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Due to a technical error the audio for Session Seven wasn’t recorded. I will leave some notes here for those who were not in attendance.
To say that pre-modern Arabia was isolated from the rest of the world would be an understatement and yet, despite this isolation, it was neither uninhabited, inactive, nor irrelevant. In fact, despite the nearly millennia and a half gap between the time of the Prophet ﷺ and our time we’ll see that very little has changed in terms of human motivations and nature.
Every human culture has its noble characteristics as well as its darker, predatory, and destructive aspects. From pre-modern Arabia to the modern global West, this remains true. As for the Arabian Peninsula (al-Jazīrah al-ʿArabiyyah), its people developed a sophisticated language, rich in meaning yet in stark contrast to the beauty and sophistication of the Arabic language was the tribal culture, often as harsh as it was exploitative.
Dr. al-Ṣallābī, the author of the book we are reading from in this class, al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah: ʿArḍ Waqā'i Wa Taḥlīl Aḥdāth (The Prophetic Biography: Presentation of Facts and Analysis of Events), presents the realities and events which comprised the world into which the Prophet ﷺ would be born for examination and study, a world he and his Message would ultimately confront. This presentation and analysis is done not solely for the acquisition of facts but to also draw similarities between his time x and ours so that we can face and confront those challenges with the timeless wisdom of Allah’s Messenger, ﷺ.
To appreciate the magnitude of the Prophet’s mission ﷺ we must first understand the world the Prophet ﷺ was born in and the culture he saws inherited, just as all of us do. The Arabian Peninsula was a land of extremes—vast deserts left little room for agricultural development. As a result, this pushed its people toward trade and seasonal markets for survival. Makkah stood as a major waypoint, its Qurayshi caravans journeying in the winter to Yemen and in the summer to al-Shām (as alluded to in the Qur’ān), while Yemeni merchants sailed the seas around them, seeking opportunities for commerce. Pre-modern Arabian society was bound together by tribal loyalties, pride in lineage, and the eloquence of poetry as cultural currency. Women more often than not were reduced to mere property. And while Arabs were (and remain) famous for this hospitality, this served as no impediment to the practice of usury, economic exploitation, and even infanticide, with the Qur’ān denouncing and condemning the burying of infant daughters.
These social conditions of pre-modern Arabia are far from being confined to a remote, alien past. In fact, upon examination, we can see that much of the past still echoes, or even rhymes, in our present “modern” society with unnerving familiarity. Human nature has not shifted so dramatically as we would like to pretend in the intervening fifteen hundred years; our world has simply traded desert garb for a digital wardrobe. Where the tribes of Quraysh guarded honor through bloodline, many today guard it through the curated “brand” of wealth, aesthetics as well as through nationalism, which is seeing a resurgence as of late.
Where the poet once commanded reputations with a well-turned verse, hip-hop artists or Instagram and YouTube influencers shape public opinion. Ancient practices of usury has been normalized with the ubiquitous presence of interest in virtually all transactions, with the poorest among us having to negotiate “Pay Day Loans” and other forms of predatory lending, ensnaring the poor and working class with crushing debt.
The devaluation of life is another troubling commonality between the world at the time of the Prophet ﷺ and our own. In that era, infanticide was rationalized out of fear or poverty. In our time, poor women are sometimes urged to abort their babies with the claim that doing so will prevent poverty, and tragically, many follow this advice.
The realm of entertainment likewise mirrors the past. In the Prophet’s time ﷺ, poetic competitions were revered in a way similar to the prestige we now grant to athletes and musicians. Celebrity culture and viral fame in our age have become modern heirs to an old tradition rooted in ignorance, vanity, and self-indulgence. An indulgence driven by fear-based decision making and an anxiety of poverty. This latter was especially powerful, one which still continues to fuel harmful decision-making today.
The Qur’ān confronted and transformed these destructive patterns, not by erasing culture but by reorienting its values toward justice, compassion, and accountability before God. If these patterns still persist in our time, we must ask ourselves: what would transformation look like today, and what values would we need to recover to make it possible?
What we see here of the Prophet’s world ﷺ are not distant parallels but living patterns, virulent mutations of the same impulses for status, influence, and control. In tracing these echoes from the past, we are not merely studying the world of the Prophet ﷺ and the Arabs before Islam. We are, in many ways, holding up a mirror to ourselves.