Sabtu, 20 Agustus 2011

The precursors Of islam (m8 3000 BCE–500 CE): Cultural Core Areas of The Settled World












By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE the settled world had crystallized into four
cultural core areas:
Mediterranean, Nile-to-Oxus, Indic, and
East Asian. The
Nile-to-Oxus, the future core of
Islamdom, was the
least cohesive and the most complicated.
Whereas each
of the other regions developed a single
language of high
culture—Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese,
respectively—
the Nile-to-Oxus region was a linguistic
palimpsest of
Irano-Semitic languages of several
sorts: Aramaic, Syriac
(eastern or Iranian Aramaic), and Middle
Persian (the
language of eastern Iran).





The
Nile-to-Oxus Region





In addition to its various linguistic
groups, the Nile-to-Oxus region also differed in climate and ecology. It lay at
the centre of a
vast arid zone stretching across Afro-Eurasia from the Sahara to the Gobi. It
favoured those
who could deal
with aridity—not only states that could
control flooding (as in Egypt) or
maintain irrigation (as in
Mesopotamia) but also pastoralists
and oasis dwellers.
Although its agricultural potential was severely
limited,
its commercial
possibilities were virtually unlimited.
Located at the crossroads of the
trans-Asian trade and
blessed with numerous natural transit points, the
region
offered special
social and economic prominence to its
merchants.





The period from 800 to 200 BCE has
been called the
Axial Age
because of its pivotal importance for the history
of religion and
culture. The world’s first religions of salvation
developed in the
four core areas. From these
traditions—for example, Judaism,
Mazdeism, Buddhism,
and Confucianism—derived all later forms of high
religion,
including
Christianity and Islam. Unlike the religions that
surrounded their
formation, the Axial Age religions concentrated
transcendent
power into one locus, be it
symbolized theistically or
nontheistically. Their radically
dualistic cosmology posited another
realm, totally unlike
the earthly realm and capable of challenging and
replacing
ordinary earthly
values. The individual was challenged to
adopt the right relationship with
that “other” realm, so
as to transcend mortality by earning a final resting
place,
or to escape the
immortality guaranteed by rebirth by
achieving annihilation of earthly
attachment.





In the Nile-to-Oxus region two major
traditions arose
during the Axial
Age: the Abrahamic in the west and the
Mazdean in the east. Because they
required exclusive allegiance
through an individual confession of
faith in a just
and judging
deity, they are called confessional religions.
This deity was a
unique all-powerful creator who remained
active in history, and each event in
the life of every individual
was meaningful in terms of the
judgment of God
at the end of
time. The universally applicable truth of
these new religions was expressed in
sacred writings. The
traditions reflected the mercantile environment in
which
they were formed
in their special concern for fairness,
honesty, covenant keeping,
moderation, law and order,
accountability, and the rights of
ordinary human beings.
These values were always potentially incompatible with the elitism and
absolutism of courtly circles. Most often,
as in the
example of the Achaemenian Empire, the conflict
was expressed in
rebellion against the crown or was
adjudicated by viewing kingship as
the guarantor of divine
justice.





Although modern Western
historiography has projected
an East-West dichotomy onto ancient
times,
Afro-Eurasian
continuities and interactions were well
established by the Axial Age and
persisted throughout
premodern times. The history of Islamdom cannot be understood
without reference to them. Through
Alexander’s conquests in the 4th
century BCE in three of
the four core areas, the Irano-Semitic cultures of the
Nileto-Oxus region were permanently overlaid with Hellenistic
elements, and a
link was forged between the Indian subcontinent
and Iran. By the
3rd century CE, crosscutting
movements like Gnosticism and
Manichaeism integrated
individuals from disparate cultures. Similarly
organized
large,
land-based empires with official religions existed in
all parts of the
settled world. The Christian Roman Empire
was locked in conflict with its
counterpart to the east, the
Zoroastrian-Mazdean Sasanian empire.
Another Christian
empire in East
Africa, the Abyssinian, was involved alternately
with each of the
others. In the context of these
regional interrelationships,
inhabitants of Arabia made
their fateful entrance into
international political, religious,
and economic life.





The Arabian Peninsula





The Arabian Peninsula consists of a
large central arid zone
punctuated by oases, wells, and small seasonal streams and bounded in
the south by well-watered lands that are
generally thin, sometimes mountainous
coastal strips. To
the north of the peninsula are the irrigated
agricultural
areas of Syria
and Iraq, the site of large-scale states from the
4th millennium
BCE. As early as the beginning of the 1st
millennium BCE the southwest corner
of Arabia, the
Yemen, was also
divided into settled kingdoms. Their
language was a South Arabian Semitic
dialect, and their
culture bore some affinity to Semitic societies in the Fertile
Crescent. By the beginning of the Common Era
(the 1st century
AD in the Christian calendar), the major
occupants of the habitable parts of
the arid centre were
known as Arabs. They were Semitic-speaking tribes of settled,
semi-settled, and fully migratory peoples who
drew their name
and apparently their identity from what
the camel-herding Bedouin
pastoralists among them
called themselves: ‘arab.





Until the beginning of the 3rd
century CE the greatest
economic and political power in the peninsula rested
in
the relatively
independent kingdoms of the Yemen. The
Yemenis, with a knowledge of the
monsoon winds, had
evolved an exceptionally long and profitable trade
route
from East Africa
across the Red Sea and from India across
the Indian Ocean up through the
peninsula into Iraq and
Syria, where it joined older Phoenician routes across
the
Mediterranean
and into the Iberian Peninsula. Their
power depended on their ability to
protect islands discovered
in the Indian Ocean and to control
the straits of
Hormuz and Aden.
It also depended on the Bedouin caravanners
who guided and
protected the caravans that
carried the trade northward to Arab
entrepôts like Petra
and Palmyra. Participation in this trade was in turn
an
important source
of power for tribal Arabs, whose livelihood
otherwise
depended on a combination of intergroup
raiding, agriculture, and animal
husbandry.





By the 3rd century, however, external
developments
began to
impinge. In the early 3rd century, Ardashir I
founded the
Sasanian empire in Fars. Within 70 years
the Sasanian state was at war with
Rome, a conflict that
was to last up to Islamic times. The Roman Empire was reorganized
under Constantine the Great, with the adoption
of a new faith,
Christianity, and a new capital,
Constantinople. These changes
exacerbated the competition
with the Sasanian empire and resulted
in the


spreading of Christianity into Egypt and Abyssinia and the encouraging
of missionizing in Arabia itself. In Arabia
Christians
encountered Jews who had been settling there
since the 1st
century, as well as Arabs who had converted
to Judaism. By
the beginning of the 4th century the rulers
of Abyssinia and
Ptolemaic Egypt were interfering in the
Red Sea area and carrying their
aggression into the Yemen
proper. In the first quarter of the
6th century the proselytizing
efforts of a Jewish Yemeni ruler
resulted in a massacre
of Christians in the major Christian centre of Najran.
This
event invited
Abyssinian Christian reprisal and occupation,
which put a
virtual end to indigenous control of the
Yemen. In conflict with the
Byzantines, the Zoroastrian-
Mazdean Sasanians invaded Yemen
toward the end of the
6th century, further expanding the religious and
cultural
horizons of
Arabia, where membership in a religious community
could not be
apolitical and could even have
international ramifications. The
connection between
communal affiliation and political orientations would
be
expressed in the
early Muslim community and in fact has
continued to function to the present
day
.





The long-term result of Arabia’s
entry into international
politics was paradoxical: it enhanced
the power of
the tribal Arabs
at the expense of the “superpowers.”
Living in an ecological environment
that favoured tribal
independence and small-group loyalties, the Arabs had never
established lasting large-scale states, only transient
tribal
confederations. By the 5th century,
 owever, the settled powers needed their
hinterlands enough to foster
client states: the Byzantines oversaw
the Ghassanid kingdom;
the Persians oversaw the Lakhmid; and the Yemenis (prior to the
Abyssinian invasion) had Kindah. These
relationships increased Arab
awareness of other cultures
and religions, and the awareness
seems to have stimulated
internal Arab cultural activity,
especially the classical
Arabic, or mudari , poetry, for which the pre-Islamic
Arabs
are so famous.
In the north, Arabic speakers were drawn
into the imperial administrations of
the Romans and
Sasanians. Soon
certain settled and semi-settled Arabs
spoke and wrote Aramaic or Persian as
well as Arabic, and
some Persian or Aramaic speakers could speak and write Arabic. The
prosperity of the 5th and 6th centuries, as well
as the intensifi
cation of imperial rivalries in the late 6th
century, seems
to have brought the Arabs of the interior
permanently into the wider network of
communication
that fostered
the rise of the Muslim community at Mecca
and Medina.





Islamic history / edited by Laura S.
Etheredge
. Britannica Educational Publishing


(a
trademark of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)
: New York.








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