Abstract
G.W. Bowersock tries to provide a situational context to Arabia over a period in Islamic history about which little is said to be known. This period comprises the decades that fall roughly between the birth of Prophet Muhammad (570
The first three chapters set the religious and political backdrop to the estimated forty-year period in question. The opening chapter explores the rule of the Ethiopian king Abraha in the city of Himyar and his military campaigns across the region including the Hijaz. The Ethiopic rule was brought to an end by the Persians around 560 and Arab traditional religions continued to flourish under Persian rule. The chapter that follows mainly features an argument for the possibility of native Arab monotheism that was independent of Judaism and Christianity. It was against this possibility of native monotheistic movements, which leads the third chapter of the book to highlight sixth-century Mecca as a hotbed for such revelatory claims as the one for which the Prophet Muhammad came to be widely known.
The next three chapters, four to six, present the reader with insight into the period in question (570s to 600s). In the fourth chapter the author uses the Ethiopic political history in Arabia to explain the earliest relation between the Prophet and Ethiopia. This, according to Bowersock, had to do with the flight of the Meccan believers to Axum for safety. The choice of Ethiopia for the Meccan refugees is indicative of the fact that the Persian administration in Arabia supported the Arab polytheism which Muhammad criticized. In chapter five the Persian siege of Jerusalem, a Byzantine territory, in 614 is discussed. The sixth chapter captures Muhammad’s metropolitan leadership in Mecca and Medina, while territorial rivalry went on between Byzantine and Persian authorities.
The last three chapters explain the developments after Muhammad’s death in 632 and how events culminated in the emergence of the Prophet’s posterity as a new political and religious force in the east. Rivalry in the old eastern Roman Empire, as outlined in the seventh chapter, would no longer be between Byzantine and Persian rulers. Rather, it now centred upon the caliphs’ armies fighting into the western and eastern frontiers of the existing powers. The eighth and ninth chapters of the book discuss the changes that came with the reign of ‘Abd Al-Malik and how Arab monotheism sought to stamp itself in the place where exiting traditions had their print.
Overall, it remains unclear in the book as to whether the historical gap being filled is about Islam or Arabia, since we can only speak of the term ‘Islam’ as a much later development than the early decades of the seventh century. However, Bowersock skilfully sketches what one can say about the Arabia of Muhammad’s lifetime, as opposed to what we can know about it. Such an attempt exposes students and experts in this area to some unique insights amid all that has been said and written concerning the Arabian roots of Islam.