[1] The book portrays pre-Islamic Arabian religion as predominantly polytheistic and guilty of idol worship (idolatry) before the coming of Muhammad, including at the Kaaba, the pre-eminent shrine of Mecca.
This, for Ibn al-Kalbi, was a degraded state of religious practice since the pure monotheism that, in Islamic religion, was instituted by Abraham (a hanif) when the Kaaba was founded.
The longest entry is about the goddess al-Uzza, mentioned in Surah 53 as one of the "Daughters of Allah" alongside Al-Lat and Manat.
Beyond this, no other organizing principle appears in the text to govern the order in which Ibn al-Kalbi discusses local idols.
By contrast, the northern and central Arabian tribes preferred the "Daughters of Allah", al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā and Manāt (named in Quran 53:19–20).
Altogether, the eight Quranic pagan deities are represented as dominating the religious scene of pre-Islamic Arabia, although the Daughters had a higher status due to their closer proximity to the Hejaz.
At the same time, while Arabia worshiped idols, Ibn al-Kalbi claims that remnants of Abraham's pure monotheism survived among people called hanifs.
Therefore Ibn al-Kalbi wrote:[12]But [in spite of the idolatry and polytheism which had spread among the Arabs] there were survivals of the time of Abraham and Ishmael which they [the Arabs] followed in their rituals – revering the sanctuary, circumambulating it, ḥajj, ʿumra, standing upon ʿArafa and Muzdalifa, offering beasts for sacrifice, and making the ihlāl [i.e., the talbiya] in the ḥajj and the ʿumra – together with the introduction of things which did not belong to it.According to Al-Azraqi, Hubal was the primary deity housed in the Kaaba of Mecca before the time of Muhammad.
[14] Ibn al-Kalbi writes that an idol, or an aṣnām, is a venerated figurine resembling a human that is made out of wood, gold, or silver.
Adam's ancestors through his two sons Seth and Cain (Qābīl) undergo different paths relative to the original, true faith.
[19] The second version reported by Ibn al-Kalbi has been compared to a legend of the origins of idolatry in the Syriac Cave of Treasures, especially through its early Arabic translation as the Kitāb al-Majāll.
[17] With the exception of its impact on Al-Masudi (d. 956) and Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229), the Book of Idols was largely unknown in the Islamic world until the discovery and publication of a manuscript of the text in Egypt in the 20th century.
[21] Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols is not considered a reliable source of information for Arabian religion in the pre-Islamic period.
Due to this phenomenon, the Quranic mushrikun were transformed, after a long period of oral transmission and development in tradition, into polytheistic idol worshippers.
[25] Likewise, Christian J. Robin and Jérémie Schiettecatte commented that the genealogical origins of an ultimate ancestor named Sheba in the Book of Idols, stated to be the third descendant of Qahtan (the mythical ancestor of the Southern Arabs), was a later, speculative reconstruction deduced from vague memories of geographical proximities and political alliances.
Thus, Christian Julien Robin interprets Ibn al-Kalbi as having exaggerated the spatial extent of such practices and the use of these ritual objects more generally.
Additional attempts to describe pre-Islamic Arabian religion include those by the likes of Masʿūdī (d. 345/956), Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), and even Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1206/1792), the founder of Wahhabism.