"most of the Arabian peninsula prior to Islam was Jewish"
Reply #1 - July 01, 2014, 04:48 PM
That article is complete nonsense in my view ... total crackpot.
But it is true that South Arabia was ruled by a Jewish kingdom for several centuries prior to Islam, and that the Northern regions had many Jews living there. One of the very first inscriptions in Arabic
The Hijaz itself does not seem to have had any traces of Jews at the time of Mohammed. There is a recent article about this subject by Robert Hoyland.
Interestingly this is one of the major problems for interpreting the Qur'an's origins in a Hijazi context. The Qur'an itself was clearly directed at a society filled to the brim with Jews and Christians. Its religious language and its religious references are entirely Christian (primarily Syriac) and Jewish. It has virtually nothing to say about paganism. And thus it is very hard to attribute its genesis to the Hijaz; if some portion of its contents does stem from the Hijaz, it was either very Northern parts or it was superimposed very late, long after Mohammed's death.
Notably, the first Arabic script inscriptions we have are all from the Sixth Century AD, and they are Christian inscriptions which are well North of the Hijaz. Robert Hoyland again has an article about this subject in the book "The Qur'an In Its Historical Context." Quoting:
"The sixth-century Usays, Harran and Nebo Arabic inscriptions are all from the
former Nabataean sphere of influence, as are the second to fourth-century Avdat,
Hegra and Nemara Arabic inscriptions. In addition to this we can throw into the
equation two plausibly Arabic texts written in Hismaic script from the Madaba
area (ca. first to third century),16 the Arabic legal phraseology evident in the first
and second-century Nabataean papyri from the southern Dead Sea region,17 the
predominantly Arabic nature of the toponyms in the sixth-century Petra papyri,18
and the aforementioned observations by Epiphanius of Salamis and Jerome about
Arabic being spoken at Petra and Elusa."