Content area
Full Text
By the late sixth and early seventh centuries, trade had opened up the worlds of Meccans and Medinans, bringing them into contact with many people from nearby lands. As the scope and intensity of trade relations increased, so did the Arabs' contact with foreigners, including Christians from South Arabia, Abyssinia, Egypt, and Syria. By the late sixth century, Christianity had stopped being only a religion of foreigners, as it began to take hold in the Meccan and Medinan populations themselves.
The subject of Christians in Mecca and Medina is one that has occupied the minds of many. Yet no work has been dedicated to specifically studying the group itself; rather, the subject has been dealt with in passing generalities. By far the most detailed work about Christians in Mecca is Henri Lammens's now outdated chapter "Les Chrétiens à la Mecque à la Veille de l'Hégire" (1928).1 The next two relevant articles we and are Muhammad Hamidullah's 1958 "Two Christians of Pre-Islamic Mecca" that looks at 'Uthmän b. al-Huwayrith and Waraqa b. Nawfal, and his 1959 "The Christian Monk Abu 'Amir of Medina."2
One of the most extensive and relatively recent writings on the subject of Meccan Christianity is Gunter Lüling's 80-page Der Christliche Kult an der Vorislamischen Kaaba als Problem der Islamwissenchaft und Christlichen Theologie. But Lüling's concern is on Christian influences on Muhammad, and the Prophet's motivation for his actions/ Lüling's much lengthier 1981 work Die Wiederentdeckung des Propheten Muhammad: Eine Kritik am "christlichen" Abendland expands on these themes, but still does not mention any Christian individuals/ Therefore, we find a general gap in the discussion of Meccan and Medinan Christianity in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. This article is an attempt to fill some aspects of this gap. While the usual concerns of authenticity and polemics surround this subject like any other in this time period, we can also glean important information from the Muslim sources, giving us a glimpse into the existence of Christians in Mecca and Medina during the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
In pre-Islamic Mecca and Medina, conversion to Christianity occurred individually, with each convert undergoing his own independent religious quest. In examining the stories of converts to Christianity, we find two major themes. The first is a...