The identification of the opponents attacked in the Koran for their shirk was made and documented in the Muslim traditional literature. In the commentaries on the Koran, the traditional lives of the Prophet, the collections of material describing conditions in the jāhiliyya and providing information about the idolatrous pre-Islamic Arab religion, and other such works, it is constantly made clear that the koranic mushrikūn were Arab polytheists and worshippers of idols in the Ḥijāz at the time of Muḥammad. The idea was thus established that the Koran was addressed to a society in which idolatry and polytheism were a real presence, and that idea has generally been adopted from the traditional texts by modern scholarship. Some parts of the Koran explicitly address or refer to Jews and Christians, but it has generally been understood that its primary message – its insistence on absolute monotheism – has as its chief target idolatrous and polytheistic Arab contemporaries, townsmen and neighbours, of Muḥammad.

This chapter considers how far, if we simply had the Koran without the traditional material, we would be led construct an image of the opponents similar to that contained in the traditional texts. How far is it necessary or satisfactory to view the koranic mushrikūn as idolators in any real sense of that word?

That last phrase indicates a large part of the problem. It has already been remarked that polytheism and idolatry are not usually neutral descriptive terms but relative, value laden and subjective.