() is an Arabic term in Islamic salvation history, often translated as Age of Ignorance. It refers to the pre-Islamic era of Arabia as a whole, or alternatively only the Hejaz, leading up to the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad.
The expression serves as a form of grand narrative to paint pre-Islamic Arabians as barbarians in a morally corrupt social order. Its people (the jahl, sing. jāhil) are portrayed as lacking religious knowledge (ʿilm) and civilized qualities (ḥilm),Hawting, Gerald. “Pre-Islamic Arabia/The Jahiliyya.” Oxford Bibliographies, 14 April 2011, ., resulting in practices of polytheism, idol worship, and alleged female infanticide. The narrative holds that these people characteristically had societies rife with tyranny, injustice, despotism, and anarchy, with prejudice resulting in vainglorious tribal antagonisms.
The pre-Islamic age was essentialized into a group of attributes and societal functions that was described as a barbaric way of life that stood in contrast with the mission of Muhammad and the way of life he introduced. Today, this narrative is not considered historical. As a grand narrative or master narrative, and as a discourse, it served the role of validating and even necessitating the venture of Islam. The Jahiliyyah is a type of light-versus darkness narrative, and is similar to grand narratives like the idea that the Dark Ages was succeeded by the Age of Enlightenment in European history or the idea that the coming of Jesus redeemed the world from Original Sin.
In modern Islamist writings, the concept is used to refer to a decadent moral state accused of imitating the Jahiliyyah. Islamists have used this concept of jahiliyyah to criticize un-Islamic conduct in the Muslim world. Prominent Muslim theologians like Muhammad Rashid Rida and Abul A'la Maududi, among others, have used the term as a reference to secular modernity and, by extension, to modern Western culture. In his works, Maududi asserts that modernity is the "new jahiliyyah." Sayyid Qutb viewed jahiliyyah as a state of domination of humans over humans, as opposed to their submission to God.Jahiliyyah The Oxford Dictionary of Islam Likewise, radical Muslim groups have often justified the use of violence against secular regimes by framing their armed struggle as a jihad to strike down modern forms of jahiliyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab have both viewed their fellow Muslims as living in a state of jahiliyyah.
Etymology The term jahiliyyah is derived from the Arabic verbal root jahala "to be ignorant or stupid, to act stupidly".Amros, Arne A. & Stephan Pocházka. (2004). A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic, Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden It has been suggested that the word jahiliyyah in the Quran means "ignorant people", in contrast to traditionalist or contemporary notions of an "age" or "state of ignorance".
Jahiliyyah has been compared to the expression "times of ignorance" (agnoias) which occurs in Acts 17:29-30, where Paul describes the state of people before God's revelation.
Traditional accounts of Jahili society
General The following summary of Jahili society appears according to the sira of Ibn Ishaq:we were an uncivilized people, worshipping idols, eating corpses, committing abominations. breaking natural ties, treating guests badly. and our strong devoured our weak. Thus we were until God sent us an apostle whose lineage, truth, trustworthiness, and clemency we know. He summoned us to acknowledge God's unity and to worship him and to renounce the stones and images which we and our fathers formerly worshipped. He commanded us to speak the truth, be faithful to our engagements, mindful of the ties of kinship and kindly hospitality, and to refrain from crimes and bloodshed. He forbade us to commit abominations and to speak lies, and to devour the property of orphans, to vilify chaste women.In the Nahj al-Balāgha, Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015) says that the pre-Islamic Arabs were:camel-herders tending to their beasts’ sores and harvesting their wool. They lived as the most wretched of nations, with the least fertile fields, with no mission under whose wing they could seek shelter, no column of unity on whose strength they could depend. Their situation was volatile, their hands discordant, their numbers scattered. They were trapped in a hard trial and crushed under rocks of ignorance: they buried baby girls alive, worshipped idols, cut ties of kinship, and raided one another. Observe the abundance of God’s blessings [with the coming of Islam] on them [the Arabs]. He sent them a messenger [the Prophet Muhammad], secured their obedience through his religion [Islam], and gathered their company within his mission. See how bounty spread the wings of her generosity over them and the wellsprings of her delights flowed. See how the new religion gathered them within the gifts of its grace. They were immersed in its bounty, joyful in the fresh greenness of its way of life
Female infanticide
According to Islamic religious scholars, a regular practice during the Jahiliyyah was for Arabians to commit female infanticide by burying their daughters alive (which they called waʾd al-banāt). According to Al-Tha'labi (d. 1035) in his commentary on Quran 81:8:When a man had a daughter and he wanted to spare her life, he would dress her in a garment of wool or hair, and [when she had grown up] she would watch over his camels and sheep in the steppe. If he wanted to kill her, he would let her live until she was six spans in length (sudāsiyyah) and then say to her mother, “Perfume and adorn her, for I will take her to meet her relatives.” [Instead,] he had dug a pit for her in the desert where he would take her. He would say to her, “Look there.” Then he would push her into it from her back and pour earth over her until the ground was even …
Ibn ʿAbbās has said that when a pregnant woman was about to give birth during the jāhiliyyah, she would dig a grave and give birth next to it. If it was a daughter, she would cast her in the grave, and if it was a son, she would keep him.According to another source, "[e]very day a pit was dug in the corner of the desert for an innocent girl to be buried". Ilkka Lindstedt argues that notions of this practice in the jahiliyyah derived as an inference of two verses in the Quran (16:57–59, 81:8–9). Lindstedt, however, argues that there is little evidence to support such a practice in pre-Islamic Arabia and that the Quranic verses themselves are unlikely to have originally carried this meaning.
Warfare and violence
During the early Umayyad era, intense intertribal competition took place to acquire appointments of generalships and governorships over newly conquered territories. It is thought that it was around this time that widespread Islamic critiques began taking the place of partisan tribalism (ʿaṣabiyyah). These critiques were then attributed to Muhammad in order to describe and discredit ʿaṣabiyyah as a defining characteristic of the Jahiliyyah.
Other extreme and violent practices attributed to the Jahiliyyah included cannibalism, corpse mutilation, abuse and torture of captives, and random murder. In one tradition, Muhammad's uncle, Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, is killed in the Battle of Uhud: subsequently, the jahl mutilated his corpse. Muhammad, by contrast, forbade the mutilation of corpses. They were also said to have tortured some Muslim prisoners they captured.
Nihāya A practice regularly attributed to the Jahiliyyah was overly emotional wailing over the death of loved ones (niyāḥa), contrasted in tradition with the more civilized and rational Islamic practice of accepting the inevitability of death without excessive displays of emotion. G.H.A. Juynboll demonstrated that Islamic attitudes towards niyāḥa were far from uniform and that the absolute prohibition against it emerged in Iraq in the second half of the eighth century before being retrojected into Prophetic hadith. In a later study, Leor Halevi diverged from Juynboll in arguing that niyāḥa was a genuine pre-Islamic practice as opposed to an Islamic-era creation, although Halevi agreed with Juynboll that it was not prohibited by Muhammad. Peter Webb's most recent study agrees that it was a practice that occurred in pre-Islamic times due to its mention in pre-Islamic poetry, but he also argued that Islamic-era authors exaggerated the features of the custom and reshaped it into a quintessential trait of the "Jahili" past.
Prostitution According to the Ibadi author Hūd ibn al-Muªakkam, the Jahiliyyah was characterized as a time when people forced their female slaves into prostitution so that they could have more children. Al-Qummī, a Shia, says that slaves were forced into prostitution for the profit of their master.
Jahili poetry Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is called al-shiʿr al-Jāhilī ("poetry from the Jahiliyyah" or "Jahili poetry"). A large amount of this poetry was codified in Islamic times, and the Jahiliyyah was commonly characterized or received through this poetry. While historians doubt that the values of this poetry were representative of pre-Islamic values more broadly, the themes of Jahili poetry emphasize a heroic value system where the enjoyment of wine, amorous adventures, and fighting came together, as can be seen in the muʿallaqa of Ṭarafa:If you can’t avert from me the fate that surely awaits me / then pray leave me to hasten it on with what money I’ve got. / But for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow / I assure you I wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive— / first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine / that foams when the water is mingled in; / second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed / streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water; / and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season / dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent, / her anklets and her bracelets seemingly hung on the boughs / of a pliant, unriven gum-tree or a castor-shrub.According to Pamela Klasova, the values expressed should not be seen as "values in themselves". That is, they are values invoked by the poet as a vehicle for the expression of the heroic refusal of the poet to surrender themselves to the power of unpredictable fate. When wine, fighting, and so forth are celebrated, these are acts of defiance against death. For the poet, death can come at any moment, and so the poet hastens death by behaving in an unrestrained manner. This perception of the world extends to other areas of the life of the poet, and so he acts with extreme generosity to others, even at the risk of endangerment of one's own life. After all, the poet sees death as inevitable, and the only form of immortality achievable is through the memory of oneself after their death. This memory is perpetuated by the performance of heroic and honorable deeds. Wars were opportunities for one to set themselves apart from others by demonstrating their courage and achieving glory. Thus, poetry portrays war as something that occurs not merely out of necessity and material gain but also "for the noble strife itself". Poetry centred the present, but in a manner that was motivated by a deeper existential framework as opposed to barbarism. Tradition depicted the poets as pagan, but the poetry itself lacks concern for religion.
Pre-Islamic poetry is not representative of the values of pre-Islamic Arabia (and likely was an expression of one cultural model among nomads and/or seminomads), but it came to be depicted in this way likely for two reasons: the scarcity of other pre-Islamic sources to have survived into the Islamic era, and deliberate reconstructions of the "Jahiliyyah".
Evolution of the Jahiliyyah narrative
Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry