Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? Traditional scholarship maintains that Islam developed in opposition to the idolatrous and polytheistic religion of the Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding regions. In this study of pre-Islamic Arabian religion, G. R. Hawting adopts a comparative religious perspective to suggest an alternative view. By examining the various bodies of evidence which survive from this period, the Koran and the vast resources of the Islamic tradition, the author argues that in fact...

This volume covers the vital early years of the second Muslim civil war, when the Umayyad caliphate seemed on the point of extinction. That it survived had much to do with the vigor of the Umayyad Marwan b. al-Hakam whose initial restoration of Umayyad authority is described here in some detail by al-Tabari's sources. In the chaos and confusion of the civil war, however, developments took place that were to prove significant for the future of the Umayyad calphate, indeed for the early history of Islam in general. Among them, the first manifestations of large-scale tribal divisions among the...