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chapter 11 Pagan as -Fearers*

The pagan Arabs to whom this paper is devoted are those of the Qurʾān, more specifically the unbelievers of whom the Qurʾān informs us that they were the Messenger’s own people (62:2, cf. 2:151; 3:164 and implicitly elsewhere). They represent the community in which he must be presumed to have grown up and from which he had broken away by the time we meet them in the Qurʾān, so they give us a glimpse of the milieu in which he had been formed, or at least in which he operated. What kind of milieu was it, then? That is a big question and I shall only deal with it in terms of religion. Before I try to do so, however, I should explain that we only know the beliefs and prac- tices of the Messenger’s opponents from his own polemical statements about them, and that this evidently poses the question how far we can infer what they actually said or did from his account of them. There are certainly times when he is exaggerating, running several positions together, or expressing himself so obscurely that one can only guess at what he meant (a recurrent problem throughout the Qurʾān). Unlike most polemicists, however, he was not work- ing at a safe distance from his opponents, but rather preaching to them face to face, hoping to convert them. This obviously placed a limit on the amount of distortion he could engage in if he was to have hope of gaining a hearing. His statements are often aggressive, but they are also coherent and accord well with what we know about religious patterns in the pre-Islamic Near East. In short, the Messenger does seem to give us enough genuine information about his opponents for us to reconstruct their views and internal divisions, if only in broad outline. To return to the question of the religious milieu in which the Messenger was active, the answer is that his people were pagans, if only in the minimal sense of being neither nor . They did have at least one genuinely pagan habit, namely infanticide, a practice abhorred by Jews, Christians and the Messenger alike; and by the Messenger’s standard, they were downright polytheists, or more precisely ‘associationists’ (mushrikūn), meaning that they assigned ‘associates’ or ‘partners’ to God.1 Some of them venerated the sun and

* I should like to thank Angelos Chaniotis and Cook for reading and commenting on an earlier draft. 1 What follows is based on P. Crone, ‘The Religion of the Qurʾānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities’, Arabica 57, 2010, 151–200 [Ed.: included as article 3 in the present volume].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004319288_012 316 chapter 11 moon (27:24; 41:37), a habit also attested for the Arabs of the Syrian desert;2 and others venerated a number of lesser deities. But they accepted God as the supreme deity whatever else they venerated, and this is presumably why the Messenger called them ‘associationists’. The lesser deities that the Qurʾān condemns are indiscriminately referred to as deities and ; some of them were female, and some or all were of pagan origin if we trust the names assigned to them in the Qurʾān (al-Lāt, Manāt, al- Uzzā, 53:19f.; , Suwāʾ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq, and , placed in ’s time, 71:23). The Messenger is outraged by the idea of female angels, and even more by the fact that the pagans credited the angels with divine status and power of their own. In his view, the angels were created beings wholly subordinated to God, so that whatever power they had was His: they had no agency separate from His. But the unbelievers saw them as sons and daughters of God (e.g. 6:100; 16:57; 37:149, 153; 43:16), or in other words as partaking of His essence, and also as capable of influencing Him, much as the Christians saw Christ. He too was both part of God and a separate person capable of influencing God, by serving as an intermediary to whom one would, or indeed should, address all prayers and petitions to God according to Origen (d. 253 or 4).3 In the centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian era the dividing line between God and angels was also indistinct in the thought of Jews, Christians and pagans of the Greco-Roman world alike. The ‘sons of God’ who figure in the Hebrew Bible had come to be understood as angels already in the Hellenistic period, as seen in the Septuagint; and by the second and third centuries philosophically inclined pagans also identified their pagan deities as angels and sons of God (i.e. the supreme pagan deity), claiming that these beings formed part of God.4 Some early Christians accepted the equation of and angels as long as it did not amount to a legitimation of worship,5 but most resisted it, and angel worship seems quickly to have been perceived as too great a danger for

2 ‘Doctrina Addai’ in I. Ramelli, Bardaisan of Edessa, Piscataway, nj, 2009, 72 (sun and moon); cf. also Cyril of Alexandria on pagans in Phoenicia and , below (astral bodies). 3 ‘We have to send up every petition, prayer, intercession, and thanksgiving to the supreme God through the high of all angels, the living and divine logos’ (Origen, Contra Celsum, iv 4 (tr. H. Chadwick, Cambridge 1953, 266)). But cf. J.A. McGuckin (ed.), The Westminster Handbook to Origen, London 2004, 53, s.v. ‘angels’, citing his Homily on Leviticus 9:8, where all the angels act as intercessors. 4 Thus Maximus of Tyre, Oration 11:5; cf. also 39:55; the Oinoanda inscription in S. Mitchell, ‘The Cult of Theos Hypsistos between Pagans, Jews, and Christians’, in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Oxford 1999, 81–148, at 86. 5 Cf. Origen, Contra Celsum, v 4; Augustine, City of God, ix 21.