14 No god but God
while the Meccans were celebrating a pagan festival at the Ka‘ba, four
men named Waraqa ibn Nawfal, Uthman ibn Huwairith, Ubayd Allah
ibn Jahsh, and Zayd ibn Amr drew apart from the rest of the worship-
pers and met secretly in the desert. There they agreed “in the bonds of
friendship” that they would never again worship the idols of their
forefathers. They made a solemn pact to return to the unadulterated
religion of Abraham, whom they considered to be neither a Jew nor a
Christian, but a pure monotheist: a hanif (from the Arabic root hnf,
meaning “to turn away from,” as in one who turns away from idola-
try). The four men left Mecca and went their separate ways preaching
the new religion and seeking out others like them. In the end,
Waraqa, Uthman, and Ubayd Allah all converted to Christianity, a
fact that indicates the religion’s influence over the region. But Zayd
continued in the new faith, abandoning the religion of his people and
abstaining from the worship of, in his words, “the helpless and harm-
less idols” in the sanctuary.
Standing in the shadow of the Ka‘ba, his back pressed against its
irregular stone walls, Zayd rebuked his fellow Meccans, shouting, “I
renounce Allat and al-Uzza, both of them... I will not worship
Hubal, though he was our lord in the days when I had little sense.”
Pushing through the crowded market, his voice raised over the din of
the merchants, he would cry, “Not one of you follows the religion of
Abraham but I.”
Like all preachers of his time, Zayd was also a poet, and the verses
that the traditions have ascribed to him contain extraordinary declara-
tions. “To God I give my praise and thanksgiving,” he sang. “There is
no god beyond Him.” And yet, despite his call for monotheism and his
repudiation of the idols inside the sanctuary, Zayd maintained a deep
veneration for the Ka‘ba itself, which he believed was spiritually con-
nected to Abraham. “I take refuge in that in which Abraham took
refuge,” Zayd declared.
By all accounts, the Hanif movement flourished throughout the
Hijaz, especially in major population centers like Ta’if, where the poet
Umayya ibn Abi Salt wrote verses extolling “the religion of Abra-
ham,” and Yathrib, the home of two influential Hanif tribal leaders,
Abu Amir ar-Rahib and Abu Qais ibn al-Aslat. Other Hanif preachers