blowing wind, some in giving parents their offspring, curing illnesses, sparing the community from famine or other social evils, and so on. In order to overcome the obvious fact that those idols were no more than objects of their own making, the Arabs allocated their idols a middle position between them and God. The idols acted as intermediaries, appealing to God on their behalf, so that He did not punish them severely for their sins.
There were 360 idols in and around the Kaʿbah. Most prominent of all were Hubal, al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā, which were considered the chiefs of all Arabian idols. Hubal was made of red carnelian, in the shape of a man. When the Quraysh gained supremacy in Makkah, Hubal was found to have one arm broken. The Quraysh replaced it with an arm of gold. It was the supreme idol. Al-Lāt was in Ṭā’if, while al-ʿUzzā had a place of its own near ʿArafāt.
When the Arabs wanted to embark on any important venture, they went to the Kaʿbah and offered a certain man who drew lots an amount of money and a camel to draw lots with the assistance of Hubal. They would accept the outcome as final. If a crime was committed and they could not determine who the criminal was, they drew lots. If the result accused a certain person, he was believed to be the criminal and there was no way he could prove his innocence.
One of their most absurd beliefs was their claim that God had married the jinn and begot angels as His daughters through that marriage. They therefore worshipped the angels, whom they considered God’s daughters, and the jinn, whom they claimed to be related to God by marriage. They feared the jinn a great deal, because they considered them to be evil spirits whose main object was to cause harm. They tried to spare themselves that harm by wearing charms and appealing to the masters of the jinn for protection. To them, madness and mental diseases were caused by the jinn, and each fortune-teller had a jinni companion who gave him news from the world beyond. According to them, every poet had a jinni who inspired him with poetry.
They further believed in all sorts of superstition, for example, that when a person was murdered, his spirit would be embodied in a certain type of bird, named al-Hāmah, which flew round his grave, calling to people to give it a drink, until his murder was avenged.
Women were treated as far inferior to men. They were not allowed any share of inheritance. Indeed, they were treated as part of the inheritance of the deceased. The heir disposed of the wife of the deceased as he pleased. He married her without even consulting her, if he so wished. Alternatively, he gave her in marriage to anyone he liked, without even asking her whether she wanted to marry or not. A man could marry any number of women, divorcing them at will and even placing them, at times, in a state of no marriage and no divorce. The birth of a girl was received with a feeling of gloom. A father considered the birth of a daughter to him as nothing less than outright disaster. This was because women did not fight in tribal wars and could not earn their living. Some of them would even hide away for a number of days because of their shame at begetting daughters. Young girls were buried alive by their parents because they were a financial burden. Indeed, such burial was occasionally agreed upon at the time the marriage contract was made.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the pleasures of this world counted for everything with the Arabs at that time. They viewed death as bringing the absolute end of life. Resurrection was considered absolutely impossible. For anyone to suggest that people come back to life after death was interpreted as outright madness.
Yet the Arabs were not without virtues. They rated bravery, faithfulness, truthfulness and hospitality very highly. These virtues, however, were not consolidated well enough to create a noble social order. Indeed, they were overshadowed by the petty concerns and the pursuit of pleasure which were characteristic of that society.2
The absurd religious beliefs led to confusion and innovations in different aspects of worship. It is known, for example, that pilgrimage to the Kaʿbah continued to be observed ever since Abraham made his declaration to mankind, on orders he received from God, that pilgrimage to the Kaʿbah was a duty incumbent on them all. Although other nations might have been totally oblivious to this duty, it continued to be observed in Arabia, despite the change that crept into their religious beliefs which made them polytheists after they had been believers in God’s oneness. Nevertheless, the Quraysh introduced certain innovations in the duty of pilgrimage. Although we cannot determine the exact date these innovations were introduced, it must have been approximately half a century before the start of Qur’ānic revelations.
It is well known that certain duties of pilgrimage are done outside the boundaries of the Ḥaram area, which extends in a circle of about a 20-kilometre radius around Makkah. Attendance at ʿArafāt, which is the main duty of pilgrimage, is one of these, since ʿArafāt lies outside the Ḥaram area. It is common knowledge that no pilgrimage is valid unless the pilgrim is present at ʿArafāt on the 9th of Dhul-Ḥijjah, the last month of the lunar year. The Quraysh, however, declared that they themselves were exempt from such attendance at ʿArafāt. To justify their claim, they argued that the Kaʿbah was the most sacred spot on earth. The Ḥaram area, which surrounds the Kaʿbah, derived its sanctity from the fact that the Kaʿbah was its centre point. It was not logical, they argued, for people living in the most sacred area in the world to go to an area which is less sacred in order to offer their worship, when other people covered hundreds of miles to come to the Ḥaram area for no purpose other than offering worship. They therefore decided not to attend at ʿArafāt when they did their pilgrimage, although they acknowledged that such attendance at ʿArafāt was part of pilgrimage for all other people. They called themselves the Ḥums, which meant, linguistically, ‘puritanical’, and included under that title the people of the Ḥaram area and their offspring, whether they lived inside or outside its boundaries. That meant a classification of pilgrims into two groups, giving unwarranted privileges to the people of Makkah, for no reason except the fact that they lived in the neighbourhood of the Kaʿbah. This is contrary to the very essence of Divine Faith as preached by Abraham, Ishmael and all Prophets, ending with Muhammad (peace be upon them all). Divine faith makes all people equal and they can achieve distinction only through their deeds, not through any coincidental factor such as birth, nationality or race.
Usually, when the notion of a privileged class takes hold in a certain society, that class manages to add to its privileges as time passes. The Quraysh did exactly that, but imposed on themselves certain restrictions which might have been introduced by way of compensation for their unwarranted privileges. They claimed that they were not allowed to produce cooking fat from milk or butter when they were in the state of consecration, or iḥrām. Nor were they allowed to enter any dwelling made of animal hair during their iḥrām. They were allowed only to stay in dwellings or tents made of animal hide. No specific reason was advanced for these restrictions except to emphasize that the Ḥums were a class apart. More stringent restrictions were imposed by the Quraysh on pilgrims from outside the Ḥaram area. Pilgrims and other visitors to Makkah were not allowed to eat any food which they might have brought with them from outside the Ḥaram area. They could eat only what they were given by the people of Makkah or what they bought in the sacred city. Moreover, they were not allowed to do their ṭawāf when they arrived in Makkah unless they had garments made or bought in Makkah itself. If they could not find or buy any, they had to do their ṭawāf in the nude. Men could wear nothing, while women were allowed to have a single garment provided that it was cut in several places in order to make their private parts visible. The idea of nakedness when practising an act of worship in a sacred place seems extremely perverted. One wonders how the Quraysh could justify it and persuade the Arabs to accept it. One has only to remember that those people accepted that wooden figures and stone statues which they themselves made were their gods, to whom they prayed and from whom they sought help. Their justification for imposing nakedness on visitors to the Kaʿbah was that people were not allowed to do the ṭawāf in the clothes which they wore when they committed sins. Nobody was there to tell them that purification from sin applied to the individual, not his clothes.
If a person from outside Makkah could not buy garments made in Makkah for his first ṭawāf and he did not wish to do the ṭawāf in the nude, he was allowed to proceed with his ṭawāf in his ordinary clothes, provided that he took them off and threw them away as soon as he finished. Neither he nor anyone else could use those