Is Islam a desert religion?
"Students of religion today are endeavoring to identify precisely the stimuli which call forth a religious response. This article attempts to display the peculiarities produced by the desert on thought and imagination. Typical religious emphasis in Islam, like the equality of all believers, fatalism, the sense of the supernatural,of God, the exaltation of divine sternness rather than compassion, the virtues of hospitality and alms-giving, and the strong sense of social solidarity. are interpreted as instances of adaptation to a desert environment.
The desert is set apart from the humid lands in many ways. It has its own dry air and cloudless sky, its distinctive Pharaoh's dream. It is unique, also, in many of the characteristicsprings, streams, and lakes, and in some of the processweathering. The face of the land is different, with itsmountains based on wide waste-slopes, its wind-carved plateaus, and its seas of drifted sand.In few areas is the struggle for existence so fierce, adaptation of living forms to the environment so marked...
...character, and customs and institutions and modes oentire complex of nomadism is an example. Aphenomena of early Islam are hardly to be explained adequately apart from the physical and social envirowhich it rose.The drama of the rise of Islam, as everybody knows was staged wholly in desert settings. Mecca, blistering on the wide, sandy floor of its little valley between barrenmountains, was a typical desert town of trade which probably owed its origin to a desert well, the sacred Zemzem, bitter alkaline, and salt. Medina was a date palm oasis. Mohammed was a caravan driver of Beduin training, and the pages of the Koran show how fully his mind was with images of the desert - the mirage, semblance ofhopes of unbelievers; the sand drifting before the storm the emblem of the destruction which shall overwhelm them. Allah seating himself on the throne of the universe as the camel rider seats himself firmly on the camel's back; yellow camels like the sparks of the fires of hell; the quickening of the dead earth after rain, a symbol of the resurrection; and the oasis of the irrigated flood plain or delta type, the simile of Paradise -- the Eden garden "through which rivers flow".
Mohammed's first successes after years of failure were won by that well-known nomadic institution the ghazu or razzia, the plunder raid, so clear a response to the hard conditions of the desert life. Few indeed are the explorers of the deserts held by Islam who have not personally experienced thisexciting adventure and game of the nomad, and, at times only alternative for starvation.
It is by the term ghazu that the first Moslem historian designates the wars of the Prophet on the Meccans. And the outpour of Arabia under the standard of the Crescent which overran the vast wastes ofAsia and North Africa may be considered as a series of ghazus..."
The Influence of the Desert on Early Islam on JSTOR
