As it was described in No god but God, there was a cult of worship around the Black Stone, and that a number of various gods were worshiped there as well. It sounded like a quasi-Hinduism to me, a tolerance of a large number of local/tribal gods. I could be only half-remembering it, though.
It turns out that they were fairly polytheistic. I'm reading the utterly fascinating Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and he goes over the, er, transition with the sort of verve that gets fatwas issued against you.
That ended up being a really wonderful read. My only knowledge, if I can be counted as having any of the subject, would come from that book, and so I'd say something like "It turns out that they were fairly polytheistic."
Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion featuring the worship of a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Allāt, Manat, and Uzza, while some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism, and a few individuals, the hanifs, had apparently rejected polytheism in favor of a vague monotheism. The most prominent Arab Christian kingdoms were the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms. With the conversion of the Himyarite kings to Judaism in the late 4th century the elites of the other prominent Arab kingdom, the Kindites, being Himyirite vassals, appear to have converted (at least partly) to Judaism too. With the expansion of Islam, the majority of Arabs rapidly became Muslims, and the pre-Islamic polytheistic traditions disappeared.
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But we weren't Arabs either.
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So, yeah.
Wiki says:
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(lost the whole mess of 'em in a poker game back in the day. What can I say, I had a pair of twos...)
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