In the southwest of the ancient Arabian Peninsula, specifically in the area west of contemporary Yemen, the Himyarite kingdom emerged between the first century BC and the beginnings of the sixth century AD, and the Himyarites were pagans at the beginning and by 425 AD, Judaism was the kingdom’s religion for a little over a century, After its local residents converted to it, then they converted to Islam in the seventh century AD.
During the time of the Jewish kingdom, the Christian population was persecuted in a religious state that favored the Jewish population, and this era was recorded in many ancient Arab historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts that recorded the course of the "Christian martyrs" who died in that era.
And in recent decades, enough engraved stones have emerged to prove the validity of these amazing accounts, according to contemporary American historian Glenn W. Powersuk, a study of ancient Greece and the Middle East, who told the story of this strange and "hard-line" kingdom that eventually fell by the Ethiopian forces' invasion of Ethiopia. Christianity, having crossed the Red Sea from East Africa to put an end to the Jewish Himyarite Kingdom around the year 531 AD.
Reinforcements from the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople joined the Ethiopian forces that clashed with the armies of the Jewish king of donkeys. A group of archaeologists - including French, Russian, Yemeni, and American scholars - have explored the monuments dating to this era of Middle Eastern history and ancient Arabia, according to a Powersock article by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton.
Christians of the Arabian Peninsula
In the book "The Atlas of Islamic Civilization" by the American academic of Palestinian origin, Ismail Al-Farouqi, the late scholar on religions chronicles the comparison of the presence of Christianity in the Arab countries, and says that Christians increased in ancient Arabia by emigration and to escape the persecution of the Byzantines.
Al-Faruqi narrated the story of an Arab Christian (known in Islamic sources as Yaqoub Al-Sarooj) from the Nabataean tribes in southern Jordan.
Al-Farouqi says that Jews and Christians alike who immigrated to the desert of the Arabian Peninsula have found a welcome from the Arabs who have preserved the heritage of Mesopotamia, and together they have strengthened the religious heritage of the Arabian Peninsula, which has become called "Hanifiya". Al-Farouqi considers that while the Jewish or Christian religious establishment was outside the transcendent religion of Abraham, and persecuted those outside it, the oppressed had no choice but to flee to the desert, where they found shelter from clans and tribes.
Al-Faruqi - who was elected as the first president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought - continues that the persecution of the Jews by Christians in 523 AD during the reign of the Jewish king of donkeys pendulum, behind a bad memory throughout the Arabian Peninsula, an incident that Al-Faruqi says the Holy Quran perpetuated in Surat Al-Buruj.
When the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Justinian I (482-565 AD) heard of the persecution of Christians, he ordered the Ethiopians to send a campaign to Yemen to avenge them and guarantee the trade route to Byzantium. Al-Ahbash won a rapid victory in Yemen and built a cathedral in Sana'a, the capital. Realizing that securing the path of trade between Constantinople and Yemen is possible only by subjugating Makkah, they headed to conquer it, according to Al-Farouqi’s account, but they were struck by a catastrophe, and that was in the year 570 AD, in the same year of the elephant that witnessed the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Al-Farouqi says that Christians in the fertile western crescent and in the Arabian Peninsula have preserved their own heritage that opposes the Roman doctrine, and Christianity in the region continued to raise questions about the nature of Christ, peace be upon him, questions of the nature of man, sin, salvation, church authority, the “Holy Holy Seat”, his legitimacy, statues, images, and icons, They even entered Islam after knocking on their doors to escape the exploitation of Byzantium, which they wanted to get rid of its yoke and religious colonization and impose the doctrine of Rome under duress.
Jewish-Christian conflict before Islam
In his study of ancient Middle East history, PowerSock, who taught professor of ancient history at Harvard and Oxford universities, tells the story of the massacre of the King of the Donkey of Joseph Yusef bin Sharahbeel (Dhu Nuwas) of Christians in Najran who refused to convert to Judaism, an incident that prompted the Ethiopian kingdom of Byzantium and the Byzantines to conquer southern West of the Arabian Peninsula in a bitter religious war mixed with strategic, political and economic motives, and competition between the empires of the Persians and the Romans.
Powersock says that religion provided the common denominator of what could be considered a "large-scale international intervention in Arab affairs" in the past, and the Ethiopians summoned their Christian faith to mobilize the expansionist invasion, while at the same time the Byzantine Emperor strengthened - in the context of his rivalry with the Persian Empire - his Christian enthusiasm to attack the Jewish kingdom that supported it The Persians.
The donkey kingdom ended in 525 AD, when the Ethiopians replaced it with their own Christian kingdom, but the legacy of the persecution of its King Nawas remained strongly present in ancient Arab, Syriac and Greek novels, and this history provides for Arabia and the Red Sea region in the sixth century AD an indispensable background for understanding the collapse of the empire Persian before its Byzantine counterpart, as well as the path of the rise of Islamic civilization.
In his book, "The Crucible of Islam" issued in 2017 by Harvard University Press, PowerSock says that the history of the Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century AD is still unknown to many, but from this time and far place there emerged faith and empire that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to India.
Today, Muslims constitute nearly a quarter of the world's population. The American author and academic sought to shed light on this most mysterious and vital period in the history of Islam, from the middle of the sixth century to the middle of the seventh century AD, to explore why the arid Arabian Peninsula proved to be fertile ground for the message of Muhammad, peace be upon him, prophetic peace, and why this message spread so quickly in The wider world.