Saleh - Historical Context

Historical Context

Thamud people are believed to have been the successors to the ancient tribe of ʿĀd. Their ancestral descendant may have been Eber, the great-grandson of Noah and their location is likely to have been in the Northwest corner of Arabia, between Madinah and Syria. In later Islamic history, when Muhammad led his expedition to Tabuk against the Romans, on a reported Roman invasion from Syria, the prophet - and his companions - came across the remains of Thamud. With the advance of material civilization, the people of Thamud became materialistic and arrogant as well as godless. Thus, God sent the prophet and seer Saleh, to warn them about the impending doom they would face if they did not mend their sinful ways.

Thamud cannot be equated with the Edomites at Petra. Salih was born before Abraham and the Edomites were a Semitic race. Historic Petra had several places of worship, and the main mountain at the site - Jebel al-Madhbah - is topped by two stone obelisks, suggesting the worship of deities via stone phallic symbols. The narrow gorge leading to the site - known as the Siq - can sometimes channel the wind to produce a loud trumpet-like sound, and it is known by local Bedouin as the trumpet of God. The Edomite occupants of Petra were, however, not obliterated, but instead just migrated to the Negev; neither were the subsequent Nabataean occupants of Petra destroyed by divine command, but instead were weakened by the Roman Emperor, Trajan, and reduced to mere peasants. The name of Saleh may originate in the name of the city, as it was historically known as Sela, a word deriving from the Hebrew term Se'lah, meaning rock; the Greek name Petra has the same meaning.

The prophet Saleh is not mentioned in any other Abrahamic scripture or contemporary historical text, and his account is only found in the Qur'an. However, the account of Thamud's destruction was well known in Pre-Islamic Arabia and among the Arabic tribes and their poets that they mentioned them (and the people of ʿĀd) in some of their poetry, as a moral lesson and a bad end. Arab Jews knew about the stories of Thamūd and ʿĀd from the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, but mostly as an Arabian tradition, and not as a matter of belief and faith, because they were not mentioned in the Jewish sources, nor in the contemporary Roman or Christian ones.