FORGOTTEN MADINAH: A DIFFERENT WORLD?

MADINAH: A DIFFERENT CITY

When we think at Madinah, the mind associates this place to the Prophet Muhammad, as he found refuge there, when his own people turned against him; today, Madinah is one of the two holy cities in Islam. Madinah is Muslim then, but it is not always been the case; in fact, Islam was revealed by Prophet Muhammad some 1,400 years ago. The history of Madinah, though, is much older, and bear witness to a history which is now almost forgotten and relegated to the realm of a few historians, experts and curious people who may wonder what was there before this city became one of the strongholds of Islam, before it came to be known as the ‘city of the Prophet’.

 

The religious landscape of the Pre-Islamic Hijaz

 

Before Islam changed forever the city and society of Madinah, of the Hijaz region, the rest of Arabia, and the world at large, the landscape was very different; in general terms, there were, in the region of Hijaz, where Madinah is located, many shrines where polytheistic cults took place. Paganism, though, was not the only tradition present here, since there were Christians and Jew communities as well, with their place of worship; some centers, then, were of particular relevance. On this regard, one may think at the sanctuary in Makkah, which in the past has been regarded by historians as the most prominent. The recent research highlighted that, though important, the pre-Islamic Makkah was less prominent than it was commonly thought; at any rate, the individual shrines were not the only places where the religious devotion was expressed before the advent of Islam. In fact, we have to mention two significant structures, know, respectively, as ‘haram’ and ‘hima’, which were much larger than the shrines.

 

Haram

 

Both in Pre-Islamic and Islamic eras the haram denotes a sacred and enclosed space, where a series of prohibitions apply; it is a striking continuity from the past, linking the period of what Muslim scholars call Jahiliya, literally ‘ignorance’ (of Islam) and the era after the Revelation. In this respect, then, the religious history of Arabia has no jumps or discontinuities.

The haram denotated also a code, a series of rules applying to a vast area, to miles and miles of territory, to be abode at any time; in these spaces, in fact, one couldn’t, among others, hunt, carry the weapons, or fight and kill. These codes were mainly present in Makkah and Madinah, but in other place as well; nowadays the haram coincides with a particular mosque, as in the case of Makkah, but in the past the area concerned was much more extended.

 

Literally, haram can be translated by ‘forbidden’ and this is the meaning we can desume from early poetic compositions in Arabic; however, the original word meant much more than forbidden. As a matter of fact, haram could denote something ‘bad’, or even ‘sacred’, especially when it was used as an adjective, as one can desume from the qualification of some months as ‘haram’, ‘sacred’.

 

The inscriptions dating back to pre-Islamic era, moreover, use the root of the word, ‘h-r-m’, to indicate the different typologies of sanctity; in these cases, the use denoted a link to some kind of place of worship. In Arabic, we have ‘mhrm’, which can be translated as ‘temple’; sometimes, though, the same word extended to the place where the temples was located.

 

Hima

 

The word hima is somewhat different from haram, as the first indicated a space which was ‘protected’, and not necessarily ‘sacred’, as the second term indicates; in fact, hima refers to some kind of land used to graze animals and where one could not enter, unless he/she had the right to do so. The early sources, dating back to the II century CE, define hima as

 

A place in which there is fresh herbage, 

which  is protected against people pasturing

(Munt, 2014)

 

Again, in the early poetry of Arabia, the root ‘h-m-y’ denotes words indicating some kind of protection, or even the prescription to keep away from a place; in this sense, one may think at the common uses of the term hima. In particular, one tribe could claim to be more prominent than the others from the ability to defend the himas located in his territory.

 

Moreover, hima seems to be linked to the grazing of the horses, an element which persists in the Islamic era as well; again, we find here another continuity between the two periods, which bear more commonalities than it could appear. Of particular importance, on this regard, are the pre-Islamic himas of the Kinda, Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and after the advent of Islam, of those near Madinah.

 

Haram or Hima?

 

Although the two words had, at least originally, two separate meanings, they were sometimes used as synonyms; at any rate, we can say that a pre-Islamic hima served to denote a protected space, where some type of animals could be kept. At times, they were linked to a particular deity, but this was not always the case; haram, on the contrary, may have indicated the most sacred space within the sanctuary, around which there was the hima. In that case, the animals belonged to the deity and were used for cult purposes; one example is given by the deity known as Alamaqah, which was worshiped at Mahram Bilqis, in South Arabia, with its own land, which could be cultivated. In Hijaz, where Madinah is located, it seems that the animals were more frequently grazed, as the available fertile land was scarcer than in the South.

In both cases, the two terms had an important social and economic role, although the utilization of the space was different, both in pre-Islamic and Islamic eras; haram denoted a space specifically reserved to a deity, while hima a proihibited (where one could not enter freely) pasture for the animals.

Conclusion

People, and Muslims in particular, tend to forget that the history of Arabia and of its most important cities, like Makkah and Madinah have a long history. Moreover, of terms like haram the origin is unknown or forgotten; the same goes with hima; with this brief article, I hope I shed some light on these matters.