Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
Author(s)	Patricia Crone
Publisher	Gorgias Press
ISBN	1-59333-102-9
OCLC Number	57718221

Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam is a book written by scholar and historiographer of early Islam Patricia Crone.

The book provides evidence that Islam did not originate in Mecca, located in the Hejaz region of what is modern day Saudi Arabia. In traditional Islamic accounts, it is portrayed as a wealthy trading center, full of merchants trading goods by caravan from Yemen in the south and Syria and the Byzantine Empire in the north. The book shows that Mecca was in fact way off the incense route from Yemen to Syria, which bypassed where Mecca is today by more than 100 miles. Furthermore, there is no mention of Mecca in any Non-Islamic sources of that period.

It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-distance trade of the kind described in traditional Islamic literature, there ought to have been some mention of it in the writings of their customers who wrote extensively about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics. Despite the considerable attention paid to Arabian affairs there is no mention at all of Quraysh (the tribe of Mohammed) and their trading center Mecca, be it in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed outside Arabia .

An exhaustive examination of all available evidence and sources leads Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career took place not in Mecca and Medina or in southwest Arabia at all, but in northwest Arabia.

Book Contents

• Spices of Araby
  • Introduction
  • The Classical Spice Trade
  • The "Meccan Spice Trade"
• Arabia Without Spices
  • What Did the Meccans Export?
  • Where Were the Meccans Active?
  • What Meccan Trade Was Not
  • What Meccan Trade May Have Been
  • The Sanctuary and Meccan Trade
• Conclusion
  • The Sources
  • The Rise of Islam
• Appendices
  • The Provenance of Classical Cinnamon
  • Calamus
  • The Etymology and Original Meaning of Aloē

External links

Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam: selected parts online (Google Books - Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam)

A Response to Patricia Crone's Book: Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam [1]