The rise of Christianity profoundly transformed patterns of religious devotion in the Near East. Many ancient temples and sanctuaries were destroyed or abandoned, their festivals were discontinued, their sacrifices and libations stopped, and their oracles were no more. For most Christians, collective worship became a matter of reading scripture and offering the spiritual sacrifice of the Eucharist, while martyria and saint shrines took the place of pagan sanctuaries. Similarly, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple ended the ancient Israelite cult and its daily sacrifices and made Jewish communal worship a matter of reading scripture and praying in synagogues. Some historians have thus viewed Late Antiquity as an era that witnessed “the end of sacrifice” and the diffusion of scriptural and spiritual paradigms of worship in the Near East. Despite this broad trend, the Qur’an provides evidence for the endurance of cultic worship in the Hijaz, in particular, at the Meccan sanctuary. The Kaʿba had its festivals (Q 2:158) and worshippers who observed its sanctity (Q 5:1–2, 95), resided by it (Q 22:25), turned around it (Q 2:125, 22:29), and prayed and sacrificed animals by it (2:196, 14:37, 22:28). How did Jews and Christians of the qur’anic milieu view the Meccan sanctuary and its cultic rituals? It is often assumed that during the prophetic era, the People of the Book did not take issue with the Meccan sanctuary. However, I have argued that some Christians or/and Jews viewed the Kaʿba as an inherently pagan shrine or at least made this accusation in their polemic against the Believers (Goudarzi 2023). This accusation makes sense of the term ḥanīf, which some Christians or/and Jews seem to have used in the sense of “pagan worshipper” and applied to the Believers on account of their adherence to the Meccan cult. Consonant with its endorsement of this cult, the Qur’an embraced the label ḥanīf but countered its pagan associations by asserting that Abraham himself had built the Meccan sanctuary and instituted its rituals (Q 2:125–8, 22:26–29). He was therefore the prototypical ḥanīf, but he worshipped the One God alone and therefore “was not a polytheist,” as the Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes (Q 2:135, 3:95, etc.). In this talk, I provide further evidence of polemic against the Meccan cult by re-reading aspects of the qur’anic discourse with the People of the Book in surahs 2, 3, and 5.