheism as incompatible with polytheism. They regarded Allah, who was surrounded by the ring of idols in the Kabah, as lord of a host of deities, in much the same way as some of the biblical writers saw Yahweh as “surpassing all other gods.”32
But some of the settled Arabs were becoming dissatisfied with this pagan pluralism, and were attempting to create an indigenous, Arabian monotheism.33 Shortly before Muhammad received his first revelation, they had seceded from the religious life of the Haram. It was pointless, they told their tribesmen, to run round and round the Black Stone, which could “neither see, nor hear, nor hurt, nor help.” Arabs, they believed, had “corrupted the religion of their father Abraham,” so they were going to seek the hanifiyyah, his “pure religion.”34 This was not an organized sect. These hanifs all despised the worship of the stone effigies and believed that Allah was the only God, but not all interpreted this conviction identically. Some expected that an Arab prophet would come with a divine mission to revive the pristine religion of Abraham; others thought that this was unnecessary: people could return to the hanifiyyah on their own initiative; some preached the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment; others converted to Christianity or Judaism as an interim measure, until the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) was properly established.
The hanifs had little impact on their contemporaries, because they were chiefly concerned with their own personal salvation. They had no desire to reform the social or moral life of Arabia, and their theology was essentially negative. Instead of creating something new, they simply withdrew from the mainstream. Indeed the word hanif may derive from the root HNF: “to turn away from.” They had a clearer idea of what they did not want than a positive conception of where they were going. But the movement was a symptom of the