Intersections of Material and Literary History in Religion and Ritual of Ancient Arabia through Islam

Abstract The reconciliation of Ibn al-Kalbī’s ninth-century CE text of on pre-Islamic Arabia with modern scholarship offers certain insights to religious practices in the Arabian Peninsula from prehistory through the seventh cenury CE This study integrates his early Book of Idols into existing archaeological and anthropological studies about diverse aspects of pre-Islamic religion and ritual: diverse forms of litholatry; pilgrimage rituals; and the social economy of sacrifice and rain rogation rituals. Al-Kalbī’s text is recognized rightly for its essential character as a product from a distinct cultural milieu, early Islamic Kūfa, distant by time, geography, and culture from the pre-Islamic culture of Arabian antiquity of the peninsula and particularly the ancient kingdoms of Yemen in the southwest. Nevertheless, this article analyzes this contested source for several of its alignments with recent archaeological and anthropological findings.