Pilgrimage in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Continuity and Rupture from Epigraphic Texts to the Qur’an
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract References to the pilgrimage in the Qur’an, called ḥajj and ʿumra , are often very brief, but recent studies have shown that most of what is gleaned from the Qur’an about the practice can find parallels in pilgrimages to other sites in Arabia. In this article, I read the Qur’anic data on ḥajj and ʿumra in the light of Arabian inscriptions that mention pilgrimage rituals. In particular, the annual pilgrimage to the Awām Temple in Ma’rib in South Arabia, about which we know a great deal, can shed light on the larger context of the ritual in pre-Islamic Arabia. I argue based on a discussion of Qur’anic and epigraphic materials that the ḥajj and ʿumra of the Qur’an share many elements with other Arabian pilgrimages, but the Qur’an clearly expresses discontent with certain practices of pre-Islamic pilgrimage such as ritual hunt while endorsing or approving others such as the procession between the hills of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa. Most importantly, I contend that the Qur’an attempts to decouple pilgrimage and animal sacrifice especially due to the latter’s strong association with physical objects of veneration called awthān and nuṣub in the Qur’an.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".