Raydolph Renault

Raydolph's project seeks to reconstruct the polytheistic religions of pre-Islamic Arabia using the Qur’an as a historical and ethnographic witness. His analysis draws primarily on ḥadīth-based exegeses, pre-Islamic poetry, early Arabic antiquarian accounts, and emerging Paleo-Arabic inscriptions—material which he synthesises with anthropology and comparative Near Eastern mythology. 

The overarching aim is to challenge prevailing scholarship that depicts the Arabs as “pagan monotheists,” worshipping Allah as a High God above subordinate deities—a model uncritically appropriated from Greco-Roman and biblical precedents and sustained by a gradualist view of religious evolution that renders the turn to monotheism in seventh-century Arabia a natural progression rather than a dramatic rupture. Raydolph’s study re-examines these assumptions by situating Arabian religion within its own social world, where divine hierarchy appears far less fixed and the cosmological imagination reflects the decentralised and competitive structures of tribal life. 

By integrating comparative anthropology and mythology, the study seeks to reconstruct an Arabian religious world on genuinely “indigenous terms,” grounding its interpretations in the internal logic of polytheism itself and their social ecology: how the Arabs’ particular social organisation, tribal ethos, environment, and collective imaginary shaped their cosmologies and theogonies—and, by extension, their conception of “Allah.” His research will be of interest to scholars working on the origins of Islam, Arabian polytheism, Qur’anic hermeneutics, and the reliability of early Muslim literary sources. It also holds relevance for researchers of contemporary Salafist–Wahhabi discourse, which frequently grounds itself in mythic parallels between pre-Islamic polytheism and the modern world. 

Prior to this project, Raydolph obtained First-Class Honours in both History and Theology & Religious Studies, developing a particular interest in the genealogy of ideas and the meta-analysis of historiography—an interest that continues to inform his methodological approach. He later worked as a historical researcher for television, balancing audience engagement with historical accuracy for period dramas and pre-modern documentaries. He has also served as Chief Operating Officer for two successful start-ups, specialising in operational design, efficiency, and early-stage investment—experience he sees as a real-world application of his academic training in analysing, synthesising, and managing complex information in projec

• Pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism
• Tafseer or Qur'anic exegesis
• Religious anthropology
• Origins of Islam;
• Epistemologies in historiography
• Salafist–Wahhabi theology