These people also say that the spirits He has begotten are connected to the celestial spheres—the sun, the moon and the stars—just as divinity is connected to the body of the Messiah. They therefore worship them as the Christians worshipped the Messiah, though their unbelief is greater in many respects. They are more rightly described as polytheists than the Christians, for they worship what they know to be separate from Allah, neither Allah Himself nor one of His attributes. The Christians, by contrast, claim that they worship only what has united with Allah, not the effects He has begotten.

Those who worshipped the angels, the stars, and human spirits and bodies then fashioned idols according to their forms and natures. This was among the greatest causes of idol worship.

For this reason, Abraham, Allah’s intimate friend and the leader of those devoted to pure monotheism, addressed those who worshipped the stars, the sun and the moon, and those who worshipped idols, while associating partners with Allah and acknowledging the source of them all. Allah has related their story in several places in the Quran. These were the polytheistic Sabians ruled by Nimrod.

Their scholars were the philosophers among the Greeks and others who lived in Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, Iraq and elsewhere, as well as on the islands of the sea, before the Christians. They inhabited these lands in the days of the Children of Israel, and it was they who fought the Children of Israel, sometimes prevailing and sometimes being defeated. Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar and others like them were kings of the Sabians after Abraham, whereas Nimrod lived in his time.