I was just wondering what religion, if any, did the Palestinians hold before Islam came about - and what other Islamic groups believed in before Islam? Clumsy wording, I know, but I’m not sure how else to phrase the question.
Start with this Wikipedia article, that deals with Arabia pre-Islam.
The majority of inhabitants of Palestine between ca. 100 AD and the Persian conquest (a bit before the Arab conquest) seem to have been Christian. Some Jews (meaning adherents to Judaism) were always present, but were already a minority after the Jewish Wars. There were no doubt surviving adherents to Greco-Roman and Ba’alist beliefs, though I don’t think there’s much evidence for them (other than Elagabalus in what’s now Syria).
well, it says not much at all really.
What Polycarp said. The Levant and North Africa was all part of the Byzantine Empire and primarily Christian, before Muslim armies took it over, and there’s still a sizable Christian minority in Lebanon and Egypt, and a small Christian minority in Syria and the Palestinian territories.
Here’s a fun little map looking at the spread of the major religions over time:
Your question presumes that there were Palestinians around that far back. There certainly were Arabs (as the already-posted Wiki link shows), but Palestinians are a much more recent development.
I sympathize, really. Please, read the links we’ve offered, and think about it for a while, and I hope you’ll be able to word it better.
Keeve, by that definition there were no Palestinians until 1948. I was using it to mean “native inhabitant of the area known to the ancients as Palestina and roughly equal to the British mandate of Palestine 1922-48”, without getting into the question of the ‘proper’ term for the geographical area between the Transjordan and Egypt.
Many of the tribes had their own beliefs, mostly polytheistic. They had a loose belief system somewhat similar to many ancient peoples, in that there was a god who did a particular thing, like the God of Rain, the Sun God, Gods for Animals etc. Spirits were also a common theme. Ancient tribal religions were very similiar to each other. The people lacked science, but wanted to understand nature and their surroundings. These gods were a way for these ancient people to try to comprehend what in the hell that huge fireball in the sky was, or that white rock in the evening that comes and goes and changes shapes during the seasons. One of the gods that was worshipped was the Moon God, from where the idea of Allah came from. Before Islam, there was an Allah, who was probably the predominate diety, or the local diety of Muhammad’s tribe.
Some of the semetic peoples were Christians and Jews. Christianity has been around for 500 years and was undoubtably a successful faith. Muhammad undountably studied their religion and came up with his own, using the same characters as in the Christian texts while changing the stories around a little bit (Ishmael was the chosen son of Abraham for instance).
Muhammad (or Mohammad, “The Big Mo”) created the Islamic religion and used it through conquest to unite the desert peoples under his religion. In Medieval times especially, religion was not only a belief, but also as power to unify the people under a King or government. Having everyone tell you that this is the true faith and cutting off those who are not members of said faith keeps everyone basically in line.
Same with Catholicism In Europe. The Pope was the King of Kings, over governments and rulers for about 1,000 years until Luther, King Henry 8th, and the Protestant reformation loosed Rome’s grip somewhat. But the power of the Catholic church has lingered into the 20th Century (Fascism especially) and the 21st Century.
Why is there no Pope in Islam? Some Head Cleric Ayatollah dude who lives in Mecca who runs the whole show? Like most religions, when Muhammad died (or was taken up in a whirlwind to the Heavens) there was dispute who was going to be the next Imam. Some wanted Muhammad’s son. Others wanted a trusted leiutenant. The religion split off into different sects, which we see today.
I thought that most of the middle east was Zoroastrian before Islam
You got any cites for any of this?
Persia, and the lands controlled by the Persians, was Zoroastrian before Islam. What’s now Turkey, what’s now Lebanon, what’s now western Syria, what’s now Israel, what’s now Jordan, what’s now Egypt, what’s now Libya, etc, was all Roman/Byzantine and Christian.
The traditional border between the Roman and the Parthian/Persian empires was the Euphrates River. Every once in a while, one of the empires would invade the other, and grab a bunch of territory on the other side of the river, but they usually couldn’t hold onto it long.
You could mean the Philistines, who were some sort of nation/tribe that were around at the same time as the Kingdoms of Israel. They were Polytheistic, and pretty much the worst enemy of the Israelites.
In fact, the reason Palestine is named Palestine is that when the Romans conquered Israel, they renamed it Palestine after the Philistines, just to piss of the Israelis.
The Palestinians themselves are just normal members of the Arab nationality/race/whatever you want to describe it as. Even Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine were not known as Palestinians. In fact, most modern “Palestinians” would have identified more with their own village than with any greater union until 1948.
Of course, there’s an open question of just how closely the people living in what is known as palestine today might eb related to the ancient Phillistines. Oh, obviously there’s some relationship - the MidEast is too open for mvoement. But who knows what kind of quiet migrations occurred over the years.
Also, Jewish residents of the area were commonly called Palestinians before 1948.
(A map posted upthread that doesn’t even mention Zoroastrianism seems rather silly. “Paradise”, BTW, started as a Zoroastrian word.)
Zoroastrianism was immensely important even outside the Persian domains, influencing Judaism, some Christian sects (including the Cathars), and perhaps Hellenism; however I don’t think many Arabs practiced Zoroastrianism directly. Instead their roots were in ancient Semitic religions and Judaism itself. (Many early Islamic scholars had been Jewish scholars, and Muhammed himself was often compared to Moses.) This is not to say Arabs were Jews (!), but rather that their religions had common roots.
It’s not currently a major word religion. And the question was what religion the people in Palestine were, and the people in Palestine weren’t generally Arabs, except for, depending on how you define Palestine, the Ghassanids and maybe the Tanukhids, and they were Christian.
Actually, as contradictory as that sounds today, there were a fair number of Jewish Arab tribes pre-Islam. A couple of the Himyarite kings of Yemen also converted to Judaism.
Actually probably a majority were by the time of the Muslim eruption. Arabs had been filtering into Syria from at least the 4th century and had become a predominant part of the population in ‘interior Syria’, particularly in the south ( the three Palestinas ) and the east ( ‘Arabia’ ). Hence a great deal of the interest for the early Muslims in the region - local rivalries and inter-tribal clashes drew them north ( and perhaps some ethnic evangelistic zeal ). It appears south of the Yarmuk, much of the local defenses were in the hands of local Arab tribes ( mostly Christian as you note ) in the last decades of Byzantine rule.
Right, but the Yarmuk is east of the Jordan. I was using the Jordan River as my eastern border of Palestine. East of that was Arabia Petraea, aka, the old kingdom of Nabatea, which was certainly Arab.
I wish to note that the continual effort of some posters here to equate the “Palestinians” with “pre Islamic Arabs” is obviously misplaced. Peoples of Syria and Palestine started calling themselves “Arabs” long after the Muslim conquest. Before that time, they would not have given the desert nomads of contemporary Arabian Peninsula the time of day. Neither did they have anything to do with the Arab tribal religions centered around Mecca.
Under the Byzantines the religions practiced in Palestine would include Judaism, Samaritan religion (there used to be a whole lot more Samaritans in the past then there are now) and Christianity. While there used to be some Greco-Roman pagans there under the Romans, the Byzantine policy was not tolerant of paganism.
Yes, you’re right. My point was that I was hoping to find out how the OP was using that word.
More importantly, I was hoping the OP would further his own understanding of the word, whether he posts again here or not.