[...]... movements of cultivators into those towns and other districts to avoid taxation, the recruitment of prisoners of war as slaves and clients by the Arabs, the continuing domination of the bureaucracy by the non-Arabs, reports about and examples of interreligious polemic and debate, and a wide variety of messianic and other ideas, later often rejected as extremist, within movements of opposition to the Umayyad... in the text itself, are anonymous One of the most obvious result of them, and of material in the literature that provides details for us about the gods and idols of the Arabs, is to establish the common image of Islam as something beginning in a largely polytheistic milieu The exegetical amplications of the Koran lead us to understand Islam as, in the rst place, an attack on the idolatry and polytheism... regard the xing of the text and its elevation to the status of scripture as a part of the gradual emergence of Islam itself Precision in xing dates is impossible and a distinction has to be made between the existence of koranic material, the compilation of the material into a collection agreed to be xed and unchangeable, and the elaboration of various doctrines dening and supporting the role and authority... polytheistic and idolã atrous in a very literal and crude way Only after the Arabs had been persuaded or forced to abandon their polytheism and idolatry was Islam able to spread beyond Arabia into lands the majority of the people of which were at least nominally monotheists It will be argued in the introduction that that account of its genesis seems to set Islam apart from other versions of monotheism... by the ndings of archaeology and epigraphy needs to be reconsidered Underlying those arguments is the view that the traditional understanding of Islam as arising from a critique of local paganism in a remote area of western Arabia serves to isolate Islam from the development of the monotheistic tradition in general At least from before the Christian era until about the 6 Idolatry and the emergence of. .. approach to the origins of Islam that treats Islam in a way comparable with other developments in the monotheist tradition and which does justice to Islam as a part of that tradition There are a number of general ideas and theoretical starting-points underlying the argument of the following chapters The rst concerns the way in which new religions emerge within the monotheistic tradition One of the main themes... approach It treats the image of the jahiliyya contained in the traditional literature primarily as a reexion of the understanding of Islams origins which developed among Muslims during the early stages of the emergence of the new form of monotheism It questions how far it is possible to reconstruct the religious ideas and practices of the Arabs of pre-Islamic inner Arabia on the basis of literary materials... other aspects of the opponents polytheism The nature and validity of the identication of the koranic opponents with idolatrous Meccans and other Arabs, the extent to which traditional material about them is coherent and consistent with the koranic material attacking the mushrikun, is one of the main themes of this work As an example of the way in which the tradition gives esh to the anonymous and sometimes... authority and theology, etc Included among them are accounts of the origins of the religion and of the life of its founder, the Prophet Those accounts have to be understood as the product of the developing community, embodying its own vision of how it came into the world and seeking to associate as much as possible with the gure identied as its founder, and for that reason it is dicult for historians to use... practice of the Prophet, the theory that the sunna (along with the Koran) was the source of the law, and the role of the scholars in elaborating the law and relating it to its theoretical sources it is dicult to give much content to what we refer to as Sunn Islam, and even if we resort to expressions such as proto-Sunn it is still dicult to see what Islam may have consisted of in the second/eighth century . The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam From Polemic to History In this book G. R. Hawting supports the view that the emergence of Islam owed more to debates and disputes among monotheists. the ja¯hiliyya was the background to Islam and that the more we know about it the better position we will be in to understand the emergence of the new religion. 2 Idolatry and the emergence of. aims to elucidate these issues and to indicate some of the start- ing-points of the discussion. A reconsideration of the nature and target of the koranic polemic, together with a discussion of