Pre Islamic Arabia

Long before the rise of modern states, a kingdom of merchants and builders flourished in the arid southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, its wealth carried across the ancient world on the scent of frankincense and…

Before it was ever called the City of the Prophet, the oasis in the Hejaz highlands of western Saudi Arabia was known as Yathrib.

Carved directly into the rose-colored sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan, the ancient city of Raqmu—known to the Greek world as Petra—began as a fortress of geography.

Long before their stone-carved capital became a wonder of the ancient world, the Nabataeans survived on the margins of the Arabian Desert by mastering the seasonal rhythms of an unforgiving landscape.

High in the southern highlands of Yemen, a wealthy tribal confederation known as the Himyarite kingdom carved an empire out of the lucrative trade in frankincense and myrrh.

The father of Arabic poetry began his life as a banished prince, exiled by a king who detested his son’s devotion to verse, wine, and women.

In the early seventh century CE, a forty-year-old orphan from the aristocratic Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh retreated to the isolation of Mount Hira, a cavernous sanctuary where he spent nights in deep contemplation.

The cosmic order of Islam rests upon a single, uncompromising truth: the absolute oneness of God, a principle known as tawhid.