Al-Jāhiliyyah (The Age of Ignorance) is a historical era in Islamic salvation history[1] that can describe the pre-Islamic Arabian past or just the Hejaz leading up to the life of Muhammad.
[16] Likewise, radical Muslim groups have often justified the use of violence against secular regimes by framing their armed struggle as a jihad to strike down modern forms of jahiliyyah.
According to Islamic religious scholars, a regular practice during the Jahiliyyah was for Arabians to commit female infanticide by burying their daughters alive (which they called waʾd al-banāt).
According to Al-Tha'labi (d. 1035) in his commentary on Quran 81:8:[19]When a man had a daughter and he wanted to spare her life, he would dress her in a garment of wool or hair, and [when she had grown up] she would watch over his camels and sheep in the steppe.
If it was a daughter, she would cast her in the grave, and if it was a son, she would keep him.According to another source, "[e]very day a pit was dug in the corner of the desert for an innocent girl to be buried".
Lindstedt, however, argues that there is little evidence to support such a practice in pre-Islamic Arabia and that the Quranic verses themselves are unlikely to have originally carried this meaning.
[21] During the early Umayyad era, intense intertribal competition took place in order to acquire appointments of generalships and governorships over newly conquered territories.
[22] Other extreme and violent practices attributed to the Jahiliyyah included cannibalism,[23] corpse mutilation, abuse and torture of captives, and random murder.
In one tradition, Muhammad's uncle, Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, is killed in the Battle of Uhud: subsequently, the jahl mutilated his corpse.
Juynboll demonstrated that Islamic attitudes towards niyāḥa were far from uniform and that the absolute prohibition against it emerged in Iraq in the second half of the eighth century before being retrojected into Prophetic hadith.
[27] According to the Ibadi author Hūd ibn al-Muªakkam, the Jahiliyyah was characterized as a time that people forced their female slaves into prostitution so that she could have more children.
/ But for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow / I assure you I wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive— / first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine / that foams when the water is mingled in; / second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed / streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water; / and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season / dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent, / her anklets and her bracelets seemingly hung on the boughs / of a pliant, unriven gum-tree or a castor-shrub.According to Pamela Klasova, the values expressed should not be seen as "values in themselves".
According to Ignaz Goldziher and Toshihiko Izutsu, the word meant "barbarism" and was used as an antonym (opposite) of ḥilm (forbearance, equanimity).
[34] In the Quran, the word is not used to refer to a historical epoch, but instead characterizes a way of life ascribed to the disbelievers who, in their ignorance, failed to acknowledge the message of Muhammad.
Jahiliyyah began to be used to describe the non-Islamic past in general instead of the time between prophets, especially one lacking in or in opposition to moral virtue.
With the Lisān al-ʿArab of Ibn Manzur (d. 1312), the word is constricted to pre-Islamic Arabs in particular in addition to their negative moral characteristics.
The commentaries of Al-Zamakhshari and Al-Qurtubi in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries introduce the phrase al-Jahiliyyah understood as a period of time whose inhabitants were morally tarred by virtue of the era they lived in.
In this period where Arab tribal identity continued to be important, many sought to extol their genealogical ancestors as opposed to denigrating them, as can be found with the Ma'add or South Arabian ancestries.
[43] During the 1930s, militant Islamist movements began to increasingly assert that Islamic civilisation was threatened by the encroachment of Western values.
The notion was revived by prominent scholars of the twentieth century Egypt and South Asia; regions that were being impacted by increasing Westernization.
[46] Such criticisms of modernity were taken up in the emerging anti-colonialist rhetoric, and the term gained currency in the Arab world through translations of Maududi's work.
[13] The concept of modern Jahiliyyah attained wide popularity through a 1950 work by Maududi's student Abul Hasan Nadvi, titled What Did the World Lose Due to the Decline of Islam?
[13] Expounding Maududi's views, Nadvi wrote that Muslims were to be held accountable for their predicament, because they came to rely on alien, un-Islamic institutions borrowed from the West.
In Egypt, Sayyid Qutb popularized the term in his influential work Ma'alim fi al-Tariq "Milestones", which included the assertion that "the Muslim community has been extinct for a few centuries.