Idols
object · 5 works · 8 mentions · 12 anchored passages
idols · aṣnām · the idols · an idol of ours · animal idols · carved images · dead images · gods more senseless than himself · molten images · objects of worship
spoken of as
1 expressionThe idols3 mentions
Barlaam and Josaphat (Greek) · Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn (Arabic)
and he himself went off senselessly to the idol-temples to sacrifice to those gods more senseless than himself and to render hymns of thanksgiving, not knowing who is truly the cause of all good things, to whom he ought to have offered the spiritual sacrifice.
in the texts
Barlaam and Josaphat
Man-made carved and molten images worshipped as gods.
For they made these things with their own hands, and they worship what their own fingers made, saying:
Therefore be ashamed with an everlasting shame, you who trust in carved images, you who say to molten images:
And all the objects of idol-worship were torn down, and all the wealth and the moneys laid up in the idol-temples were taken away;
Kitāb al-Safīnah al-Nūḥīyah fī al-sakīnah al-rūḥīyah
The objects of false worship named as the furthest thing the commanding soul may call a man to, alongside apostasy and murder.
and it may command the eating of what is forbidden, and drive a man to the killing of the noble, and call him to abandon Islam and to the worship of idols.
Protrepticus
Cult statues and stones worshipped by pagans, repeatedly dismissed as lifeless matter.
many, too, deprived of their privy parts, showing in fact that the precincts of the idols are tombs or prison-houses.
Surely it is plain to everyone that they are stones, just as Hermes himself is.
Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn
Idols whose hollows are said to have spoken, whether by spirits or by the keepers' devices.
) and while we were at an idol of ours one night, seeking its judgement in a matter that had arisen between us, of a sudden a crier cried out from its hollow
And in one line of report they used to hear, in the Days of Ignorance, a murmuring out of the hollows of the idols;
O you riders, you men of judgements — what have you to do with flighty wits and with leaning the judgement upon idols This is a prophet, the lord of created beings — proclaiming aloud the truth and Islam the most just of any who judges with judgements and the light follows upon the darknesses — he will be made manifest in the sacred town he has purified men of their sins
Ansāb al-ʻArab al-qudamāʼ
The graven images of pre-Islamic and ancient Near Eastern cult, some in animal form, whose worship the passage insists is symbolic representation of higher powers and not totemic reverence for a species.
For some tribes of the Arabs did worship gods in the shape of animals, just as the rest of the ancient heathen nations worshipped — in Egypt, Ashur and Phoenicia — peoples who worshipped idols by which they figured the powers above;