Holy Prophet of Islam - Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa — Page 28
The Holy Prophet of Islam, Hadrat Muhammad Mustafa sa. The power of tribal leaders was exercised from oases, where they had close links with merchants who organized trade through the territory controlled by the tribe. In the oases, however, other families were able to establish a different kind of power through the force of religion. The religion of pastoralists and cultivators seems to have had no clear shape. . Local gods, identified with objects in the sky, were thought to be embodied in stones, trees and other natural things; good and evil spirits were believed to roam the world in the shape of animals; soothsayers claimed to speak with the tongue of some supernatural wisdom. It has been suggested, on the basis of modern practice in southern Arabia, that gods were thought of as dwelling in a sanctuary, a haram, a place or town set apart from tribal conflict, serving as a center of pilgrimage, sacrifice, meeting and arbitration, and watched over by a family under the protection of a neighboring tribe. Such a family could obtain power or influence by making skillful use of its religious prestige, its role as arbiter of tribal disputes, and its opportunities for trade. . Throughout this Near Eastern world, much was changing in the sixth and early seventh centuries. The Byzantine and Sasanian Empires were engaged in long wars, which lasted with intervals from 540 to 629. . They were mainly fought in Syria and Iraq; for a moment the Sasanian armies came as far as the Mediterranean, occupying the great cities of. Antioch and Alexandria as well as the holy city of Jerusalem, but in the 620s they were driven back by the Emperor Heraclius. For a time too. Sasanian rule extended to south-western Arabia, where the kingdom of. Yemen had lost much of its former power because of invasions from. Ethiopia and a decline in agriculture. The settled societies ruled by the empires were very curious about the meaning of life and the way it should be lived, expressed in the idioms of the great religions. . The power and influence of the empires reached parts of the. Arabian peninsula, and for many centuries Arab pastoral nomads from the north and center of the peninsula had been moving into the countryside of the area now often called the Fertile Crescent: the interior of Syria, the land lying west of the Euphrates in lower Iraq, and the region between. Euphrates and Tigris in upper Iraq (the Jazira) were largely Arab in population. They brought with them their ethos and forms of social 28