ABSTRACT
While Western scholarship on the Qurʾān has focused considerable attention on the Jewish and Christian background of the text, the influence of pre-Islamic Arabian religious traditions has received relatively little attention, despite the many signs of their importance. Traces of such influence include the accounts of the prophets Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, and Shuʿayb; the place of the Kaʿba and the adoption of the pre-Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca; the prevalence of sajʿ, the standard medium of the pre-Islamic soothsayers (kuhhān), in many individual Sūras; and the many passages reminiscent of the genres the kuhhān are known to have performed. Some neglect resulted from deep-seated prejudices in Islamic literature towards the pagan religious culture of the Jāhiliyya. Western scholars’ expertise in Biblical studies, the field out of which Islamic studies developed, also made them disposed to stress Jewish and Christian material. Furthermore, the lack of the pagan equivalent of the Bible, a sacred text that would serve as an extant record of the religion or mythology of the pre-Islamic Arabs, made it much more difficult to learn about the pagan tradition. Pre-Islamic Arabia had produced no Iliad or Odyssey, nor even the equivalent of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Extant Islamic sources provide some relevant information in focused studies such as al-Kalbī’s (d. 204/819) Book of Idols and Hamdānī’s (d. 334/945) Book of the Crown, and scattered in other works such as Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk and Masʿūdī’s (d. 356/945) Murūj al-dhahab. Drawing on such texts, Julius Wellhausen published in 1897 Reste arabischen Heidentums, a seminal investigation of the religion of the pre-Islamic Arabs, yet few scholars followed his lead. To date, perhaps the most important work on this facet of the cultural background that preceded the Prophet Muḥammad’s mission is Toufic Fahd’s 1966 study of Arab divination, which includes a number of forays into explaining aspects of the Qurʾānic text. 1 More recently, Jaroslav Stetkevytch has written a work that looks at the myth of Ṣāliḥ and Thamūd as it can be partially reconstructed from Islamic sources. 2 Perhaps less successful, but nevertheless suggestive, are broad comparative studies of Islamic and earlier Semitic material that claim a more or less direct connection between Islamic and primordial Semitic forms, particularly David Heinrich Müller’s study of strophic poetry, which in his view is a prophetic form that connects the Qurʾān, the Hebrew Bible, cuneiform literature, and even the choruses of Greek tragedy. 3
