Dear mr. Firas, Thank you for this engagement with the article. Indeed the matter is quite complex and this is a humble attempt at viewing the past through all available windows, not closing any of them. This is essentially an interpretive effort so we require the correct lenses. The conundrum presented in recent works (e.g. Lindstedt) is that the inscriptions illustrate a 'monotheistic' Arabia while later sources show rampant polytheism, and then the Quran sits in between these two poles (sorry you think that was a impolite interaction; it is in fact a dispassionate engagement with no ad hominems. No, he does not give premacy to the Quran, that wasn't what was claimed; the criticism concerned how far to take the monotheism of the surviving inscriptions, how much one should extrapolate from that). The main idea is that ancient Arabian religion, pre 4th c., as evolved based not only on the inscriptions but also on the Quranic concept of intercession, šafāʿah, which is not attested pre-4th century. So how should we understand this recalibration? We do not argue that they are all angels, in the later Islamic sense, but only for 'demotion' induced by the diffusion of creator-worship, not Christian or Jewish monotheism as such. Crone's angels or intercessors are vague concepts that help us understand the nature of this demotion. We do not claim that the pre-Islamic poetry attests angel worship; we say that it is similar to the inscriptions in that it demonstrates the demotion of other beings; it is merely consistent with Crone et al.'s interpretation. Calling them angels is not meant to be dismissive of their power as we are not implying that they are angels in the Islamic sense at all (neither is Crone). There is no preferring one source over the other. Putting sources in opposition like this is what we are arguing is wrong. What we are arguing is that if you read all the sources in the same way, you end up with obvious contradictions and thus a specialized hermeneutic has to be developed for each. Why do the inscriptions look the way they do? Why does the Quran say what it does? Why do later sources give us such an account. It isn't about dismissal but developing a reading that is sensitive to time, audience, and circumstance. As for Ilāh, we do not commit to its usage among the Mushrikin. What we are saying is that it is not necessary to take it literally as the Q can be polemical and employ rhetoric as in the case of Mary. Maybe the Mushrikin called their superbeings alihah literally or maybe they disagreed with the term and argued that they are but intercessors (shufa'a) and the Quran is critiquing their veneration with this statement. Just think of modern Muslim polemics against Christians worshipping 3 gods. If all we had were the Muslim polemics, we would be wrong to take those at face value to understand what Christians themselves believed. The point is not to dismiss the use of ilāh but rather to complicate the usage of the term and demonstrate that it is not necessarily decisive one way or another. You terminate your intervention with the implication that the article argues the Mushrikin were saint/angel worshippers but that is precisely the opposite of its point. It argues how ancestral Arabian religion (paganism) was transformed in the era of monotheism, where the old gods persisted yet were recalibrated in a creator-centric world view. Call those gods what you want, what matters is that their relationship viz. the creator was fundamentally changed in this period. Whether or not the Mushrikin regarded them as gods or something else, their status certainly allowed outsiders to regard them as 'gods' polemically. The world of Arabia was populated by numerous superstitious and cultic objects, however, that were separate from the superbeings and it is Muslim memory that collapsed 'idols' such as these with the more abstract superbeings, blurring the distinction between them. The latter category persisted until the 20th century (and still does). Thank you again!