of the Days of Ignorance.
1 Among these,
Muḥammad respected the months of religious truce,
2 retained the prohibition of swine’s flesh, continued the use of the lunar calendar and the names of the months and so on. There is a considerable number of such laws specifically enumerated in the texts:
“The people of the Days of Ignorance engaged in many practices which the Law of
Islám later confirmed. They would not take in marriage both a mother and her daughter, and the most shameful of acts in their view was to marry two sisters. They would stigmatize a man marrying the wife of his father, derisively calling him his father’s competitor. It was their custom to go on pilgrimage to the House at
Mecca, where they would perform the ceremonies of visitation, putting on the pilgrim’s dress, practicing the circumambulation, running between the hills, pausing at all the stopping-places, and casting the stones. It was, furthermore, their wont to intercalate one month in every three-year period, to perform ablutions after intercourse, to rinse out the mouth and snuff up water through the nostrils, to part the hair, use the tooth-stick, pare the nails and pluck the armpits. They would, likewise, cut off the right hand of a thief.”