The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an

Abstract

at a mortuary installation where it cannot be determined if the carving was made at the time of burial or later (51). There are times when Al-Jallad’s refusal to draw connections between the Safaitic inscriptions and other religious traditions and topoi seems perhaps overly cautious. He engages in a lengthy discussion of the most frequently named deity, the goddess Allat, placing her within multiple pre-Islamic cosmoi, including Chaldaea, Syria, Rome and Nabataea, but does not move beyond this into tracing connections to the Qur’an or the Islamic era, despite the clear linguistic connections to terms used in the Qur’an to describe relations between humans and the Divine, such as ʿbd (slave) or sḍq (righteous one or devotee) or themes such as deities enacting justice or vengeance (62–4). One unanswered question in this work pertains to gender. The overwhelming majority of inscriptions are made by, for and about men and their feelings and deeds; women appear only occasionally, either as objects of longing (a sister) or as initiators (a daughter accomplishing a rite for someone ‘on account of her property’, followed by an invocation to ‘favor her and aid her’ (8)). While it would likely be prudent not to draw broad conclusions from such brief mentions, the apparent connection between wealth and favour seems intended to justify this particular woman’s accomplishment of a rite that seemingly was otherwise the prerogative of men. It further raises the question of what kinds of religious practices were engaged in by women and why certain practices seem to have been favoured by and/or were exclusive to men, particularly in light of the apparent lack of priests and institutions. Along the same lines, it is disappointing that Al-Jallad comments upon the prominent featuring of female figures in pre-Islamic Arabian rock art, mostly as dancing and singing girls playing instruments, often in the context of battle, but offers no discussion of this important presence. The chapter on figurative representations was disappointingly brief at a mere two pages, suggesting that the artistic representations of rock art were less interesting to the author than the inscriptions, despite the gender disparity. Even at times when Al-Jallad raises questions about which themes are covered (droughts, migrations, warfare and pasturing) and which are not (births of children, marriage, abundant rain) in prayers (89), he does not interrogate the relationship between these themes and the potential gender dynamics of the society. Overall, this work offers solid new evidence of pre-Islamic religious practices in Northern Arabia, adding to the knowledge base, even as some questions remain unanswered.