Very good question

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 10, 2009 at 20:10

Sam wrote

>Can someone research about the history of Jewish people presence in Mecca , Medina and Arabian peninsula.

Well there is no evidence that any Jews or Jewish communities ever existed in al-Hijaz and in Mecca and medina before the death of Muhammad in 632CE or afterwards. The rabbical sources are silent about such communities as well as the Syriac, the Greek and the Coptic sources. Yes sources can be lost but someone somewhere following the Arab invasion of the Middle East in 632CE should have recalled anything about such communities, but the silence of the sources here is very significant

Yes argument from silence is not enough but if these communities ever existed there should have been some textual evidence external to the Muslim sources but there is none.

Now if we are to turn to the Islamic sources we also have many serious problems about the reliability of such sources because such sources are:

1. They are very late and they were written in the late 2nd and 3rd century of islam

2. These sources are tendentious and can only be regarded as in the words of Wansbrough as "salvation history" and not real history as in "what really happened"

3. These sources be it the hadith or the sira or tarikh are no more than different forms of Quranic exegesis so if the Qur'an talks about the Jews then the ulama must invent some qissa or story to explain such verse and non of it is for real

So the question is then why does the Qur'an talk about the Jews? Well the only way out of this problem is that it tells us about Jews but these Jews were those that resided in the old civilized Middle East be it in Mesopotamia or Iran or Palestine. but in this case the locale of where the Qur'an was composed must be moved from the late antique Hijaz to the late antique Middle East, and indeed more likely than not islam and the Qur'an are the products of the civilized Middle East and not Arabia as the tradition tells us.

and here is more evidence: If you check Qur'an 106 or surat Quraish there is a word there that have no meaning at all and it is ilaf and there are other examples in the Qur'an where we have strange liguistic puzzles (eg: kalala, ababeel, sijeel, al-qayyum) that even the Ulama in the 3rd century could not tell what all these strange words really mean: Do you know what this means: It means that either the Qur'an predates Muhammad and by the time he died no one has a clue about what all these pericopes and logias really mean or that as suggested by Wansbrough that the Qur'an was not canonized until the 3rd century of islam and by then no one had a clue what the Qur'an really says.

Now i'm not telling you any secrets here and many historians of early islam are now saying that Islam originated from the Middle East and it is the byproduct of what Wansbrough diagnosed as sectarian debates in a Judeo-Christian millieu and the rule of the Arabs is as follows: we have the Arab polity invading the Middle east and selecting a new religion and that is islam, for reasons that we still do not understand, that was in the process of being created by non Arabs

Oh Muhammad? Well Gerd Puin seems to believe that even the word MHMD (Muhammad) in extant Syriac sources prior to the Arab invasion was no more than another name for Jesus

So do we have any extant sources that come from the Hijaz be it coins or epigraphy or papyri or ostraca that can shed some light on such Jewish communities. The answer is no and what is even more shocking is that there are no extant Arabic/ muslim sources either that come to us from the Hijaz prior to 632CE and for this see Hoyland's "Arabia from the Bronze age to the rise of islam"

>What were the jewish people's origin, activities and any other details of communities in arabian peninsula.

Again there is no evidence that such communities ever existed

>Why can't jewish people go back to mecca and medina as a right of return ?
Mohammed started the first religious apartheid, by banning jewish people to enter mecca.

Well here is what is more amazing about early islam: we do not know very much about what really happened. There is really no evidence that there was such thing as meccan tarde in the way the tradtion tells us (see Patricia Crone) and that more likely than not if Mecca even existed in any shape before islam it was no more than a poor little town

>Please someone write a detailed article about this religious apartheid.

I hate to disappoint you but there really is no evidence that such communities ever existed

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