Pre-Islamic Arabia

In the black basalt desert east of the Hawran, on the borderlands of what are now Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the rocks are covered with writing. Some two thousand years ago the nomads who grazed their herds there scratched their names and their fathers' names into the boulders in a script now called Safaitic, and often added a line about their lives: that they had camped here in the spring, that they were watching for rain, that they grieved for a brother killed in a raid. Then, very often, a prayer. The goddess most often called on is Allāt: asked for safety, for plunder, for rain, for a reunion with a loved one, and sometimes asked to curse whoever would deface the carving. More than fifty thousand such inscriptions are known. They are the voices of ordinary Arabians practising their own religion before Judaism, Christianity and Islam reached the desert, and they tell a different and more detailed story than the one later remembered.

Two kinds of evidence

The religion of Arabia before Islam is known from two very different kinds of source, and much of the history of the subject is the story of their disagreement.

• Islamic-era writings. The Qur'an argues against those who "associate" other beings with God (mushrikūn) and names three goddesses, al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā and Manāt (53:19–20). The biographies of the Prophet and the histories describe Meccan cults, and Hishām ibn al-Kalbī (d. 819/821) wrote the Kitāb al-Aṣnām, the Book of Idols, a catalogue of the gods and sanctuaries of the "time of ignorance" (jāhiliyya). These texts were written a century or more after the events, by Muslims describing a past they regarded as idolatrous, and many historians treat their details with caution.
• Inscriptions and archaeology. Tens of thousands of inscriptions in the pre-Islamic scripts of Arabia (Safaitic, Hismaic, Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Nabataean Aramaic and the Sabaic and other languages of the south), along with temples, altars, stelae and tombs. These are contemporary and written by the worshippers themselves, but they are brief, and they come mostly from the north and the south, not from Mecca, where no pre-Islamic inscriptions or excavations of that period are known.

Gods of the north

In the northern half of the peninsula and its borderlands, the inscriptions name a recognizable set of deities.

• Allāt, "the Goddess", the most widely worshipped. The Greek historian Herodotus already knew of an Arabian goddess he called Alilat in the fifth century BCE. She had temples at Palmyra, where she was shown like Athena with a lion, and at Ṭāʾif near Mecca.
• al-ʿUzzā, "the Mightiest", associated with the morning or evening star (Venus), and prominent among the Nabataeans at Petra.
• Manāt, a goddess of fate and portion, whose shrine lay on the coast between Mecca and Medina; the Book of Idols calls her the most ancient.
• Ruḍā (Ruḍaw), a god known from Assyrian records of the seventh century BCE to late antiquity, in some communities the father of Allāt, in others part of an astral triad.
• Dushara (Dhū Sharā, "he of the Sharā mountains"), the chief god of the Nabataean kingdom, whose capital was Petra. The Nabataeans wrote dedications to "Dushara and all the gods".
• At the oasis of Taymāʾ a stele names the god Ṣalm of Maḥram with Shingalā and Ashīrā; the Babylonian king Nabonidus lived at Taymāʾ for ten years in the sixth century BCE. The stele's own date is disputed: the Louvre, which holds it (AO 1505), dates it to the fifth century BCE, giving Joseph Naveh's 1970 study of Aramaic script, which placed it in the middle of that century, while Peter Stein (2013) dates it to about 380 BCE, in the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes II.
• Hubal, remembered in Islamic tradition as the chief idol inside the Kaʿba, appears in only one pre-Islamic inscription, a Nabataean tomb text at Hegra (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ), beside Dushara and Manāt.

The Nabataeans, whose kingdom stretched from Petra to Hegra until Rome annexed it in 106 CE, very often worshipped their gods in the form of a betyl, an upright stone block, sometimes plain and sometimes carved with a stylized pair of eyes and a nose. The stone was not a portrait but a house or presence of the god; the Greek word baitylos comes from the Semitic bēt-ʾel, "house of god".

The nomads' religion, from the rocks

The Safaitic inscriptions, studied above all by Michael Macdonald and Ahmad Al-Jallad, give an eyewitness picture of nomad religion in the centuries around the turn of the era. They show:

• Prayer for everyday needs. Security on the journey, rain, recovery from illness, revenge, plunder, the return of an absent person.
• Sacrifice. Inscriptions record slaughtering animals (the verb dbḥ) to particular gods, sometimes at named places.
• Mourning. Long inscriptions record grief for relatives and friends, and some mortuary sites were visited again and again by later writers who added their own laments.
• Many gods, one supreme. Allāt is by far the most invoked, but prayers also go to Rḍw, Dushara, Baʿal-Samīn ("lord of heaven"), Gad (the fortune of the tribe), and to ʾlh, "the god", the ancestor of the name Allāh. A few inscriptions appear to speak of a creator who brings light against the darkness of death. How this "god" related to the others is a live research question.

The kingdoms of the south

Southern Arabia, modern Yemen, was a land of irrigated cities and kingdoms made rich by the trade in frankincense and myrrh: Sabaʾ (Sheba), Qatabān, Ḥaḍramawt, Maʿīn, and later Ḥimyar. Each had a national god: Almaqah for Sabaʾ, ʿAmm for Qatabān, Sayīn for Ḥaḍramawt, Wadd for Maʿīn. Their inscriptions in the South Arabian alphabet (musnad) are formal dedications by kings and nobles, and they reveal a religion of temples, priests, pilgrimages and communal feasts.

The greatest temple was the Awwām temple of Almaqah at Maʾrib, the Sabaean capital, known locally as Maḥram Bilqīs, "the sanctuary of Bilqīs", after the name later tradition gave the Queen of Sheba. It had a huge oval enclosure and a monumental entrance hall of tall square pillars, and received hundreds of inscribed dedications. Sabaean kings also held ritual hunts, especially of the ibex, which seem to have been sacred acts, and there was a regular pilgrimage to Almaqah. Carved stelae show the crescent and disc, and the bull and ibex are the animals most associated with the gods in art. The Queen of Sheba herself, who visits Solomon in 1 Kings 10 and appears in the Qur'an (27) and the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast (Vault, V66), has not been identified in any South Arabian inscription.

The turn to one God

The most dramatic change in pre-Islamic Arabia happened in the south, and it is documented in stone. From about 380 CE, the inscriptions of the kingdom of Ḥimyar, which by then ruled most of southern Arabia, stop mentioning the old gods. Instead they invoke Raḥmānān, "the Merciful", "Lord of heaven" or "Lord of heaven and earth". The temples of Almaqah fell out of use. Byzantine and later sources credit King Malkīkarib Yuhaʾmin with the change, and many of the new inscriptions are explicitly Jewish: they mention Israel, use Hebrew words such as amen and shalom, and name synagogues. Scholars such as Christian Robin argue that the Ḥimyarite elite adopted Judaism or a monotheism close to it, while the population's religion is less clear.

In about 523, the Jewish king Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar, remembered in Islamic tradition as Dhū Nuwās, massacred Christians at Najrān in the north of his kingdom. Syriac and Greek sources, and inscriptions of Yūsuf's own officers, record the campaign. The Christian king of Aksum in Ethiopia invaded in about 525 with Byzantine encouragement, and Ḥimyar came under Christian rulers. One of them, the Aksumite general Abraha, made himself king and left long inscriptions that open "By the power of the Merciful One and His Messiah". One, at Murayghān in central Arabia, records a campaign against the tribes of Maʿadd. Islamic tradition remembers Abraha's expedition against Mecca with an elephant, in the "Year of the Elephant" traditionally dated to 570, the year of Muhammad's birth, and the Qur'an's short sura 105 speaks of "the companions of the elephant". A fragmentary inscription of Abraha published in 2025 may mention elephants; the reading is hypothetical, and the connection between his known campaigns and the Meccan story is debated.

Christianity also had deep roots among the Arab tribes of the north, including the Ghassānids, allies of Byzantium, and the Lakhmids of al-Ḥīra, allies of Persia; and there were Jewish tribes at Yathrib (Medina), Khaybar and elsewhere in the Ḥijāz. By the sixth century, monotheism was all around the peninsula.

Mecca before Islam

What is known of Mecca itself comes almost entirely from Islamic tradition. It describes:

• the Kaʿba, "the cube", a stone shrine housing the image of Hubal and surrounded, the sources say, by 360 idols, with the Black Stone (Vault, V26) built into its corner;
• circumambulation of the shrine, and rites at nearby sites that were later incorporated, reinterpreted, into the Islamic ḥajj;
• a sacred territory (ḥaram) where fighting was forbidden, and sacred months of truce for pilgrimage and trade fairs;
• divination with arrows before Hubal, which the Qur'an later forbids (5:90);
• kāhins, soothsayers who spoke in rhymed prose (sajʿ) inspired by jinn, and poets thought to have a jinn companion;
• theophoric names such as ʿAbd Manāt, ʿAbd al-ʿUzzā and ʿAbd Shams ("servant of the Sun");
• a few ḥanīfs, individuals such as Zayd ibn ʿAmr who, the tradition says, rejected the idols and sought "the religion of Abraham".

The Qur'an also reports that the Meccans acknowledged Allāh as creator and lord of the Kaʿba while worshipping other beings as intercessors or as "daughters of God" (e.g. 29:61; 53:19–23; 39:3). A story told in early biographies, the so-called "Satanic verses" incident, has Muhammad briefly praising the three goddesses as intercessors before the words were withdrawn as Satan's; its historicity is disputed among both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars.

The believer's lens

For Muslims, the history of Arabia is framed by the Qur'an. God's first house, the Kaʿba, was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael as a sanctuary of the one God (Qur'an 2:125–127). Over time the Arabs fell away into idolatry, which tradition says was introduced by a chieftain, ʿAmr ibn Luḥayy, who brought idols from Syria; the age before Muhammad was the jāhiliyya, the time of ignorance. The ḥanīfs kept a remnant of Abraham's faith. With the revelation to Muhammad and the conquest of Mecca in 630, the idols were destroyed and the Kaʿba restored to the worship of God alone; the pilgrimage rites were purified and kept. The goddesses were, in the Qur'an's words, "nothing but names you have named" (53:23).

Some Arabs today, Muslim and not, also value the pre-Islamic past as cultural heritage: its poetry above all, the celebrated Muʿallaqāt, and its sites, such as Hegra, opened to visitors in Saudi Arabia, and Maʾrib in Yemen. A small number of modern revivalist pagans have taken up the old goddesses. The archive reports these views as belief and heritage.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first observation is that almost everything written about Mecca before Islam comes from Muslim sources written generations later, with a religious reason to present the past as idolatrous and dark. Numbers such as the 360 idols are traditional, and the Book of Idols mixes genuine memory with antiquarian reconstruction.

The second is that the inscriptions tell a story of gradual change, not a single sudden break: Ḥimyar turned to one God some two centuries before Islam; Christianity and Judaism were present across the peninsula; and among the nomads of the north a god called ʾlh already had a prominent place. Some scholars, notably Gerald Hawting and Patricia Crone, argued from the Qur'an itself that its opponents were not simple idolaters but monotheists of a kind, who honoured lesser beings as angels or intercessors; others think this goes beyond the evidence. The debate is open.

The third is to set aside claims that the evidence does not support. The idea, spread by some Christian polemicists since the 1990s, that Allāh was originally a moon god, Hubal or another, is rejected by specialists: the name derives from al-ilāh, "the god", and the evidence links Hubal and Allāh as distinct figures. The story that the Kaʿba was founded by Abraham is a faith claim; there is no archaeological evidence either way, and no pre-Islamic source connects Abraham with Mecca. The "Year of the Elephant" date of 570 is traditional and may not fit Abraha's known reign.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The stone as presence. Across Arabia gods were worshipped in aniconic stones: the Nabataean betyls, the cubic stone of Allāt at Ṭāʾif, the stone of Dhū l-Khalaṣa. The word kaʿba, "cube", and the Black Stone set in its corner belong to this world of sacred stones; the Qur'an redefined the Kaʿba as the house of the one God.
• Eye-idols. Some Nabataean betyls carry only a pair of stylized eyes and a nose, a minimal sign that the stone sees and is present. One from Petra is inscribed "the goddess of Ḥayyān son of Nybat".
• The crescent and the disc. South Arabian altars and stelae often carry a crescent enclosing a disc. It is an astral emblem of the gods, not evidence of a single "moon god" behind later Islam; the crescent's association with Islam is much later.
• The ibex and the bull. The sacred animals of the southern gods, carved in rows on friezes and altars; the ibex hunt was a royal rite.
• The musnad alphabet. The South Arabian script, used for monumental inscriptions in carefully cut, geometric letters, was itself a display of piety and power in temple dedications. Ethiopian script descends from it.
• Divine names as theology. The move from Almaqah and ʿAmm to Raḥmānān in Ḥimyar, and the appearance of ʾlh among the nomads, show religious change encoded in names. Raḥmān would become one of the names of God in the Qur'an (al-Raḥmān, "the Merciful").
• Sacred time and space. The ḥaram and the sacred months encoded peace into the calendar and the landscape, making pilgrimage and markets possible; both passed into Islam.
• Divining arrows. Blank or marked arrows (azlām) drawn before an idol to decide marriages, journeys and disputes, a technology of divine answer later forbidden.

Connections

Pre-Islamic Arabia is the setting from which Islam (ch21) emerged, and this chapter is its prehistory. Its gods are cousins of the Canaanite and Phoenician deities of ch58, with whom they share names and the practice of standing stones, and of the Mesopotamian gods of ch03 (the Venus goddess, the storm god, the "lord of heaven"). Ḥimyar's Judaism links it to Rabbinic Judaism (ch19); the Najrān martyrs and Abraha to Early and Eastern Christianity (ch16, ch60) and to the Aksumite and Nubian world of ch68. The goddesses al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā and Manāt belong in the comparisons of The Great Goddess (ch48), the kāhins and jinn in the history of ecstatic speech also found in Early Greece (ch08) and Pentecostalism (ch64), and Arabian sacrifice in Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51). In the Vault, the Black Stone (V26), the Birmingham Qur'an (V28) and the Kebra Nagast (V66) touch this chapter.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch70.html · a comparative library of the sacred.