Abstract

Scholarly debate on the nature of the Hajj before Muhammad and radical questions of whether Mecca was a ritual site at all in pre-Islamic times are answerable from the large corpus of pre-Islamic poetry, which has been underutilised as a source for pre-Islamic history. This paper reveals the poetry to be both a reliable and valuable witness. It demonstrates that the Hajj was performed in the generation before Muhammad in substantially similar terms to subsequent Muslim practice. Some modifications and shifts are discernible, but ritual continuity emerges as a major theme. The poetry also underscores the restricted ambit of the pre-Islamic Hajj: we uncover a highly-localised ritual followed primarily by groups living near Mecca – the expansion of the Hajj into a pan-Arabian phenomenon with an intimate role in informing communal identity and political power are new in the Islamic period. This paper closes with comparison of the poetry and hadith on the Hajj, which reveals a major Muslim-era reinterpretation of the pilgrimage as an Abrahamic rite.