By Timothy W. Dunkin
A Rebuttal to the Islamic
Awareness Article Entitled “Is Hubal the Same as Allah?” by M.S.M. Saifullah and ‘Abdallah David
Introduction
There
can be little doubt that one of the most contentious propositions that may be
encountered across the broad spectrum of Muslim-Christian debate is the
suggestion that, rather than being the omnipotent God of creation, the God of
Abraham, the sole and all-powerful Ruler of the universe, Allah might merely be
instead the evolutionary development of a native Arab god from being a high god
in a previously polytheistic, or at best henotheistic, religious environment to
being the monotheistic deity now worshipped by over a billion Muslims the world
over. As a theological system, Islam has invested quite a lot of emotional and
spiritual capital into the belief that it is the final revelation of Allah, the
return to the true religion of the only God from the apostate departures which
are represented by every other system on earth. Therefore, any suggestion that
the god of Islam may have merely been elevated to his present exalted status
from a previous position of being one among many in the pagan system found in
the Jahiliya, the
so-called “Times of Ignorance,” will naturally meet with a negative response
from Muslims. The venerable Carleton Coon observed, “Moslems are notoriously loath to preserve traditions of earlier
paganism, and like to garble what pre-Islamic history they permit to survive in
anachronistic terms.”1
So
it is with the object of our present inquiry. In their article entitled “Is
Hubal the Same as Allah?," Saifullah and David attempt to counter the
charge that Allah’s origin lies in the pre-Islamic god Hubal, a deity who was
worshipped in the Ka’bah in Mecca according to the traditions. As will be shown
below, however, much of their argumentation is erroneous, and much more of it
is simply irrelevant because it does not truly investigate the issue. I will
present a refutation of their claims, and also provide what I hope to be some
insights which will encourage further scholarly investigation into the subject
of pre-Islamic religious history.
The
Value of the Islamic Traditions
A
good deal of Saifullah and David’s contentions rest upon arguments made from various
stories that appear in the traditional Islamic historiographic material. So
before I begin to address their specific arguments, I will first assess what
value, if any, this traditional material has as far as presenting an accurate
picture of the pre-Islamic world of the Arabs.
One
of the most serious impediments to true learning that has plagued the study of
the cultural and religious milieu from which Islam arose has been the excessive
reliance upon the Islamic traditions and biographies as trustworthy historical accounts.
While this error may be quite understandable on the part of Muslims themselves,
the fact that many Western investigators also demonstrate a continued
confidence in these materials exposes a systematic deficiency on the part of
much of our scholarly activities with regards to Islam. This is not to say that
this traditional historiography is of no value. On the contrary, the
biographies and the sunnat and the ahadith and the histories show us a great deal
about the views, beliefs, and attitudes of the early Muslims as Islam gradually
developed into its present form. The stories about Mohammed were invented so as
to present an idealized picture of what early Muslims thought a prophet should
be. The traditions redacted into the historical accounts enlighten us as to the
values and outlooks held by the various competing factions in the first two
centuries of Islam.
But it is there that the real value of the traditional material ends. The
various data presented in these works have, beginning with Goldhizer, been
recognized as contradictory and synthetic. Goldhizer offered to the Western
study of Islam the first real challenge to the heretofore universal belief that
the Islamic traditions presented to us a priceless and unique insight into a
completely documented set of historical events, what Ernest Renan called “the
clear light of history,” surrounding the rise of Islam. It is not coincidental
that he was also one of the first Western scholars to actually engage in a
scientifically systematic study of the traditional material. Goldhizer observed
the contradictory nature of the various traditions, and the obvious evidences
for invention and embellishment in these works.2Schacht neatly summarizes the necessary conclusions from such a study,
"I
should like to present some ideas on what, I think, is a necessary revaluation
of Islamic traditions in the light of our present knowledge; but am at a loss
whether to call my conclusions something new and unprecedented, or something
old and well known. No one could have been more surprised than I was by the
results which the evidence of the texts has forced upon me during the last ten
years or so; but looking back I cannot see what other result could possibly be
consistent with the very foundations of our historical and critical study of
the first two or three centuries of Islam. One of these foundations, I may take
it for granted, is Goldhizer's discovery that the traditions from the Prophet
and from his Companions do not contain more or less authentic information on
the earliest period of Islam to which they claim to belong, but reflect
opinions held during the first two and a half centuries after the Hijra.”3
Since
then, other scholars have noted the ahistoricity of these traditional
materials. G.H.A. Juynboll argued persuasively for the origins of the
standardization and transmission system based upon the supposed authority of
Companions of Mohammed and other early Muslims, the isnad, beginning near the end
of the first Islamic century. He believed that it arose out of a recognizable
need on the part of the early Muslims to establish a solid basis upon which to
ground their traditional beliefs and to bring order to the very haphazard
system of commandments, stories, personal examples, and doctrines jumbled
together and each claiming authority.4 Going further, Crone states concerning the Sira of Ibn Ishaq, one of the primary
sources for traditional historical information about early Islam and the
pre-Islamic period,
“The
work is late: written not by a grandchild, but by a great grandchild of the
Prophet's generation, it gives us the view for which classical Islam had
settled. And written by a member of the ulama,
the scholars who had by then emerged as the classical bearers of the Islamic
tradition, the picture which it offers is also one-sided: how the Umayyad
caliphs remembered the Prophet we shall never know. That it is unhistorical is
only what one would expect, but it has an extraordinary capacity to resist
internal criticism...characteristic of the entire Islamic tradition, and most
pronounced in the Koran: one can take the picture presented or one can leave
it, but one cannot work with it."5
The
traditional material is recognized as being very late - over a century after
the events which it purports to be describing from first-hand witnesses. Crone
further notes the incongruity of the many and various statements from these
writings,
“There
is nothing, within the Islamic traditions, that one can do with Baladhuri's
statement that the kiblah (direction of prayer) in the first Kufan mosque was
to the west (opposite direction to Mecca
As
such, we can see that the Muslim historiography and traditions are not
trustworthy presentations of historical events as they really were. Instead,
this material often presents the viewpoints of the factions in power and events
are cast as they wanted them
to be. Muslims will argue that the systematic organization of many of the
traditional materials (all the while depending, as we saw, on majority and
minority opinions, on isnad chains of transmissional authority
which are often not as dependable as one would hope) is evidence for their
veracity. Yet, Wansbrough provides evidence which shows that the supply of isnad for statements or examples attributed
to Mohammed and his Companions is a formal innovation datable only to the very
beginning of the third Islamic century (200 AH/815 AD).7Further, as Cragg so succinctly observed, the methodical organization
and scrupulous concern for transmitted authority may themselves simply be the
result of later redactive meticulousness,
“This
science being so meticulous that it is fair (even if somewhat paradoxical) to
suspect that the more complete and formally satisfactory the attestation
claimed to be, the more likely it was that the tradition was of late and
deliberate origin. The developed requirements of acceptability that the
tradition boasted simply did not exist in the early, more haphazard and
spontaneous days.”8
Thus,
we must understand that any investigation into a question of history and
empirical evidence simply cannot rest upon an uncritical acceptance of the
Muslim traditions as literal, historical documents. Instead, we must take the
same approach to them that Joseph Schacht counseled - that until traditions
about the Prophet (and by extension, I believe we can say, history before and
during his purported lifetime) are demonstrated valid by evidence, they should
not be taken as authentic, but rather as the “fictitious expression of a legal
doctrine formulated at a later date.”9 While I believe that we can perhaps see a “kernel of truth” lying at the
heart of some of the statements made in the traditional materials that pertain
to our present study, we must also exercise enough critical faculty to strip
away the chaff that surrounds the kernel.
Ba’al
and Hubal - Linguistic Matters
Before addressing the relevant traditions, let us first engage the
particular linguistic arguments employed by Saifullah and David to substantiate
their argumentation. They attempt to dispute the equation of Hubal (hbl)
with the more general Semitic deity Ba’al (b’l) by making recourse to a
number of questionable historical and linguistic arguments. They begin by
summarizing Noja’s thesis10 that the name “Hubal” originated from the elision of hn-ba’al to habal or hubal, ha-/hn- being a form of the definite article
in some early dialects used by the ancient Arabians. The assimilation of the n and the disappearance of the guttural ayin were proposed in the process.
Against
this, they first present a somewhat extraneous argument against the
transformation of hn- to the more familiar ‘l- article, known to us today in
Classical and Modern Arabic dialects. They attack this thesis by stating,
“The
idea that the h- or hn- article found in Ancient North Arabian
is the ancestor of Arabic ’l- has been suggested by scholars over a
long period.[31] This view has come under criticism due to the lack of
epigraphic evidence for the transformation ofh- or hn- to Arabic ’l-.[32] Theoretically, it can
be argued that it could have happened in a number of ways, the problem always
come back to the lack of epigraphic evidence for the actual process.[33] Noja
assumed a similar transformation from the Ancient North Arabian h- to Arabic ’l-.[34] Not surprisingly, he
did not furnish any proof either.”
This
is beside the point, since the name under discussion is “Hubal” (with a
theoretical ha-/hn- article still present), not some
hypothetical “’l/al-bal” proposed by Noja. Concerning the linguistics of
Noja’s proposal for the origin of the name “Hubal” itself, his thesis is
certainly quite feasible. Saifullah and David correctly point out that, in the
main, the hn- article appears to be somewhat older
than the ‘l- form, but that Herodotus’ use of the
name Alilat to describe the Arabian goddess may
indicate an earlier use of the ‘l- form several centuries before that
form finds broad attestation in the epigraphic record. They appear to be trying
to argue from this that Noja’s hn-ba’al argument is invalid, since the ‘l- form was certainly available to use
for any name meaning “the lord.”
However,
their argument seems to assume a cut-and-dried linguistic uniformity in the
ancient Arab world that simply was not there. Beeston has pointed out that
prior to the general dominance of the ‘l- form of the article in Arabic dialects
which was finally established around the beginning of the 6th century AD, there
was a “linguistic mosaic in the peninsula.”11 The ha/hn- form was just as widespread and just
as ancient as the ‘l-,
even if we consider the evidence from Herodotus as sound. Retsö notes that the ha/hn- form is attested as early as the
latter half of the 5th century BC in inscriptions found in Arab-occupied areas
east of the Nile Delta near Pelusium, which mention “Geshem the Arabian” and
which are devoted to HN-’LT (the goddess).12 This alone concretely places the ha/hn- form as contemporaneous to Herodotus’ ‘l- form. Further, Livingstone has
proposed that the hn- form of the article (as it would have
appeared in the Arabian dialect) should be implicitly understood to have
existed with certain Arab terms that were apparently carried over wholesale
into the Akkadian of a triumphal inscription celebrating victories won by the
Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (r. 744-727 BC).13While this reading is more tenuous, it may well push the epigraphic
evidence for the hn- form in Arabian languages back another
three centuries.
So,
we see that the hn- form is definitely ancient. It was
also, however, relatively recent, being found in Arabian inscriptions until
around 500 AD. This means that the form would certainly have still found much
use, especially among Arabian dialects such as Lihyanic, Thamudic, and Safaitic
(all used in the Arab regions east of Syro-Palestine and in the northern part
of the Hijaz) in the general timeframe that the tradition about ‘Amr ibn Luhayy
(which we deal with below in more detail) seems to indicate that he had brought
the idol of Hubal to the Ka’bah.
The
proposed assimilation of the n in hn-ba’al ---> haba’al is certainly possible linguistically. Southern
and Vaughn demonstrate that the assimilation of an n before a consonant is fairly typical
in North Semitic languages,14 and indeed they note that it is well-attested and not just theoretical.15 This same phenomenon is observed in Hebrew, for instance, where the
terminal n in the preposition min (with) is assimilated with the
doubling of the following consonant (except, of course, when before a guttural
or a resh, in which case
the prepositional vowel is lengthened along with the assimilation of the nun). Voigt further points out
that old North Arabic forms show assimilation of the n to the following consonant,16 and do not seem to show a doubling of the consonant, as is found in some
other North Semitic languages. Thus, the proposed elision by Noja is certainly
possible on this count, as well.
What
of Saifullah and David’s argument that Hubal cannot come from Ba’l because this
transformation would require the dropping of the glottal consonant ayin? Again, their arguments
are less than convincing. They state,
“Moreover,
for the name b‘l to become bl with the loss of ‘ayn, it would have to have
been transmitted through a language such as Akkadian or Punic in which the ‘ayn had disappeared. This would give in
Akkadian Bel and in Punic Bol.”
However,
the dropping of the ayin is not impossible. Drijvers certainly
did not consider it to be, as he saw no difficulties in stating that
Ba’al-Bel-Bol (together) was the original West Semitic form of the name.17 Beeston states that the “conversion of consonant into vowel” such as
occurs in the Punic bol for ba’l,
is “well-attested in Semitic languages.”18 More to the point, Voigt demonstrates that glottal stops in Arabian
dialects can contract, using the example of the contraction of the hamza in the
conversion bi-?al ---> bi-l.19 This same principle could certainly apply to the contraction of the
similar ayin. As such, Noja’s argument, based as it is upon the disappearance
of the ayin, is most certainly plausible.
Saifullah
and David argue, for some reason, that the conversion of b’l ---> bl would not have taken place because,
while the forms Bel and Bol were found in Palmyra, Palmyrene Aramaic did not
use the ha/hn- form of the article. They then
proceeded to closely paraphrase (including the co-opting of his endnotes) a
large portion of text from Healey’s Religion
of the Nabataeans before
getting back to the point by arguing that “there is no Nabataean and Safaitic
epigraphic evidence which shows that the name b‘l to becoming [sic] blwith the loss of ‘ayn, which in turn enabled hb‘l to become hbl.” Again, both of these
arguments are beside the point. There is no reason why the lack of the ha/hn- article in Palmyrene would have any
bearing on this discussion whatsoever. Nobody has proposed that the name Hubal
came from Palmyrene, and there were certainly many other dialects, including those
much closer to the Arab milieu such as Nabataean (in which the name appears as hblw) from which an entrance by
Hubal into the Arab consciousness could have been made. Many of these dialects
also used the ha/hn- form of the article.
Further,
their arguments involving Ba’alshamen seem gratuitous. By their own admission,
this deity was introduced into the Nabataean realm from Syria Mecca Transjordan or from Hit in Mesopotamia , both of which were
already settled by Arabs in the timeframe suggested by the ibn Luhayy
tradition. But, this does not mean that the dialect of these Arabs was
Classical Arabic (and indeed, in the 3rd century AD it almost certainly was
not). The dialect of these Arabs would have been closer to that of the
Nabataeans and the Mesopotamian Arabs, dialects in which the form bl was used. If Hubal were brought to
Mecca from either of these regions, then his name hbl would certainly reflect those dialects
and simply indicate the direct carryover of the name into the later b‘l-containing dialect of
Classical Arabic, and the whole issue of converting b’l to bl is nullified.
The
Coming of Hubal
In
light of what has been said above, it is unfortunate that the majority of our
information concerning the place of Hubal in the Jahiliya comes from the
traditional Muslim histories. These traditions show an unfortunate tendency on
the part of the early Muslim historiographers towards making the early
histories conform to the orthodoxy of Islam once it had matured and
crystallized into its present form. Attendant with this is a certain amount of
artificiality and contradiction built into these stories, as the early
historians sought to reconcile and organize a scattered and highly variant body
of subject matter. Let us take for a relevant example that of the story of how
Hubal even came to be in Mecca Mecca Moab Moab Mecca Mesopotamia . Saifullah and David state,
“There
is no clear-cut position that can be adduced from the Islamic traditions on the
issue of the place of origin of the Hubal idol at Makkah, although all of them
are united on its foreign origin.”
But this just makes my point - the traditions themselves are
untrustworthy as history, per se. Some of the Muslim authorities in thegraphia say he came from Hit, while others say
he came from Balqa’ or Moab Syria Jordan river (including Balqa' and Moab Arabia .”20 Likewise, Hit was a city in an Arab-dominated region which had been
settled by Arab tribes for at least a century prior to the time of the Luhayy
story.21 Indeed, the Arab tribes of central Mesopotamia played an important geopolitical role as client states and buffer zones
between the two superpowers of the time, Rome
This
historical reconstruction is supported by the fact that the name for this god
was “Hubal,” without the ayin.
This would seem to indicate that his origin was from among a dialect group
which used the bl-form,
and which also used the ha/hn- article. Dialects like these found
representation in the northern Hijaz and Syrian areas. Further, this
introduction appears to have taken place prior to the establishment of the ‘l-form (whose most well-known
representative is the Classical Arabic of the Qur’an and the other traditional
writings) as the dominant dialect type (around the beginning of the 6th century
AD), which is why we would not see Noja’s hypothetical’l-bal form. The earlier attestation of Hubal
in the Hijazi regions of the Nabataean kingdom, as well as in the Transjordan and Syria
Now,
if Hubal was a known quantity to the Arabs, then how does he relate to Allah? We
must understand that a straight-forward reading of the traditional material,
even with the later redactions, seems to indicate that Hubal was the Lord of
the Ka’bah, a position also attributed to Allah, whose house the Ka’bah now is
(bayt allah). Perhaps the premiere story in the traditions which bears
on this question is that of Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of Mohammed, and
his oracle from Hubal.22 In this tradition, which deals with Abd al-Muttalib’s efforts at getting
around a vow that he had made to Allah to sacrifice one of his sons, it is
twice mentioned that Abd al-Muttalib prayed to Allah while standing next to the
statue of Hubal. In their apologetic, Saifullah and David more or less dismiss
the notion out-of-hand that this would suggest that Hubal and Allah were
connected,
“As
to how standing next to the statue of Hubal and praying to Allah is equivalent
to Hubal actually being Allah is a great mystery. By this "logic," a
Christian standing next to the cross and praying to the Trinitarian deity makes
him a cross-worshipper.”
This
argument, of course, lacks much and the outright dismissal is irresponsible. Their
attempt to draw a parallel between Abd al-Muttalib’s standing next to Hubal
while praying to Allah with a hypothetical Christian standing next to a cross
and praying to God is non-sequitur. A cross is not an idol fashioned in the likeness
of a certain god, nor is divination made to a cross, while both of these most
certainly do apply to the statue of Hubal . The statement that al-Muttalib was
standing next to the idol of Hubal is recognized as an euphemistic statement
made by later Muslim traditionalists who were squeamish about depicting the
grandfather of Mohammed praying directly to an idol. But we must understand,
the idol of Hubal is central
to the entire story. It was through this idol that the cleromantic
divinations took place, as the Arabs sought guidance from the god. The purpose
for al-Muttalib’s worship was to take part in just this sort of divination, and
he does so while praying
specifically to Allah. As such, al-Muttalib was doing more than just
“standing next to” the icon of Hubal. The story quite clearly demonstrates that
al-Muttalib viewed Allah and Hubal to be one and the same, which is why he
explicitly prays to the one for guidance while simultaneously engaging in the
divination governed and controlled by the other. The story shows clearly, if
indirectly, the equation of the two in the mind of Abd al-Muttalib.
In
opposition to the equation of Hubal with Allah, first suggested by Wellhausen
largely because of the prominence of Hubal in the “House of Allah,”23 Saifullah and David bring forward several quotations to serve as
authorities on which to base their rejection. The citations from Peters and von
Grunebaum will not be addressed here, as they really amount to no more than
simple affirmations of the traditional viewpoint found within the larger body
of those authors’ texts, and present no argumentation against which criticism
needs to be made. The statements by Margoliouth and Crone are more interesting,
each in their own way. Citing Margoliouth, Saifullah and David state,
“For
example, over 100 years ago, Margoliouth had casted [sic] doubts on
Wellhausen's identification of Hubal with Allah and dismissed it as a
"hypothesis."
They
then proceed to focus upon Margoliouth’s use of the term “suggested”24 and make it appear as if Margoliouth was rejectingWellhausen’s
suggestion. This is despite his statement which he made immediately previous to
the sentence quoted by Saifullah and David, “Between Hubal, the god whose image
was inside the Ka‘bah, and Allah ("the God"), of whom much will be
heard, there was perhaps some
connection.”25 Saifullah and David are simply reading their own preconceptions into
Margoliouth’s words. He was merely being cautionary - as any good investigator
in a field in which so much evidence remains to be uncovered must be. Margoliouth wasaffirming that the link
between Hubal and Allah was hypothetical - but then again, that only means that
it is a proposal not fully borne out yet but the proposition of which
nevertheless is based upon
evidences at hand, nothing more and nothing less. Saifullah and David are
merely putting words into Margoliouth’s mouth, even though what Margoliouth
really said in no wise “noted that Hubal and Allah can't be one and the same
entity,” as they would have us to believe.
Concerning
the citation from Patricia Crone, Saifullah and David have merely cited the
last of several suggestions made by Crone as to the disposition of Hubal and
Allah - the one which is based upon an acceptance of the Muslim traditions as
essentially historical in nature. If one does not accept that proposition, as I
do not for reasons outlined above, then the arguments from traditions in which
people are asked to renounce Hubal in favor of Allah are of little diagnostic
value. Indeed, the more reductionist argument that Crone suggests prior to the
statement cited by Saifullah and David, made on the basis of historical and
archaeological evidence, would seem to strike againsttheir
arguments. While discussing aspects of Arabian litholatry (the worship of a
deity through a stone), she notes that this can easily apply to Allah as well,
through the black stone housed in the Ka’bah,
“If
we assume that bayt and ka’ba alike originally referred to the
Meccan stone rather than the building around it, then the lord of the Meccan
house was a pagan Allah worshipped in conjunction with a female consort such as
al-’Uzza and/or other “daughters of God.” This would give us a genuinely pagan
deity for Quraysh and at the same time explain their devotion to goddesses.
“But if Quraysh
represent Allah, what was Hubal doing in their shrine? Indeed, what was the
building doing? No sacrifices can be made over a stone immured in a wall, and
the building accommodating Hubal makes no sense around a stone representing
Allah. Naturally Quraysh were polytheists, but
the deities of polytheist Arabia preferred to be housed separately. No pre-Islamic sanctuary, be it
stone or building, is known to have accommodated more than one male god, as opposed to one male god and female consort. The Allah who is
attested in an inscription of the late second century A.D. certainly was not
forced to share his house with other deities. And the shrines of Islamic Arabia
are similarly formed around the tomb of a single saint. If Allah was a pagan
god like any other, Quraysh would not have allowed Hubal to share the sanctuary
with him - not because they were proto-monotheists, but precisely because they
were pagans.”26
It
is from here that Crone continues on into the statement quoted by Saifullah and
David - a statement which, in context, seems to be a hypothetical answer to her
previous questions if one were
a Muslim who did not accept that Allah was previously a pagan god. She is
not, per se, arguing against the equation of Hubal and Allah - indeed, she does
not directly address the question at all.
But,
we see some interesting information presented. Arabian sanctuaries housed no
more than one male god. So indeed, what was Hubal doing in Allah’s house? The most
reasonable answer is simply that Hubal and Allah were not viewed by the
pre-Islamic Arabs as being different deities. They were compatible. More than
that, they were co-personal. This brings sense to the al-Muttalib story, and
rejects the otherwise nonsensical suggestion that praying to one god while at
the same time divining through the other somehow does not mean that the two
gods were really the same.
What
then of the traditions relied upon by Saifullah and David, most notably that of
Abu Sufyan (the leader of the Quraysh in Mecca
So
Who Was Hubal?
We have previously seen that the understanding of b’l = bl is certainly not improbable on
linguistic grounds, within the Semitic environment that is the setting for this
discussion. Indeed, we see that throughout the ancient Near East, gods bearing
these names, with and without the ayin,
appear to be equivalent. Drijvers’ ready link between Ba’al, Bel, and Bol was
already noted above. In Palmyra, the older deities Yarhibol and Aglibol, each
bearing the archaic form of the name, appear to have been gradually assimilated
into a cult association with the more recent Mesopotamian import Bel,28 and could even be considered as hypostases of that deity. Brody likewise
notes that one of the forms taken by Ba’l at Palmyra
The
name Ba’al appears to have originally been titular and localized - it would
denote “the lord” over a certain region. Examples of this sort of usage would
include Baal-Peor, Baal-Zebub, and Baal-Shamiyn. However, by the middle of the
2nd millennium BC Ba’al had also become a god, with his own name, in his own
right,31 as evidences from the El Amarna documents and Ugaritic texts indicate. Hence,b’l/bl evolved from a generic title to a
specific name. The local ba’alim remained, however, and were most
likely viewed by their worshippers as being personifications or manifestations
of the high god Ba’al.
The
name Hubal, then, begins to be comprehensible to us, seeing as there is no
sound argument against understanding Hubal to be a ba‘al. Hubal appears late on
the scene, relatively speaking. We do not see any real evidence for his
existence until the time of the Nabataeans, and from there he goes wherever the
Arabs go - to Palmyra Arabia seems to have
gradually been evolving towards monotheism) would be referred to with
universalist terminology such as “the lord” or “the god,” denoting his stature
as the god par excellence.
An
example of this sort of evolving conception was found with the Nabataeans and
other northern Arabian tribes who referred to Dushara, their high god, with the
term ’lh’, “the god.”33 The name Hubal “the lord” certainly fits this motif of a local high god
being referred to as “the Ba’al of ____” Likewise, the term Allah (= al-ilah, the god) has the same
sort of ring to it. We know that other deities in the Semitic Near East were
referred to with the title/epithet of Ilah/Allah. In South Arabia , the goddess 'lhtn (containing the suffixed article -n, making this the South
Arabian equivalent to al-ilaha, "the goddess") was a sun-goddess and
was paired with the deity'lhn.34 This 'lhn would be the South Arabian equivalent
to the more northerly al-ilah - Allah - and his association with a female solar
deity suggests that he fulfills the role of a lunar god, per the typical astral
arrangement in the settled parts of Arabia. The Edomite deity Qos/Quash,
clearly connected with moon worship through the use of the typical crescent
moon and star symbology found throughout the ancient Near East ,35 was carried over into the Nabataean realm with the name Qos-Allah.36 Guillaume noted that Ilah was a name applied to the moon god among some
Pre-Islamic Arabian tribes.37
Hubal
did have astral, and in many cases specifically lunar, characteristics, just as
we have seen were connected with al-ilah.
Hubal is noted for having originally had a stellar aspect to his nature, in
addition to the cleromantic functions he acquired in the Ka’bah.38Hommel also notes that among the Nabataeans, Hubal was a moon god, one
of two along with Dushara.39 Occhigrosso flatly states that Hubal was a moon god whose worship was
associated with the black stone at the Ka’bah, and that he was also associated
with Manat (also the object of Arabian litholatry).40 That Hubal should have a lunar station should not necessarily be
surprising. If the name were originally titular, then its descent from and
connection with b’l/bl will also carry with it a legacy of
astral religion. In later ancient Near East times, the various ba’alim developed astral overtones, which were
primarily solar in nature,41 but which could also be lunar. Even in post-Hellenistic times, we see
this phenomenon continue to take place. A votary inscription in Harran devoted to the moon
god Sin calls that god the “Baal of Harran.”42 In Palmyra
Saifullah
and David’s arguments against Hubal as a moon god are simply wrong. Contrary to
their claims, the view of Hubal as having lunar provenance is attested by
others besides Winckler and Brockelmann. Likewise, while it is true that
Nielsen’s particular theory about astral triads in Arabian religion was
overstated and has rightly been rejected, this does not mean that there was no
astral, and especially lunar, character to pre-Islamic Arabian religion, as
Saifullah and David appear to be arguing. Indeed, the evidences from
archaeology and history, tell us that astral religion made up a goodly share of
pre-Islamic Arabian devotion. It was to Tayma in Arabia that the Babylonian
king Nabonidas went to buttress his devotion to the moon god, and the presence
of lunar temples all across the peninsula and the appearance of lunar gods in
the pantheons of the various tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia show that moon
worship played a significant role in the religious life of the people of Arabia
prior to the rise of Islam.
And
it is here that we see that two seminal claims advanced by Saifullah and David
- the rejection of Allah being the same deity as Hubal, and the dismissal of
the characterization of Hubal/Allah as a lunar deity - fall apart. Clearly
“Allah,” both as a title and as a proper name, was applied to lunar deities in
the ancient Near East. Allah also shares many direct similarities with
Ba’al/Hubal. We know that at various times in pre-Islamic Arab regions, Hubal
was linked to the same deities with whom Allah was connected. Hoyland informs
us that Hubal was worshipped jointly with Manat in the Hijaz portion of the
Nabataean kingdom,43 and that he was served by a priestly office jointly with Dushara and
Manat at Hegra, also in the northern Hijaz.44 Indeed, the earliest inscription to bear Hubal’s name shows him to be
associated with Manawat, a cognate name of Manat, in the Nabataean kingdom.45 Also among the Nabataean remains have been found references to Ba’l
along with Manat and al-Uzza.46 All in all, despite the claims of Saifullah and David to the contrary,
Hubal does indeed seem to have been “integrated into the divine family” of
Allah.
This
is even more enlightening when we consider that the evidence of the much
earlier Ras Shamra texts tell us that Ba’al was a god who had three daughters,
just like Allah.47 It is not at all improbable that Ba’al with his three daughters passed,
with some modifications and evolution due to the passage of time, to being
Hubal with three daughters - Hubal (the lord) known also by the name Allah (the
god, al-ilah). It then
becomes explicable why the Qur’an would condemn the worship of the daughters of
Allah as shirk (association of other deities with
Allah), while remaining strangely silent about the worship of Hubal. The
worship of Hubal was the worship of Allah - the error of the particular
idolatry in question lay solely in associating daughters with Hubal/Allah. Allah,
as a title,48 was applied to Hubal, the god’s name, so the writers of the Qur’an did
not see a need to raise a row about Hubal. It is likely that only later, when
the absolute monotheism of Islam became more crystallized and reference to the
names of pre-Islamic deities in conjunction with Allah became discouraged, do
we see the traditions arising in which Hubal is opposed to and ultimately
defeated by Allah.
Conclusions
The
identification of Hubal with earlier b’l gods has been shown to be
linguistically feasible, but paradoxically this linguistic possibility is not
necessary to make a case for the connection. The traditions which deal with
Hubal, while showing a great amount of redaction by later Muslims, nevertheless
still contain a core of information that helps to show us that Hubal was
understood to be the Lord of the Ka’bah. Hubal demonstrates the characteristics
of having been a high god, and as was seen, his presence in the Ka’bah is not
merely incidental, but is most logically understood to have been as “the Lord
of the House.” The suggestion that the terms ba’l and ilah,
both general terms, can refer to this “lord of the house” interchangeably is by
no means out of bounds. Despite claims to the contrary, Hubal appears to have
had astral characteristics among his repertoire, and he was associated with
goddesses with whom Allah was also associated. Further, Allah was a name
applied elsewhere to moon gods, in Yemen Nabataea Mecca
(1)
- C. Coon, "Southern Arabia: A Problem for the Future," The Annual Report of the
Smithsonian Institute, 1944, p. 398
(3) - J. Schacht, "A Revaluation of Islamic Traditions," Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, (1949), p. 143
(4) - See G.H.A. Juynboll, Muslim
Tradition, p. 5
(5) - P. Crone, Slaves
on Horses, p. 4
(6) - Ibid., p. 12
(7) - J. Wansbrough, Quranic
Studies, p. 179
(8) - A.K. Cragg, Encyclopaedia
Britannica: Macropaedia, 15th Ed. (1998), Vol. 22, p. 11
(9) - See J. Schacht, Origins
of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, p. 149
(10) - S. Noja, “Hubal = Allah,” Reconditi:
Instituto Lombardo Di Scienze E Lettere, Vol. 28 (1994), pp. 283-295
(11) - A.F.L. Beeston, "Languages of Pre-Islamic Arabia," Arabica, Vol. 28 (1981), p. 183
(12) - J. Retsö, The
Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads, p.
250
(13) - A. Livingstone, “An Early Attestation of the Arabic Definite
Article,” Journal of Semitic
Studies, Vol. 42(1997), p. 261
(14) - M. Southern and A.G. Vaughn, "Where Have All the Nasals
Gone? nC > CC in North Semitic," Journal
of Semitic Studies, 42(1997), p. 282
(15) - Ibid., p.
263
(16) - R. Voigt, “Der Artikel in Semitischen,” Journal of Semitic Studies,
Vol. 42 (1997), p. 225
(17) - H.J.W. Drijvers, The
Religion of Palmyra, p. 10
(18) - A.F.L. Beeston, Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies: London University, Vol. 46,
no. 3(1983), p. 552, in a review of Bruce Ingham’s North East Arabian Dialects
(19) - Voigt, op. cit.,
p. 225
(20) - A term, in fact, which originally encompassed only the Sinai, the
deserts east of Syria, and the northern parts of the Hijaz around Midian and
al-’Ula (Dedan).
(21) - See especially Retsö, op.
cit., chaps. 15-16
(22) - Related in its fullest form by Ibn Ishaq in his biography of
Mohammed, see The Life of
Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume,
pp. 66-68
(23) - J. Wellhausen, Reste
Arabischen Heidenthums, p. 75
(24) - “...yet the identification of the two suggested by Wellhausen is
not yet more than an hypothesis.” - D. S. Margoliouth, Mohammed And The Rise Of Islam,
p. 19
(25) - loc. cit.
(26) - P. Crone, Meccan
Trade and the Rise of Islam, pp. 192-193
(27) - For instance, there is the story, related by Ibn Sa’d and Ibn
‘Asakir, which details the conversion of Hind bint ‘Utba, the wife of Abu
Sufyan and the mother of the future Caliph Mu’awiya. In this story, Hind dreams
for three successive nights. The first night, she is in pitch black darkness
and Mohammed appears to her in a beam of light. The second night, she dreams
she is on a road, and Hubal and Isaf (another idol) are on either side of the
path, calling to her to leave the path, while Mohammed is in front of her
showing her the right path. The third night, she is standing at the brink of
hell, and Hubal calls upon her to enter, while Mohammed seizes her clothing
from behind to draw her back. When she wakes the next morning, she strikes the
idol in her house with an adze and says to it, “You have misled me for a long
time!,” after which she converts to Islam and pledges her allegiance to
Mohammed. See M. Lecker, “Was Arabian Idol Worship Declining on the Eve of
Islam?,” pp. 4-5, in People,
Tribes and Society in Arabia Around the Time of Muhammad , Ch.
(28) - J. Teixidor, The
Pantheon of Palmyra, pp. 2-3
(29) - A.J. Brody, “Each
Man Cried Out to His God”: The Specialized Religion of Canaanite and Phoenician
Seafarers, p. 56, note #95
(30) - T. Fahd, Le
Pantheon de l’Arabia Centrale a la Veille de l’Hegira, p. 53, note #8
(31) - H. Ringgren, Religions
of the Ancient Near East, p. 131
(32) - L.K. Handy, Among
the Host of Heaven: The Syro-Palestinian Pantheon as Bureaucracy, p. 25
(33) - J.F. Healey, The
Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus, p. 92
(34) - M. Maraqtan, "An Inscribed Amulet from Shabwa," Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy,
Vol. 7 (1996), p. 91
(35) - See I. Browning, Petra,
p. 28
(36) - See N. Gleuck, Deities
and Dolphins, p. 516
(37) - A. Guillaume, Islam,
p. 7
(38) - T. Fahd, The
Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Menage, C. Pellat, and J.
Schacht, Vol. 3, p. 536
(39) - F. Hommel, First
Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. M.T. Houtsma, T.W. Arnold, R. Basset, and R.
Hartmann, Vol. 1, pp. 379-380
(40) - P. Occhigrosso, The
Joy of Sects, p. 397
(41) - See e.g. F.M. Cross, Canaanite
Myth and Hebrew Epic, n. 13, p. 7, who notes the equivalence of Baal Shamen
with Zeus Helios, a solar deity, in Nabataean inscriptions.
(42) - Teixidor, op. cit., p. 43
(43) - See R. Hoyland, Arabia
and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, p. 142
(44) - Ibid., p.
159
(45) - Fahd, The
Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Menage, C. Pellat, and J.
Schacht, loc. cit.
(46) - A. Negev, Nabataean
Archaeology Today, pp. 10,14-15
(47) - See A.S. Kapelrud, Baal
in the Ras Shamra Texts, pp. 80-82
(48) - The Arabic sources relied upon by Wellhausen to say that Allah
was always used as a proper name are, as seen above, necessarily suspect, and
probably are the result of later redaction by Muslim theologians of a later day.
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