Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam: Difference between revisions

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'''''Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam''''' is a book written by scholar and [[Historiography of early Islam|historiographer]] of early Islam [[Patricia Crone]].

The book provides evidence that [[Islam]] did not originate in [[Mecca]], located in the [[Hejaz]] region of what is modern day [[Saudi Arabia]]. In tradionaltraditional Islamic accounts , it is portrayed as a wealthy trading center, full of merchants trading goods by caravan from Yemen in the south and [[Syria]] and the [[Byzantine Empire]] in the north. The book shows that Mecca was in fact way off the incense route from [[Yemen]] to [[Syria]], which bypassed where Mecca is today by more than 100 miles. Furthermore, there is no mention of Mecca in any Non-Islamic sources of that period.

:It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-distance trade of the kind described in traditional Islamic literature, there ought to have been some mention of it in the writings of their customers who wrote extensively about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics. Despite the considerable attention paid to Arabian affairs there is no mention at all of [[Quraysh]] (the tribe of [[Mohammed]]) and their trading center Mecca, be it in the [[Greek language |Greek]], [[Latin]], [[Syriac]], [[Aramaic]], [[Coptic]], or other literature composed outside Arabia .