Further reading: Marjo Buitelaar, Fasting and Feasting
in Morocco: Women’s Participation in Ramadan (Oxford:
Berg, 1993); Riadh El-Droubie, “Muslim Festivals.” In
Festivals in World Religions, edited by Alan Brown, 211–
233. (New York: Longman, 1986); Hava Lazarus-Yafeh,
“Muslim Festivals.” Numen 25 (April 1978): 52–64.
idolatry
Idolatry (Arabic:
shirk
) in Islam is mentioned in
the q
Uran
in a variety of forms whose root (sh-r-
k) meaning is “sharing, participating, associating,”
in the context of “associating” anything other
than God with God. “Associationism” in Islamic
tradition has been applied in two basic contexts.
The primary meaning is usually understood as
actual polytheism or the worship of images, both
overt infringements of Islam’s cardinal principle,
tawhid
, declaring in life and thought “the one-
ness of God.” The secondary and polemic sense
involves accusations by some Muslims against
other Muslims for being insufficiently “pure” in
thought or practice, even though those accused of
shirk might consider themselves monotheists in
good standing.
The early quranic contexts for shirk, mean-
ing polytheism and idolatry, identify “opponents”
of Muhammad and the early
umma
, or religious
community of Muslims, among the pagan Mec-
cans. According to one of the earliest postquranic
Arabic sources on pre-Islamic religion, Kitab al-
asnam (The book of idols) attributed to Hisham
ibn al-Kalbi (d. 821), the Prophet’s pagan contem-
poraries among the q
Uraysh
, who dominated the
social, political, economic, and religious life of his
hometown, m
ecca
, had images of plural divini-
ties and sacred powers within the center of tribal
worship for the region, the k
aaba
, including such
deities as Hubal, Shams, Sin, and, among others,
a triple
goddess
associated with Arabian star-wor-
ship of Venus as the morning-evening star who
is named briefly (Q 53:20) in the Quran as Allat
(fem. of Allah, lit. “the Goddess”), al-Uzza (fem.
“the Mighty One”), and Manat.
According to a highly problematic narrative
known later as the s
atanic
v
erses
, the triple
goddesses were alluded to in the eighth- to mid-
ninth-century biography of the prophet (Sirat
rasul Allah) as well as described by Muslim histo-
rian al-Tabari in his early tenth-century History of
the prophets and kings as “the high flying cranes
(gharaniq) whose intercession is to be hoped for.”
In other words, the early Meccans could continue
to have recourse to the triple goddess alongside
recourse to a
llah
. This reference to the “satanic
verses,” which do not actually appear in the
Quran as we have it today, is usually explained
in Islamic exegesis as an occasion of abrogation
(naskh) in the Quran wherein God sent down a
later revelation (Q 53:19–23) to supersede and
“abrogate” the authority of the earlier narrative
suggested in the Sira. The quranic verses as they
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