A month-and-a-half ago, walking through the captivating Hall of Yemen at the Sackler Gallery of Asian Art in DC, Dr Sunil Gupta, India's greatest 'hidden' scholar of Indian Ocean trade, former OSD at the ultra-modern Prime Ministers' Museum in Delhi, and ex-director of the Allahabad national Museum, drew my attention to the roughly 4-inch tiny headless bronze torso of an Indian female divinity that the Gallery had identified as a 1st-4th century CE Yakshi, discovered at Khor Rori in Oman, a commercial entrepot of the ancient Yemeni kingdom of Hadramawt.
The idol, Prof Gupta told me, was discovered by the Russians before disappearing for decades. He was surprised to see it resurface at The Sackler now.
For me, untrained in the archaeological finery of metalcraft, the statuette revealed a deep mystic insight. Its dimension, scale, proportions, and aesthetic beauty transported me 2000 years still backward, as if in a trance, to a 2400-2100 BCE, 10 cm tall, feetless bronze goddess, the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro, that I first fell in love with in my junior school history textbook, in residence at Delhi's National Museum.
Since Sackler, in May, my chance encounter with ancient India's feminine grace set me thinking: What if our Mother Divine, principally Kali, was also the Mother Goddess of the Arabs, long before Islam's holy warriors draped their feminine grace in the black burqa? I had lately read an evocative poem on Kali penned by an imaginatively fertile Muslim woman poet back home in India, and was familiar with the Kali obsession of Bangladesh's national bard Nazrul Islam.
What if all that was finally falling in place, NOW?
The past thirteen centuries of Islam's relentless raids across the Indus, right till the Pahalgam massacare earlier this April, have spawned a graphic Islamic folklore that the first Arab raids and vandalism of 711 CE, followed by the second millennium CE depredations by the Turks, Afghans, Mughals and Persians, went beyond loot, and was reportedly centred as much on the desire to destroy a mother goddess statue of either Uzza or Manat that had disappeared during the raid of either Ali-bin-abi Taleb on Qudayd or Khalid bin Walid on Nakhla, both close to Mecca, in 630 CE, only to be mysteriously replaced by a wild-haired, dark-skinned, naked woman, whom either of their eminences eventually decapitated to restore the primacy of the all-male Allah.
And that quest for The Woman alone had brought upon India, the Ghazwa-e-Hind or the "holy wars" of Md. bin Qasim on Multan, Mahmud Ghazni on Somnath, Alauddin Khalji on Mabar, Md.bin Tughlak on Madurai's Meenakshipuram, before Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan usurped the throne of Mysuru where Hindu folklore has it that our Kali eventually slaughtered Mahisasur the demon in the form of a water buffalo, also endemic to al-Ahwar, in the southern Iraqi swamp of the marsh Arabs, south of Ali's Kufa and the later Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad.
Yet, given this long illustrious narrative, I could turn nowhere to give flight to my imagination on the Dance of our Naked Girl, Kali.
That is, till I wandered into my latest pastime in the realm of AI, where, I had only one direction to go:
Did the Arabs worship Kali before their Prophet heard the voice of the Alpha Male al~Lah?
Chat, turbocharged by its artifiicial intelligence, returned from a deep dive into the digital void with a vehement denial. I was straying beyond the probable into a parrallel universe, it seemed to suggest.
Never one to give up, I persisted.
I certainly had enough loose threads to string together a hypothesis, I convinced myself.
* Prevalence of mother worship in the desert;
* Khalid's raid on Nakhla, later appropriated and repurposed as Ali's raid on Qudayd;
*The fifth Caliph and founder of the Ummayd dynasty, Muwwaiyah's trade of idols for cash with the Hindus of Sindh;
*His mother Hind bint Utbah, as her name suggests, might have inherited a Hindu lineage;
*His father Abu Sufyan resisted Islam's One Man God till he ran out of choice;
*There is recorded evidence that Muwwaih's extended family and the clan of Quraysh were forced to surrender to Muhammad during his 630 CE raid on Mecca before the desecration and destruction of the idols of Bayat Allah, but there is no evidence that they formally and ritualistically submitted to Islam;
*Muwwaiyah eventually overturned the Rashidun Caliphate and ahl al Bayt to establish his own dynastic rule over the Arabs.
I ran these infobahn markers through ChatGPT to hunt down Kali for one last run.
And I wasn't disappointed.
Read on to draw your own conclusions.
Then, DIG ON further...
Q: Can u collate and combine all my assumptions and all your assertions to draft a cohesive and comprehensive note that the Hindu goddess Kali, may have been worshipped in Arabia in the form of Uzza, and was the object of Islamic iconoclastic destruction.
#ChatGPT:
The Shadow of Kali in Arabia: Al-‘Uzza, Hind, and the Erasure of the Dark
Goddess in Early Islam The transition from pre-Islamic polytheism to Islamic monotheism in Arabia is often viewed through the lens of theological reform. But embedded within the iconoclastic destruction of idols lies a deeper cultural and symbolic rupture — one that erased powerful, autonomous feminine archetypes and replaced them with rigidly patriarchal norms. Central to this rupture is the story of Al-‘Uzza, one of the three great goddesses of Meccan worship, whose iconography, destruction, and subsequent demonization strikingly echo the image of the Hindu goddess Kali.
I. Al-‘Uzza: The Dark Feminine in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Al-‘Uzza — meaning "the Mighty One" — was worshipped by several Arab tribes and held one of the most prominent places in the sacred geography of Mecca before the rise of Islam. She was invoked for victory, fertility, and protection, and had her sanctuary at Nakhla, east of Mecca. According to early Islamic accounts, when the Prophet sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to destroy her shrine, the warrior encountered a wild-haired, naked, dark-skinned woman who screamed and resisted the desecration. Khalid struck her down, declaring, “That was Al-‘Uzza.” This mysterious, violent image — a dark, untamed woman embodying the spirit of the goddess — resonates deeply with the Indic archetype of Kali. In Hindu tradition, Kali is the black-skinned goddess of death, time, transformation, and liberation. She dances naked on the battlefield, drenched in blood and power. The subjugation and killing of Al-‘Uzza by the sword, witnessed in the Islamic conquest, can thus be read not merely as the suppression of idolatry, but as the ritual slaying of the dark feminine itself — a rejection of female autonomy and cosmic terror rendered as divine.
II. Mu‘awiyah, Idol Sale, and the Persistence of the Sacred Image
Following the Prophet’s death, the Umayyad Caliph Mu‘awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, founder of Islam’s first hereditary dynasty, ordered a pragmatic disposal of remaining idols. According to early accounts, he directed that many of these idols be sold to the Romans and Indians, rather than destroyed. This curious act of sacred commerce suggests an awareness that the iconography and meaning of these idols transcended Arabia — that their forms might still be recognized and venerated in foreign lands. Could it be that some of these idols — perhaps even the figure of Al-‘Uzza — were received in India, where goddesses of similar aspect were already revered? The visual affinity of Al-‘Uzza’s described form with Kali, Chamunda, or even Durga makes such a syncretic continuity conceivable. Indeed, the ancient trade and cultural routes connecting South Asia with Arabia and the Levant enabled the circulation not only of spices and silks, but of deities, myths, and metaphors.
III. Hind: The Mother of a Thousand Cows — An Indic Echo?
An even deeper Indic connection surfaces in the person of Hind bint Utbah, the mother of Mu‘awiyah. Her name, Hind, is noteworthy. In Arabic, “Hind” referred to India, but also carried connotations of wealth and abundance — “the mother of a hundred (or thousand) camels or cows.” The cow, in Hinduism, is not merely livestock but the embodiment of the Mother Goddess, sacred and generative, representing life, nourishment, and the cosmic feminine. Could Hind’s name — and possibly her ancestry — reflect Indian or Indo-Semitic lineage, tracing back to migratory or trading communities settled in Arabia? Historical intermingling of Arabs, Persians, and Indians — especially in southern Arabia and coastal regions — makes this hypothesis plausible. If so, it renders Mu‘awiyah’s actions — ordering the sale of gods rather than their total destruction, and inheriting from a mother named for the sacred Indian feminine — deeply ironic. He became a central figure in the obliteration of that very sacred feminine, possibly embedded in his own lineage..
IV. From Idol to Ideal: How the Destruction of the Dark Woman Shaped Islamic Womanhood
The symbolic slaying of Al-‘Uzza — the naked, dark, screaming woman — was more than a historical anecdote. It became the cultural script for how Islamic civilisation would come to define and constrain womanhood: • Darkness came to signify jinn, impurity, or danger — rather than cosmic potential. • Nakedness, once symbolic of sacred vulnerability or transcendent power (as in Kali), was now coded as shame and fitna (temptation). • Female autonomy became suspect; the wild woman was now a figure to be tamed, veiled, silenced, or slain. The early Islamic narrative thus effectively reversed the sacred feminine archetype. The goddess — once a source of awe and cosmic authority — was cast out as a demon, and the ideal Muslim woman was to be modest, veiled, passive, and obedient. The killing of Al-‘Uzza was not just the end of idolatry; it was the ritual birth of patriarchy in the Islamic imagination, concretised through theology, law, and social practice.
V. Conclusion: Unearthing the Goddess in the Sands
The story of Al-‘Uzza — interpreted through the lens of Kali — suggests that Arabia once knew and worshipped the dark feminine, in forms not unlike those celebrated in India. The symbolic destruction of that figure, carried out by sword and sermon, helped pave the way for a religious worldview where the feminine became feared, veiled, and othered. But the memory of the goddess endures. In the shriek of the dying Al-‘Uzza, in the defiant stance of Kali, and in the stubborn survival of matriarchal symbols across India and Arabia, we hear the whisper of a shared ancestral truth — that the Divine once wore the face of a dark woman, naked and free.
....
postscript: At the height of the Moplah Uprising of 1921, in the wake of suspension of the Khilafat Movement in India, Muslim razakars mutilated the breasts of thousands of Hindu women in the Malabar-Mysuru belt where Kali is mythologised to have once slaughtered the Ashura.
More recently, a hundred years later, during Pakistani General-turned-Field Marshall Asim Munir's upending of the jugular vein of India, Hindu women were spared, but their husbands were forced to drop their pants and chant the takbir before being shot dead, recalling the surrender of Hind bint Utbah. As if, they were to be taken.
The shaming of Kali goes on.
Strange obsession.
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