Divine lineages · 13

Arabian Lore

Mythic realm: Arabian Peninsula
Age remembered: pre-Islamic era to the Thousand and One Nights
Names preserved: 12

At the root of Arabian lore lies the desert belief of the pre-Islamic peninsula: the invisible jinn share the world with humankind, holding the ruins, dry wells and wastelands, dictating verses to poets, while travellers on night roads watch for the shapeshifting, man-eating ghul. With the rise of Islam this hidden race was written into scripture — the Quran declares the jinn created from smokeless fire, rational beings alongside angels and humans, and devotes a chapter to their conversion. The prophet-king Solomon pressed them into service, building sanctuaries and diving for pearls, and sealed the rebels into brass bottles sunk in the sea, stocking the later stories with inexhaustible props.

These scattered beliefs pooled at last in the Thousand and One Nights. Its frame descends from the Persian Hazar Afsan, 'A Thousand Tales', noted by al-Mas'udi and Ibn al-Nadim in the tenth century, then thickened over centuries of retelling in Baghdad and Cairo, until Scheherazade's nightly stories, each suspended at daybreak, grew into a labyrinth wide enough for fishermen, porters, merchants and jinn. From 1704 Antoine Galland's French translation swept Europe; the most famous pieces of all — Aladdin, Ali Baba — are 'orphan tales' with no Arabic source text, told to Galland in Paris by the Syrian traveller Hanna Diyab.

The temper of the tradition is mercantile. Its leading hero is Sinbad, a merchant of Baghdad, and even its wonders carry price tags — a flying carpet bought for forty purses of gold, diamonds fished from their valley with slabs of thrown meat. Yet its cosmos is vast: beyond the emerald ring of Mount Qaf lie the kingdoms of the jinn, and the earth rides on the backs of an angel, a bull and the cosmic fish Bahamut.

Return by the star-path

CHRONICLE OF ORIGINS · A LIVING SCROLL

Arabian Lore

Arabian Peninsula08 STAGESENTER THE MYTHIC LINEAGE ↗

The Formless Deep1 / 8

Before the six days

The Throne upon the water, the sky still smoke

The Qur'an does not begin from nothing. In 11:7 God makes the heavens and the earth in six days, and His Throne was upon the water — the water is simply there on the first line, and where it came from is not said. In 41:11 He turns to the sky while it is still smoke, and tells the sky and the earth to come, willingly or unwillingly; they answer that they come willingly. Creation works by command: when God decrees a thing He says to it 'Be', and it is (2:117). There is no adversary at the outset, no combat, no slain monster.

VARIANTS, FRAGMENTS & ANCIENT SOURCES

Pre-Islamic Arabia left no systematic cosmogony at all. What is known of its religion comes from three places — the Qur'an's mentions of the goddesses Allat, al-'Uzza and Manat (53:19–20); Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols, which catalogues Hubal and the tribal cults; and the large surviving body of pre-Islamic poetry — and none of the three tells how the world began. Anything sold as an 'ancient Arabian creation myth' is a modern reconstruction. The timeline below is Islamic.

The Qur'an does not narrate creation in sequence either. The material is scattered across dozens of suras, mostly as allusions to a story the hearers were assumed to know. The order followed here is the one used by the later compilers who did lay it out as a sequence: al-Tabari's History and the Qisas al-Anbiya (Stories of the Prophets) tradition.

Several points inside the text have been argued over for centuries. On the six days: 41:9–12, taken literally, gives two days for the earth, four for its provisions, and two for the seven heavens — eight in all — and the standard exegetical fix is to read the four as inclusive of the first two. The order of earth and sky is another old crux: 2:29 and 41:9–12 put the earth first, while 79:27–30 builds the heaven and only afterwards says that He spread the earth out. Ibn 'Abbas, asked about this, is reported to have answered that the earth was made first but was spread out and provisioned after the heavens, and that reading became the standard one. 'Day' (yawm) is generally read as a period, and its length is given differently in 22:47 (a thousand years of your reckoning) and 70:4 (fifty thousand). The clearest contrast with Genesis is the absence of a seventh-day rest: 50:38 states that God made the heavens and the earth in six days and no weariness touched Him. The stuff Adam was made from is named with different words in different verses — dust (turab, 3:59), clay (tin, 6:2), dried clay from dark mud (salsal min hama' masnun, 15:26), clay like pottery (salsal ka'l-fakhkhar, 55:14) — which the commentators read as stages of one process rather than as rival accounts.

The personal detail has to be sorted by layer. Adam's wife is never named in the Qur'an, only called 'his wife'; the name Hawwa and the rib both come from hadith. They are tempted together, both say 'we have wronged ourselves' (7:23), and Adam is then given words from his Lord and forgiven (2:37), so there is no doctrine of original sin. The status of Iblis has been disputed since early times: 18:50 says plainly that he was of the jinn, but because the command to prostrate was addressed to the angels, exegetes in the line of Hasan al-Basri held that he was a fallen angel, and both positions are still current. Details like Adam's height of sixty cubits, the clay gathered in different colours from the four quarters of the earth, or Iblis walking around the lifeless figure and finding it hollow come from hadith and from the Qisas — a stratum that includes a good deal of isra'iliyyat, material drawn from Jewish and Christian tradition, which later scholars such as Ibn Kathir treated with suspicion.

The last stage is not doctrine. The seven heavens and seven earths are scriptural (2:29, 65:12), but the emerald mountain ringing the world and the stack of angel, rock, bull and fish belong to the popular 'aja'ib cosmographies of al-Qazwini and Ibn al-Wardi. The bull and the fish are given different names in different manuscripts, and the picture never entered the creed.

Drawn fromThe Qur'an (suras 2, 7, 11, 15, 20, 21, 29, 38, 41, 50, 55, 65, 67, 72 and others); the hadith collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim; al-Tabari, Ta'rikh al-rusul wa'l-muluk, vol. 1 (10th c.); the Qisas al-Anbiya tradition — al-Tha'labi, 'Ara'is al-majalis (11th c.), and al-Kisa'i; for the cosmography, al-Qazwini, 'Aja'ib al-makhluqat (13th c.) and Ibn al-Wardi, Kharidat al-'aja'ib (15th c.); for pre-Islamic religion, Ibn al-Kalbi, Kitab al-Asnam (9th c.)