Pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion

Here are some notes from Pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion, by Joseph Henninger

To describe the religion of pre-Islamic Arabia, and especially the pre-Islamic Bedouin religion, is no less than portraying ancient Bedouin society, because of serious lacunae in documentation. Since the classical and biblical references were too few and the cuneiform inscriptions still unknown, it was impossible to consider undertaking such a project before the Arabic sources became at least partially accessible in the West. Information on pre-Islamic Arabia is to be found for the most part in works by Muslim histoians, traditionists, and jurists, which did not come to the attention of Christian Europe until the Renaissance, and then only gradually.

Arab and Bedouin Religion

It's necessary to give a purely descriptive of pre-Islamic Bedouin religion as we are able to oberve it immediately prior to the rise of Islam.

research difficulties:
1. a large number of inferences by which the authors have attempted to compensate for the lacunae in the existing data;
2. great difficulty distinguishing clearly between the religious practices of the nomads and those of the settled people(sedentary communities), for many of the tribes were partly nomadic, partly settled. The religious practices of pre-Islamic Arabia has to do primarily with the cultic centers located at oases, to which the Bedouins came as pilgrims, associating themselves with the religious practices of the settled groups.

two tendencies:
1. Bedouin's gods were borrowed from more advanced civilizations;
2. Nomads represent a more primitive form of Semitic religion, which considers the Bedouin religion to be older than that of the settled peoples.

Pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion

religious indifference of the Bedouins?
--Incomparison with South Arabia where a very large body of data bears directly on the religious life. Bedouin were never particularly zealous in the practice of Islam, which is not surprising in view of the fact that Islam is markedly urban in character. Nevertheless, to conclude from this a total absence of religious sentiment is to go too far. See some expressions of Bedouin religion:
1. sacred stones--fetishism
the material object is not venerated for itself but rather as the dwelling of either a personal being(god, spirit) or a force.
2. the collective and anonymous phenomenon of the jinn.
3. the existence of a cult of ancestors.
4. local divinities.
5. astral divinities were in South Arabia, not central Arabia.
6. the final divinity to be considered is Allah who was recognized before Islam as god, and if not as the only god at least as a supreme god.

Practices of the pre-Islamic cult:
1. Prayer does not seem to have been very important. More frequently mentioned are the sacrifices: bloody sacrifices.
2. How about cultic officials? The priests mentioned in the Arabic sources were not sacrificers but rather guardians of the sanctuaries, for each man was allowed to slaughter his own victim. The absence of a special class of priests recalls the primitive situation of the Semites and other shepherd nomads.

Conclusion

A. Brelich, 1958: one cannot speak of polytheism in proto-Semitic civilization, but one does find the belief in a supreme being, coupled with animism.
Writer of this paper: inclined to accept this formula, with a few slight modifications: one must attribute a little less importance to animism(belief in nature spirits), and emphasize ancestor worship a little more.
Here then are the elements of this religion: Allah, creator of the world, supreme and undisputed lord, but relegated to the background in the cultic and practical life of the people; next, manifesting the rudiments of a polytheism, several astral divinities(at least that of the planet Venus) and atmospheric divinities(perhaps the attributes of a creator god which have been hypostatized); finally, ancestors and jinn, these last having more importance in the belief system than in the cult. All of this, moreover, is somewhat vague and far from being organized into a real pantheon or hierarchical system. the cultic practices as well were characterized by very little ritual and in turn reflected the individualism of the Bedouin and the lack of rigidity in their entire social system.
Islam whicn followed this religion did not grow out of a void, nor was it of purely foreign origin. It was not a Bedouin religion, for its principal roots are to be found in the biblical religions; however, in Arabia it found not only human values but also religious values it could and did incorporate.