Jahiliyyah

In Islamic salvation history, the Jāhiliyyah (Age of Ignorance) is an Arabic expression for an era of pre-Islamic Arabia as a whole or only of the Hejaz leading up to the lifetime of Muhammad.

The expression serves as a form of religious propaganda and grand narrative to paint pre-Islamic Arabians as barbarians in a morally corrupt social order. Its people (the jahl, sing. jāhil) lacked religious knowledge (ʿilm) and civilized qualities (ḥilm). As a result, they practiced polytheism, idol worship, and allegedly committed female infanticide, had societies rife with tyranny, injustice, despotism, and anarchy, and prejudice resulted in vainglorious tribal antagonisms.

The pre-Islamic age was essentialized into a group of attributes and societal functions that was described as a barbaric way of life that stood in contrast with the mission of Muhammad and the way of life he introduced. Today, this narrative is not considered historical. As a grand narrative or master narrative, and as a discourse, it served the role of validating and even necessitating the venture of Islam. Analogous grand narratives that have existed across societies include the Age of Enlightenment succeeding a Dark Ages in European history, and the idea that the coming of Jesus served to redeem a world contaminated by Original Sin.

In modern Islamist writings, the concept is used to refer to a decadent moral state accused of imitating the Jahiliyyah. Islamists have used this concept of jahiliyyah to criticize un-Islamic conduct in the Muslim world. Prominent Muslim theologians like Muhammad Rashid Rida and Abul A'la Maududi, among others, have used the term as a reference to secular modernity and, by extension, to modern Western culture. In his works, Maududi asserts that modernity is the "new jahiliyyah." Sayyid Qutb viewed jahiliyyah as a state of domination of humans over humans, as opposed to their submission to God. 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. Ibn Taymiyyah and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab have both viewed their fellow Muslims as living in a state of jahiliyyah.