Pilgrimage in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Continuity and Rupture from Epigraphic Texts to the Qur’an

1 Introduction

This article aims to identify the main features of the pilgrimage ritual in the Qur’an and to compare the resulting picture with similar rituals depicted in the Arabian epigraphy, particularly the pilgrimage to the temple of Awām in Ma’rib, modern day Maḥram Bilqīs. The first part of the article will closely examine the words that Arabian inscriptions and the Qur’an use for pilgrimage as well as the vocabulary employed in these sources to describe some key rites associated with pilgrimage. One objective in this section is to mark the differences between the two seemingly distinct rituals that the Qur’an refers to: ʿumra, “a visitation [of the Kaʿba]”,^[1] and ḥajj, “festival”^[2] of a time-specific nature with certain indispensable practices, and to identify the extent to which they reflect distinct pre-Islamic rituals. Then, I will present elements from pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage that the Qur’an appears to honor or discard, with a particular emphasis on the questions of animal sacrifice, ritual hunting, and timing of pilgrimage. Some of my findings through the survey of inscriptions and the Qur’an will confirm previous scholarship on the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba, especially the argument proposed by Julius Wellhausen and later by Gerald Hawting that the ʿumra and ḥajj were two separate ritual cycles that were combined in the Qur’an and later Muslim traditions.^[3] Other findings will complicate the conventional picture we have on the Muslim pilgrimage. I will argue that animal sacrifice was not an integral part of the Qur’anic ḥajj, and the Qur’an made a conscious attempt to undo the link between pilgrimage and animal sacrifice, a link that clearly existed in the pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple and the Temple of Awām. The Qur’an’s endeavor to decouple the ḥajj from its pagan vestiges also led to its prohibition on hunting during the state of heightened purity, iḥrām,^[4] and on intercalation.

Before I begin my discussion of the primary sources, let me briefly acknowledge the main pieces of secondary literature that helped me think through this paper as they will be my interlocutors. The most detailed study of pilgrimage to the Temple of Awām in Marib is by Muhammad Maraqten who published a book chapter on this topic in 2021.^[5] Maraqten was personally involved in the excavations and epigraphic analysis of the findings at the temple. His chapter does make connections with the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba and I will use his work as a starting point in this article. On a more theoretical level and with more emphasis on the Muslim pilgrimage, I will also engage with Gerald Hawting’s recent piece titled “The Ḥajj, An Appendix to the Cult of the Kaʿba”.^[6] Even though my focus will be on the Qur’an and pre-Islamic evidence, Muḥammad’s last, and arguably the only, ḥajj, as it is described in later Muslim sources will be useful as well. Therefore, I will refer to Uri Rubin’s resourceful article on Muhammad’s farewell pilgrimage when necessary, in addition to Muslim sources that mention Muḥammad’s multiple ʿumras and his ḥajj.^[7]

2 What is Pilgrimage?

Let me start with a deceptively simple question: what does pilgrimage in its Arabian context exactly mean? Or, rather, to what extent do our dominant perceptions of pilgrimage correspond to what the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba or any pilgrimage in Arabia entailed? The English word “pilgrimage” has strong connotations of a journey, perhaps more than a visitation or a religious festival. It is the journey, and what one does and learns through it, that defines the pilgrimage as a spiritual or edifying activity, and it is therefore not rare for it to be used in a metaphorical sense without a clear, physical destination. Obviously, this is a very Christian way of understanding pilgrimage as attested in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which is the quintessential pilgrimage story where the journey itself is the most important part of the pilgrim’s activities. If the English word pilgrimage is skewed towards this sense of journey, it is important to be reminded that the root for the Qur’anic word for pilgrimage, ḥajj, in its common Semitic sense, primarily means to “hold a feast”, “to celebrate a religious holiday”, with likely etymological roots in “dancing” and “reeling”, which might have been part of activities performed during such festivals in ancient Israel.^[8]

The Hebrew Bible uses the word ḥag, the cognate to the Qur’an’s ḥajj, in this sense of religious festival, particularly in the context of the three great pilgrimage feasts. When the temple in Jerusalem still existed, Israelite men were supposed to be present at the temple, or more precisely “appear before God”, three times a year, for Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot.^[9] Offering of first-fruits and animal sacrifices led by priests were important components of these three festivals, and that dancing was part of these festivities can be inferred from another ḥag, the one that Israelites celebrated after fashioning the Golden Calf, where they made offerings and danced until Moses arrived.^[10]

The three pilgrimage festivals are precisely timed and attached to a sacred space: either the temple in Jerusalem or the altar that Aaron built in the desert for the ḥag of the Golden Calf. It does not matter how one’s journey was, or how long it took one to get to Jerusalem, what matters is that one arrives at the temple in time for the holidays to be celebrated and to be present before God. It can be argued that the requirement of presence at a set place and time is what separates a ḥag from a moʿed, “sacred season”, which is only temporally bound.^[11] This might sound like a trivial distinction, but it is an important one to understand the Arabian religious festivals that we tend to translate as pilgrimages. As I will argue, the Arabian pilgrimage was essentially the act of being present at a particular place, at a particular time in a particular state of ritual and mental purity.

3 Pilgrimage in Old South Arabian Texts

The centrality of being present for a religious festival at a particular place and time is behind the most common Old South Arabian word for pilgrimage, ḥḍr.^[12] The word means “to be present, to attend, to arrive” in Arabic, and this sense is preserved in some Old South Arabian inscriptions as well, especially in Qatabanic and late Sabaic texts.^[13] Maraqten identifies several other words that denote “pilgrimage” or “religious festival” in Old South Arabian, including ḥg, but it is clear that words from the root ḥḍr are the most prominent in the epigraphic record, including for the pilgrimage to Awām Temple.^[14] The word ḥg, on the other hand, is much less used and appears to be restricted to Haramic inscriptions, which are known to have closer affinities with Arabic than the rest of the Old South Arabian corpus.^[15] There are more than twenty different inscriptions that contain words from the root ḥḍr in the sense of “religious festival, pilgrimage”, some about the pilgrimage to the Temple of Awām but also around fifteen that talk about feasts dedicated to the Minaic god Wadd and ʿAthtār from Qarnaw, the Minaean capital.^[16] The number of attestations for the ḥḍr-festivals in South Arabia is impressive, but they hardly give much information about what these pilgrimages entailed, how long they lasted, and what kind of rituals were performed. Even the most well-known of these pilgrimages, that of the deity Almaqah at the Awām Temple which was surveyed and excavated for years and yielded several in-situ inscriptions, is not properly understood. Based on his study of the temple architecture and inscriptions from the site, Maraqten masterfully analyzed all that can be gleaned about the pilgrimage to the temple. Here I will focus on three aspects of the ḥḍr-ritual at Awām and other temples that can be followed in inscriptions with some certainty and can be useful for the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba: animal sacrifice as a practice during pilgrimage, purity regulations and prohibitions, and the timing of the ritual.

Despite the lack of detail in inscriptions about how the ḥḍr-festivals were conducted, one thing is clear: animal sacrifices were part of it. This connection is especially strong in Minaic texts, some of which were affixed to the city walls of Qarnaw. All of the Minaic ḥdṛ texts I was able to identify (see the footnote 16 above) also include information about animal sacrifices made during the festival with the word ḏbḥ, often giving the number of victims slaughtered on the occasion. To give an example, in an inscription placed on the eastern gate of the Qarnaw city walls, a man named ʿAmmyadaʿ tells about his successful commercial visits to Egypt, Assyria, and Gaza and thanks the deities Wadd and ʿAthtār ḏ-Qbḍm for whom he sacrificed 30 animals during their festivals, b-ʾḥḍrm ʾḏbḥm.^[17] It is hard to tell whether offering an animal sacrifice per every attending individual was needed, and ʿAmmyadaʿ in his inscription gives a large list of family members for whom the sacrifices could have been made. That sacrifices were made per household or per clan can be inferred from altars or sacrificial stone bases (mḏbḥt) found in the Awām Temple inscribed with the name of the family.^[18] In addition to mentioning to whom the altar belongs, inscriptions sometimes contain the name or the symbol of the deity that is the benefactor of the sacrifice. In one example, an altar belonging to an anonymous king doubles as a boundary stone (myṯn),^[19] which had cultic significance as I will explain below. More than ten of these mḏbḥt-stones are extant, and the fact that most of them were found not in the temple but far from it could mean that families would carry them to the temple and then take back home. I should also mention that this South Arabian connection between a religious festival and sacrificial altars to be used during the festival is something familiar from the biblical ḥag: Aaron, too, builds a mizbêaḥ to the Golden Calf in the wilderness before the festival.^[20]

As sure as the presence of animal sacrifice during the ḥḍr-festivals is that the sacrifice, and thereby the festival, took place at a prescribed time at the Awām Temple in Ma’rib. Some of the mḏbḥt-stones, as well as the inscription RES 4176, the most detailed account of the pilgrimage to the Awām Temple, clearly show that there was one prominent ḥḍr-festival that took place in the month of Dhū-Abhī (ḏ-ʾbhy) or Abhī (ʾbhy). Altar inscriptions mention two different days on which the sacrifice would take place, the seventh and the ninth,^[21] which might mean that there was a window of three days to perform the sacrifice or that each family or clan had their designated days for the service. Our knowledge of South Arabian calendar is incomplete, to say the least,^[22] but Christian Robin recently showed, based on a Nabataean-Sabaic bilingual inscription, that the month of Dhū-Abhī corresponds to February-March before the spring equinox.^[23] The festival at Awām Temple was so strongly associated with the month of Dhū-Abhī that an inscription could casually refer to it as “the festival of Abhī” (ḥḍr ʾbhy) without any further specification.^[24] Although taking place at the Temple of Almaqah, the festival seems to have drawn worshippers of other deities all across Ancient South Arabia and had almost a pan-South-Arabian character. For instance, in one inscription, the deity Tʾlb Riyām asks his devotees to make the pilgrimage to Almaqah in the month of Abhī.^[25] In another inscription, which contains a dedication to the deity Nswr, a priest of the latter mentions his pilgrimage to Almaqah in Abhī.^[26] Yet, it is also clear that such pilgrimage-festivals with the title ḥḍr could happen at other times. In one inscription, a woman offers a penitential gift to the Temple of Awām because she broke her promise to perform a pilgrimage to Almaqah together with her daughter right after the latter recovered from an illness.^[27] Her pilgrimage was meant to take place in another month, in ḏ-Hbs¹, and curiously no mention of an animal sacrifice is found in the inscription. It is possible that the animal sacrifice was a requirement of the annual Abhī festival, whereas individual visitors to the temple throughout the year did not have that obligation.

The third sure conclusion that we can derive about Arabian pilgrimages from inscriptions is that attendees of religious festivals had to follow strict codes of conduct and requirements of ritual purity, often at the risk of severe punishments and hefty fines. Temples and other spaces dedicated for cultic purposes, such as grazing fields for sacrificial animals, were deemed protected spaces, denoted by the semantic range of the root ḥ-r-m.^[28] People who perform the pilgrimage or pass through sacred spaces would also enter a state of heightened ritual purity as reflected in the inscription RES 4176.^[29] We do not have a complete list of prohibitions during this heightened period of ritual purity but sexual relations are clearly unacceptable as one inscription suggests.^[30] The same inscription indicates that the resulting ritual impurity could be resolved by washing but the transgressor did not wash themselves after the intercourse (lm yġtsl). A Safaitic inscription also suggests that washing was necessary before performing a pilgrimage.^[31] Another prohibition is on fighting and having disputes, once again mentioned in the inscription RES 4176.^[32] Possibly related to the warning against fighting is the ban on carrying weapons during a religious festival, this time denoted as mʿd rather than ḥḍr, as attested in a Haramic inscription. In this inscription those who enter the sanctuary of Ḥlfn at Kharibat Hamdān with a weapon are asked to pay a fine, and the fine is doubled if the weapon is blood-stained.^[33]

These three broad inferences from pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimages or religious festivals certainly have some bearing on the pilgrimage to Mecca as I will discuss below. Arabian pilgrimages, be it for Almaqah in Ma’rib or for Syn in Shabwa or for Wadd and ʿAthtār in Qarnaw, were centered around the idea of being present at a sacred space, at a prescribed time to perform what appears to be the most important act of the festival: animal sacrifice. Even though the evidence is admittedly not strong on this point, it can be said that ritual hunting was part of the festival as well, at least according to the inscription RES 4176.^[34] I should note, however, that most of our knowledge about pilgrimage in Arabia comes from the pre-monotheistic era, i. e., pre-400 CE. There is only one Sabaic inscription I was able to locate presumably from the monotheistic era^[35] that mentions a pilgrimage, and it is a woefully short one. The undated inscription, in which the inscriber asks the deity Rḥmnn to listen to their prayer (lysmʿn rḥmnn ṣlts),^[36] uses the word ḥg for pilgrimage, but it is our last testimony in epigraphy before ḥajj resurfaces in the Qur’an. During the two centuries when epigraphy was silent on Arabian pilgrimage and when pagan deities, to whom the pilgrimages would be dedicated, began to disappear from the epigraphic record, the ritual might understandably have gone through changes. As I will argue below, two key practices of the Arabian pilgrimage, animal sacrifice and ritual hunting, would be jettisoned in the first Islamic ḥajj.

4 Pilgrimage in the Qur’an: ḥajj and ʿumra

The Qur’an uses two words for pilgrimage, ḥajj and ʿumra, which are sometimes translated respectively as the “major” and “minor” pilgrimage. The distinction between the two is obvious according to later Muslim sources: the former is performed in a short window of time every year with a distinct set of rites at and around the Kaʿba, whereas the latter can be performed any time of the year (barring a few exceptions) and its rites take place primarily at the Kaʿba. This distinction is hard to uphold by the Qur’anic evidence alone, and it has been argued, by Wellhausen first and Hawting later on, that ḥajj and ʿumra were originally two separate rituals both having their own yearly cycle, only to be reinterpreted by Muḥammad and his followers to their current forms. The pilgrimage to the Awām Temple, however, presents itself as a comparable model for the ḥajj/ʿumra distinction in the Qur’an as there was one annual festival in Ma’rib in the month of Dhū-Abhī, but visitations at other times were attested as well. Both of these forms of festivals were called a ḥḍr whereas the annual one was, at least once, referred to as the “ḥḍr (festival) of Abhī”. Therefore, it is understandable that the Qur’an sticks with the North Semitic word for an annual festival, i. e., ḥag of the Hebrew Bible or ḥg of Safaitic and Haramic inscriptions, to refer to the annual pilgrimage, and the word ʿumra, literally “living, inhabiting, visiting”, parallels the semantics of Old South Arabian word of ḥḍr, “to be present, to live”. Even though the Qur’an does not spell out the ḥajj/ʿumra distinction clearly enough, it can be surmised that only ḥajj was strictly time-bound. Q 2:197 states that ḥajj is in “known months” (al-ḥajju ashhurun maʿlūmāt), and a few verses before that the Qur’an explains the rationale for the existence of new moons (ahilla) as tools of time measurement to calculate the time of the ḥajj, mawāqīt li-n-nās wa-l-ḥajj, “timekeeping signs for the people and the ḥajj” (Q 2:189). Q 2:203 also tells that rites of the pilgrimage take place during ayyām maʿdūdāt, “numbered days”. A similar statement is found in Q 22:28. It might in fact be the case that before Islam Arabs had a preference to perform the ʿumra during the sacred month of Rajab to align with a yearly fair,^[37] but the Qur’anic evidence seems to suggest that unlike ḥajj, ʿumra had no time limitations.

In other words, the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba, ḥajj in the strictest sense here and not ʿumra, was a religious festival at a sacred place at a specific time, similar to the pilgrimage to the Awām Temple in Ma’rib, and to Jerusalem when the temple existed. Journey was only a necessary part of participating in the festival if one did not live in these places. To wit, Q 2:196 stipulates that those who cannot afford to offer a sacrifice as part of the pilgrimage can fast ten days in total, three days while in Mecca and seven when they go back home. The Qur’an adds, however, that this stipulation is for those whose family is not present, or who does not live, near the Masjid al-Ḥarām (dhālika li-man lam yakun ahluhu ḥādirī^[38]l-masjidi l-ḥarām). In other words, the presence at Mecca at the right time is key for fulfilling the pilgrimage, and one gets a shorter fast of kaffāra if they actually live there. I would venture to say that the short Safaitic inscription that talks about someone whose pilgrimage to Baʿalsamīn in Sīʿ was rendered void (bṭl ḥg sʿ) addresses the same problem.^[39] The pilgrim simply could not make it to Sīʿ in time for the pilgrimage. The idea of ḥajj as the act of being present at a sacred space is succinctly worded in a ḥadīth of Muḥammad that goes as al-ḥajj ʿarafa, “the pilgrimage is [standing] at ʿArafa”^[40] and its precise timing during the month of Dhū al-Ḥijja is provided in other reports. Sure enough, later Muslim manuals of fiqh would identify “presence at ʿArafah on the 9th of Dhū al-ḥijja” as one of the three farāʿiḍ of the pilgrimage. One could travel for months, but if one did not make it to ʿArafah on the ninth day of Dhū al-ḥijja, they would not have fulfilled the ḥajj ritual.

If the ʿumra was indeed a year-long visitation as opposed to the annual festival of ḥajj, did these two rituals share the same practices or were they different from each other? As Wellhausen and Hawting considered ʿumra to be another annual festival based on testimonies in Muslim sources, they argued that ʿumra and ḥajj entailed two separate sets of rituals performed at two different seasons. While ḥajj took place in stations at a distance from Mecca such as ʿArafah, Muzdalifa and Minā, ʿumra was primarily a festival of the Kaʿba, and its main performance was a circumambulation of the latter. According to this model, the participants of the ḥajj had no obligation to visit the Kaʿba in pre-Islamic times. Only Muḥammad, or early Muslims after him, united the rites of the ḥajj and ʿumra in order to insert the visit of the Kaʿba among the obligations of the ḥajj. The evidence for the distinctness of ḥajj and ʿumra rites according to the Wellhausen-Hawting thesis is two-fold. First, the Muslim pilgrim is allowed to leave the state of iḥrām during the ḥajj before their final visit of the Kaʿba, which might indicate that ancient ḥajj would be over after the animal sacrifice at Minā. Second, there are reports about the ḥajj of the Umayyad governor Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf (d. 714) during the rebellion of ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (d. 692), where the former completed his pilgrimage without visiting the Kaʿba that was under Ibn al-Zubayr’s control. A reading of the Qur’anic passages about the ḥajj and ʿumra alongside the epigraphic evidence, however, raises doubts about the Wellhausen-Hawting thesis on the role that the Kaʿba played in these two rituals. First of all, both the three ḥagim among the Israelites and the pilgrimage in the month of Abhī to Ma’rib had a temple at the center of it. The pilgrimage had the sanctuary at its target even though other localities in the vicinity of the temple could be visited as part of the festivities. The pilgrimage to the Awām Temple, for instance, seems to have had a procession as part of its rituals from another temple in the city to the main sanctuary.^[41] Second, the Qur’an leaves no ambiguity about the connection between the ḥajj ritual and the circumambulation of the Kaʿba, mentioned in Q 2:125 and Q 22:29. It is more likely, therefore, that the Kaʿba and its attendant rites were part of both the ʿumra and the ḥajj on the eve of Islam, even though the latter had further rites associated with sites around Mecca.

The two obligatory acts of the ḥajj, being present at ʿArafah in the right season and the visitation of the sanctuary, then, have parallels in previous Arabian religious festivals. The third requirement, iḥrām, namely observing a heightened level of ritual purity during the performance of the pilgrimage, also has clear precedents in Arabian epigraphy as mentioned above. Just as in the religious festivals of the Awām Temple and the temple at Ḥlfn, the Qur’an has a set of rulings on prohibited acts during the pilgrimage, particularly about sexual intercourse and fighting. Q 2:197 states fa-man faraḍa fīhinna l-ḥajja fa-lā rafatha wa-lā fusūqa wa-lā jidāla fī l-ḥajj, “So whoever obliged himself in these months to do the pilgrimage, there are no sexual relations, no disobedience, and no dispute during the pilgrimage.” Another prohibition that the Qur’an is keen on promulgating during the pilgrimage in iḥrām is that of hunting land animals, and this is a curious one. It is mentioned twice in Sūrat al-Māʾida, once at the beginning and once towards the end. Q 5:95 states:

O believers, do not kill the game [lā taqtulū l-ṣayd] while you are in pilgrim sanctity [wa-antum ḥurum]; whosoever of you kills it willfully, there shall be recompense – the like of what he has killed, in flocks as shall be judged by two men of equity among you, an offering to reach the Kaʿba [hadyan bāligha l-kaʿba]; or expiation – food for poor persons or the equivalent of that in fasting, so that he may taste the mischief of his action. (tr. Arberry with my emendations)

After mentioning the prohibition and the associated terms of penitence for it, the Qur’an says in 5:95 ʿafā allāhu ʿammā salaf, “God pardoned what happened in the past”, hinting that people did habitually hunt during pilgrimage, perhaps even as part of the pilgrimage, but it was not acceptable anymore. The next verse clarifies that fishing or sea-game, ṣayd al-baḥr, and consuming of fish were permissible whereas it repeats that land-game is forbidden in iḥrām.^[42] One way to interpret the Qur’an’s insistent rhetoric against hunting during the pilgrimage could be that hunting had a religious character in Arabia before Islam and the Qur’an rejected it for its polytheistic undertones. Ritual hunt is a fairly well-studied aspect of religion in pre-Islamic South Arabia^[43] and there is much evidence for hunting as an activity dedicated to polytheistic gods like Athtar and Tʾlb Riyām. In addition to the possible reference to hunting during pilgrimage in the inscription RES 4176 that I mentioned above, there are inscriptions that describe ritual hunts at specific seasons, the non-observance of which was a severe offence. CIH 547, still from the Haram region, contains the penance paid by two clans for delaying the ritual hunt in the month of ḏ-Mwṣbm.^[44] There is even an inscription that suggests that a ritual hunt was dedicated to the deity Rḥmnn in the early monotheistic period but it quietly disappeared in Old South Arabian texts after the fourth century.^[45] It is likely that the Qur’an’s strong words against hunting in the state of iḥrām reflect its awareness of a polytheistic practice that was still fresh in the memories.

5 Animal Sacrifice During the Pilgrimage: Obligatory or not?

As I listed the farāʾiḍ of the ḥajj in Islamic jurisprudence above, one key practice of pre-Islamic Arabian and Jewish pilgrimage was curiously missing: animal sacrifice. Both Wellhausen and Hawting take it for granted that animal sacrifice was part of the Muslim pilgrimage as a continuation of pre-Islamic practices, but the issue appears to be more complicated. Muslim scholars have long disagreed about the status of sacrifice during ḥajj, but the majority opinion seems to be that for someone just fulfilling their ḥajj duty, sacrifice is at best mustaḥabb, “recommended” and certainly not compulsory. However, if one does combine their ḥajj with an ʿumra, either by going into clothing of iḥrām twice (known as ḥajj al-tamattuʿ) or by combining their niyya, “intention” for ḥajj and ʿumra but doing the necessary rituals for both separately (known as ḥajj al-qirān), then they need to perform an animal sacrifice. The basis for this ruling comes from Q 2:196, which somewhat obliquely refers to an ʿumra performed during the ḥajj season requiring a hady, “animal offering”. What this verse implies is that animal sacrifice becomes necessary only when the ʿumra and ḥajj are united or, according to another verse (Q 5:95), if the pilgrim violates the rules of iḥrām. Accordingly, Muslim jurists did not consider animal sacrifice a requirement of the ḥajj if it were to be performed alone. In fact, it almost seems from the Qur’anic evidence that animal sacrifice is a condition of ʿumra and not of the ḥajj. Q 48, which is concerned about Muhammad’s aborted attempt to perform an ʿumra before the Conquest of Mecca according to Muslim sources, mentions that Meccans did not allow the sacrificial animals (hady once again) that Muḥammad and his people brought with them to reach the place of sacrifice (maḥill).^[46] Later Muslim scholars, based on this verse and others about hady in the Qur’an, considered animal sacrifice a recommended act (mustaḥabb), not a compulsory one, for both ʿumra and ḥajj when they are performed separately.^[47] The question I will explore in the remainder of this article is why the animal sacrifice was taken out of the ḥajj (or relegated to a recommended status at best) even though it is an integral part of both Second-Temple Jewish and pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage that I find otherwise largely comparable to the Qur’anic ḥajj. Here I’ll propose two solutions, or rather two ways of thinking to understand why the transition from the pre-Islamic to Islamic ḥajj created complications for animal sacrifice.

First, we have to consider the chronology of Muḥammad’s approach to the pilgrimage as reflected in the Qur’an’s internal chronology. Here I’ll rely on Nicolai Sinai’s revision of Nöldeke-Schwally’s order of the sūras based on average verse length.^[48] A diachronic reading of the Qur’an suggests that Muhammad’s concern with the ḥajj came very late in the process of the Qur’an’s composition, even later than his interest in performing an ʿumra. Even then, the Qur’an was primarily concerned with expurgating pagan residues in the ḥajj by at times approving and at times disapproving existing practices. It is necessary, therefore, to enumerate the references to the ḥajj and ʿumra and put them into a rough chronological order. There are five chapters of the Qur’an that contain information about the pilgrimage, all of them considered to be Medinan in the Muslim tradition as well as in the chronology of Nöldeke-Schwally: Q 2 (al-Baqara), 5 (al-Māʾida), 9 (al-Tawba), 22 (al-Ḥajj), and 48 (al-Fatḥ). With respect to their content on the ḥajj and ʿumra, I put them in the following chronological order from the earliest to the latest: 48, 22, 2, 9, 5. As I go through each chapter’s references to the ḥajj and ʿumra, I will explain my reasoning for the order I propose. The sequence of the references, in turn, will show how the animal sacrifice and ritual hunting were taken out of the picture for Muḥammad’s only ḥajj.

The first in the list, Q 48 talks about Muḥammad’s unsuccessful attempt to perform a visit of al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, which could best be understood as an ʿumra, even though the word itself does not appear in the sūra. Muslim scholars associate the chapter with the events around this ʿumra and the subsequent Treaty of Ḥudaybiya, dated traditionally to the year 6 AH / 628 CE. The only relevant information in the chapter about this visit is that Muḥammad and his followers brought animals to offer (hady, Q 48:25) but they were not able to reach the Kaʿba leading to the Qur’an’s promise that they shall enter the sanctuary the next year with their shaven or shortened hair (Q 48:27). As Hawting argues, by this time Muḥammad seems to have had no interest in the ḥajj, which was a timed ritual filled with pagan rituals. The treaty of Ḥudaybiya established a ten-year truce and gave Muḥammad the chance to perform an ʿumra the year after. In two years, however, Mecca would be conquered, forcing Muḥammad and his followers to make a decision about the time-honored ritual of the ḥajj. According to the sīra, Muḥammad’s lack of interest in the ḥajj continued during the next two years when Mecca was under his control. In the first year (8 AH / 630 CE), Muḥammad performed an ʿumra after the conquest in the month of Dhū al-Qāʿda, a month before the usual time of the ḥajj. Then he left for Medina and asked his representative in Mecca, a companion called ʿAttāb b. Asīd, to participate in the ḥajj. Interestingly, al-Ṭabarī adds that the ḥajj in that year was performed “according to the usual customs of the Arabs”, ʿalā mā kānati l-ʿarabu taḥujju bihā.^[49] In the second year (9 AH / 631 CE), Muḥammad once again did not perform the ḥajj but sent Abū Bakr from Medina with three hundred people and twenty-five camels to represent Muslims at that year’s festival.^[50] It is on the occasion of this pilgrimage in the year 9 AH / 631 CE that Muslim sources consider Q 9 to be revealed, abolishing the practice of intercalation to match the month of pilgrimage with the same season (Q 9:37), and declaring the mushrikūn to be ritually impure (najas) to ban them from entering the holy precincts (Q 9:28).^[51]

To summarize the progression of the events so far, Muḥammad left the ḥajj to unfold as it used to in the first year of his control of Mecca (8 AH / 630 CE), as there was very little time to make any changes to it between the conquest and the season of ḥajj. In the following year (9 AH / 631 CE), he laid the groundwork to transform the ḥajj by sending Abū Bakr and ʿAlī with his instructions while still avoiding to perform it until such changes he deemed necessary to be implemented. Only the year after that, and a few months before his death on 10 AH / 632 CE, did Muḥammad finally perform his only ḥajj with further restrictions and prohibitions proclaimed in some verses of Q 5. I would argue that the references to ḥajj and ʿumra in Q 2 and Q 22 need to be placed chronologically in the period between the composition of Q 48, the ʿumra of 6/628, and Q 9 (around the time of the ḥajj season in 9 AH / 631 CE), during when the ḥajj was a question to be resolved after the Conquest of Mecca. In both Q 2 and Q 22, the Qur’an associates the ḥajj and ʿumra with Abraham and his building of the Kaʿba with Ishmael. Q 22:26 – 27 states on this point:

And when We settled for Abraham the place of the House: 'Thou shall not associate with Me anything. And do thou purify My House for those that shall go about it and those that stand, for those that bow and prostrate themselves; and proclaim among men the ḥajj, and they shall come unto thee on foot and upon every lean beast, they shall come from every deep ravine. (tr. Arberry with my emendations)

Q 2:125 has the same association with almost the same words as Q 22, but Q 2 has additional instructions about the rites of the ḥajj and ʿumra, including the status of walking between the hills of Ṣafā and Marwa that I will discuss below. This might indicate that the verses on the ḥajj in Q 2 were slightly later than those in Q 22.

My conclusion from this chronological reading is that between Muḥammad’s first attempt at an ʿumra (recounted in Q 48) and the time of his only ḥajj (around the time of Q 5), the Qur’an progressively raised the status of these two rituals while trying to cleanse them of unwanted practices of the pagan past. A striking case of such cleansing appears in Q 2:158 on the question of the procession between the hills of Ṣafā and Marwa. The Qur’an’s stance on the practice is one of concession: “Ṣafā and Marwa are among the waymarks of God (shaʿāʾir allāh); so whoever makes the ḥajj to the House, or the ʿumra, it is no fault in him (fa-lā junāḥa ʿalayhi) to circumambulate them.” Here the Qur’an chooses to honor the practice but with a wording that exculpates those who do it rather than recommending the ritual. I would argue that the Qur’an displays an even stronger uneasiness when it comes to animal sacrifice during pilgrimage. Q 22, which I dated to the period before the first truly Islamic ḥajj of 9 AH / 631 CE, mentions an obscure prohibition concerning the consumption of animals, which must be about those sacrificed during religious festivals. After the verses asking Muḥammad to invite people for the ḥajj (Q 22:27) and a brief reference to sacrificial animals and other rites of the ḥajj in Q 22:29, the next verse states: “You are permitted [animals of] grazing livestock except for what will be recited to you. So avoid the abomination of idols (wa-jtanibū rijsan mina l-awthān), and avoid false speech.” What is meant here by “the abomination of the idols” and what does it have to do with animal sacrifice?

The word awthān (pl., s. wathan) is often translated simply as “idols” based on two other attestations of it in the Qur’an,^[52] but epigraphy suggests that it refers to something very specific in the context of pagan practices of animal sacrifice. The word wathan only exists in Old South Arabian, Arabic, and Ge’ez,^[53] and the latter very likely has it as a loanword from Arabic. There are tens of extant wṯn-stones from pre-Islamic South Arabia, the majority of which appears to be boundary stones to delimit personal property^[54] and tribal territories.^[55] In some cases, however, the stelae are erected as a monument to a deity^[56] or because a deity commanded a devotee to install them through an oracle for their well-being and prosperity.^[57] In one occasion, a man dedicated a wṯn to the deity Almaqah, as the latter dictated to him, for the protection of his crops and cattle. The man also promised that he were to sacrifice to the wṯn an unblemished female or male animal every year so that Almaqah would protect him.^[58] The fact that animal sacrifice and blood libations were performed near the wṯn is further confirmed by another inscription that describes the process of obtaining an oracle from a wṯn by interpreting the flow of a lamb’s blood.^[59] If the South Arabian evidence is any reference for the Qur’anic awthān, these stones acted as markers of sacred space and in some cases, as sacrificial altars. As I mentioned above, excavations at the Awām Temple yielded many such sacrificial altars, also called mḍbḥt, that families would bring to the temple to perform their sacrifices during pilgrimage. In other words, just as in the case of hunting, there was a strong connection between pilgrimage, sacrifice, and sacrificial stones that were taken to represent pre-Islamic deities. The fact that the Qur’an is warning pilgrims about awthān indicates that their use as loci of sacrifice was still in place. A few verses after mentioning the abomination of awthān, the Qur’an presents another corrective to what appears to be the pre-Islamic notion of animal sacrifice as a gift to deities. Q 22:37 states: “The flesh of them [sacrificial animals] shall not reach God, neither their blood, but godfearing (al-taqwā) from you shall reach Him.”

Another indication that the legacy of pre-Islamic sacrificial practices during pilgrimage continued to bother Muḥammad in his only ḥajj can be seen in the prohibitions listed at the beginning of Q 5. The sūra opens with a warning against consuming meat that is hunted during the pilgrimage, more precisely while in the state of iḥrām (Q 5:1), followed by a wider set of rules about respecting the symbols of the pilgrimage and the Kaʿba (Q 5:2). The next verse adds further limits on food, particularly meat, including a ban on eating “that which is sacrificed on altars (wa-mā dhubiḥa ʿalā l-nuṣub) and that you divide by divination arrows (wa-an tastaqsimū bi-l-azlām)” (Q 5:3). Once again, the word nuṣub here is often translated as “idols” but their precise meaning can be followed in epigraphy. The root n-ṣ-b is common Semitic with the meaning of “setting up a stone” and a nṣb can then refer to a pillar or a monument erected for cultic purposes or as a memorial for the dead. The word maṣṣēbāh from the same root is used for both senses in the Hebrew Bible.^[60] In ancient South Arabia we find a sizeable corpus of nṣb specimens, which are alabaster or stone monuments of rectangular shape usually containing a relief image of the dead person with a brief inscription saying “the funerary stela (nṣb) of so-and-so”.^[61] These were memorial pillars acting as tombstones and it is hard to tell whether they were ever used as loci of sacrificial offerings. In the few Nabataean inscriptions from the Ḥijāz (first century BCE to second century CE) that the word occurs in, it seems to denote funerary monuments as well, but it is also attested in Petra in the sense of “erected stone monuments” or betyls that represent deities.^[62] It is in Safaitic texts, as Ahmad al-Jallad has shown recently, that nṣb-stones have a clear juxtaposition with animal sacrifice (ḏbḥ) similar to the way the Qur’an talks about nuṣub.^[63]

The stark warning against meat sacrificed on nuṣub right after mentioning the rites of the ḥajj, and in a verse considered to be the last one to be revealed no less,^[64] shows that pre-Islamic practices continued to lurk behind the ḥajj to the end of Muḥammad’s career. It is also striking that the Qur’an seems to deliberately avoid using the words from the root ḏ-b-ḥ when referring to animal sacrifice during pilgrimage, opting for hady, “animal led somewhere to be offered”, except in Q 5:3, when it refers to the pre-Islamic practice. This is all the more remarkable considering that both Ancient South Arabian and Second Temple Jewish pilgrimages would refer to the animal sacrifice with words from the root ḏ-b-ḥ. Finally, I should mention that the reference in Q 5:3 to the partitioning of sacrificed animals through divination seems to have an intriguing parallel in a Minaic inscription, still in the context of sacrifice during a religious festival. The inscription YM 28488 B mentions three priests of the deity Wadd, who were responsible for dividing the portions of the sacrificed animals at a ḥḍr festival to Wadd and other deities of Maʿīn, as well as their priests.^[65] Given the close connection between pilgrimage and animal sacrifice on the one hand, and the inertia in the ways animal sacrifice was practiced in pre-Islamic ḥajj, it is perhaps understandable that the Qur’an was not keen on pronouncing it as a sine qua non of the Islamic pilgrimage. Hady, a gift of gratitude for being able to perform ḥajj and ʿumra together and certainly not a compulsory sacrifice, replaced the formal ḏbḥ-sacrifices of pre-Islamic pilgrimage while ritual hunting was strictly condemned.

6 Conclusion

An obvious conclusion from the discussion above is that there is much to learn from epigraphic sources to shed light on the pilgrimage in the Qur’an. The Qur’anic pilgrimage, just as its Jewish and Ancient South Arabian counterparts, was essentially a festival tied to a sanctuary and to a sacred time. Inscriptions about the pilgrimage to the Awām Temple and other sanctuaries in Yemen consisted of parallel practices and prohibitions to the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba, most importantly on the issue of regulations around iḥrām. Yet, there was a conscious effort in the Qur’an to put some distance between questionable practices from the pre-Islamic ḥajj to the ritual that Muḥammad and Muslims could endorse and perform. Muḥammad’s reluctance to perform the ḥajj for two years after the conquest of Mecca, according to the Muslim sources, should be interpreted in this light. Among his major concerns, it appears, were the practice of hunting during pilgrimage as a ritual performance and animal sacrifices performed on stone altars that the Qur’an calls awthān and nuṣub. These latter, in particular, have multiple attestations in Arabian epigraphy in the context of religious festivals and animal sacrifice.

Another point that a reading of the Qur’an about ḥajj and ʿumra together with pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy reveals is that some aspects of pre-Islamic religious practice lingered longer than others. It has lately been argued, convincingly in my opinion, that Muḥammad’s interlocutors were not idol-worshippers as the Muslim narrative suggests, and that monotheists have long been advancing into the Ḥijāz before the rise of Islam with the testimony of inscriptions and the Qur’an.^[66] This view, as much as it makes sense with the current state of the epigraphic evidence, should take into account the fact that physical rituals have an engrained inertia, or “persistence” as Walter Burkert called it.^[67] Long after forsaking their pantheon for a henotheistic or monotheistic worldview, pre-Islamic populations of the Ḥijāz could have naturally retained their habits around recurrent rituals such as the pilgrimage and animal sacrifice. It is telling that the Qur’an’s rhetoric against disapproved practices about the ḥajj comes at the final end of the text chronologically, in late Medinan chapters. Transformation in the realm of quotidian, conspicuous religious practices was slow, even in the case of a watershed moment as the emergence of Islam.