Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [100]
Certainly the eye—and the agenda—of the beholder needs to be considered when it comes to wickedness in the biblical era. Nations and tribes (and their chroniclers) have long looked at one another and said, "We can't conquer them, we can't control them, therefore they're ignorant, barbarous, wicked." For all we know, the populace of Sodom and Gomorrah (to say nothing of the entire world before the Flood) may have not been that bad a lot, just a little rough around the edges.
Nonetheless, there was a dark, dystopian side to life in pre-Islamic Arabia. In the works of classical authors and in the inscriptions left behind by southern Arabians, there is a dispiriting sense that life was coarse and brutish, particularly in the Jehiliaya, the approximately four-hundred-year "age of darkness" that preceded the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the rise of Islam. The Arabians were mired in blood feuds and internecine wars. Drunkenness and debauchery were common. The vocabulary of the pre-Islamic Arabians has an astounding number of words descriptive of treachery, cruelty, and malice.5 HBT means "to act corruptly," TBR is "to crush or ruin," RIDH is "to sow death." There appears to be but a single recorded use of the word HMRN, which means "a gracious act."
Every Arabian is by nature "a huckster and merchant," Strabo tells us, and that's the best he has to say. He proceeds to describe a convoluted, dissolute social order:
Brothers are held in higher honor than children.... One woman is also the wife for all, and he who first enters the house before any other has intercourse with her, having first placed his staff before the door, for by custom each man must carry a staff; but she spends the night with the eldest. And therefore all children are brothers. They also have intercourse with their mothers; and the penalty for an adulterer is death; but only the person from another family is an adulterer. A daughter of one of the kings, who was admired for her beauty, had fifteen brothers, who were all in love with her, and therefore visited her unceasingly, one after another. At last, being tired out by their visits, she used the following device: she had staves made like theirs, and when one of them left her, she always put a staff like his in front of the door, and a little later another, and then another—it being her aim that the one who was likely to visit her next might not have a staff similar to the one in front of the door. 6
This polyandry arose because of the prevalence of female infanticide. The prophet Muhammad felt the practice was poison to the cup of Arabia. As he sought to reform his world, eliminating it was his first and major social concern. Muhammad's assertions in the Koran are reinforced by a grim account offered by Abu al-Kasim al-Zamakhshari, an early commentator on the Koran:
When an Arab had a daughter born, if he intended to bring her up, he sent her, clothed in a garment of wool or hair, to keep camels or sheep in the desert; but if he designed to put her to death, he let her live till she became six years old and then said to her mother, "Perfume her, and adorn her, that I may carry her to her mothers"; which being done, the father led her to a well or pit dug for that purpose, and having bid her to look down into it, pushed her in headlong, as he stood behind her, and then filling up the pit, leveled it with the rest of the ground. Others say that when a woman was ready to fall in labor, they dug a pit, on the brink whereof she was to be delivered; and if the child happened to be a daughter, they threw it into the pit; but if a son, they saved it alive.7
We can understand why the historian al-Tabari wrote of the "inhuman brutality" of the People of 'Ad, which they "indulged without remorse, and with unmitigated ferocity." So it may have been that, beholding the dark practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, Muhammad preached that Allah told the People of'Ad: "An ignominious