Islam did not spread rapidly by the sword

Q: What was the prevailing religion (if any) in the Middle East before Muhammad began to establish Islam in the early 600s?

A: Apparently you didn’t have to live in Rome to do as the Romans did. Just as Caesar’s minions worshiped a god squad that featured a different deity for just about everything you could think of, experts say most residents of pre-Islamic Arabia in the first centuries after Christ practiced polytheism (many gods) as well.

However, where the Romans and Greeks had an established pantheon led by Jupiter and Zeus, worship practices differed among various socio-economic classes in the Arab world. If you were one of the nomadic Bedouins (literally, “desert dweller”), you likely practiced animism (the belief that animals, rocks, etc., each possesses a spirit), totemism (a spiritual connection with another physical being) and ancestor worship.

Because Bedouins were constantly on the move, building churches would have been a waste of time. Instead, they would erect stone idols to represent the divine powers that were most important to them. As in many such religions, bloody sacrifices were important to keep the gods constantly on your side. After all, experts surmise, you weren’t thinking about eternal salvation. You merely wanted to keep your family and your animals safe and see food on the table each day.

On the other hand, urban and other more settled Arabs developed a more formal belief system with a larger pantheon of deities. They would worship their gods and godsesses at local shrines, such as the Kaaba in Mecca, which has evolved into the most sacred site in Islam. At that time, however, the Kaaba was dedicated to Hubal, who was the greatest of the shrine’s 360 idols (possibly one for every day of the year), according to Karen Armstrong, a noted expert on comparative religion.

Also deserving of much worship were Hubal’s three daughters: Allat, the goddess of the underworld, Al-’uzza, a goddess of fertility, and Manat, the goddess of fate. Ironically, some scholars think that Allah may have been one of the gods to whom a Kaaban idol was dedicated, but he apparently had little relevance to the religion then. At the same time, Bedouins also may have worshiped a god named Al-ilah (or “the god”), which may have been the origin for Allah as the supreme god of Islam.

Remember, though, that all of this was happening about 400 A.D., nearly two centuries before the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570. Before that happened, other religions also gained a foothold, although to a much lesser degree. In various areas of the Arabian Peninsula, you would have found Jews around Medina as well as Zoroastrians and Buddhists in Eastern Iran. You even would have met small pockets of Christian converts taking up various forms of the new religion, including Nestorianism and Monophysitism, which basically had heated arguments with other Christians over whether Jesus Christ had a human side in addition to his divine nature.

This big stewpot of religions started to come to a boil in about 610, when a little-known Mecca native named Muhammad began receiving what he said were revelations from God through Jibril (the archangel Gabriel). Muhammad would direct his companions to memorize and record these revelations, which would become the Quran, the central religious text of Islam. Most important, Muhammad would spend the last 22 years of his life pleading for his fellow Arabs to abandon their polytheistic beliefs and worship the one true God.

But just as Christ’s teachings did not sit well with Roman leaders, Muhammad’s ideas of monotheism and racial equality apparently riled the grand poobahs in Mecca at that time. They feared his radical ideas would cause civil unrest, especially because his teachings were finding favor among the poor and former slaves. For 12 years, Muhammad and his followers endured persecution until in 622, they performed their “Hijra” (emigration) to Medina. There they finally would be able to establish a political and religious base. They even wrote a Constitution of Medina, which formed the basis of a multireligious state that included Jews, Christians and pagans.

Experts, however, stress that contrary to what many may think, Islam did not suddenly dominate the area after Muhammad died in 632. Granted, they say, the political spread of Islam was fast and sweeping as the caliphate (the form of Islamic government led by a caliph, who is considered a political and religious successor to Muhammad) spread. But the conversion of individual Arabs to the new religion was slow. Even in the10th century — about 300 years after Muhammad’s death — only half of the population under the caliphate was Muslim.

Without mass media or the Internet, it simply took time to convince people to discard their old beliefs and accept a revolutionary new religion. And it likely didn’t help when a major schism over who would become the new leader after Muhammad’s death soon led to the bloody Shia-Sunni split that continues to this day, nearly 1,400 years later.

In any case, I had three local professors of Middle Eastern religion and culture stress to me that although some pressure to convert did occasionally occur, the idea that Islam spread rapidly by use of the sword is false. Rather, it occurred slowly through social mobility, missionary activities, integration, incentives and the aspiration to become part of an advanced, civilized society in addition to, of course, conviction in the tenets of the religion.

Please remember that this answer has been a super-condensed version of centuries of Islamic history. Books have been written on the subject, and I might recommend Armstrong’s “Islam: A Short History,” Jonathan Berkey’s “The Formation of Islam” and Geoffery Parrinder’s “World Religions” among many others.

Today’s trivia

Why are people of the Islamic faith called Muslims?

Answer to Wednesday’s trivia: Have you ever ordered anything from a Lillian Vernon catalog? If so, you’ve bought something from the first company founded by a woman to be listed on the American Stock Exchange. Born Lilli Menasche in Leipzig, she and her parents fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in Mount Vernon, N.Y., when she was 10. In 1951, she invested $2,000 from her wedding gifts to begin selling personalized purses and belts by mail. Fourteen years later, she founded the Lillian Vernon Corp., adapting the name of her American hometown to her own. Sales began to falter in the ’90s, and she sold the company in 2003. She is 88 and still active in Democratic Party politics.

This story was originally published December 3, 2015 at 2:05 AM with the headline "Islam did not spread rapidly by the sword."