Encyclopedia of Islam

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