Holy Prophet of Islam - Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa — Page 27
The Holy Prophet of Islam, Hadrat Muḥammad Mustafa. Sa culture maintained by agriculture and by trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. One was Ethiopia, an ancient kingdom with. Christianity in its Coptic form as the official religion. The other was. Yemen in south-western Arabia, a land of fertile mountain valleys and a point of transit for long-distance trade. At a certain stage its small local states had been incorporated in a larger kingdom, which had grown weak when trade declined in the early Christian era but revived later. Yemen had its own language, different from Arabic which was spoken elsewhere in. Arabia, and its own religion: a multiplicity of gods were served by priests in temples which were places of pilgrimage, votive offerings and private, but not communal prayer, and also centers of great estates. In later centuries Christian and Jewish influences had come down from Syria on the trade-routes or across the sea from Ethiopia. In the sixth century, a center of Christianity had been destroyed by a king attracted to Judaism, but invasions from Ethiopia had restored some Christian influence; both the Byzantines and the Sasanians had been involved in these events. . Between the great empires of the north and the kingdoms of the. Red Sea lay lands of a different kind. The greater part of the Arabian peninsula was steppe or desert, with isolated oases having enough water for regular cultivation. The inhabitants spoke various dialects of Arabic and followed different ways of life. Some of them were nomads who pastured camels, sheep or goats by using the scanty water resources of the desert; these have traditionally been known as 'Beduin'. Some were settled cultivators tending their grain or palm trees in the oases, or traders and craftsmen in small market towns; some combined more than one way of life. The balance between nomadic and sedentary peoples was precarious. . Although they were in the minority, it was the camel-nomads, mobile and carrying arms, who, together with merchant groups in the towns, dominated the cultivators and craftsmen. Their ethos of courage, hospitality, loyalty to family and pride of ancestry was also dominant. . They were not controlled by a stable power of coercion, but were led by chiefs belonging to families around which there gathered lasting groups of supporters, expressing their cohesion and loyalty in the idiom of common ancestry; such groups are usually called tribes. 27