Arabia experienced persistent droughts during the rise of Islam

Evidence from a new precipitation record suggests that persistent droughts in southern Arabia throughout the 6^th century CE may have contributed to the profound societal and political changes that took place during the emergence of Islam. For nearly 300 years, the Himyarite kingdom was the dominant power in ancient Arabia. Its economy, based on agriculture and foreign trade, linked East Africa and the Mediterranean world. However, Himyar political, economic, and religious grip on the region declined during the early 6^th century until it ultimately fell to Aksumite invaders in 525 CE. Himyar’s fall and what followed was characterized by political disorder, socioeconomic change, and the abandonment of the major irrigation systems that once supported the kingdom and its people. Its widely thought that these transformative changes, which further eroded major Arabian polities, set the stage for the rise of Islam in the early 7^th century. Explanations surrounding this social upheaval have focused on sociopolitical factors. However, the southern Arabian region is prone to drought, and given that their economy was pegged to rain-fed and irrigated agriculture, the Himyar would have been vulnerable to persistent dry spells. Despite this, the possibility that drought could have contributed to Himyar’s decline has been generally overlooked. Here, Dominik Fleitmann and colleagues combine hydrological, historical, and archaeological records from the Middle East and East Africa with a new high-resolution stalagmite precipitation record from northern Oman. Fleitmann et al. show that droughts plagued the region throughout the 6^th century, with the most severe aridity persisting between 500 and 530 CE. According to the authors, the concurrence between peak aridity in southern Arabia and the sudden demise of Himyar suggests a relationship between the two events. While Fleitmann et al. note that correlation is not necessarily causation, the persistence of 6^th century drought in a region that relied on rain-fed agriculture coincides with a turning point in Arabian history that resulted in a number of political and socioreligious transformations over the decades that followed.