RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT ARABS

C1oncerning the religion of the ancient Arabs we have no great amount of knowledge. Wellhausen rightly entitles his admirable work on the subject _Reste arabischen Heidenthums_. Nevertheless we can make certain of some points of special importance with regard to our present consideration. The heathen Arabs possessed many holy places and many ceremonial rites, but very little earnest religious conviction.

2Excessively conservative by nature, the people observed the customs of their fathers without troubling their minds about their original significance, offered sacrifices to the gods (rude stone fetiches for the most part), and marched in procession round their sanctuaries, without counting much upon their aid or standing in any great awe of them; they cried to the dead, “Be not far from us,” without associating with the cry the idea of a future life which alone gave it meaning.

3In the north the savage king Mundhir ben Ma-assama (505-554) still sacrificed multitudes of Christian captives in honour of the goddess of the planet Venus, even as the Israelites had done long ago in honour of their God.[17] The Arabs of the Sinaitic peninsula likewise offered human sacrifices to the planet Venus,[18] and we have other accounts of similar human sacrifices among the Arabs of the north. Possibly their close contact with Christians and the adherents of other superior religions may have to some extent revived the old Semitic religious zeal and fanaticism among the Arabs there. Farther south we find only faint traces of human sacrifice and we may regard it as practically extinct by the time of Mohammed.

4In the meantime, however, the Arabs who had entered into closer relations with the Roman Empire, and the majority of those who occupied a like position towards Persia, had adopted at least a superficial form of Christianity. There were also some Christians in the interior of Arabia, while in the south Christianity had long since gained a considerable following. It had been persecuted for a while by a Jewish ruler; it was ultimately delivered by the Abyssinian conquest, but had made small progress since then. Christianity as practised by the Syrians, or, worse still, the Abyssinians, was not well adapted to win proselytes among the Arabs. If only the disciplined strength of Rome had acted upon these regions the case would probably have been different.

5There were Jews here and there in Arabia, and like the Jews of Abyssinia most of them seem not to have been genuine children of Israel, but native converts to Judaism. The Arab Jews, though possessed of no great theological knowledge, adhered strictly to their religion. The majority of Arabs was composed of heathen who had outgrown their religion. There were probably men who were conscious of the defects of this state of things, and recognised that the Christians had in many points an advantage over the heathen. We are told of certain persons from Mecca and its vicinity who adopted, and even preached, a monotheistic faith more or less Christian, but the details are very obscure.

6Certainly at the beginning of the seventh century not even the profoundest and acutest observer could have foreseen that in the heart of Arabia a religion was soon to arise and to result in the establishment of an Arab empire destined to give new shape to vast regions of the world, including the countries which had been the homes of the oldest civilisations.