A
visionary facing the hostility of his fellow citizens, Muhammad left
Mecca in 622, accompanied by a few dozen followers and their families,
to settle in the nearby city of Yathrib. This event, known as the hijra in
Arabic—rendered in English as “Hegira” and in French as "Hégire"—marks
the beginning of the Islamic era. When he died ten years later, his sect
had become a religion and had conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula.
By
around 650, in the year 28 of the Hijra—eighteen years after the
Prophet's death—Islam had absorbed the Sassanid Persian states,
stretching from Mesopotamia to the Amu Darya, and had wrested the Levant
and Egypt from the Byzantines. By 750, in the year 128 of the Hijra,
its dominion extended from Spain to the borders of China.
A "Geopolitical Miracle"—From a Handful of Fugitives to a Universal Empire
This
astonishing transformation holds a central place in Muslim apologetics:
how else to explain such a vast and rapid expansion if not through
faith—and its corollary, divine blessing? To reinforce this argument,
theologians and preachers have further emphasized the "barbarism" (jahiliya)
of pre-Islamic Arabs. "We were once an ignorant people, driven by our
impulses," declared a Muslim envoy to an Ethiopian ruler during
Muhammad’s lifetime. "We worshiped idols, fed on carrion, and committed
shameful acts. Such was our miserable fate until Allah sent us His
Apostle."
Yet history may be far more complex and nuanced.
Advanced Arab civilizations had emerged long before Islam. By the 7th
century, many Arabs were no longer pagans but monotheists, adhering to
Christianity or Judaism. They already formed, on the periphery of
ancient empires, the foundations of a new, virtual empire. Perhaps,
then, the rise of Islam should be read "in reverse"—not as a movement
from the religious to the geopolitical, but rather from the geopolitical
to the religious.
The French historian Christian-Julien Robin—one
of today's leading specialists on the Arabian Peninsula—reminds us that
this region, like its African counterpart, the Sahara, "was not always a
desert of sand and rock." Between 7000 and 4000 BCE in the south of the
peninsula, and between 4000 and 1000 BCE in the north, the climate was
relatively humid, with far richer and denser vegetation than today. "In
the lowlands, filled with permanent or seasonal lakes, game thrived,
attracting hunters... But as the intertropical front gradually shifted
southward, the desert spread across the peninsula," sparing only the
northern and eastern oases, which benefited from permanent groundwater
reserves, and "the high mountains of Yemen and Oman."
The First Arabs: Merchants, Miners, and Navigators
The
earliest Arabs, Semitic peoples related to the Akkadians of
Mesopotamia, the Canaanites and Hebrews of the Levant, and the
Abyssinians of the Horn of Africa, settled in the Arabian Peninsula—or
merged with older populations—at a time when desertification was still
incomplete. They may have first been sedentary farmers before becoming
nomadic agriculturalists. Even after the full aridification of the
region, they continued to combine or alternate various forms of farming
with livestock herding.
From the Bronze Age (circa 3200–1300 BCE),
they developed expertise in mining copper, tin, iron, and extracting
semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli. A significant share of this
production was exported, along with aromatic gum resins harvested in the
south of the peninsula, mineral soda (natron) collected from seasonal
lakes and oasis basins, and naturally occurring bitumen or crude oil
seeping to the surface.
