Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PAST REMEMBERED t 47
Quran seems to refer to the practice of such animal offerings in
5:106, as part of a repertoire of pagan ritual practices.
Among the things forbidden to the believer by the Quran is
“that which has been sacrificed upon a stone” (5:4). Such sacrificial
stones are described as “abominations,” and the “work of Satan”
(5:93). These are familiar objects indeed, already known
from the story of Jacob’s stone pillar in Genesis (35:14). Stones on
which one poured out the blood of animal sacrifice were widely
used among the ancient Arabs, not only as here in the vicinity of
the Kaaba, but even as tombstones and boundary markers for sacred
enclosures. After the coming of Islam their use constituted a
form of idolatry, and the believer might not share in the food sacrificed
thereon.
Besides animal sacrifice, grain and milk were offered to the gods,
as well as the captured arms of enemies, and precious objects like
the golden gazelles kept in the treasure pit of the Kaaba. Such pits
or hollow places were generally near altars, and sacrificial blood or
other offerings were collected in them. As often seems to have occurred
in such circumstances, the pit and the altar stone began to
participate in the same sacred quality as the sacrifice itself, a characteristic
they then shared with, or borrowed from, the god who
was the object of the cultus.
There is little or no reference to the practice of formal liturgical
prayer in Meccan paganism, not in its later Islamic sense, at any
rate. Whatever evidence there is emerges, somewhat indistinctly,
from the Quran, which is, of course, derisive of the pagans’ prayer.
The Quraysh’s prayers at the Holy House are described as “nothing
but whistling and clapping” (8:35). The word used in this
verse, salat, is the same as that employed for the Muslim’s own
canonical prayer and is almost certainly a loanword borrowed
from Aramaic/Syriac and so taken over from contemporary Jewish
or Christian usage. But there is a somewhat more authentic Arabic
word, dua, a “calling” (on God), an “invoking,” and one verse of
the Quran (2:186) seems addressed to reassuring the Muslims’
questions concerning the efficacy of their own practice of “calling”:
“When My servants ask you concerning Me, (say) then: I am