The Book of Idols (Kitāb al-ʾAṣnām), written by the Arab scholar Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (737–819), is one of the most important Islamic-era works to describe and present the Islamic conception of the gods and rites of pre-Islamic Arab religions. The book portrays pre-Islamic Arabian religion as predominantly polytheistic and guilty of idol worship (idolatry) before the coming of Muhammad, including at the Kaaba, the pre-eminent shrine of Mecca. This, for Al-Kalbi, was a degraded state of religious practice since the pure monotheism that, in Islamic religion, was instituted by Abraham (a hanif) when the Kaaba was founded.[1][2]
Broadly, the Book of Idols provides an itemized list of idols and sanctuaries, and for each one, their geographical situation and the tribe associated with them is also described. Less consistently, Al-Kalbi will also offer additional information about each idol/sanctuary, such as the way it was destroyed in the Islamic era. Each entry is short and the entire text runs fifty-six pages with twelve-lines per side in the primary manuscript of the text. The longest entry is about the goddess al-Uzza, who is mentioned in Surah 53 of the Quran as having been venerated as one of the three "Daughters of Allah" alongside Al-Lat and Manat. The three goddesses are described in sequential entries in the Book of Idols, as are the only other pagan deities named in the Quran, the five mentioned in Surah 71. Aside from this, there is no other evident logic in how Al-Kalbi has ordered the entries of his work. Illustrative citations of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry sometimes appear in Al-Kalbi's entries, alongside a smaller number of Quranic quotations. The entries in Al-Kalbi's work are sometimes interrupted in order to provide an explanation as to how humanity became idolatrous after God's intervention in the sending of Abraham who is believed to have delivered a form of pure monotheism to the people around him.[3]
There is existence evidence that the Book of Idols is a product of earlier traditions and emerges out of a long process of accretion, reworking, interpolations, and it contains many repetitions, variants and interruptions. The same subject is occasionally treated multiple times in different segments of the text in contradictory ways. Nyberg has argued that the Book of Idols contains a core text that goes back to Al-Kalbi: this text was transmitted to Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Jawhari (d. 944–45), the last link in the shorter isnads (chains of transmission) in the second half of the work, who added to this core text other reports outside of the Book that he believed were ascribed to Al-Kalbi. Later on, appendices containing information on another two idols were attached to the text. Even then, there appears to have been additional recensions of the text that do not exist today. For example, Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229) quotes extensively from the Book but has material that is not found in manuscripts of it today. As such, Hawting states that Al-Kalbi cannot be considered the author of the Book of Idols in the modern-sense of the word, as the cumulative work appears to be the result of a growing amalgamation of individual reports and traditions over the centuries.[4]
Quran 71:23 names five pagan deities: Wadd, Suwāʿ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq and Nasr. Ibn al-Kalbi, along with Ibn Ishaq, associates the worship of such deities with South Arabia. By contrast, the northern and central Arabian tribes preferred the worship of the three "Daughters of Allah", al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā and Manāt (mentioned in Quran 53:19–20). Altogether, the eight pagan deities named in the Quran are described as dominating the religious worship of the main geographic regions of pre-Islamic Arabia. Because the earlier five deities were worshipped at a further distance away from the Hejaz compared to the Daughters of Allah, their status was simultaneously considered to be lower compared to the Daughters.[5]
Al-Kalbi states that the North Arabian tribe Nizār commonly said:[6]
‘Here I am, Allāh! Here I am! (Labbayka Allāhumma! Labbayka!) Here I am! You have no partner (sharīk) save one who is yours! You have dominion over him and over what he possesses.’ They were used to declare his unity through the talbiyāt while associating their gods with him, placing their affairs in his hand.
At the same time, while Arabia had largely entered into a state of idol worship, Al-Kalbi states that there was a remnant of monotheism that remained alive since the time of Abraham. These monotheistic figures are called hanifs. An example of a hanif from the traditional literature was Waraqa ibn Nawfal. To this effect, Al-Kalbi wrote:[7]
But [in spite of the idolatry and polytheism which had spread among the Arabs] there were survivals of the time of Abraham and Ishmael which they [the Arabs] followed in their rituals – revering the sanctuary, circumambulating it, ḥajj, ʿumra, standing upon ʿArafa and Muzdalifa, offering beasts for sacrifice, and making the ihlāl [i.e., the talbiya] in the ḥajj and the ʿumra – together with the introduction of things which did not belong to it.
According to the ninth-century writer Al-Azraqi, the god Hubal was the primary deity housed in the Kaaba in Mecca before the time of Muhammad. Al-Kalbi shares a similar tradition, whereby Hubal is the main god of the Quraysh tribe. In the archaeological record, there is only one Nabataean inscription mentioning Hubal where the name may appear as an epithet for the god Dushara. Other Muslim sources also represent Hubal being venerated alongside some lesser pagan deities and baetyls in the Kaaba.[8]
Al-Kalbi offers two etiologies for how polytheism came to dominate pre-Islamic Mecca from the pure monotheism instituted by Abraham. The first, which is also found in the writings of Ibn Ishaq, revolves around a character named 'Amr bin Luhay who had gathered some idols during his travels in Syria and set them up at the Kaaba when he returned. According to the second explanation, Mecca was experiencing overpopulation and so people began to leave it. Anyone who left would leave with a sacred stone from the holy shrine. After a while, the original meaning/function of the stones was forgotten and they came to be mistaken for idols. This second version is similar to an idea reported by the fifth-century historian Sozomen, author of one of the first documents to associate Arabs with an Ishmaelite heritage. According to Sozomen, the great lapse of time between Abraham and the current-day led to the forgetting of the old custom.[9]
Al-Kalbi also describes three pre-Islamic sanctuaries called a "Kaaba" other than the one located at Mecca.[10]
Al-Kalbi writes that an idol, or an aṣnām, is a venerated figurine resembling a human that is made out of wood, gold, or silver. However, if made of stone, it is called an awthān.[11] In the Quran, the words used for 'idol' or 'statue' include wathan (plural awthān) and ṣanam (plural aṣnām). These terms are used primarily in describing those who lived in past ages (with the exception of Quran 22:30), whereas it uses terms such as ṭāghūt and jibt for contemporary situations, although the precise meaning of both terms is imprecise and the latter is a hapax legomenon (meaning it is only used once) that appears in Quran 4:51. These two terms might be used to describe some kind of accusation of idolatry against rival monotheistic groups.[12]
Islamic traditions about an idolatrous past came to first be seriously studied by Gerald Hawting, in his book The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam (1999). For Hawting, accusations of idolatry against the pre-Islamic Arabian past were absent from the Quran and depend on later Islamic sources. According to Hawting, accusations of idolatry were common rhetorical weapons against other monotheistic competitors. Due to this phenomena, the Quranic mushrikun were transformed, after a long period of oral transmission and development in tradition, into polytheistic idol worshippers. Therefore, for historians like Hawting, depictions of pre-Islamic Arabian religion like that in Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols are not reliable representations of the past.[13] Furthermore, as opposed to it being a collection of Arabian traditions about Arabian religion, it is better understood as "a collection of characteristic monotheistic traditions and ideas adapted to reflect Muslim concepts and concerns".[14] Hawting believes that some of the names of gods in tradition may be historical, but that such names may have been deduced from the theophoric names of contemporary Arabs. Islamic traditions about these gods, in turn, reflect later elaboration and speculation built on top of deductions of the existence of such gods from such theophoric names.[15]
The archaeological record has also come to be seen in conflict with Al-Kalbi's text. For example, despite his portrayal of South Arabian religion on the eve of Islam, no polytheistic inscriptions are known from South Arabia after Malkikarib Yuhamin, the king of the Himyarite Kingdom, adopted monotheism in the last quarter of the fourth century AD. No archaeological attestations of any of the eight pagan deities named in the Quran are known in pre-Islamic Arabia, more broadly, after the fourth century. As opposed to a simple archaeological silence, the archaeological record instead depicts an abrupt disappearance of polytheistic circles around the turn of the fifth century AD.[16] Furthermore, Al-Kalbi's association of pre-Islamic Hudhalī poetry with polytheism clashes with the type of religious rites actually described in the putative corpus of Hudhalī poetry.[17] Broadly speaking, Al-Kalbi's depiction of the ritual use of cultic stones or statues across Arabia has clashed with the fact that, archaeologically, neither of these are known anywhere in Arabia in any time period outside of northwest Arabia and Nabataea. Thus, Christian Julien Robin interprets Al-Kalbi as having exaggerated the spatial extent of such practices and the use of these ritual objects more generally.[18]
Alongside Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols, the main Muslim sources for (especially polytheistic) religion in pre-Islamic Arabia include works by al-Tabari (primarily his History of the Prophets and Kings) and Ibn Ishaq (Al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah).[19] There is also the Book of Reports about Mecca by Al-Azraqi. Additional attempts to describe pre-Islamic Arabian religion include those by the likes of Masʿūdī (d. 345/956), Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), and even Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1206/1792), the founder of Wahhabism.[20] Al-Jahiz (d. 868) is said to have composed a work with the same title as Al-Kalbi's, but it is lost.[21]
The Book of Idols was extensively cited by Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229), to the degree that Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) was able to work with Al-Kalbi's work through these citations and quotations prior to the discovery of its manuscript in the years after his death.[22]
Ahmad Zaki Pasha, the Egyptian philologist, discovered the text; he bought the sole extant manuscript at auction in Damascus[2] and the manuscript, one of many in his extensive collection, was donated to the state after his death in 1934. Zaki Pasha announced his discovery at the XIVth International Congress of Orientalists.[23]