Book of Idols

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]

The Book of Idols is essentially an itemized list of short descriptions of idols and sanctuaries in pre-Islamic Arabia. For each one, he describes their geography and their associated tribe. Sometimes Al-Kalbi offers more information about the idol or sanctuary, such as how it was destroyed in the Islamic era. In the primary manuscript, the text is 56 pages and each page contains 12 lines. The longest entry is about the goddess al-Uzza, mentioned in Surah 53 as one of the "Daughters of Allah" alongside Al-Lat and Manat. Al-Kalbi says that the cult of al-Uzza was centered in Mecca, of Al-Lat in Taif, and Manat in Medina. The entries on these goddesses appear sequentially, as are the five pagan deities of Surah 71. This is the only organizing principle that appears for the entries in the work. Al-Kalbi occasionally cites pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and, more rarely, the Quran. Entries are sometimes interrupted to explain the origins of idolatry after God's introduction of monotheism with Abraham.^[3]

The Book of Idols is considered a composite work comprising materials from many sources.^[4] It emerged as a result of accretion, reworkings, and interpolation, which resulted in the production of repetitions, variations, and interruptions in the text. On a number of occasions, the text treats the same subject more than once, in each case offering a contradictory account. Nyberg argued that the core of the Book goes back to Al-Kalbi, transmitted through Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Jawhari (d. 944–45), whose name appears as the final link in the shorter isnads (chains of transmission) that are listed in the second half of the text. Al-Jawhari is thought here to have added to Al-Kalbi's core several reports that he thought also, in some way, went back to Al-Kalbi. Later, an appendix with information about more idols was also added to the text. Other recensions of the text have not survived but are likely to have existed. Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229) quoted the text at length, and these quotations contain some material not found in manuscripts of the Book of Idols. Al-Kalbi cannot therefore be considered the author of the work, which is a centuries-long accumulation of individual reports.^[5]

In the first half of the 20th century, 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.^[6]

Quran 71:23 names five pagan deities: Wadd, Suwāʿ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq and Nasr. Ibn al-Kalbi, along with Ibn Ishaq, associates their worship with South Arabia. By contrast, the northern and central Arabian tribes preferred the "Daughters of Allah", al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā and Manāt (named in Quran 53:19–20). Altogether, the eight Quranic pagan deities are represented as dominating the religious scene of pre-Islamic Arabia, although the Daughters had a higher status due to their closer proximity to the Hejaz.^[7] According to Al-Kalbi, the North Arabian tribe Nizār commonly exclaimed:^[8]

‘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 worshiped idols, Al-Kalbi claims that remnants of Abraham's pure monotheism survived among people called hanifs. Therefore Al-Kalbi wrote:^[9]

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 Al-Azraqi, Hubal was the primary deity housed in the Kaaba of Mecca before the time of Muhammad. Similarly, Al-Kalbi identifies Hubal as the main god of the Quraysh. Archaeologically, just one Nabataean inscription mentions 'Hubal', as an epithet for the god Dushara. Other Muslim sources also represent Hubal being venerated in the Kaaba alongside lesser deities and baetyls.^[10]

Al-Kalbi also describes three pre-Islamic sanctuaries called a "Kaaba" other than the one located at Mecca.^[11]

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.^[12] 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.^[13]

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.^[14]

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.^[15] 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".^[16] 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.^[17]

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.^[18] 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.^[19] 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.^[20]

With the exception of its impact on Al-Masudi (d. 956) and Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229), the Book of Idols was largely unknown in the Islamic world until the discovery and publication of a manuscript of the text in Egypt in the 20th century.^[4] Yaqut quoted the text extensively in his Ma'jum al-buldan, to the degree that Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) was able to work with Al-Kalbi's work through Yaqut's citations before its main manuscript was discovered.^[21]

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).^[22] 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.^[23] Al-Jahiz (d. 868) is said to have composed a work with the same title as Al-Kalbi's, but it is lost.^[24]

• Faris, Nabih Amin (1952). Hishām Ibn-Al-Kalbi, The Book of Idols or The Kitāb al-Aṣnām. Princeton: Princeton UP. English translation.

• Ibn Al-Kalbī, Kitāb al-Aṣnām, ed. R. Klinke-Rosenberger. Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1941.
• Ibn al-Kalbī, Hishām ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sāʾib. Kitab al-Aṣnām: ʿAn Abī al-Mundhir Hishām ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Sāʾib al-Kalbī. Edited by Aḥmad Zakī. 3rd ed. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyyah, 1995.

• Elias, Jamal J. (2012). Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam. Harvard University Press.
• Grasso, Valentina (2023). Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults and Identities during Late Antiquity. Cambridge University Press.
• Hawting, Gerald (1999). The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. Cambridge University Press.
• Healey, John (2023). "Sacred Stones". Ancient Areabia.
• Miller, Nathaniel (2024). The Emergence of Arabic Poetry: From Regional Identities to Islamic Canonization. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-1-5128-2531-2.

• H. S. Nyberg. "Bemerkungen zum Buch der Götzenbilder von Ibn al-Kalbi." Lund: Svenska Institut i Rom. Ser. 2, Bd. 1, 1939. pp. 346–66.