Arab Christian Confederations and Muhammad’s Believers: On the Origins of Jihad

Marco Demichelis

doi:10.3390/rel12090710

Abstract

The meaning and elaboration of Jihad (just-sacred war) hold an important place in Islamic history and thought. On the far side of its spiritual meanings, the term has been historically and previously associated with the Arab Believers’ conquest of the 7th–8th centuries CE. However, the main idea of this contribution is to develop the “sacralization of war” as a relevant facet that was previously elaborated by the Arab Christian (pro-Byzantine) clans of the north of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant and secondarily by the Arab confederation of Muhammad’s believers. From the beginning of Muhammad’s hijra (622), the interconnection between the Medinan clans that supported the Prophet with those settled in the northwest of the Hijaz is particularly interesting in relation to a couple of aspects: their trade collaboration and the impact of the belligerent attitude of the pro-Byzantine Arab Christian forces in the framing of the early concept of a Jihad. This analysis aimed to clarify the possibility that the early “sacralization of war” in proto-Islamic narrative had a Christian Arab origin related to a previous refinement in the Christian milieu.

Highlights

Why Is Research on the Canonization of Jihad Still Relevant Today?The 9/11 terrorist attack had a deep impact on the creative identification of Islam from a detrimental perspective, emphasizing this religion as having been violent, in particular against religious otherness, since the beginning of its history
Just as Christianity needed time to be framed and canonized, because, during the first centuries, it was often rejected and persecuted, the same approach must be used for Islam for erasing the banal idea that the Arab conquests were already Islamic as they were rooted in a bellicose canonized concept of Jihad, regardless of the concept attributed to it
Irfan Shahid (d. 2016) dedicated his academic life to searching for the pre-Islamic Arab identity in the Roman eastern Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity; in his works, he was able to identify a process of increasing Romanization, Hellenization and Christianization of those people, described as “Arabs”, that emigrated to the north of the Peninsula in different centuries CE (Fisher 2011, p. 14)

Summary

Introduction

The 9/11 terrorist attack had a deep impact on the creative identification of Islam from a detrimental perspective, emphasizing this religion as having been violent, in particular against religious otherness, since the beginning of its history. Just as Christianity needed time to be framed and canonized, because, during the first centuries, it was often rejected and persecuted, the same approach must be used for Islam for erasing the banal idea that the Arab conquests were already Islamic as they were rooted in a bellicose canonized concept of Jihad, regardless of the concept attributed to it It was not until 140 years after the Prophet’s death before an Islamic moral attitude to war became solidified, which was included in Islam’s earliest juridical text, in which a limited section (Kitab al-Jihad) was dedicated to war and soldiers’ behavior. The above-listed passages need to be elucidated, for framing the doctrinal and theological differences that characterize the new religion compared to the previous ones, in this case, Islam from Christianity and Judaism.

The “Sacralization” of War in the Arab Christian Confederation before Islam

Conclusions