Forgotten Arabia: Himyarite Yemen and Early Islam

Islamic historians have tended to overfocus on the more easily intelligible north Arabia and dismiss Yemen and the south - missing clues in recently published inscriptions as to the context in which the Islamic theory of God's relationship to Christ developed.

Read the full article on Substack: https://andrewhammond.substack.com/p/forgotten-arabia-himyarite-yemen

Pre-Islamic Yemen has attracted relatively little attention from scholars of early Islamic history, including those who regard themselves as radically revisionist. The temptation to overlook south Arabia is understandable in that the familiar Late Antiquity regions of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Egypt were the main target of the Hijazi conquests outside Arabia. Those regions provided some contemporary written records of the early Islamic empire’s fortunes (controversies over their evaluation aside) and they are where the classical Islam of the legal schools, theological debates and philosophy then develops. Fortunately, they are also regions that have always been relatively easy to access for historians. Yet the epigraphic evidence regarding the far Arabian south is considerable, including thousands of graffiti and rock drawings in mountains north of Najran in southern Saudi Arabia, as well as within modern Yemen. More and more of this material is being published, offering the chance to refine understandings of south Arabian history during the sixth century CE and examine further south Arabia’s role in the early rise of the Islamic movement.

#yemen #islamichistory #christianity #christology #theology #aksum #ethiopia