The Arabs before Islam By Michel Gurfinkiel

Pre-Islamic Arabia

7INN : The rise of Islam should perhaps be read "in reverse"—not as a movement from the religious to the geopolitical, but rather from the geopolitical to the religious.

Michel Gurfinkielis a French conservative journalist and public intellectual. He served as editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles from 1985 to 2006.

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.

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