Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: how true is it that arabian polytheism was on the — February 9, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

I think there's a conflation here between what we are considering polytheism and what the Quran considers polytheism. Several forms of what are conventionally defined as monotheism are called "shirk" or assosciation in the Qur'an. The Qur'an accuses Christians and Jews of being mushrik (assosciators) which is the same thing it accuses Quraysh of.

In the Quran, it primarily addresses Quraysh as being henotheistic - again considered a form of monotheism. However, it calls this religion shirk. It also makes references to some of Quraysh that seem to believe there are other deities in control of the universe, putting forward arguments about multiple creators.

I think it's a mistake to consider Quraysh as monolithic, especially in the absence of an organized religion. Quraysh clearly had a syncretic religion with individual members or tribes having their own beliefs. Some of them were as rigidly monotheistic as the Quran, others were completely polytheistic, most of them somewhere in the middle. There were Jewish and to a lesser extent Christian influences.

The Quran considers henotheism, trinitarianism, outright paganism, intermediaries with God, and even the accused Jewish attribution of Uzayr as a son of God, all shirk. I think that's part of where the confusion comes from. It doesn't mean they are all the same, in fact they're extremely different.

Early Muslims believed that the henotheism of Quraysh had to be totally eliminated by conversion or war, but trinitarian Christians and Jews were "People of the Book" - despite all of them falling into the category of mushrik.

It's a mistaken to translate or understand shirk as paganism. Shirk is anything that is not Quranic monotheism (Tawhid).