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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow!  Been a couple of days since I checked into this thread an see pages and pages have been added, almost all about the oath some women made at the gate of Medina.

I think it's fair to say this may be the only general listserv that hosts such heated debate over such obscure historical events.

About Jahaliyya--I've never heard it referred to as the days of darkness, but rather as the days of ignorance, and specifically ignorance about the monotheistic God.  In other words, the days of paganism.

I don't believe there is any evidence people of the jahiliyya were any more cruel or barbaric then those who followed them.  Yes, there was infanticide, but most people on the Arabian peninsula lived hard scrabble lives that became even more difficult in a time of drought.  Infanticide would have been an economic response as it was in China and many other places.  Moreover, the practice of infanticide, which was not limited to female children, appears to have been the practice of one tribe in Arabia, and even then only in times of famine.

Women in the jahiliyya clearly could live pretty emancipated lives as Khadija did.  However, women who were captured or sold into marriage did have a pretty miserable lot.  Under Islamic rules, they would have been entitled to more rights.

As one PP has said there is a bit of marketing around the term; and it is pretty common to paint a very dark picture of the jahaliyya that was relieved by the Quranic revelations to Mohammed.  History is written by the winners.

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There is nothing wrong with paganism or polytheism.[/quote]

PP here--didn't mean to imply anything wrong with polytheism.  Just that jahaliyya is used to refer to the days in which most practiced polytheism.  (Not all of course; there were communities of Jews and Nestorian Christians.)  In its original usage it meant just that and did not connote that it was an age of cruel, barbaric, and licentious ways of living.

Pre-islamic Arabia had some interesting goddesses, about which we sadly know all too little.  Allah was the creator God and had three daughters.  One of these was Al Uzza, who, in typical Semitic tradition was the goddess of both fertility and war (see Babylonian Ishtar).  The other two were Manat (goddes of fate) and Al-Lat, goddess of the underworld.  Allah is thought to have had sons, but interestingly, there names are lost, presumably because they were very minor deities in comparison to their sisters.

The pre-Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca was pretty much a pagan fest, and is thought by some to have been been a seasonal festival for rain.  It was held around the autumnal equinox--rain in Arabia falls strictly in the winter.  Pre-Islamic Arabs followed the practice of having a lunar year, and every several months an additional month was inserted to keep the lunar year in sync with the solar year.  Whether a new month would be intercalated (as insertion of a month is called) would be announced at each pilgrimage.

Intercalation kept the pilgrimage at around the same time every year, keeping it firmly rooted as a seasonal feast.  Muhammed made a farewell pilgrimage, which helped him win over the people of Mekka, whose economy depended on the pilgrimage and the trading that went on around it.  He changed many of the rituals, making them less pagan.  In addition, verse were revealed to him strongly prohibiting the practice of intercalation.  This is a very strong absolute prohibition and may seem very odd but it had the effect of divorcing the pilgrimage from its seasonal roots; with a strictly lunar calendar the time of hajj will move throughout the year.
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