Quran Background 1: Arabia in Muhammad's Time

Arabia in the sixth century AD had no central government.  The opinion of the great civilizations of the time, namely the Byzantine Empire and the western states of crumbling Rome, was that the Arabian desert was the unknown wilderness.  The population there was divided up among various nomadic tribes, whose economic focus was trading.  They mostly traded spices and other exotic items, and a few tribes became quite wealthy.

                The religious center of Arabia was the city Mecca (alternative spelling, Mekka) where there was an intersection of trade routes.  In Mecca was the Ka’ba, the large black box which contained every and god that the Arabians worshipped.  It was said among a few that the foundation of the Ka’ba was built by Abraham and his son, Ishmael (in Arabic Ibrahim and Ismail) who were the ancestors of the Arabian peoples.  As opposed to Ibrahim, however, most Arabians at the time of Muhammad were polytheistic, worshipping local deities.  The greatest of these deities was the god, Allah, yet even he was only one of many gods who were worshipped, which included the Virgin Mary.  To show respect to all of these deities, many Arabians would make an annual pilgrimage to Mecca.  One tribe, the Quaysh was the group of caretakers for the Ka’ba, the center of the pilgrimage.  It is within this tribe that Muhammad was born.

                But not every Arabian was polytheistic.  There were also quite a few other religious groups that had come to Arabia.  Jews, fleeing persecution, came to rest in Arabia.  In fact, it is estimated that up to one half of the Arabian city of Yathrib was Jewish.  

There were also Christians trading with the Quaysh, mostly on the other side of the Red Sea, in Africa.  Most of these Christians believed in a different kind of Trinitarianism than most orthodox Christians do today..  They held that the divinity and humanity of Christ was completly separated, and so discussion of Jesus' divinity was different than how we understand it.  However the Christians had monasteries and many good works such as fasting and giving to the poor, although there is no evidence that they existed in Mecca itself.  

There were quite possibly also some small splinter groups of Gnostics who separated morality into spirit, which was good, and flesh, which was evil.  These groups were somewhat Christian in outlook, but they denied the crucifixion and the incarnation to a certain degree.