Amr bin Luhayy

[koikhanate 2]

According to tradition, the name of the man who introduced idolatry to Meccans was Amr bin Luhayy. Does anyone know the timeframe as to when this happened?

[koikhanate 2]

What we know:

-Custodianship of the Ka'aba passed to Quraysh at the time of abdul Muttalib's great-grandfather Qusay.
- Qusay lived from 400-480 AD, at the time of inheriting the Ka'aba he was of age and married, so at the bare minimum he would have been maybe 25, and very possibly older considering the premium Arabs place on seniority; knowing that there were 
- Qusay inherited the Ka'aba from Hulail ibn Hibishia, the great grandson of Amr ibn Luhayy. 

This means that there were 4 generations accounted for between Amr ibn Luhayy and Qusay, whose son was Hashim, who seems to have been born in 464, around 106 years before the birth of Prophet Muhammad. From then the birth years get fuzzier, but it is generally possible to assume that all births happened generally between their fathers' 20th-40th year with early deaths being very common then. For the 4 generations between Hashim and P*, we get a clean average of average of 26.5 years at the time of their fathers' births.

Also, the timeframe of Qusay's and Hashim's lifespans (the source is wikipedia, so that's not great, but the guess is as good as any) is a little hoopty, and if it's true, Qusay would have 64 at the time of his son Hasmin's birth, which seems um, not quite impossible but certainly unusual so it's reasonable to expect that maybe Hashim was born earlier or Qusay later. 

Qusay was not Hulail's son, and the lineage goes Hulail, Salul, Ka'ab, Amr b. Luhayy. So assuming another average of 26.5, we can guess Amr's son Ka'ab to have been born 79.5 years before Qusay. Depending on whether we want to move Qusay's birth up, say it was somewhere between 400-430, this puts Ka'ab's birth at somewhere between 320-360 AD. BUT, we don't actually know if Amr brought Hobel back from the Levant before or after Ka'ab's birth. Meaning that a realistic timeframe for when Amr could have brought Hobel was anywhere between 320 and 360 or even 470 or 480 at the extreme end, since it's known that the reason he'd traveled to the Levant was due to illness which is common in old age. Much later would have been too old to travel, but the younger he gets the more unusual it would have been for him to have the kind of chronic illness which still allowed him to make the journey. So the best bet would be 350-370, around 200-220 years before Prophet Muhammad's birth.

Tomorrow or sometime soon inshallah I'll want to do similar calculations for the people who introduced al Lat and al 'Uzza... for now I'm going to sleep.

This is a result of work I've done since the original post, by the way; it isn't an intentional double post, it's just my topic has not been approved yet.

Also, I welcome any correction or better sourcing for anything involved in my calculations....