Religion
For more details on the ancient Semitic religion, see Arabian mythology.There are some materials on which to base a description of pre-Islamic religion, particularly in Mecca and the Hejaz. The book originally compiled by Ibn Ishaq around 740 A.D "The biography of the Prophet" passed on through notable transmitter Ibn Hisham translated by A. Guillaume 1st edition in 1955 gives an insight into the conditions pervailing in Mecca around Prophet's time. The Qur'an and the hadith, or recorded oral traditions, give some hints as to this religion. Islamic commentators have elaborated these hints into an account that, while coherent, is doubted by academics in part or in whole.
Many of the tribes in Arabia had practiced Judaism. Christianity is known to have been active in the region before the rise of Islam, especially unorthodox, possibly gnostic forms of it.
Read more about this topic: Pre-Islamic Arabia
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Whitman is like a human document, or a wonderful treatise in human self revelation. It is neither art nor religion nor truth: Just a self revelation of a man who could not live, and so had to write himself.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)