In answer to the video "How Islam Shaped Its Sources"
There are countless sources that connect Abraham with the Arabs and those that desired to return to his ways, without any connection to Jewish and Christians ways, were considered hanifs. None among the Arabs ever contended with such facts. This whole tradition revolved especially around the legacy of the Kaaba. The ARAB (although later transmitted by Muslims) tradition on this point is so strong and of such old standing that the Quran every now and then refers to it as a matter of undoubted history, and the Arabs never contended with it. There isnt any trace of the Arabs tracing their genealogy to anyone else than Ismail. Islam didn't show up and made them believe this massive conspiracy by first causing a general blackout.
The onus is on the revisionists and critics of Islam to establish that what the Arabs believe is their identity is not true or that they identified themselves as anything else than Ishmaelites prior to Islam.
All their objections and calumnies -whether aimed at the the prophet's personality or his message- are reported and can be seen by anyone today, both in and out of the Quran. No eyebrow was raised as regards the Abrahmic connection to the Kaaba, yet it was the focal point and core of Muhammad's prophetic message. The same is the case concerning the monotheistic origin of some of their most highly revered rituals, although at the time stained with idolatrous practices. It is also interesting noting that although Abraham is clearly pictured as having been to and prayed at the Kaaba where he had settled a place of monotheistic worship together with his son, yet this is never done in a polemical tone against the believers of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is thus inevitable that traditions about Abraham relating him to Mecca and its sanctuary were current in the peninsula well before the rise of Islam.
As appropriately noted by Goudarzi
"It is well known that Ishmael did not occupy a prized position in late-antique Jewish or Christian thought. For Jews, he was an outcast, excluded from Abraham’s household and inheritance, a man of the desert who was worthy neither of the land nor of the law that was given to Isaac’s descendants. For Christians, Ishmael was above all the son of Abraham “according to the flesh” but not the spirit, the son of the slave woman who inherited the servile state of his mother, and therefore a type for the spiritually incapacitated Jews toiling under the burden of the law. Jewish and Christian writers depicted Ishmael as a foil for their beloved Isaac, a potential rival who resorted to violence and persecution, a man guilty of idolatry and sexual misconduct— whose menacing ambitions were nipped in the bud thanks to Sarah’s timely intervention".
All these perverted and corrupt ideas were well established in the historical background of pre-islamic Arabia. The prophet Muhammad, or any Arab prior to Islam, had nothing to win in terms of credibility or eminence in the eyes of Jews and Christians by supposedly inventing family ties to Ishmael. Even the covenant of the land, as stated in the Torah, is open to any non-Israelite convert. Also, nowhere does the HB restrict the covenant of prophethood to the descendants of Abraham, be it Israelites or Ishmaelites. The notion of the Arabs or the prophet resorting to a radical re-shaping of their ancestry to gain any kind of legitimacy in relation to the people of previous scriptures is therefore not only improbable given the scale of the conspiracy but mainly useless and even counter-productive.
The question one should be asking one's self is how could Muhammad actually pass off the Kaaba as being built by Ibrahim, if the Arabs did not already believe it considering that Arab tribes had since antiquity been paying extensive homage to the Kaaba and its rites? It is the height of absurdity to say that in any culture, one would manage to fake not only his own identity but also that of an entire nation without anyone raising an eyebrow. This is worth emphasizing; for nothing was more obnoxious to an Arab than to ascribe a false or imaginary ancestry to him. Arab culture had such pride in its ancestral origins that when the Quran wanted to give a point of reference to how intensely Allah should be praised, it evoked the remembrance of their forefathers which Allah's remembrance must surpass 2:200. Despite the effects of modernism and the loss of oral culture, some Arabs even today still keep their ancient family trees that date to the time of Prophet. The Quraysh, the prophet's own tribe, was respected among the Arabs not only because it ruled over Mecca but also because of the nobility of its lineage. To come and argue that the prophet fabricated it is very unrealistic.
Even if we disregard these facts and suggest that the Arabs had a memory lapse, why would a people who had forgotten their common ancestor, accept the ancestor of another people as their ancestor too because the latter stated so, thus not only puting in question their identity but also compromising their claim on their prime religious site and by extension the economical benefits of being its custodians? Such an illegitimate attack on a people's known identity and its ancestral worship sites would have met with universal resistance, both from the preexisting idolatrous population of Mecca as well as from the Arab tribes.
Critics of Islam ignore these simple observations, forget that the starting point of studies on the Arabs concerning their origin, culture and religious identity should start from their own sources. This is a well-recognized modus operandi in ethno-historical studies of a group of people.
By the time of the prophet Muhammad, the assimilation of the Abrahamic legacy into the regional polytheistic systems was such that only a distant echo had remained in their minds from their spiritual connection to Abraham. Just as happenned to the Temple of Jerusalem that slowly became transformed into a pagan shrine and idols were introduced in it 2kings21 the prime symbol of monotheism in Mecca became thus radically transformed through pagan influence. As the Ishmaelites, like the Israelites throughout their history, drifted from the original path of monotheism, the Hajj pilgrimage became a celebratory occasion, and the Kaaba was stocked with idols and false deities supposed to bring the worshipers closer to the One God, Allah, whom they believed in.
Men and women would run naked throughout the holy precinct. Merchants from all over would travel to the Kaaba and set up shop during the pilgrimage. People and tribes from all over Arabia would make the journey to Mecca to take part in the festivities. But this annual pilgrimage was in greater parts disconnected from the Abrahamic practice 22:26-7. It was simply a time to make money instead of being charitable, drink alcohol, and commit immoral acts. The importance of the annual event perdured despite the corruption. It was maintained by those that settled in Mecca, and the Arabs of the entire peninsula that got attracted to it with time. These are the points brought to attention in 2:196-7. And then until v203 great stress is laid on the spiritual dimension, forgotten and neglected, of that occasion.
No other nation can be compared to the Ishmaelites' handling of their spiritual legacy and sacred shrine, than their own Israelite brothers. They could not maintain the way of their forefathers despite the constant sending of prophets to them to bring them back to the right path. When the Arabs were admonished and urged to reform, they qualified the warnings as
16:24,27:68"stories of the ancients".These Ishmaelites vaguely recalled the Abrahamic ways, but found no other constructive argument in their opposition but by denigrating it as old and useless stories, based on its ancienty and supposed obsolescence, inaplicability to the current circumstances. They never qualify these stories as "false". It was in fact one of the Quran's oft repeated functions, to "remind" the people of the truth they were still somewhat aware of but that had been supressed by falsehood. The Quran openly states that
26:196"most surely the same is in the scriptures of the ancients".It repeats, time and again, its role as the guardian and preserver of the truth present in the past scriptures. Along with Abrahamic and monotheistic practices known in pre-islamic days, going back to previous prophets, was the Zakat which the people knew they had to give away to the poor but rarely practiced or misused 19:30-31,54-55,70:24,Deut14:28-29,26:12-14, fasting 2:51,183-187,7:142,Deut9:9,Ex24:18,34:28,Matt4:2,Lk5:33-6 prayer that continued after Ibrahim established it in the settlement of the Kaaba 14:37,19:55,Dan6:10,Ps55:18,1Chr23:30 until it was disfigured 8:35, animal sacrifice, circumcision. Other concepts propounded by previous prophets and which the Quran was reminding its addressees of, include the Resurrection, day of Judgement and accountability Matt13:24-43,1Kings17:17-24,2Kings4:17-37,13:20-1,1Sam2:6,Isa2:17,26:19,66:14,Ezek37:1-28,Ps71:20,Prov6:22,Prov31(see Rashi),Dan12:1-2,Quran29:36,54:36-9. There are pre-islamic poems with clear eschatological connotation, some of them speaking of the resurrection of the soul, and Allah being the judge of mankind. One such poems is that of Zuhayr who wrote in his muallaqat
"Do not conceal from Allah what is in your souls, trying to hide it. Whatever is concealed from Allah, He knows. It is delayed and entered in a register and stored up for the day of reckoning, or it is brought forward and avenged".Labid wrote
"every human will one day come to know his striving when it will be disclosed before the God what has been extracted".See also the lines of al-A'sha evoking fear of the final accounting
"when the resurrected souls will shake of the dust".The Quran and the traditions speak of the hanif remnants that tried preserving the monotheism of Ibrahim, and these lines of poetry might echo these marginal beliefs. The majority of the pre-islamic Arabs however rejected bodily resurrection and otherworldy accountability, the Quran repeatedly condemns this attitude. This phenomenon is clearly seen with the "talbiya", the invocations the pilgrims coming from all over Arabia made during their rituals. Some of these have come down to us, referring to Allah as
"al wahid al qahhar rabb assamad",while others clearly referred to the idols as subservient to him
"laa nabudul asnama hatta tajtahida li rabbiha wa tutabad"or
"rabb al thalitha ukhra/Lord of the third goddess",and others spoke of the One Lord of the last hour
"rabba assa'a".All of this shows the multifaceted shades of idolatry among the pilgrims, some of them praising Allah alone, others associating with Him while maintaining Him above the intercessors, and others still referring to the day of judgement. This confirms the Quranic statement that the original religion established at the sanctuary was Abrahamic monotheism. It got disfigured with time, polluted with foreign concepts, although it maintained a recognizable foundation of truth, which the last prophet came to revive. Sura 87, after summing up the pillars of divine truth, such as monotheism, intelligent design, resurrection, God's all-encompassing, intricate knowledge and sway over His creatures' affairs, spiritual purification through prayer and constant remembrence of God as being the ways to success in the Hereafter, it says that these are all concepts known, written and transmitted by the prophets, from Ibrahim to Moses. All of these things were known to the people whom Muhammad was addressing over 4000 years later but have been neglected for so long that only a dim remembrance of them remained
23:83"Certainly we are promised this, and (so were) our fathers aforetime; this is naught but stories of those of old".Muhammad revived the corrupted, obscured and forgotten way of Ibrahim
6:161"Say: Surely, (as for) me, my Lord has guided me to the right path; (to) a most right religion, the faith of Ibrahim the upright one, and he was not of the polytheists".The climax of that revival occured when he entered Mecca triumphantly, cleansed the Kaaba of its idols and rededicated it to its monotheistic purpose. Prior to that physical uprooting, the Quran would remind the Meccans of their legacy and duty towards the Kaaba, in many verses beyond the scope of that discussion.
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