Female Divinity in the Qur'an: In Conversation with the Bible and the Ancient Near East

This is the first book to examine how pre-Islamic/Late Antique goddesses shaped the Qur’an, including its basic theology and cosmology. Exploring the traces found in the text of cultic veneration to goddesses of Arabia and the Ancient Near East, this book analyses what these traces tell us about female power in late antique Arabia, and how this power changed on the advent of Islam. While recent studies on the Qur’anic God have typically considered the question of divinity separately from ge...