In the years when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was passing through his thirty-sixth to his thirty-ninth year, the anguish that had been growing in him since his youth gathered around a single sight: the Sanctuary itself. The Kaaba stood in the valley of Makkah as it had stood from the hand of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both), the first house appointed for mankind, raised, as the later revelation would declare, for the worship of Allah alone and the proclamation of His name; and around its ancient stones, in these very years, stood the gods. Al-Buti writes that the Kaaba was one of the vestiges of the religion of Ibrahim which the Arabs of the jahiliyyah still respected, erected by the father of prophets and his son so that it would be a place for the worship of Allah and a mosque in which only His name would be mentioned; and the very reverence the Arabs paid it became the pedestal upon which their idols were set. This page of the chronicle follows the Prophet's ﷺ distress into that sight and asks what it was that he saw, for the master record names it plainly: increasing distress and sorrow over the widespread idol worship, the pagan rites, and the moral degradation practised by Quraysh around the sacred Sanctuary, and the believer who understands what the idols were will understand why the purest heart in Makkah could not look upon them in peace.
The origin of the idolatry was itself remembered history, and the sirah preserves it. Al-Mubarakpuri transmits the account: most of the Arabs had first followed the call of Ismail (peace be upon him) and professed the religion of his father Ibrahim, worshipping Allah and professing His Oneness, until they forgot part of what they had been reminded of; and then there came a chief of Khuzaah named Amr ibn Luhay, a man renowned, as the account has it, for righteousness, charity, and care for religion, who travelled to Syria and saw the people there worshipping idols, approved of it, and brought back with him an idol named Hubal, which he placed in the middle of the Kaaba, summoning the people to its worship. From Makkah the paganism spread through the Hijaz, the Makkans being the custodians of the Sacred House; and a great many idols, bearing different names, were introduced until, at the coming of Islam, the tradition counted three hundred and sixty of them around the Kaaba. Let the believer weigh the tragedy of it: the corruption entered the Sanctuary through a man celebrated for piety. The enemy of Allah rarely announces his innovations with the face of a villain; he wears the garb of reverence, and the innovation that would hold a nation in darkness for centuries arrived in the holiest city on earth carried by a pious chief.
The gods themselves stood in a hierarchy the Prophet ﷺ knew by name. Hubal, the imported deity of Amr ibn Luhay, had his place within the Kaaba, and before him were cast the divining arrows of the azlam, consulted in the gravest matters of lineage and inheritance: when a man doubted the filiation of a child, the arrows before Hubal would decide whether the child was of the tribe, an ally, or cast off; and the decision of a carved stone was suffered to settle the fate of human beings. Around the Sanctuary and across the land stood the goddesses: al-Lat in Taif, al-Uzza in the valley of Nakhlah, and Manat at al-Mushallal near Qadid on the Red Sea; every tribe had its own idols, and every house its gods, and the pilgrimage season itself distributed the deities among the tribes to carry home. The Book of Allah would later name the three goddesses in a single verse, and the believer notes that of all the panoply of Arabian paganism, it is precisely these that the Quran condescends to mention, for they were the great ones, the daughters of Allah as their worshippers claimed, and the final revelation would expose the claim in the hearing of all the worlds.
What made the sight intolerable to a heart created for tawhid was the theology that was practised at the idols, for the Arabs of the jahiliyyah did not imagine they had abolished Allah. Al-Mubarakpuri sets out their reasoning from the Quran's own report of it: they believed that the idols, their heathen gods, would bring them near to Allah, lead them to Him, and mediate with Him for their sake; and the Book answered them in the words that were yet to descend, the words by which their whole system stands judged in every age: is not pure devotion due to Allah alone, while those who take protectors besides Him say, we only worship them that they may bring us near to Allah. And in another place: they worship besides Allah that which neither harms them nor profits them, and they say, these are our intercessors with Allah. Here is the anatomy of shirk laid bare: not the denial of the Creator, but the insertion of carved mediators between the creature and his Lord; and the Prophet ﷺ, whose soul had been kept from every taint of it by the guarding of Allah, saw the whole of it, the prostrations to stone and wood, the circumrotation before the images, the hands raised in supplication to things his own hands could have carved, and his grief was the grief of a man watching his people call upon what could never answer them.
For the futility of the idols was total, and the later Book would press the point upon every generation with a logic that closes every door of escape. Those you call upon besides Allah are servants like you, the revelation would say: call upon them, then, and let them answer you, if you are truthful. Do the idols create, or provide, or hear? A carved god is the work of its worshipper's hands; the wood that is not warmed by fire may be shaped into a god, and the remainder of the tree fuels the kitchen; and the same block that a man bows to in the morning may be planed into a shelf by evening. The idols of Makkah had no power even over themselves: when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ entered the city at the conquest, years after these years of anguish, the Companion Ibn Masud (may Allah be pleased with him) reported what he did to them, striking the three hundred and sixty with a stick in his hand while the word of Allah came from his tongue: truth has come, and falsehood has departed; indeed falsehood is bound to depart. The believer reads that scene as the answer of Allah to the anguish of these earlier years: the grief of the thirty-sixth year was requited in the sixtieth year of the same life, and the man who had never bowed to Hubal was raised to break him before the eyes of the people who had bowed to him.
The rites of the idols extended through the whole calendar and the whole economy of Makkah, and the Prophet ﷺ could not walk the city without walking among them. The worship, as al-Mubarakpuri catalogues it, was devotion to the idols, seeking refuge with them, acclamation of their names, calling on them in hardship and supplicating them for the fulfilment of wishes; pilgrimage to the idols and circumrotation around them, self-abasement and prostration before them; the seeking of their favour through sacrifices and immolations upon the stone altars, the nusub, and the consecration of portions of food and drink and cattle and crops to them, portions that could be transferred from Allah's share to the idols' share, though never once in reverse. Upon the animals were laid the classifications of the bahira and the saiba, the wasila and the hami, the whole invented system of dedicated beasts that the Quran would one day abolish in a single verse; and all of it, the tradition states, was first invented by Amr ibn Luhay, the same pious chief who had set Hubal in the House. The prophet of Allah ﷺ saw a people whose religion had become a vast machinery of superstition, eating up their herds, distorting their families, and crowding the house of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) with the very objects of wood and stone that Ibrahim himself had been sent to destroy.
His own recorded response to all this belongs to these years and is stark in its simplicity. Al-Mubarakpuri, in his review of the Prophet's ﷺ life before the commissioning, writes that he held the idols in extreme aversion and most abhorrence, and that he could never tolerate someone swearing by al-Lat and al-Uzza. Not merely would he not worship them, and not merely would he not invoke them, but the hearing of their names upon an oath was a weight upon his spirit; such was the perfection of the tawhid planted in him before he could have named it a doctrine. The reader of this chronicle already knows from an earlier page how the guarding of Allah had kept him from every prostration to an idol from his boyhood, and how the tradition witnesses that he never once saluted an idol up to the coming of revelation; that page told of the divine protection. This page tells of the inner fruit of that protection: an active, sorrowing abhorrence that made the idol-filled Sanctuary a place of pain to the purest of its visitors, and the oath by a goddess an offence to his spirit.
The consequence, in the economy of Allah's preparation, was withdrawal. Ibn Kathir, weighing all the accounts of the seclusion that followed, states the connection as the scholars of the sirah received it: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ only preferred seclusion and being alone from his people because of the clear error in which he saw them engaged, and that error was their worshipping and prostrating before idols; and his liking for being alone increased as the revelation of Allah came closer to him. Here the chronicle's threads are drawn together for the reader: the theological anguish of this event and the turning inward that the following pages record are not two stories but one. The heart that could not worship what its people worshipped, and could not be silent about what its Lord's house had become, sought in the hills above Makkah the room to hold its grief before Allah alone; the solitude of Hira, which the reader is approaching, was born in the valleys of idolatry described on this page.
The idols did not merely receive worship; they were consulted as oracles, and in their oracles the servitude of the worshipper became complete. Al-Mubarakpuri describes the divinatory tradition of the azlam, the featherless arrows of three kinds, one showing yes, another no, and a third blank, which were cast in the serious matters of life, travel, marriage, and the like: if the lot showed yes, the matter proceeded, and if no, it was delayed to the following year; other arrows were cast for water and blood-money, or showed from you and not from you; and in the doubts of filiation the parties resorted to Hubal himself, with a gift of a hundred camels for the arrow-caster, and the arrows decided whether a child belonged to the tribe, would be received as an ally, or be cast off with neither lineage nor alliance. Beside the arrows stood the soothsayers, the diviners, and the astrologers, trafficking in the foretelling of events and the uncovering of secrets, with their claimed informants among the jinn; and around them all spread the omens of the birds and the ominous days and the months. The believer sees what such a religion makes of a man: the custody of his decisions surrendered to sticks, the custody of his future to tricksters, the custody of his children to arrows; and the Prophet ﷺ, whose Lord would one day teach his community that decision belongs to Allah alone, could watch his people at the altar of Hubal and see the whole anatomy of a religion of things that cannot know.
It is the contrast with Ibrahim (peace be upon him) that completes the picture, for the idols around the Kaaba were not merely an offence against abstract truth; they were an outrage against the very founder of the house they defiled. Al-Buti recalls what the earlier scriptures and the Quran both record: that Ibrahim underwent a painful struggle to destroy the idols of his people and the temples in which they were worshipped, and that the Kaaba itself was built for the worship of Allah alone. The Arabs knew this; they claimed Ibrahim as their father in religion; the very talbiyah they cried at the rites had come down from the religion of Ibrahim, its confession of His unity hedged with an exception for the idols; and yet the House he had purified was the one place in Arabia where the idols stood thickest. The Prophet ﷺ, a son of that city and an heir of that House, stood in the line of the patriarch: what Ibrahim had smashed in Chaldea, his descendant would be raised to smash in Makkah; and the believer sees in the whole sweep of sacred history one continuous war between the builder of the House and the fillers of it, a war that paused for the centuries of the jahiliyyah and was resumed in the person of the final Messenger.
A word must be added on the scope of this page, for the master chronology sets beside it another on the social injustices of the same Makkah: the oppression of the weak, the pride of wealth, the abandonment of the orphan. The Prophet's ﷺ grief was one grief, and it embraced both wings; he was distressed by the moral decay and the social inequity of his people together with their idolatry, and the sirah does not cut his sorrow into pieces. But the theological error stands first, as this page has shown it standing first in the seclusion it produced: the wrong worship of Allah is the root from which the wrong treatment of man grows, for a people who will bow to a stone will bow to anything; and the revelation that would descend upon this anguished heart would begin not with an ordinance of markets but with the name of the Lord who creates. The chapters of the Quran that answer the idols are among the most thunderous in the Book precisely because the error they answer is the first error.
When the final reckoning with the idols is remembered, the believer should remember also the man who was its instrument, and what had been his portion before it. Forty years in the idol-city, and never a prostration; a lifetime of festival days and sacrificial stones and oaths by Lat and Uzza, and never once his tongue or his forehead given to any of them; and then, when the hour came, the same hands that had never carried an offering to Hubal lifted a stick against all three hundred and sixty of the gods of his people. The unity of Allah, which his heart had possessed before the Book taught its words, was thus proven in his conduct twice over: once by thirty-nine years of refusal, and once by a single morning of demolition. Glory be to Him who prepares His witnesses: the distress recorded on this page was not weakness but vision, the pain of seeing truly what a whole city had agreed not to see; and every believer whose heart is troubled at the shirk of his own age may take his pattern from the Beloved of Allah ﷺ, who grieved at the idols, withdrew from them to his Lord, and was raised, in the fullness of the appointed time, to see their towers fall.