The Idols of Arabia and the Meaning of Tawhid

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The most striking thing about the Arabs before Islam is that they worshipped the very God we worship, by His name Allah. They never made an idol of Allah, for they knew He could not be represented; they affirmed that He alone created them, sent down the rain, and sustained them. Ask them, "Who created you? Who is the Lord of the heavens and the earth?" and they answered: Allah.

❧Intermediaries, not rivals

Their idols, al-Lāt at al-Ṭāʾif, Hubal at the Kaʿbah, al-ʿUzzā and Manāt, were not in their minds rivals to Allah but go-betweens. The Qurʾān records their own words: مَا نَعْبُدُهُمْ إِلَّا لِيُقَرِّبُونَا إِلَى ٱللَّهِ زُلْفَىٰ, "We worship them only that they may bring us nearer to Allah" (al-Zumar 39:3), and هَٰؤُلَاءِ شُفَعَاؤُنَا عِندَ ٱللَّهِ, "These are our intercessors with Allah" (Yūnus 10:18). They thought themselves too lowly to approach the Most Holy directly, and sought Him through these beings. This is the heart of their shirk: not the denial of Allah, but the setting up of intermediaries to reach Him.

❧How the good become gods

The origin of the idols shows how it begins. Al-Lāt was a righteous man who ground barley and made broth for the pilgrims, "the one who makes the soup." When he died, a monument was raised over his grave to honour him; people rubbed against it and sought blessing there, until by slow degrees a good man's memorial became a god beside Allah. It is not the wicked who are deified but the good, and so it has ever been, even to those who took ʿĪsā son of Maryam as a god. For this reason Islam forbids raising monuments over graves. And it is a warning against those of our own Ummah who bow at the graves of a walī or a pīr and circle them in Ṭawāf: this is exactly what the Jāhilī Arabs did.

❧Isaf and Na'ilah, and the 360

Two figures, Isāf and Nāʾilah, were set upon al-Ṣafā and al-Marwah and touched during the Saʿy. ʿĀʾishah said the Arabs told their legend from her childhood: they were two lovers who could find no place to be intimate but the interior of the Kaʿbah, and as a punishment Allah turned them to stone where they stood; Quraysh took the two petrified figures as a wonder and set them on the two hills. When Islam came, the Muslims hesitated to make Saʿy between the hills, until Allah revealed: إِنَّ ٱلصَّفَا وَٱلْمَرْوَةَ مِن شَعَائِرِ ٱللَّهِ, "Indeed, al-Ṣafā and al-Marwah are among the symbols of Allah" (al-Baqarah 2:158), His signs long before Isāf and Nāʾilah were ever placed there. By the Conquest of Makkah some three hundred and sixty idols stood around the Kaʿbah, many of them humanoid, part human and part animal, like the centaur or the Sphinx.

❧No creed, and the daughters of Allah

Quraysh even held that the angels were the daughters of Allah, and worshipped them as such. And note that the Arabs, like every idolatrous society, had no unified creed. As the Hindus are the clearest example, ask ten of them their religion and you get ten answers, for there is no fixed ʿaqīdah. So it was with the Arabs: some believed in a Day of Judgment and some denied it, some this and some that; the one thing they shared was worshipping idols to draw nearer to Allah. Abū Rajāʾ al-ʿUṭāridī, who accepted Islam, said in a report in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: "In the Jāhiliyyah we would worship a stone; and if we found a finer stone we would throw the first away and take the other. And if in the desert we could find no stone, we would heap up a mound of sand, milk a goat over it to firm it, and then perform Ṭawāf around it." It is mind-boggling that intelligent people did this, and yet to this day in some lands you find a painted rock with meat and butter and sweets set before it. So the religion came to make plain that there are no intermediaries between a servant and his Lord, and that the meaning of لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱللَّه is that worship, in every form, belongs to Allah alone.