Quote
I saw Amr ibn Luhay al-Khuza'i wandering around in the Fire of Hell with his entrails cut open behind him.
Describing the fate of the man who first introduced idolatry to Arabia.
Details differ across the sources
Some accounts hold it was not Amr ibn Luhay himself but later generations who changed the talbiyah to grant Allah a partner.
In brief
Amr ibn Luhay al-Khuza'i was the man who introduced idol worship to the Arabs, roughly five centuries before the Prophet ﷺ, when his tribe Khuza'a held custodianship of Makkah. Until then the Arabs had kept, however faintly, the religion of Ismail AS. Travelling to Syria, Amr was overawed by the powerful Amaliq and the idols they credited with their success, asked for one, and brought back Hubal, which he set up in front of the Ka'bah. It became the chief idol of the Quraysh. He is also said to have altered the hajj talbiyah to give Allah a partner, introducing the idea of a supreme god with lesser gods beneath Him, and, by one narration, to have revived under shaytan's prompting the names of the idols worshipped before Nuh AS, which different Arab tribes then adopted. His respected standing, his awe of a more advanced civilisation and the long centuries since Ibrahim AS explain how one man could overturn his forefathers' religion. Hubal was still the idol Abu Sufyan invoked over the Muslims at the Battle of Uhud.
This is presented by the Prophet ﷺ himself (in Sahih Muslim) as the origin point of Arabian idolatry, explaining how a people descended from the monotheism of Ibrahim AS and Ismail AS came to be steeped in paganism by the time of the Prophet ﷺ's birth.
I saw Amr ibn Luhay al-Khuza'i wandering around in the Fire of Hell with his entrails cut open behind him.
Describing the fate of the man who first introduced idolatry to Arabia.
Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr were originally five righteous men who lived before the time of Nuh AS. When they died, their people built statues of them to remember their piety, but as later generations passed, veneration of the statues turned into worship of the men themselves: shaytan's use of their own righteousness as the first stepping stone to idolatry.
مَا جَعَلَ اللَّهُ مِنْ بَحِيرَةٍ وَلا سَائِبَةٍ وَلا وَصِيلَةٍ وَلا حَامٍ
“It was not Allah who instituted (superstitions like those of) a slit-ear she-camel or a she-camel let loose for free pasture or idol sacrifices for twin-births in animals or stallion-camels freed from work.”
This ayah (Q5:103) lists the exact superstitious practices -- the slit-ear camel, the baheera, sa'iba, waseela, hami -- that classical sources (e.g. Sahih Muslim's hadith on Amr ibn Luhay) attribute to this same man introducing them to Arabia.
This ayah names the idols of Nuh (AS)'s people (Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Ya'uq, Nasr) -- the same idols that, per Ibn Ishaq and Sahih al-Bukhari's tafsir, Amr ibn Luhay reintroduced into Arabia at this event.