ABSTRACT
A warrior society without a military institution, Arab tribes practiced the art of war by alternating commerce by caravans with pillaging expeditions. Quranic revelation gives them a geopolitically expansionist objective, as well as an ethical motivation: the jihâd, which evokes notions of effort and self-perfection. The jihâd also instills a theocentric view of the world, the center of which revolves around the Ka’aba in Mecca, rippling out to the war-torn territories of the infidels.
