These kinds of places are beyond enumeration, unlike appointed times, which are limited and known. This category is uglier than the one before it, for it either resembles the worship of idols, leads to it, or is itself a form of idolatry. Idol-worshippers used to make pilgrimages to a specific spot where an image—or even no image at all—stood, believing that such devotion would draw them nearer to God.

The greatest false deities for which people undertook journeys were three: al-Lat, al-‘Uzza, and Manat, the third and last. Allah all-glorious mentions them in His Book:
“Have you considered al-Lat and al-‘Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other? Do you have the males while He has the females? That, then, would be an inequitable division.” (al-Najm 53:19–22)

Each of these three idols belonged to a particular Arab settlement in the region surrounding the Sacred Precinct. The stations for the Hajj were likewise three: Mecca, Medina, and Ta’if.

Al-Lat belonged to the people of Ta’if. They report that she was originally a righteous man who used to prepare gruel for the pilgrims. When he died, they lingered at his grave for a time, then fashioned an image of him and built over it a shrine they called “the House of the Goddess.” The story is well known: the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—sent an expedition to demolish it when Ta’if was conquered after the fall of Mecca, in the ninth year after the Hijrah.

As for al-‘Uzza, she belonged to the people of Mecca, near ‘Arafat, where there stood a tree