Al-Uzza

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A child born to the Quraysh might be named for her before he could speak: Abd al-‘Uzza, the servant of the Mightiest. It was among the commonest names of the age along the dry valleys of the Hijaz, carried by men who never thought to explain it, the way a name needs no explaining. The goddess it bound them to had a grove in the valley of Nakhla, east of Mecca, where three trees stood sacred to her and the blood of the offerings ran at her stone. To the tribe that held Mecca and kept its sanctuary, she was the foremost of the powers — not one goddess among many but the Mightiest, which is what her name says outright.

The Mightiest of the powers

Her name is a superlative. Al-‘Uzza is the feminine of al-a’azz, the mightiest, the strongest, built from the same root that gives al-‘Aziz — and the Quraysh meant it as a name and a description at once. She was the most powerful of the powers her people knew, and her people were not minor: the Quraysh were the tribe that controlled Mecca and the rites of its haram, the sacred precinct, the keepers of the most frequented sanctuary in the western peninsula. Beside them in her service stood the Banu Kinanah, the kindred confederation from which the Quraysh themselves descended. When the men of Mecca went to war they called her name in the line; when they swore, they swore by her.

She was the youngest, in the later reckoning, of three. The tradition that survives sets her beside al-Lat, whose very name is the Goddess, and beside Manat, the older power who apportions the lot of fate and death — three goddesses honored across the Hijaz and north into the country of the Arabs of the Syrian border. Each had her own people and her own seat: al-Lat at al-Taif among the Thaqif, Manat by the sea at Qudayd among the tribes of Yathrib, and al-‘Uzza at Nakhla, the goddess of the Quraysh themselves. They were not a fixed pantheon with a settled theology but a constellation of the greatest names a traveler in that country would have to reckon with, and al-‘Uzza was reckoned the greatest of the three by those who held Mecca.

The grouping itself is worth a caution. That the three were sisters, and that they were held to be daughters of the high god, is the way the later memory arranges them — a tidy triad with al-‘Uzza the youngest, framed for the telling. The worship on the ground was looser than the scheme. A devotee of the Quraysh gave herself first to al-‘Uzza; a man of the Thaqif to al-Lat; the tribes that watched the sea road to Yathrib to Manat. Each cult had its own valley, its own keepers, its own season of pilgrimage, and the three need not have been thought one family by the people who kept them. What the sources hand down is at once the gods and a frame already laid over the gods — the goddess of Nakhla and the genealogy of goddesses into which a later age fitted her. To read her, one has continually to feel for the seam between the two.

What she ruled, the record renders unevenly. Modern scholarship, reading her against the wider Semitic field — against Ishtar of Mesopotamia and the star-goddesses of Syria — has long identified her with the planet Venus, the bright wanderer that rises before the sun or follows it down. The identification is well grounded but not without its knots. Some of the tradition names her as the planet under the forms al-Zuhara and Kawkabta, “the little star,” and ties her particularly to the evening star, while reserving the morning star for the male god Athtar of the South — so that “morning-star goddess” is a real strand of her nature rather than a settled fact. The scholarly definition maintained by the Ancient Arabia project of the French CNRS sets out the Venus association together with her standing as a great goddess of the north and west; her exact astral identity, like much about the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia, sits among the contested questions rather than the settled ones.

Relief of three Arabian goddesses above a roaring lion, from the fifth temple at Hatra, Parthian period (1st-3rd c. CE), Iraq Museum, Baghdad. The figures have been read as al-Lat with Manat and al-Uzza. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The grove at Nakhla and the betyl in the north

Her sanctuary lay in the valley the sources call Nakhla, in the country east of Mecca near Qudayd, and what stood there was not a temple of columns but a stand of trees and a precinct. Three trees were sacred to her — samura, the thorny acacia of the wadis — and within the precinct a stone received the offerings. Near it, the tradition holds, was a built house called Buss, where her servants attended and where men came to hear her answer. The shape of the cult is the shape of much Arabian worship: a haram marked off and kept inviolate, a betyl or sacred stone rather than a carved likeness, the slaughter of beasts whose blood was given to the god, and the pilgrim’s circuit. This is rite described, not rite instructed — the outline of a devotion, set down at a distance by those who came after.

Almost everything in that paragraph reaches us through a single channel, and the channel is late. The fullest account of al-‘Uzza’s grove, her stone, her house at Buss, and the man said to have introduced her cult — Zalim ibn As’ad — comes from the Kitab al-Asnam, the Book of Idols, compiled by Hisham ibn al-Kalbi at Kufa around the turn of the ninth century of the common era. That is to say: roughly two centuries after the sanctuary at Nakhla was gone. Ibn al-Kalbi is the indispensable witness to the gods of the Hijaz, and he is also a witness who never saw what he describes, who wrote within the frame of the faith that had superseded the cult, and whose reliability for the older religion scholars weigh carefully rather than accept whole. The source-distance is not a footnote here; it is the condition of nearly everything one can say about her. The trees, the stone, the house — these are the memory of a memory, set down in a world that had already turned away from the goddess.

Where the record is firmer, it is firmer because it is stone. To the north, among the Nabataeans of Petra and the desert of what is now southern Jordan, al-‘Uzza is named in inscriptions cut in her own time, in the Nabataean Aramaic script, standing in close relation to the high god Dushara and to the god al-Kutba. At Petra and at the sanctuary of Iram in the Wadi Ramm she was given, like the other Nabataean powers, an aniconic form — a betyl, a rectangular block-idol, in her case marked with stylized eyes and a nose but no mouth, a face that is barely a face. The block is the offering’s address, the place where the god is held to be present without being shown; the avoidance of the carved likeness is itself the theology, the great power named and located but not depicted. There the goddess of the morning and evening star drew to herself, as the caravan world drew everything, the features of neighbors: she shades toward Aphrodite, toward Isis, in the syncretism of a trading kingdom whose roads ran to the Mediterranean. This is the documentary al-‘Uzza, attested where she was worshiped — and it sits beside, and partly corrects, the literary al-‘Uzza of the Hijaz, whom we know only at the remove of the later books.

The contrast runs through the whole study of these gods. The powers of the deep south of the peninsula — the great god Almaqah of the Sabaeans, whose temple stood at Marib — speak in their own monumental inscriptions, in the South Arabian script, in the words of the kings who served them; one reads the southern gods, in part, as their own worshipers wished them read. The goddess of the Quraysh has no such voice. Where the south inscribes itself, the Hijaz of al-‘Uzza falls silent in its own time and is spoken for, generations later, by the books of those who came to replace it. Her betyls in the Nabataean north are the nearest thing she has to an utterance of her own, and they are a borderland’s testimony — Arabian devotion phrased in an Aramaic hand, on the edge of the Roman world rather than at the center of hers. The further south and west one looks, toward Nakhla and Mecca, the thinner and the later the record grows, until the goddess is wholly a thing reported.

The three names in the recitation

She enters the scripture of the faith that ended her cult by name. In the Meccan surah called al-Najm, the Star, the recitation turns to the three goddesses of the tribe and asks: “So have you considered al-Lat and al-‘Uzza? And Manat, the third — the other one?” — the verses numbered 53:19-20. The passage goes on to set the three aside, to deny that the daughters claimed for God could be what their devotees held them to be. To the Quraysh who first heard it, these were not abstractions. Al-‘Uzza was the goddess of their own valley, sworn by in their own mouths, her name lodged in their own children’s names. To name her in the recitation was to name the most familiar power of the Meccan world and to declare a different order over against her.

The early tradition preserves, and then qualifies, an episode attached to these very verses — the account in which a concession to the three goddesses was briefly spoken and then withdrawn, the passage that later writers in the Christian West would label with a sensational title. Within the tradition it is handled as a moment of trial and correction in the course of the revelation; it is recorded by some early authorities and rejected by others, and it belongs to the history of how the surah was understood rather than to the cult of al-‘Uzza as such. What it registers, for our purpose, is the sheer weight the three goddesses carried in Mecca: that the turning away from them was a thing the sources felt the need to narrate, not a silence.

The same body of revelation that named her also reframed the sanctuary she shared a city with. The rite of divination by arrows before the god Hubal in the Kaaba, the circuit of the pilgrims, the precinct kept inviolate — the architecture of the old devotion was not all destroyed but in part absorbed and turned, the haram of Mecca kept while its gods were emptied out. What the recitation did to al-‘Uzza by name, it did to the gathered powers of the Hijaz at large, the supersession of one sacred order by another.

The felling of the trees

The end of her cult is given as an act, and the act is dated. In the tradition, after the submission of Mecca, the warrior Khalid ibn al-Walid was sent to Nakhla — to the year 630 of the common era, the eighth of the Islamic reckoning — and there cut down the trees sacred to al-‘Uzza and broke her precinct, ending the worship at the grove. The Book of Idols dresses the felling in a scene: a figure rising from the stricken tree, a final confrontation, the goddess put down. Read soberly and at its distance, the episode is a tradition-account of a real supersession — the closing of a sanctuary that had stood for generations, narrated by the side that closed it. Whether every detail of the scene happened as told cannot be recovered; that the cult at Nakhla ended at the coming of Islam is not in doubt.

After that the goddess of the Quraysh survives mainly as a name in books and in older names. The theophoric Abd al-‘Uzza, once so common, faded as a given name and lingered only where it had hardened into a family designation — most famously in the kunya of one of the Prophet’s own uncles, remembered by the by-name Abu Lahab, whose given name had been Abd al-‘Uzza. The men of the next generations who carried it no longer served the Mightiest; the name had outlasted the worship, as names do.

What can be known, and at what distance

Al-‘Uzza is, in one sense, the best-documented of the three Hijazi goddesses and, in another, almost entirely a creature of report. Her betyls in the Nabataean north are physical, datable, hers; her grove at Nakhla and her stone at Buss are the recollection of authors who wrote after the grove was felled, within a faith that had set her aside. The Venus identification rests on the comparative weight of the whole Semitic star-goddess field and is strong but not closed; the apportioning of morning star and evening star between her and the male Athtar is one of the open seams. Her standing among the Quraysh — the foremost of their powers, sworn by and named in their names — is as secure as anything in this terrain, because it is attested from two directions at once: in the later Islamic memory that had reason to recall what it had overcome, and in the bare survival of Abd al-‘Uzza on so many lips.

She was the great star-goddess of Mecca’s own tribe, the Mightiest of the powers of the western Arabs, honored at a grove of acacias in a valley that no longer holds her shrine. Reading her demands holding two things together: the goddess as her servants knew her, the radiant power of the bright star to whom the Quraysh gave their first allegiance and their children’s names — and the long shadow of the record, which preserves her chiefly in the words of those who came to end her. The grove is gone and the books remain; between the two stands the goddess, named in both, fully present in neither.

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