Manāt (also Manāh; Old Arabic Manawat; Nabataean Manōtu)

The road between Mecca and Medina ran close to the Red Sea, and where it passed the sandhills of al-Mushallal the pilgrims stopped. They shaved their heads there. Hair fell into the dust in front of a block of black stone, and men who had walked for days stood before it without speaking, waiting for something they could not have named. Then they went on. Until they had done this, no journey they had made counted for anything at all.

The stone was Manāt, and she was older than the road. Her name comes from a root that means to mete out, to measure, to determine, and it sits close to the Arabic word for fate itself. Both meanings fit a goddess whose business was the exact quantity of luck and misfortune assigned to a human life, and the exact hour it ran out. She was one of the three great goddesses of Mecca, worshipped alongside al-Lat and al-‘Uzzá, and she was the eldest of them. The evidence for her seniority is buried in people’s names. Arabs were calling their sons Abd-Manāt, servant of Manāt, and Zayd-Manāt long before comparable names appear for her two sisters, which puts her among the most ancient figures in the whole Semitic religious landscape.

Her earliest known form was wood. A carved image, and over the years of its use a crust of sacrificial blood layered onto the grain until the figure was dark and tacky with it. The famous idol at al-Mushallal was different: a black stone, unshaped, kept in a casket, the kind of object that gives back nothing to the eye and gains its authority from that refusal. Two tribes above all others belonged to her. The Aws and the Khazraj, the great clans of Yathrib, held her in such devotion that the place of sacrifice before her was known by its association with the Khazraj, and an old line of verse survives from a poet swearing an oath he means to keep: truthful and just, sworn by Manāh, at the sacred place of the Khazraj.

She was not confined to that stretch of coast. Far to the north, in the sandstone tombs of Hegra, the Nabataeans carved her name into the doorways of their dead. The formulas are legal and cold and they are also prayers. May Dushara and Manōtu curse anyone who sells this tomb or buys it or pledges it or leases it or draws up any document concerning it or buries in it anyone but those named above. She appears there as a fixture of the funerary contract, standing behind the threshold with the god Dushara, ready to fall on whoever tampers with the arrangements of the dead. The Nabataeans did not give her much beyond this. Around Hegra she mattered; elsewhere in their kingdom she is invoked only rarely. Fate is a specialist.

An idol of hers is thought to have stood among the crowd of images in the Kaaba, and when the Meccans made their circuits of the sanctuary they chanted her name with those of her sisters and asked the three of them to intercede. That chant is the hinge on which one of the most contested episodes in Islamic tradition turns. The Qur’an names her in the fifty-third sura: have you considered al-Lat and al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt, the third, the other. Some early narratives, all of them traceable back through a single chain to one man, hold that as those verses were recited a further line slipped in, praising the three as exalted birds whose intercession was to be hoped for, and that the line was Satan’s work and swiftly retracted. The story has been argued over for centuries and shows no sign of settling.

Her end came in the eighth year after the migration to Medina. Sa’d ibn Zayd al-Ashhali was sent to al-Mushallal with twenty horsemen. The tradition says a woman appeared at the shrine, dishevelled and wailing and beating her chest, and that she was cut down; the casket was broken open and the black stone destroyed. The riders who did it had once been among her worshippers, which appears to have been deliberate. Other accounts name Ali instead, though the weight of the evidence sits with Sa’d. Either way, the goddess who apportioned deaths was given one.

Stone, though, is difficult to be certain about. In 1024 Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the temple at Somnath in Gujarat, and his court poet Farrukhi Sistani, who claimed to have ridden with him, reported that the name Somnat was a corruption of su-manat, and that when the idols of Arabia were smashed the image of Manāt alone had been smuggled east and hidden. A later Ghaznavid historian repeated it. An unworked block of black stone is an easy thing to mistake for a lingam, and a raid is an easy thing to dress up as a holy errand. Mahmud wrote to the Caliph inflating the temple’s wealth and significance and collected grand titles in return.

What she could do was absolute and narrow. She fixed the term of a life and the fortune within it, and there is no story of anyone bargaining her out of a decision, no charm against her, no hero who outruns his allotted portion. Her power required no myth cycle and no adventures; it required only that people go on being born and go on dying, which they obliged her by doing. Her weakness was the one that finally undid her: she had no defence that was not made of other people. The wooden figure needed hands to bloody it, the black stone needed pilgrims to shave their heads before it, and the tomb curses needed masons to cut them and heirs to fear them. Take away the Aws and the Khazraj, take away the road past al-Mushallal, and what remains is a piece of rock in a broken box, indistinguishable from any other rock, still measuring nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Manāt?

Manāt was the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess of fate, fortune and death, and the eldest of the three chief goddesses of Mecca alongside al-Lat and al-‘Uzzá. Her name derives from a root meaning to mete out or determine, closely related to the Arabic word for fate. She was worshipped across the Arabian Peninsula and is among the most ancient deities attested in the region.

Where was Manāt worshipped?

Her principal shrine stood at al-Mushallal, near Qudayd on the Red Sea coast between Mecca and Medina, where an idol of black stone was kept in a casket. The Aws and Khazraj tribes of Yathrib were her most devoted worshippers, and pilgrims shaved their heads before her image and did not regard their pilgrimage as complete without visiting it. An idol of Manāt is also thought to have stood among the images in the Kaaba.

What did Manāt look like?

Her earliest known representation was a carved wooden figure that was repeatedly covered with sacrificial blood. Her most famous image, at al-Mushallal, was an aniconic block of black stone kept in a casket rather than a carved likeness of a woman.

What happened to the idol of Manāt?

In the eighth year after the migration to Medina, Sa’d ibn Zayd al-Ashhali was sent with twenty horsemen to al-Mushallal, where the casket was broken and the idol destroyed. Some sources name Ali as the one sent instead, but the evidence favours Sa’d, since former worshippers were typically the ones dispatched to destroy the idols they had once served.

Why is Manāt connected to the Somnath temple in India?

The Ghaznavid poet Farrukhi Sistani and the historian Gardezi claimed that the idol of Manāt had been secretly carried east to Kathiawar for safekeeping when the Arabian idols were destroyed, and that the name Somnath was a corruption of su-manat. The story may have helped justify Mahmud of Ghazni’s raid on the temple in 1024. Since Manāt’s idol was an unworked black stone, it could easily be confused with a lingam.

Related Entries

Al-Lat, Al-‘Uzzá, Djinn, Ifrit, Marid, Ghoul, Nasnas, Qareen, Shaitan, Bahamut, Roc, Ananke, Norns, Urd, Nemesis