Hubal

Hubal at the Kaaba

Hubal was a deity whose image was worshipped at the Kaaba in Mecca. According to one scholar, the sanctuary itself was devoted to Hubal, who was considered the most important among the 360 idols housed there, likely representing the days of the year. The Book of Idols by Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi describes the statue as human-shaped, with its right hand missing and replaced by a hand made of gold. Ibn Al-Kalbi says the figure was carved from red agate, while the early commentator Al-Azraqi claims it was made of cornelian pearl. Al-Azraqi also mentions that the idol had a vault for sacrifices, and that offerings could include a hundred camels. Both writers note that seven arrows were placed before the image, used for divination in matters of death, virginity, and marriage.

Ibn Al-Kalbi states that the idol was first erected by Khuzayma ibn Mudrika, but another account from Ibn Ishaq says that Amr ibn Luhayy, a leader of the Khuza’a tribe, placed an image of Hubal inside the Kaaba, where it was worshipped as one of the tribe’s main gods. The exact date of Amr’s life is uncertain, with some suggestions as late as the end of the fourth century AD, but it is clear that the Quraysh later took over as guardians of the sacred site, replacing the Khuza’a.

A story from Ibn Al-Kalbi tells of Muhammad’s grandfather, Abdul Mutallib, who vowed to sacrifice one of his ten children. He consulted Hubal’s arrows to decide which child to offer, and the arrows pointed to his son Abd-Allah, who would become Muhammad’s father. The boy was spared when a hundred camels were sacrificed instead. According to Tabari, Abdul Mutallib later brought the infant Muhammad before the idol as well.

After the Quraysh were defeated by Muhammad’s forces at the Battle of Badr, their leader Abu Sufyan ibn Harb called on Hubal for help in their next fight, shouting, “Show your superiority, Hubal.” When Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630, he destroyed the statue of Hubal along with the other 360 images at the Kaaba and rededicated the structure to Allah.

Origins of Hubal

There is a possible basis for the tale that Amr traveled to Syria and brought back the worship of the goddesses ʻUzzāʼ and Manāt, merging them with the cult of Hubal, the idol of the Khuza'a tribe. Al-Azraqi recorded that the statue of Hubal came to Mecca from Hit, a region in Mesopotamia. Philip K. Hitti connected the name Hubal to an Aramaic term for spirit and proposed that its worship reached Mecca from northern Arabia, perhaps Moab or Mesopotamia.

The name itself might combine Hu, meaning spirit or god, with the Moabite deity Baal, meaning master or lord, or it could derive from the Syriac habbǝlā or Hebrew heḇel, meaning vanity. Outside of South Arabia, Hubal appears only once in a Nabataean inscription, where he is listed alongside the gods Dushara and Manawatu—Manat, as she was known, was also worshipped in Mecca. Based on this limited evidence, some scholars have suggested Hubal may have originally been a Nabataean god.

Additionally, inscriptions show Hubal used in personal names, with phrases that can be translated as "Son of Hubal" or "made by Hubal."

Mythological role

Historians have very little evidence to go on when trying to understand Hubal, a figure from pre-Islamic Arabian religion. In the 1800s, scholar Julius Wellhausen proposed that Hubal was seen as the son of the goddess al-Lāt and the brother of the god Wadd. A few decades later, Hugo Winckler suggested Hubal might have been a moon god, an idea that other researchers later repeated. This theory came from Ditlef Nielsen’s larger idea that South Arabian mythology centered on a family of three: a moon father, a sun mother, and their son, the evening star (Venus).

More recent experts have dismissed this moon-god view. They consider it pure guesswork, and also point out that if Hubal actually came from Nabataean culture, then ideas from South Arabia would not apply. Scholars Mircea Eliade and Charles J. Adams described Hubal as a god of rain and war. They noted that near the end of the pre-Islamic period, he became a warrior god worshipped by several tribes, including the Quraysh, Kinana, and Tihama.

David Adams Leeming later repeated this description of Hubal as a warrior and rain deity. John F. Healey, in his 2001 book on Nabataean religion, agreed that Hubal likely originated with the Nabataeans. However, he stressed that there is very little information about Hubal’s mythological role. Healey did suggest that Hubal might have been closely connected to the god Dushara.

The only surviving inscription mentioning Hubal is a religious rule that orders people to make amends to him and other gods for disturbing a tomb.

Modern usage

Muslims have invoked the figure of Hubal in the ideological struggles of the post-Cold War era. In Islam, Hubal has been used as a symbol of modern forms of idol worship. According to Adnan A. Musallam, this can be traced to one of the founders of radical Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, who used the label to attack secular rulers such as Nasser, seen as creating idols based on un-Islamic Western and Marxist ideologies. In 2001, Osama bin Laden called America the modern Hubal.

He referred to allies of America as hypocrites who all stood behind the head of global unbelief, the Hubal of the modern age, America and its supporters. Al Qaeda's then number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeated the phrase hubal al-'asr in describing America during his November 2008 message following Barack Obama's election to the presidency. The analogy may have been passed on to Bin Laden by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam. Many Evangelical Christian critics of Islam have claimed that the worship of Allah as proclaimed by Muhammad was not a restoration of Abrahamic monotheism, but an adaptation of the worship of Hubal.

Robert Morey's 1994 book Moon-god in the Archeology of the Middle East revives Hugo Winckler's identification of Hubal as a moon god, and claims that worship of Allah evolved from that of Hubal, thus making Allah a moon god too. This view is repeated in the Chick tracts Allah Had No Son and The Little Bride, and has been widely circulated in evangelical and anti-Islamic literature in the United States. In 1996, Janet Parshall asserted that Muslims worship a moon god in syndicated radio broadcasts.

In 2003 Pat Robertson stated, The struggle is whether Hubal, the Moon God of Mecca, known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah God of the Bible is supreme. Farzana Hassan sees these claims as an extension of longstanding Christian evangelical beliefs that Islam is pagan and that Muhammad was an impostor and deceiver.