Historical Traditions in the Holy Qur'an: Pre-Islamic Arabs as a Model

Abstract

This study emerges from a central question that has occupied a significant space in contemporary Islamic thought: how the Qur’an addresses the movement of history as a stage for interaction between human agency and divine laws. The Qur’an does not present events as isolated occurrences or sequential narratives; rather, it frames them within a coherent legal system that links the past to the present and opens horizons for civilizational interpretation. Building on this awareness, the present study—entitled Historical Laws in the Qur’an: The Arabs before Islam as a Model—examines the epistemological structure established by the Qur’anic text, viewing it as a comprehensive framework that regulates the dynamics of societies and reveals laws that recur whenever their conditions are met. The study begins with two fundamental problems: the neglect of the historical-legal dimension of the Qur’an in much of exegetical heritage, and the predominance of mythological or homiletic approaches to the text, which marginalized the law-like perspective that refuses to separate action from consequence. Accordingly, the study seeks to apply these laws to the Arabs before Islam, who constituted a complete historical model in which mechanisms of decline and revival were manifested, thereby demonstrating the sensitivity of these laws to moral, social, and political deviation. Methodologically, the study adopts an inductive analytical approach, tracing the meanings of historical laws in the Qur’an and interpreting them within their historical context. It arrives at several significant findings, most notably: that historical laws are a fixed legal system not biased toward any particular community; that the Qur’an employs history as a reformative tool; that the experience of the Arabs before Islam embodied laws such as substitution, respite, and proportionality between sin and punishment; that the failure of societies cannot be attributed solely to external factors but rather to internal patterns of deviation; and that psychological transformation constitutes the deepest driver of every civilizational change.