By Timothy W. Dunkin
“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant
moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
- Differing Views of the Nature of the Deity
- A God of Love Versus a God of Hate
- Putting a Difference Between the Holy and
Unholy
- Traces of Pre-Islamic Paganism in Attitude
and Practice
- Allah as the Pre-Islamic Arabian High God
- Ilah and the Sumerian Origins of Allah
- Enter the Moon
God
- Bel, Baal, and
Hubal
- Dushara - Proto-Islamic Arabian High God
- Hadad/Rimmon and the Islamic
Rahman
- What Does It All Mean?
One of the most common
assertions that we hear when a comparison between Islam and the
Judaeo-Christian tradition is made is that both conventions essentially worship
the same God. Allah, it is said, is merely another name for Jehovah, the God of
the Bible. Such statements are often made by those who are attempting to bring
these disparate religions together in the spirit of ecumenism. Likewise, the
claim is also made by Muslims who seek to assuage Christian and Jewish
opposition to Islam, often as a prelude to dawah,
extending an "invitation" to accept Islam that usually comes at the
end of Muslim attempts at proselytism. The superficial characteristic of
monotheism is emphasized, while the vast differences between God and Allah are
ignored. Vast differences there are indeed. As will be shown below, the
characteristics of Allah and the God of the Bible are quite different. Further,
the origin of Allah will be seen from WITHIN the pagan system of the ancient
Near East, not as an outsider and opponent of that system who nevertheless was
sometimes treated syncretistically by compromising followers (as was the case
with Jehovah in the Hebrew scriptures), but instead as one who was integrally
important to pagan beliefs during the long process that eventually led to his
monotheization.
Differing Views of the
Nature of the Deity
There are many
differences between the attributes of God and Allah. First, there is the
attribute of knowability, the idea that human beings may know God and enjoy a
personal relationship with the Creator. God, as He is revealed in the Bible,
allows Himself to be known and fellowshipped with on a personal basis by those
who have trusted in Him through His Son Jesus Christ. John 17:3 says, "And
this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ, whom thou hast sent." The Bible presents God as a Being who
intimately reveals Himself to man, and who encourages us to learn of Him and
enter into ever closer fellowship with Him. The Bible presents a God who had a
personal relationship with Abraham such that Abraham was called "The
friend of God." The God of the Bible wants for mankind to come to Him, be
cleansed of their sins, and enjoy this close personal fellowship. "Draw
nigh unto God, and he will
draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts,
ye double minded." (James 4:8)
Contrast this with the
Islamic description of Allah as unknowable. Indeed, in Islam, it is considered
blasphemous to "presume" that one can know Allah intimately or claim
any sort of close, personal fellowship with him. This theological view
developed early in Islam, and became an important feature of Islamic theology,
being espoused by Muslim thinkers such as al-Ghazali. Shehadi summarizes the
teachings of this Sufi theologian on this point,
"The
end result of the knowledge of the `arifin [ed. note - a term denoting "the
knowers"] is their inability to know Him, and their knowledge is, in
truth, that they do not know Him and that it is absolutely impossible for them
to know Him." 1
This view is also
understood among modern Islamic scholarship, where the statement of al-Faruqi
is representative,
"He
[God] does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. God reveals only His will.
Remember one of the prophets asked God to reveal Himself and God told him, 'No,
it is not possible for Me to reveal Myself to anyone'....This is God's will and
that is all we have, and we have it in perfection in the Qur'an. But Islam does
not equate the Qur'an with the nature or essence of God. It is the Word of God,
the Commandment of God, the Will of God. But God does not reveal Himself to
anyone. Christians talk about the revelation of God Himself - by God of God -
but that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam. God is
transcendent, and once you talk about self-revelation you have hierophancy and
immanence, and then the transcendence of God is compromised. You may not have
complete transcendence and self-revelation at the same time." 2
Allah is considered by
Muslims to be unknowable, transcendent, so exalted that he would never lower
himself to treat with man on a personal level of friendship and fellowship. It
is for this reason that Muslims consider Christian doctrines such as the
incarnation and the vicarious atonement to be illogical and blasphemous - from
the Muslim’s perspective, Allah would never take on the form or flesh of a human
being, and certainly would never yield himself to die, however temporarily.
Because the incarnation, vicarious atonement, personal salvation and other
related doctrines in Christianity carry with them the necessity of immediate
encounter with God by man, they are considered unacceptable in Islam, which
teaches that such encounter would never occur, that they would be an insult to
Allah. Youssef states this well when he says,
"When
Muslims reject the concept of God-become-man, they also reject the concept of a
relationship between God and man, which is the essence of Christian faith. Put
simply, Islam delineates a concept of God that ultimately is irreconcilable
with the Christian Gospel. Muslims do not believe that God would have an
interest in a personal relationship of love and friendship with man, much less
that he actually would enter into human history for the purpose of
establishing, or rather re-establishing, such a relationship....According to
Muslims, divinity and humanity are totally exclusive entities. They believe God
really could not have entered into human life and that the relationship with
God enjoyed by Christians is impossible. Fellowship with God, which is the
religious experience of the Christian, is unimaginable to Muslims. They
consider the Christian assertion that man was created in God's own image to be
blasphemous."3
However, this Muslim
view of Allah’s transcendence and unknowability should be understood as being
an ideal only, for in practice the Muslim treatment of Allah only imperfectly
attributes transcendence to him. As stated above by al-Faruqi, you may not have
complete transcendence and self-revelation at the same time. Yet, al-Faruqi’s
statement is itself internally contradictory. Muslims seek to separate the
revelation of Allah’s will,
as found in the Qur’an, from the revelation of Allah himself. Akhtar attempts
this separation as well,
“Muslims
are not entitled to claim that 'Allah is Love' or 'Allah is Wisdom.' Only
adjectival descriptions are attributed to the divine being, and these merely as
they bear on the revelation of God’s will for man. The rest remains
mysterious.” 4
What can be described
about Allah is his will, not his being, nature or essence. Yet, this separation
of Allah’s will from Allah’s nature seems quite artificial. By the revelation
of his will, Allah must necessarily be revealing something about his nature, as
well. The will of a deity originates from the nature and essence of that deity.
Allah’s will must be a reflection of Allah’s essential nature, for if Allah
wants such-and-such to be done or not done, this desire stems from an
underlying reason rooted in his nature and being. The “adjectival descriptions”
of which Akhtar speaks, in defining and describing the will of the divine
being, become a description of the divine being himself. The very act of
revelation, as seen in Islam through the artifice of the Qur’an, negates the
complete transcendence of Allah, for it de
facto entails self-revelation of some sort or
another.
As this applies to
Islam, it does indeed become apparent that the ideal of the perfect
transcendence of Allah is not attained in Islam, no matter how much the
traditional Islamic paradigm may desire for it to be so. Hierophancy, in fact,
does enter heavily into the Muslim tradition, and indeed, forms the entire
basis of the Muslim claim to finality. The Islamic teaching on the multitude of
previous prophets, and the culmination, via the Qur’an, of Allah’s repeated
revelation to man, is perfectly hierophantic. It involves Allah relaying his
revelations to man through a series of intermediaries (the angel Jibril and
Mohammed). This giving of revelation, then, demands a certain amount of
immanence, of entry into the created world and interaction with it. Indeed, the
Qur’an itself quite often depicts Allah as acting within the universe, in
judgment, provision, and so forth.
Revelation to man by a
deity necessitates some form of self-revelation, at least if that revelation is
to be considered in any way comprehensible by man. The Qur’an claims for itself
to be both easily understood (44:58) and clear in its rightness as a source of
doctrine (98:3-5). As such, the quranic claims impart a measured amount of
knowability to the will of Allah, and hence to the nature of Allah, from whom that will
originates and of whom it is a reflection. However, the conflicting desire of
Muslims that Allah be transcendent and unknowable, too highly exalted to ever
be known and in any way understood by his creations, produces a certain
double-mindedness on the part of Islamic theology.
As such, Islamic
theology faces a certain tension, a conflict between the desire to maintain
Allah’s complete transcendence and unknowability on the one hand, and on the
other, the simple reality that if a deity is to relay any revelation to man of
any sort, this will necessarily demand a certain level of immanence and
interaction with the created world. It is at this point that orthodox Islamic
theology makes a “leap of faith” not dissimilar from that which was advocated
by Soren Kierkegaard (in many ways the founder of modern existential
philosophy) who believed that the rational and the logical could not
successfully be synthesized (in a dialectical sense) with faith, and therefore,
to have faith one needed to set aside what reason told him, and simply
“believe”. Muslims makes this leap because, having dispensed with the notion
that God is a personal God who condescends to deal with man in a personal and
real way, they still must accept that the Qur’an is an act of revelation, which
whether they like it or not, is an act of self-revelation.
Hence, the unknowable Allah has yet made known something about himself - the
reconciliation of the contradiction is the “leap of faith” that sets aside
reason, and accepts the Islamic proposition on blind faith. This can be seen in
al-Ghazali’s statement above. The “knowers” are those who know they do not know
anything about Allah. And yet, despite the attempt to play semantic games, to
have the Qur’an and believe it is the revelation of the “will of Allah” is to
have a book that implicitly tells you something about Allah’s nature and
character. The “knower”, the good Muslim, the student of the Islamic system,
must simply accept, without even having the benefit of an internally-consistent
theological system. While al-Ghazali may have been a Sufi (who is yet
considered largely orthodox by Sunnis), and hence inclined towards the mystical
side of matters, the problem remains for all sects within the Islamic realm.
What must be understood
about Islam is just how much of an existential and New Age philosophical system
it really is. “New Age?”, one might ask, “What does Islam have to do with power
crystals and Shirley MacLaine?” The answer is, “Nothing” - if we only look at
external trappings. However, we can see in Islam the same underlying
philosophical propositions that pervade the outlook of the Existentialists, New
Age movement, and Eastern religious thought in general. We have previously seen
the denial of personality and immanent concern that is attributed to Allah, and
the Kierkegaardian-style “leap of faith“ that is needed to reconcile the
rational with the non-rational in the Islamic system. The natural out-flowing
of this denial of personality to Allah is the necessary denial of personality
to Allah’s slaves. If we remove from the equation a personal God who made man
in His own image, who has given to man his personal attributes expressly for
the purpose of being able to rationally and realistically interact with the personal
God, then the need for personality is removed from the created being. We end up
with the same lack of need for and consequent de-emphasis of the individual,
the unique personality, the distinctive and irreplaceable qualities of each
person that mark him or her off from all others. Muslims cannot have a personal
relationship with Allah, because that requires two personal beings interacting
with one another. Instead, Muslims can only be Allah’s slaves, reduced to mere
cogs in the machine of the Islamic system, with the Islamic ummah and the Islamic deen acting the part of the
all-encompassing One found in Eastern thought and in the New Age movement. The
individual is subsumed into the Whole.
Another aspect of this
erasure of the personal God and His replacement with an impersonal deity is the
elimination of any absolute, moral right or wrong. Existence becomes
metaphysical, rather than moral. Man is what he is because that is his
essential nature that has never changed, rather than because he has a special
relationship to and with his Creator. This leads both to a fatalistic
acceptance of life’s circumstances, as well as an attitude of moral relativism.
Bad things happen in life not, as Christianity posits, because of the
universally destructive principle of sin which was introduced into creation at
the Fall by a free-will act of Adam, a principle that will also, as the Bible
teaches, one day be expunged from the created world. Instead, whatever happens
is so because that is how Allah wills it. This is not much different from the
Hindu principle of the karmic cycle, in which every event and every life
circumstance is mysteriously governed by the underlying action of the
unknowable, universal All. In such a system, deeds are not “moral” based upon
how they relate to some absolute standard of right and wrong against which such
acts are to be measured. Instead, deeds are judged in a situational context,
related to the Vedic principle of “duty” - any person, any animal, any plant,
is “judged” on the basis of whether it fulfills the role assigned to it (for
this particular life) by the karmic cycle. Hence, if you are a thief, it is
“right” for you to steal, because that is the duty assigned you by your lot in
life, and so forth. Morals and ethics become entirely situational.
Despite the popular
misconception that Islam is a system of rigidly established rules and mores,
the relation of the Islamic system to moral questions is actually quite
situational. This comes partly as a result of the fact that the Qur’an, by itself,
is in many cases inadequate to address questions that come up in life. One
example of this would be the relation of the “inheritance laws” in Suwar 4:11-12 and 4:176. These statutes,
setting up rules for how much of a man’s estate various of his relations are to
receive upon his death, in many cases end up yielding mathematically impossible
results when you begin to plug in various possible sets of inheriting
relatives. In some cases, you can end up with 9/8 or 17/16 of a man’s estate
being divided out! To get around this, as well as around other sundry problems
with the quranic revelation, Islamic theology has traditionally relied upon the sunnat and the ahadith to “fill in the gaps“, so to speak.
Hence, a book which is supposedly divine revelation from Allah only becomes
comprehensible in certain parts when it received the modifying additions of
these other sets of religious texts - texts that all sides agree were authored
by men. As one can imagine, this has produced a good deal of confusion and contradiction
over the centuries, with some theologians pointing to the Qur’an and saying it
teaches one thing, and others pointing to the same place in the book and saying
it teaches something totally the opposite - all on the authority of ahadith or a sunnah that has the backing of someone or
another behind it from way back when. Hence, two Muslims can look to the same
verse in the Qur’an, rely upon two different man-made authorities, and arrive
at opposite conclusions based upon the relative moral or ethical or theological
standards of their authority. The point, however, is that they can do this and neither one is wrong, since
they both are basing their opinions upon an “accepted” traditional source.
They may disagree with each other, even to the point of violence, but neither
can ever really give more than his own or some other man’s opinion as to how or
why the other is not right. Or, they can both accept, again by a leap of faith,
that they are both right. Either way their approach, which is encouraged by the
realities of the Islamic system as they pertain to Islam’s holy texts, is
relativistic.
And it is this
relativism that underlies the Islamic attitude towards “sin”. As will be seen
in more depth below, Islam’s attitude towards sin is little different from that
exercised by the ancient Semitic paganisms that existed all across the ancient
Near East. It surprises many to find this out, but Islam does not teach that man has a sin nature, as
Christianity does, which originally began as a result of the free-will choice
to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. Islam believes that man is basically
good, but that he errs because of weakness or ignorance. Hence, man’s sin is
metaphysical and not moral. Christianity’s view of sin is that of it being a
moral problem - man has a sin nature, but this sin nature entered in because of
a choice to disobey God by violating a divinely-provided absolute moral
standard. Islam’s view is metaphysical - man sins because that is just what
sometimes happens, that is how he is, there was no point at which a moral line
was crossed which resulted in man falling from grace and becoming (a
change-indicating word) prone to sin. Hence, there is no consequent need in the
Islamic system for man to be renewed to grace as there is in Christianity. In
Islam, when a man sins, it is just because that is what he does, and if he
wants to avoid the punishment for sin, he merely performs a ritual or asks for
forgiveness - but there is no need for God to exercise Himself personally to
bridge the gap between God and sinner. In turn, we find that in Islam, there is
no truly absolute, concrete moral system established. Islamic morality is
actually quite situational. In some circumstances (as will be shown later), it
is quite acceptable for a Muslim to lie, to cheat, to steal, and even to kill,
if these will be to the benefit of the Islamic system and the advancement of
the ummah. These have
nothing to do with the intricacies of any underlying, complex yet absolute
moral code. Rather, they depend entirely on the situation, not underpinning
principle. Even horrible acts, endeavoring as they do to advance the “greater
good” of expanding the power and control of the Islamic system, end up being
situationally “good” in much the same sense as the thief-born-to-be-a-thief in
the Vedic system. The duty of Muslims is to see the rule of Allah’s deen established over the whole earth, so
to do acts that would be viewed as “wrong” in a Judaeo-Christian context are
accepted as being “necessary” to fulfill the assigned role of the Muslim.
As such, while it would
certainly be simple-minded to state that Islam is synonymous with the New Age
movement or with the Eastern religions, we must concede that we can see within
it many of the same underlying principles and systems of thought - all of which
are in sharp contrast with the Judaeo-Christian worldview traditionally found
in the West, with its emphasis on a personal God and an unchanging, absolute
moral system.
In contrast to what has
been said above is the characteristic of the biblical God's personal nature.
God, as revealed in the Bible, is a person, not a force. God has emotions, a
will, an intellect, He reasons, He can be entreated, He speaks, and so on. As
such, God deals with mankind on a personal basis, and this forms the backbone
of the fellowship described above. The God of the Bible has chosen to reveal
Himself to mankind and to involve Himself in the affairs of mankind in such a
way, thus dealing personally with the creations whom He loved enough to send
His Son to die for. The personality of God and the desire for fellowship with
His creations who are separated from Him by sin, thusly combined, find their
culmination in Christ's work on the cross. "Therefore being justified by
faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Romans 5:1)
Through Christ's death and resurrection, man is able to trust in His sacrifice
and be saved to a relationship of peace and fellowship with God. God has willed
that man should come to peace with God through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The personality of the
God of the Bible is demonstrated in that distinctive doctrine of Christianity
that Muslims despise the most - the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of
the Trinity entails a self-manifestation of God to man in a way that can be
considered highly interactive. Man can know God through the various
manifestations that God has chosen, by His own sovereign will, to employ in His
dealings with His creations. He is the Father, the one from whom all provision,
authority, and power flow. As the Son, He is the agentive Logos, the Word of
God both preincarnate and made flesh, active in bringing tangible and knowable
revelation of God to man through His own self, and interactive with His
creations as a means of restoring human beings to a right relationship with God
through His self-sacrifice and subsequent victory over death and sin by His
resurrection. As the Spirit, He is the motive power that operates to bring all
the acts of God to pass, from creation to regeneration to the final
restoration, and who also has a very real and personal ministry of teaching and
conviction in the hearts of God‘s children. The interaction of God with man is
intimately bound up in his interaction with Himself, and the positional
differentiation of the Persons of the Godhead serves the function of allowing a
comprehensible self-revelation to the human beings with whom God desires a
personal relationship.
Wolfhart Pannenberg
presents a strong case for the purpose of God’s triune revelation of Himself by
looking at the eternity and “temporal wholeness” of God inherent in the
Trinitarian nature of God, and how it relates to the eternal life that God
gives to those who trust in Him,
“The
divine economy that manifests the activities of Father, Son and Spirit includes
the temporal distinctions between creation, incarnation and the final
consummation of the world. The unity of immanent and economic Trinity secures
these distinctions to be significant within the eternal life of the immanent
Trinity. Conversely, however, the same unity of the divine economy and the
immanent life of the Trinity guarantees the wholeness in the "eventful
actuality" of the divine economy. It does not get separated in the course
of time, but it overcomes the separateness of our temporal experience and of
our finite life in such a way as to let it participate in the wholeness of
God's eternal life.” 5
In essence, Pannenberg
is saying that God’s Trinitarian-ness is manifested to us both immanently (in
God’s dealings within His creation) and economically (God dealings with
Himself). The “economic Trinity” of the Father, Son, and Spirit’s interrelation
focusing on their temporal relationships to each other (God‘s eternality
outside of time as we know it), which was expounded upon earlier in his essay,
entails God’s possession of whole and complete life and being in an eternal,
extra-temporal sense. The unity of this economic aspect of the Trinity with His
immanent aspect as manifested by God’s Trinitarian dealings with man, allows
man to be able, by responding to God’s grace, to participate in that eternality
and totality of life. This, necessarily, entails a close communion with God,
for it is only through the activity of all three members of the Godhead that
grace is extended and eternal life given to the repentant sinner. Pannenberg
elsewhere summarizes the necessity of God’s uniplurality for His nature as a
personal God,
“The
biblical God is personal in his elective will and action and as he is revealed
as Father by his Son Jesus Christ. And because as Father he is related to his
Son for all eternity, he is personal in eternity in the unity of Father, Son,
and Spirit. In them, the unspeakable divine mystery is eternally concrete.
Therefore, one cannot have one God as personal without the trinitarian
persons.” 6
Pearcey iterates this
general view in a more down-to-earth fashion,
“Since
September 11, we have heard it said again and again that Islam is just another
Abrahamic faith--as though it were not really very different from Christianity.
So it may come as a surprise to learn that the God of Islam is actually more
akin to the nonpersonal Absolute of neo-Platonism and Hinduism than to the God
of the Bible.
“Yet it is true, and
the central reason is that Islam rejects the Trinity. Without that concept, it
cannot hold a fully personal conception of God. Why not? Because many
attributes of personality can be expressed only within a relationship--things
like love, communication, empathy, and self-giving.
“Traditional Christian
doctrine maintains a personal conception of God because it teaches that these
interpersonal attributes were expressed from all eternity among the three
Persons of the Trinity. A genuinely personal God requires distinct
"Persons," because that alone makes it possible for love and
communication to exist within the Godhead itself.” 7
In short, the very fact
of the Trinitarian doctrine illuminates to us a personal God. Christ’s prayer
for the churches in the Gospel of John speaks of the fact of God’s desire for
man to share in that eternal life,
“These
words spake Jesus and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour
is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast
given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as
thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:1-3)
The Son is given power
by the Father (an interaction between two of the Persons of the Godhead) to
give eternal life to those who have been given to Him by the Father. Christ is
said to have “power over all flesh”, which is an important element in His
giving of eternal life, and alludes to His capacity as God to restore complete
wholeness to the saved sinner, wholeness which culminates in the eventual
glorification and finalization of the salvation of the believer by Christ “who
shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious
body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things
unto himself.” (Philippians 3:21) This is a direct interaction of God with man
that finishes the work of salvation and restoration that begins when a sinner
believes on Christ and is justified before the Father by faith. The result of
this process, which is nothing less than the everlasting, personal fellowship
of the believer with God, is shown in Christ’s prayer,
“That
they may all be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also
may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the
glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we
are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and
that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou
hast loved me.” (John 17:21-23)
This oneness is not
pantheistic or panentheistic. The Bible clearly shows that believers will
retain their personal individuality throughout the eternity to come, just as
the three Persons of the Trinity retain their distinct personhood. But,
believers in the eternity to come will be one, just as the Father and Son are
one - there will be such a unity of purpose and heart that their fellowship
will approach the ontological unity of the Trinity, the sharing of the same
essence and being of God by the three manifestations by which He chooses to
reveal Himself. This unity is in God, made possible by the interactions of a
loving and personal God who acts by His own internal counsel for the benefit of
His creations.
The statement that “God
loves us” only becomes relevant when we understand that God is a uniplural
Being whose love towards us, and the love we are to show to each other, mirrors
that which exists between the Persons of the Godhead. Francis Schaeffer put it
this way,
“The
validity and meaning of love rests upon the reality that love exists between
the Father and the Son in the Trinity. When I say I love, instead of this being
a nonsense word, it has meaning. It is rooted in what has always been in the
personal relationship existing in the Trinity before the universe was created.
Man’s love is not a product of chance that has no fulfillment in what has
always been. Now, love is a thing not only of meaning but of beauty and wonder
to be nourished with joy.” 8
To say, then, that an
absolutely unitarian god such as Allah truly understands and is capable of love
is to speak gibberish.
What should be further
evident from this whole line of reasoning is that not only is the revelation of
a deity through the giving of a written scripture a form of self-revelation,
but so is the act of creation itself. The Bible indicates this in Romans 1:20,
“For
the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and
Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
Just as the handing
down of Scripture contains inextricably a view of the nature and being of God,
so does the creative act of God in fashioning, forming, ordering, establishing
the fruits of His work. When we consider our common experience of the world
around us, we see the Trinitarian nature of God revealed to us. We experience
existence in three dimensions - height, width, and length - which to have any
real meaning to us must all be present, intertwined, inseparable.
We simply cannot truly comprehend an existence with only one or two of these
dimensions. Even a piece of paper, drawings upon which we usually think of as
two-dimensional, still exists in three dimensions, for even a single sheet has some thickness. Likewise, our whole
comprehension of time rests upon the intertwined, inextricable interplay of
past, present, and future, each of which lacks any sort of comprehensible
meaning without the others. Our whole conception of the universe rests upon the
interplay of space, time, and matter/energy (which are really the same thing,
per Einstein’s equation E=mc2), all of which are necessary for us to
have any meaningful understanding of our very existence. We commonly experience
in the physical universe only three phases - solids, liquids, and gases (of
which plasmas are only a special form). All matter exists in one of these three
states by everyday experience, yet this matter can interchange, depending upon
environmental conditions, between these states of being, yet it remains the
same substance - the atoms in an iron bar remain iron, even when it melts, and
even when it vaporizes.
Thus, the very created
world around us testifies to the nature and essence of its Creator - a world in
which trinity after inseparable trinity demonstrates that its maker is one God
who yet exists as a tri-unity of His own manifestations who all exist as
integral, contemporaneous, and completely contiguous members of the Godhead.
Just as we cannot even conceive of, much less rationally experience, an
existence of length and width without height, so also can it simply not be that
God would exist as two of His persons without the third - it’s not a matter of
a sum of parts, but rather of complete expression of being. As difficult as
this may be for us to understand, the testimony of God’s nature to us in His
creation all around us affirms the truth of His Trinitarian nature. And
further, it is the Trinitarian nature of creation that even makes this creation
sensible and comprehensible to us in the first place - without this
trinitarianness, existence as we know it would not be possible. It is this
trinitarianness that enables our life to exist, our senses and reason to function,
and our personalities to interplay with each other and with God. Personal,
comprehensible, reasonable existence would not exist were it not for the
Trinity of the Godhead, through which God expresses His personality and
personal dealings with His creations.
Again, this all
contrasts sharply with the Allah of the Qur'an, who is a non-personal deity. He
is a deity to whom Islam considers it blasphemous to attribute personhood.
Allah is taught to be so transcendent that to try to understand him as a personal
being is to lower him to the level of his creation and deny his godhood. Allah
is presented in the Qur'an as being far-off and aloof, transcendent and
impersonal, to be worshipped and feared, but never fellowshipped with or
approached in a personal, familiar manner. Even when Allah is described as
being "nearer to him than (his) jugular vein" (Surah 50:16), this is more a reference to
Allah’s omnipresence than it is to his personal care or concern. It is a
statement of impersonal immanence, not the personal immanence
of the Biblical God.
As will be seen below,
the Islamic Allah is the end result of a good deal of theological evolution
from pagan pre-Islamic religious systems in the Middle East . The conception of
Allah idealized by Islam is not far removed from that of the henotheistic “high
gods” that existed in many ancient Near East religions. Among many peoples, it
was common to have a pantheon of gods or demi-gods that pagan worshippers
sought to interact with on a daily basis through the working of magical or
propitiatory rituals - seeking blessing for crops, asking for rain, etc. In
most of these systems, a “high god” existed, a being thought to more or less
rule over the pantheon of lesser gods, to whom more explicit qualities of
universality were attributed, but who in most cases was inaccessible to man.
These high gods were far-off, aloof, disinterested in the general affairs of
the world which may very well have emanated from them. The Muslim conception of
Allah is in many ways similar to this in his impersonality and unknowability.
These differences can
be shown in the disparity between the prayers of Christians and those of
Muslims. Christians are told to "pray without ceasing" (I
Thessalonians 5:17 ) and can approach God at any time as His children, crying out to Him as
a child would to a parent. Christians may cry "Abba [daddy], Father!"
(cf. Romans 8:15 ) and know that their heavenly Father hears and cares about their needs
and concerns. Muslims, on the other hand, are required to make ritual prayers
five times in a day, prayers which are repetitious and memorized, perfectly
designed for addressing and appeasing a transcendent force with no personal
interest in its creatures. Additional prayers from a Muslim must still be
addressed to an unknowable, impersonal being of whom there is no certain
knowledge that he cares or takes notice.
A God of Love Versus a
God of Hate
God, as revealed in the
Bible, is a God of love who cares for and desires the best for His creations.
He is merciful, full of grace and compassion, and seeks to restore a humanity
alienated from him by sin. "For God so loved the world that he sent his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life." (John 3:16) We are told in the Bible that God does not
desire the damnation of any soul, but wants all to come to Him through Christ
for forgiveness of their sins and reception of eternal life. It is God
"Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the
truth." (I Timothy 2:4). God, in his great mercy towards mankind, has
provided to mankind an Advocate before His heavenly throne, Jesus Christ, who
intercedes on behalf of the Christian before the Father, and who shed His blood
to free lost and sinful men and women from the wrath of God against sin.
"My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And
if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous. And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but
also for the sins of the whole world." (I John 2:1-2) These verses
illustrate the position and activity of Christ as both Savior and Advocate. He
is the propitiation for our sins, meaning that the shedding of His sinless
blood in sacrifice for us satisfied the demands of God's wrath against sin, and
that this act of grace was performed for the whole world, for every man, woman,
and child who has lived and ever will live. Likewise, He is the Advocate, the
one who stands before the throne of the Father and pleads His own righteousness
on behalf of those who have trusted in Him as Savior, if we sin.
This contrasts with the
quranic Allah, who hates sinners and has made no provision for their
reconciliation to him. "..and Allah loveth not those that do wrong."
(Surah 3:140) -
"Contend not on behalf of such as betray their own souls; for Allah loveth
not one given to perfidy and sin." (Surah 4:107) - "Those who reject Faith
and do wrong,- Allah will not forgive them nor guide them to any way- Except
the way of Hell, to dwell therein for ever. And this to Allah is easy." (Surah 4:168-169) - "....And if they
turn away, be assured that for some of their crime it is Allah's purpose to
punish them. And truly most men are rebellious." (Surah 5:49) - "The Unbelievers will be addressed:
"Greater was the aversion of Allah to you than (is) your aversion to
yourselves, seeing that ye were called to the Faith and ye used to
refuse." (Surah 40:10)
As presented in the Qur'an, Allah is a vindictive deity who desires to afflict
sinners, not save them. This understanding of Allah seems to be the orthodox
Islamic position. Note the passage below:
"This
is the covenant which you make with Allah as soon as you recite La ilaha illallah, and in doing
so you make the whole world your witness. If you violate this covenant, your
hand and feet, the minutest hair on your body and every particle of the earth
and of the heaven before which you made that false declaration, will render
evidence against you in the court of Allah where you will be in the dock in
such a helpless condition that not a single defence witness will be available
to you. No Advocate or Barrister will be there to plead your case...." 9
As demonstrated here,
breaking the covenant made with Allah, which is the covenant to live and abide
by Islamic law and practice, will result in being hauled before the court of
Allah completely defenseless, with no hope of ever being either redeemed from
your sin or of being saved from the wrath of Allah. Of course, the way in which
this covenant is broken is by apostatizing from Islam, not by committing some
other gross or negligent personal sin. Indeed, the main thrust of the quranic
verses mentioned above seems to be the condemnation of those who "betray
their own soul" and who were "called to the faith" and refused,
essentially choosing to reject Islam.
Further, the Qur'an
contains a great deal about the types of people who Allah hates, usually
understood to be those who have rejected Islam, or who will not convert to it:
- Transgressors (2:190)
- Ungrateful and wicked
creatures (2:276)
- Those who reject faith (3:32;
30:45)
- Those who do wrong (3:57, 140;
42:40)
- The arrogant, the vainglorious
(4:36; 16:23; 31:18; 57:23)
- One given to perfidy and crime (4:107)
- Those who do mischief (5:64;
28:77)
- Those given to excess (5:87)
- Wasters (6:141; 7:31)
- Those who trespass beyond bounds (
- Treacherous (8:58)
- Ungrateful (22:38)
- Those who exult in riches (28:76)
This does not reconcile
with the God of the Bible who, while hating sin and the performance of sin,
also loves sinners and seeks to turn them from their wicked ways. "But God
commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8) This passage
illustrates to us God's amazing love, His willingness to send His Son Jesus
Christ to die in our place, to take the wrath against sin upon ourselves, even
though we are all sinners. Further, God's attitude toward the damnation and
punishment of sinners is shown in Ezekiel 18:23, "Have I any pleasure at
all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should
return from his ways and live?" While Allah may hate all who are not
righteous and even seek their damnation, God loves them and has made abundant
provision for them to receive forgiveness and eternal life. Truly, human beings
go to hell in spite of the undeserved grace that God seeks to
give to them.
The reason for this
difference in the perception of God between Christians and Muslims has to do
with the perception of love. The former believe in a God who loved them enough
to send His Son to die for them even while they were still sinners, the latter
believe Allah hates any who do not conform to his demands. As noted earlier,
love is a necessary part of a reconciled relationship. Yet, Islam rejects love
from being an attribute of Allah's character. Self-sacrificial love is
considered to be weakness in the Islamic mindset, and to say that God loves is
tantamount to saying that God is weak and vulnerable. Youssef, himself a former
Muslim, describes the mindset this way,
"The
concept of love as one of God's attributes is conspicuously missing from Islam
because in Islamic thought love is a sign of weakness. Far be it from Allah,
the all-powerful, to be weak. To love is to be vulnerable, and far be it from
Allah to be vulnerable. But love also produces genuine confidence and hope and
teaches the beloved to love freely and generously in return. Islam has no
concept of the strength of love or of the characteristic qualities of love as
desirable. The Koran gives no knowledge of the perfect love of God in Jesus
Christ, which casts out fear and which is strong enough to overcome death and
inaugurate eternal life. Muslims cannot rest in the promise of a faithful God
who assures that nothing will separate them from the love of God in Christ
Jesus.
"In Islam, God and
man are wary of each other, in contrast to Christianity, in which God and man
are in love with each other. This difference is of great importance because it
lies at the heart of the tensions Muslims feel toward Christians. The same
relationship that exists between God and humans in each of the two religions
exists by extension between the humans. Christians are taught to love their neighbors
as they have first experienced Christ's love. Muslims are taught - many
exhortations to charity notwithstanding - to judge, condemn, and even eliminate
their neighbors if they fail to measure up to a certain standard of faith and
practice, because that is how they expect Allah to deal with them."10
Contrast this view of
the lack of love in God's character with that expressed by God in the Bible,
"And
they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations whither they shall
be carried captives, because I am broken with their whorish heart, which hath
departed from me, and with their eyes, which go a whoring after their idols:
and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all
their abominations." (Ezekiel 6:9)
The sin of God's people
may lead to chastisement, but He does not seek their destruction. Instead,
their sin breaks His heart (talk about vulnerability!), and He desires for them
to return to Him. He does not want to destroy them, He wants to restore them as they repent of their sins
against Him.
The lack of assuring
knowledge of God's love for them is much of the reason why the spirit of Islam
is so harsh and hateful towards those who are not submitted to its system.
Because Allah does not love self-sacrificially - and he certainly does not love those who are not
Muslims - neither does the orthodox, fundamentalist Muslim trying to live by
the letter of the Qur'an. The Muslim cannot claim that Allah loves him or her.
He or she has no true hope or assurance of salvation from all the efforts made
in this life. The Muslim is instead left hanging in limbo, never quite knowing
if he or she has "done enough" to please Allah at the Last Day. As
Youssef further tells us about this,
"The
harshness of Islam is the direct result of its uncertainty about salvation and
eternity. Not only are people what they worship, but they become what they
fear. The Muslim's fear of Allah's judgment and condemnation turns outward into
the same kind of action toward others. Grace and forgiveness are rare
attributes of God or man in Islam, which proves a common saying that 'Islam is
as arid as the deserts of its birth.'"11
As Youssef rightly
perceives, we become what we worship.
Putting a Difference
Between the Holy and Unholy
Lastly, but yet very
importantly, we must note that the God of the Bible is a holy God. By this term is meant that God is
completely and unalterably separated from sin. In fact, it is this complete
holiness which lies at the very foundation of the necessity of the Christian
Gospel. As the Bible tells us, "there is none as holy as the LORD..."
(I Samuel 2:2) When the Bible says "none", it really does mean
"none":
"For
there is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God." (Romans
3:10-11)
"For all have sinned, and come short of the
glory of God." (Romans 3:23)
These statements are
directed to each of us, individually. All of us are sinners, by nature and by
practice, and hence fall short of this glory of God, which is embodied by His
holiness, His complete separation from sin. It is this holiness that keeps all
of us, sinners that we are, from being able to naturally enter into God's
presence, and which keeps us from being able to enter into heaven when we pass
from this earth.
However, the Bible also
tells us that God provided a way for us to be saved, for us to receive the gift
of eternal life and eternal fellowship with Him, in a way that both upholds His
holiness while simultaneously exercising His love for mankind, His creation.
This is through Jesus Christ, very God yet very man, God incarnated in the
likeness of sinful flesh, yet without sin, so that He could take ourplace under God's wrath
against sin.
"But
God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)
Jesus Christ, who is
God, was completely sinless, and He came to earth to take our place, to provide
the sacrifice in our place that was needed to satisfy God's wrath against sin.
Whereas man cannot ever satisfy God because of our sinfulness, Jesus who is
sinless, was able to do so, and faith in His sacrifice and in His resurrection
(whereby He also defeated death and hell, and provides eternal life to sinner)
is the requirement for the extension of God's grace of salvation to the lost
sinner. Further, true repentance is necessary for a sinner to receive grace. It
is not enough for a person to merely come to Jesus and say "I'm
sorry". There must be a true, heart-felt attitude of repentance, of a
desire to not only be cleansed of sin, but also to turn away from it and put it
away from your life. "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your
sins may be blotted out...." (Acts 3:19a). Hence, we see the resolution of
the seeming paradox between God's love for man and desire for man's fellowship
and the fact that man is separated from God because of our sin and is under God's
wrath against sin.
In Islam, this is a
paradox that never occurs, because sin is not something about which Allah is
especially concerned. In Islam, Allah is not presented as "holy", in
the sense in which Christianity conceives of the idea. The term is used,
certainly, but not in the same way as was traditionally understood by the
Hebrews concerning Jehovah for thousands of years before Islam, and which was
carried into Christianity at its inception. According to Muslim theology, Allah
has never provided a way for the sin problem of mankind to be dealt with so
that man can be made clean in God's eyes. In fact, Islam does not even
recognize that man is a sinner by nature. Instead, sin is considered to be a
"mistake" which people make, and which Allah will forgive when asked
(if one is already a Muslim). So yes, Islam does engender an element of seeking
God's forgiveness for wrongdoing, just as Christianity does, but the differences are much more
important than this superficial similarity. The Islamic teaching on getting
right with Allah completely ignores true repentance. There is nothing said
about seeking a complete change of life when a person gets right with God.
There is nothing about making a conscious choice to avoid sin because that is
what God wants and because we are to be holy as God is holy (cf. I Peter
1:15-16). According to Biblical teaching, repentance is summed up as such,
“He
that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” (Proverbs
28:13)
However, in Islam the
primary sins which a person can commit and not receive easy forgiveness from
Allah seem to be apostasy from Islam (as was seen above in Maududi's statement)
and the refusal to convert to Islam. For these there is little remedy, and much
attribution of moral reprobacy and "obvious" inferiority. Indeed, it
seems that the teaching of Islam on sin is more designed to assure that people
do not reject Islam as a politico-religious system than to encourage them to
keep themselves from sin. The Islamic teachings on apostasy/disbelief versus
other sins appears to be more concerned with advancing Islam as a human system
than in turning people towards Allah in any meaningful way.
In Islam, a person
commits a sin, and can have this sin forgiven merely by asking, but then can go
out and commit the same sin over and over again, each time asking for
forgiveness, and having it given. Lacking from this, however, is any notion of
repentance, of seeking to put away sin permanently. This attitude is quite similar
to the attitude toward repentance that is exhibited through the auricular
confessional used in many Catholic systems. This is also why we see so much
violence and corruption in the Muslim world.
"For
these, there is hope that Allah will forgive: For Allah doth blot out (sins)
and forgive again and again." (Surah 4:99)
Jehovah, as presented
in the Bible, does bear long with man, and will forgive us our sins again and
again, but the difference is that when a person
has trusted Christ, the Spirit of God will work in them to make them more
Christ-like, which includes sinning (and desiring
to sin) less, and certainly not having a life which is characterized by sin.
"Whosoever
abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known
him." (I John 3:6)
In this verse, the word
"sinneth" is translated from a Greek verb, the tense of which
indicates an on-going state of affairs, as opposed to single instances. What
this verse says is that a person who is truly saved, who truly abides with Christ,
will not have a life characterized by on-going sin and a corresponding lack of
repentance. This is, in fact, a way which is provided for Christians to be able
to distinguish between true brethren and false brethren who are only saying
that they are Christians.
The Islamic view does
not take this into account. Saying "I'm sorry" is enough for Allah.
There is no provision in Islam made for the removal of that person's sin, the
washing away of the sin stain from the heart, as God has made through the blood
of the Lamb of God, Christ Jesus. In fact, Allah is unholy because he does not need such a provision according to Islam.
Allah is not separated from sin, and will allow unwashed sinners into his
presence for all eternity, indicating that Allah really has no separation from
sin that comes from pure holiness. Instead of a God-given provision for the
removal of sin, Allah is satisfied merely with man's works and man's own
"goodness".
"O
Prophet! say to those who are captives in your hands: "If Allah findeth
any good in your hearts, He will give you something better than what has been
taken from you, and He will forgive you: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most
Merciful." (Surah 8:70)
In this passage above,
it is taught that Allah will forgive captive prisoners of war who fall into
Muslim hands, if these prisoners have good in their
hearts, usually understood to be a willingness to accept Islam. Thus, it is
taught that inherent goodness in men (or at least some men) will be enough to
provoke Allah's forgiveness. Indeed, it may suggest that those who are
inherently good will be the ones to convert to Islam (and vice versa). This
teaching basically affirms the Muslim contention that man is inherently good,
and that sin is not truly a barrier that separates man from God. The Islamic
teaching is essentially man-centered,
not God-centered.
This Islamic teaching
that man can be good at heart contradicts what God says in Jeremiah 17:9,
"The
heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know
it?"
Further, the Qur'an
teaches that not all sin needs to be actively forgiven. Merely staying away
from the major sins (called kabira,
roughly thought of as Islam's equivalent to mortal sins) will automatically
result in your "small" sins (saghira, Islam's venial sins)
being overlooked by Allah:
"If
you shun the great sins which you are forbidden, We will do away with your
small sins and cause you to enter an honorable place of entering." (Surah 4:31, Shakir translation)
Hence, as long as you
do not murder (at least outside of jihad,
one supposes) or rape or blaspheme, it is acceptable for you to lie a little
bit or to maybe sneak an adulterous glance every now and then, so the logical
conclusion of the teaching seems to be. What we see is that the combination of
these teachings yields a sanctioning of sin in a person's life. After all, stay
away from the major sins, and the minor ones are automatically forgiven. If you
do commit a major sin, then merely asking for forgiveness (even if you do not
have true repentance, and just want to get out of the supernatural punishment
for your sin) gets you off scot-free.
Islam's teachings on
sin, like those of every other world religious system aside from Bible
Christianity, is engineered to appeal to worldly, sinful people through its
teaching that human beings really are not that bad (and can be inherently
good!), that God will look the other way for some sins, that sin is not a big
deal that we have to go changing our way of life over, etc. It is designed,
just as with much of the rest of Islamic theology, to appeal to carnal people
and to tickle the ears of the unrepentant sinner.
Indeed, this Islamic
attitude towards sin and forgiveness is typical of the pre-Islamic pagan
attitudes which existed in the ancient Semitic world. In this sense, Allah is
little different from the gods of the pagans before Islamic times. Smith notes
concerning this attitude in pre-Islamic paganism,
"To
reconcile the forgiving goodness of God with His absolute justice, is one of
the highest problems of spiritual religion, which in Christianity is solved by
the doctrine of the atonement. It is important to realize that in heathenism
this problem never arose in the form in which the New Testament deals with it,
not because the gods of the heathen were not conceived as good and gracious,
but because they were not absolutely just. This lack of strict justice,
however, is not to be taken as meaning that the gods were in their nature
unjust, when measured by the existing standards of social righteousness; as a
rule they were conceived as sympathising with right conduct, but not as rigidly
enforcing it in every case. To us, who are accustomed to take an abstract view
of the divine attributes, this is difficult to conceive, but it seemed
perfectly natural when the divine sovereignty was conceived as a kingship
precisely similar to human kingship."12
This conception of
deity contains an imperfectly just god because it is patterned off of the
imperfect justice of a temporal, human ruler. Just as a human ruler may at
times fail to act against a crime, for whatever reason, so might the gods.
Indeed, the imperfect justice of the gods meant that no reconciliation may need
to be made between the sinner and the god because the god might not punish the
sinner for his evil deeds. Indeed, the justice, when applied, might be
perverted towards favorites of the ruler or the god. That this is implied even
in the Qur'an can be seen,
"Whether
thou ask for their forgiveness, or not, (their sin is unforgivable): if thou
ask seventy times for their forgiveness, Allah will not forgive them: because
they have rejected Allah and His Messenger. And Allah guideth not those who are
perversely rebellious." (Surah 9:80)
Whereas the God of the
Bible is "no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34 )
not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (cf.
II Peter 3:9), Allah guides not those who are "rebellious", instead
seeking their damnation. If you have not been the recipient of Allah's
apparently capricious favor, then there is no remedy for you.
Other aspects of
pre-Islamic pagan religious systems were transferred into the Arab religion as
it developed. The setting aside of haram,
sanctuaries or sacred precincts devoted to a certain god or gods, was a common
trait in all primitive Semitic religion. These were regions in which human
cultivation or other agricultural activity were prohibited, because the area
was sanctified to the god of theharam and could not be soiled by human
labor. The haram often were associated with settled
regions, and would generally be overseen by a hereditary priest who was not
necessarily associated with the dominant tribe or tribes of the area. Despite
their nomadic nature, the Bedouin tribes would frequent these areas for worship
and other religious duties. Concerning Bedouin worship at these sanctuaries,
Rodinson says,
“...Homage
was paid to the divinity with offerings and the sacrifice of animals and
perhaps, occasionally, of human beings. Certain sanctuaries were the object of
pilgrimage (hajj) at which a variety of rituals were performed, consisting
notably of ceremonial processions around the sacred object. Certain prohibitions
had to be observed during these rituals, such as in many cases abstention from
sexual relations.”13
This sort of ritualism
was carried over into Islam, at the haram in Mecca
Another aspect of this
ritualistic worship in the Ka'bah bears some attention. This is the
veneration of the black stone of the Ka'bah,
reputed in some Muslim traditions to have fallen from heaven, after which it
served as the center about which Abraham built the originalKa'bah. The
veneration of sacred stones or pillars was common to ancient Semitic religious
systems. Henninger discusses this,
“One
detail which already impressed the Greek authors was the role played by sacred
stones....the material object is not venerated for itself but rather as the
dwelling of either a person being (god, spirit) or a force.” 15
Dussaud agrees with
this assessment, denying this veneration any overtly litholatric character, and
instead recognizing that the worshippers were really directing their honor
towards the deity who inhabited or could be contained within the stone16. Hitti stated that among the Nabataeans Dushara, the Nabataean high
god, was worshipped through an obelisk of rough-hewn black stone17. He also reports that black, conical stones were venerated in the
temple at Baalbek Syria Syria
One interesting thing
to note in the Qur’an is the use of the phrase sala-l-lahu ‘alayhi wa-sallam.
This Arabic phrase is also used by Muslims whenever they speak or write the
name “Mohammed”, and is often abbreviated in transliterated Arabic texts as saw. The phrase is often
mistranslated into English as “peace be upon him” (abbreviated pbuh). A literal translation
from the Arabic, however, would be “the prayers of Allah be upon/for him with
peace”. This is interesting, as well as a bit disconcerting to knowledgeable
Muslims, because the obvious question becomes “to whom is Allah praying”? And
this is certainly what the Arabic phrase implies, as the native Arabic-speaker
Anis Shorrosh points out 20. Muslim apologists will argue that the Arabic word sala’h that appears in the invocation does
not mean “prayer”, however this is flatly contradicted by Muslim-Arabic
lexicographic sources. Ibn al-Atheer’s classic Arabic dictionary says the
following about this word,
“'Al-Sala'h'
and 'Al-Salawaat': used for a particular kind of worship. Its literal origin is
supplication (prayer). Sometimes, 'Sala'h' is referred to by mentioning any one
or more of its parts. It is also said that the literal origin of the word is
'to glorify' and the particular worship is called 'Sala'h', because it entails
the glorification of the Lord.” 21
This understanding of
the word is also demonstrated from a prominent Arabic source by Sam Shamoun,
affiliated with Answering
Islam, who points out that the term describes the making of prayer and
supplication to someone22. Shamoun observes from the highly respected Arabic tafsir source, Ibn Kathir, that the meaning
of sala’h is quite specifically that of
“supplication”, of “bowing and prostration”, especially in what appears to be a
ritualistic sense, and he goes on to clearly demonstrate that no arguments can
be made to suggest that the word has any other meaning other than of prayer.
Hence, the one receiving sala’h is receiving prayer, worship, and
glorification from the one giving it. The phrase, rightly understood, clearly
implies that Allah is praying to another being. This other being, of
course, should not be understood to be Mohammed. All the same, Allah is indicated to be praying to someone - so who is it? The answer is likely
found in the religious and cultural milieu of the ancient Near East. It was not
uncommon for some gods in ancient Near Eastern religion to be viewed as
arbitrators or negotiators between men and other gods, either their equals (as
a favor to the man) or to those who were their superiors (as a supplicant on
behalf of the man)23. It is quite possible that the use of sala-l-lahu
‘alayhi wa-sallam in the
Qur’an is a vestige of such a type of arbitration, a hold-over from earlier
Arabian religion that found its way into the text as the development of Islam
from primitive henotheism to absolute monotheism progressed.
Thus, Islam
demonstrates several traces of pagan practices that were widespread across the
ancient Near East before the Arab advent. The toleration and even incorporation
of pagan practices and concepts into the worship and conception of Allah is
markedly different from the God of the Bible. Throughout the Old Testament, God
commanded the Israelites to reject and extirpate heathen practices from the
nation. Indeed, many of the Old Testament laws that many Christians today think
of as strange or overly legalistic (for instance, the prohibitions against
marking or cutting the flesh, against the shaving of the head, etc.) were put
in place because these were practices that went on in the pagan societies
around Israel. God wanted to put a clear distinction between His holy people
and their neighbors.
From this comparison of
the attributes and attitudes of God and of Allah, we can and should conclude
that the two are not one and the same. Allah is definitely not the God of the Bible.
Allah as the
Pre-Islamic Arabian High God
If Allah is not merely
Jehovah repackaged under a new name, then who is he? Who is this Allah to whom nearly a
fifth of the world's population bows down and gives reverence? The answer is
somewhat surprising to those unfamiliar with the pre-Islamic history of the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East .
Belief in Allah was
widespread across the Arabian peninsula prior to the rise of Mohammed. However, the Allah worshipped in those
days was not the monotheistic Allah who Muslims know today. Rather, Allah was
just one of many gods, most often considered to be the highest or supreme god
among many in a henotheistic system that developed in Arabia over the centuries
prior to Islam.
“The
name Allah, as the Quran itself is witness, was well known in pre-Islamic Arabia . Indeed, both it and its feminine
form, Allat, are found not infrequently among the theophorous names in
inscriptions from North Arabia. ” 24
Watt states concerning
the pre-Islamic Arabian religious situation,
“In
recent years I have become increasingly convinced that for an adequate
understanding of the career of Muhammad and that of Islam great importance must
be attached to the existence in Mecca of belief in Allah as a ‘high god’. In a
sense this is a form of paganism, but it is so different from paganism as
commonly understood that it deserves separate treatment.” 26
However, when remarking
that Allah was viewed as a "high god" in Arabia , this must not be
understood to mean that he was the only god worshipped by the pre-Islamic
Arabs. Watt elsewhere states,
"The
use of the phrase “the Lord of this House” makes it likely that those Meccans
who believed in Allah as a high god – and they may have been numerous –
regarded the Ka’ba as his shrine, even though there were images of other gods
in it. There are stories in the Sira of pagan Meccans praying to Allah while
standing beside the image of Hubal."27
Zwemer tells us,
“But
history establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt that even the pagan Arabs,
before Mohammed’s time, knew their chief god by the name of Allah and even, in
a sense, proclaimed his unity. In pre-Islamic literature, Christian or pagan,
ilah is used for any god and Al-ilah (contracted to Allah), i.e. the god, was
the name of the Supreme. Among the pagan Arabs this term denoted the chief god of
their pantheon, the Kaaba, with its three hundred and sixty idols.” 28
While it is typical to
think of "Allah" as a name, it originally was not. In fact, the term
"Allah" was a title, a contraction of Arabic words meaning "the
god", indicating the general sense in which "Allah" was used
prior to the rise of Islam. MacDonald states about al-ilah, which appeared
frequently in pre-Islamic poetry,
"By
frequency of usage, al-ilah was contracted to allah, frequently attested to in
pre-Islamic poetry (where this name cannot in every case have been substituted
for another), and then became a proper name (ism 'alam).” 29
This is corroborated by
Peters,
"The
cult of the deity termed simply ‘the god’ (al-ilah) was known throughout Syria
and Northern Arabia in the days before Islam -- Muhammed’s father was named
‘Abd Allah’ (Servant of Allah) -- and was obviously of central importance in
Mecca, where the building called the Ka’bah was indisputably his house. Indeed,
the Muslims’ ‘shahada’ attests to precisely that point: the Quraysh, the
paramount tribe of Mecca
Indeed, the fact that
Allah was at one time a single god among many in the pagan Arabian pantheon is
accepted by orthodox Islam, which refers to the pre-Islamic period as the Jahiliya, the "times of
ignorance". However, Islam's traditional teaching about the times of
ignorance differs from the facts established by investigation into the history
and archaeology of the ancient Near East. Islam recognizes that these other
gods were at one time worshipped alongside Allah (termed shirk, or associationism).
However, Islamic dogma also holds that Allah is the same God who appears in the
Bible, in other words, the original monotheistic being with whom mankind later
associated false gods out of ignorance and rebellion. Yet, as will be shown
below, there does not seem to have ever been a time when Allah (al-ilah) was
conceived of as purely monotheistic prior to the rise of Islam, and further,
al-ilah, as a title, was at various times applied to false gods whose origins are
found in the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia, and from whom the path to
the current Arabian conception of Allah can be traced.
The Ka'bah, known as beit allah, the "house of
Allah", is believed to have been a center of pagan worship in the Hijaz region
of Arabia for centuries prior to the appearance of Islam. Scholars recognize
that it has served as a house of idolatrous worship for its entire traceable
history. Gilchrist writes,
“There
is no corroborative evidence whatsoever for the Qu’ran’s claim that the Ka’aba
was initially a house of monotheistic worship. Instead there certainly is
evidence as far back as history can trace the origins and worship of the Ka’aba
that it was thoroughly pagan and idolatrous in content and emphasis.” 31
Van Ess further states,
"In
pre-Islamic days, called the Days of Ignorance, the religious background of the
Arabs was pagan, and basically animistic. Through wells, trees, stones, caves,
springs, and other natural objects man could make contact with the deity. The
heavenly bodies, so familiar to pastoral people, were revered; the moon, the
shepherd's friend, was worshiped, though the sun, the Bedouin's terror, was
placated. At Mekka, Allah was the chief of the gods and the special deity of
the Quraish, the prophet’s tribe. Allah had three daughters: Al Uzzah (Venus)
most revered of all and pleased with human sacrifice; Manah, the goddess of
destiny, and Al Lat, the goddess of vegetable life. Hubal and more than three
hundred others made up the pantheon. The central shrine at Mekka was the
Qaabah, a cube-like stone structure which still stands though many times
rebuilt. Imbedded in one corner is the black stone, probably a meteorite, the
kissing of which is now an essential part of the pilgrimage." 32
Indeed, there were many
"al-ilahs" existing throughout the Semitic world, down to the time of
Islam's development. When the Arab Empire extended its control, first over Syria Palestine Egypt Mesopotamia , and the whole of the Arabian
peninsula , it became necessary
to fold the various religious beliefs among its new subjects into the bosom of
the developing religion of Islam. For the pagan Arabian tribes, this included
the assimilation of their various high gods with the "al-ilah" which
had been established as the monotheistic god of Islam. Speaking of the various
Arabian tribes, Wellhausen originally noted,
“At
first Allah was the title used within each individual tribe to address its
tribal deity instead of its proper name. All said 'Allah', but each one had its
own deity in mind. The expression 'the god' (al-ilah), which became the only
usage, became the bridge to the concept of an identical god which all tribes
had in common." 33
As will be discussed in
Chapter 5, while it is unlikely that Mohammed actually existed, at least in the
role to which Islam assigned him in later centuries, there is a strong case to
be made for the assimilation of the many pagan "al-ilahs" into Islam
that is ascribed to Mohammed by these above. This Allah was the key which the
early Muslims used to bring the pagan Arabians firmly into the fold. They
introduced to these tribes a monotheistic version of the god al-ilah that they
had already been worshipping for centuries, as the title for various gods
differing by locality. As Nöldeke notes,
“In
the Nabataean inscriptions we repeatedly find the name of a deity accompanied
by the title Alaha, 'the god'. Hence, Wellhausen argues that the Arabs of a
later age may also have applied the epithet Allah, 'the god', to a number of
different deities, and that in this manner Allah, from being a mere appendage
to the name of a great god, may gradually have become the proper name of the
Supreme God. In any case it is an extremely important fact that Mohammed did
not find it necessary to introduce an altogether novel deity, but contented
himself with ridding the heathen Allah of his companions, subjecting him to a
kind of dogmatic purification and defining him in a somewhat clearer manner.” 34
Allah became the bridge
for the Muslims to link all the Arabian tribes together under their new
religion, Islam. Allah was a generic expression for the idols of Arabia , used by each tribe
for its own particular high god, and these became amalgamated into the al-ilah
of the state-sponsored religious system of the new Arab Empire.
Where did the
"al-ilahs" of the tribes come from, and what were the deities to
which these titles referred? What sort of gods were these deities? To begin to
trace the development of the deity now known as Allah, we must look to Mesopotamia .
Ilah and the Sumerian
Origins of Allah
The quest for the
historical Allah begins in Sumeria, over three millennia before Christ. The
Sumerians worshipped a well-organized and highly developed pantheon of gods.
The greatest of the Sumerian gods after the distant sky-god Anu (who had little
to do with human affairs) was the active and vigorous atmospheric god Enlil.
The name “Enlil” is a compounded Sumerian word meaning "lord of the
storm/air" (en = lord, lil = storm, air). It is from this god Enlil that
we see the beginning of Allah, for it is from this deity that we find the
beginning of the lexical track which leads us to al-Ilah, that was mentioned
above as the title ("the god") which grew to be "Allah" by
elision.
Enlil was the
principle god of the Sumerian pantheon, ruler of the atmosphere, bringer of
winds and storms, and was also known by the epithet of "the great
mountain", perhaps emphasizing his great strength or connection with the
cosmic mountain, the seat of divine sovereignty35. This god was known among the Sumerians from earliest times, with his
name appearing in engravings dating as far back as the Jemdat Nasr period, at
the beginning of the Sumerian Bronze Age36. As stated before, the name "Enlil" is a compound of
"en" and "lil". This latter particle, "lil" is of
interest in this discussion because it is the source of the word
"il/ilu" which came to mean "god" in the branch of Semitic
languages, starting with Akkadian, from which the Arabic word "ilah"
ultimately derived.
In the Akkadian
civilization, a Semitic group which occupied the northern part of Mesopotamia , and which was roughly
contemporaneous with the Sumerians, Enlil was brought over and introduced to
the Semitic world. In Akkad , the pronunciation of his name gradually changed to "Ellil"
through assimilation of the n37. The Akkadian word for "god" was "il" or
"ilu". It is likely that this meaning developed as a result of
eliding the syllables in the name of this high god "Ellil",
eventually giving "il". Because of "il"'s position at the
head of the pantheon, it would be natural for the meaning of his name to expand
beyond the idea of wind and storms to encompass a fuller understanding of his
sovereign divinity. Thus, it is likely that the term later used to describe deity
throughout Arabia originated from the Sumerian god Enlil as he passed down to
later generations of Semites in Akkad and elsewhere. Indeed, an Old Babylonian
copy of an Akkadian myth-hymn (but which Jacobsen says "speaks with the
voice" of the 3rd millennium BC), specifically names Enlil "Ilu"38, showing the particularization of that term to this god.
One point of confusion
that arises in the discussions surrounding the Mesopotamian Lil/Il is that many
will confound this god-name with the western Semitic names El/Eloah, which
appear both in the Bible as a name for God, as well as in various mythologies
among the Canaanites and allied peoples as the name for the chief god of their pantheon.
Guillaume presents a typical example of the assumed relation of El and Il,
"The
oldest name for God used in the Semitic world consists of but two letters, the
consonant 'l' preceded by a smooth breathing, which was pronounced 'Il' in
ancient Babylonia, 'El' in ancient Israel."39
There is not, however,
necessarily reason to think that the western Semitic El descends from the
Akkadian Il. As noted before, Lil is a Sumerian term denoting "wind"
or "air", and this carried over into the Akkadian adaptation of the
god-name. Scott informs us, however, that the origin of the term El, as it
appears as a god-name across the breadth of Semitic languages, is unknown - the
most frequently mentioned etymological suggestions for the original meaning of
the term are "fear" or "power", but he agrees that even
these are widely contested40. The mere similarity of the lexical root does not clinch a direct connection between El and Il. As
Shahid informs us in another context,
"Arabic
and other Semitic languages are full of homophonous but non-synonymous roots
and lexemes...."41
El may well present a
similar sense to the Akkadian Il, while yet not being directly related or
directly descended. The word/particle "il" may be related to the
Akkadian verb elu (vocalized with a long "e")42, which has various related meanings of "to raise, to ascend, to be
high, to be exalted", and which itself may be connected with the Sumerian lil through the sense of the heights of
the air or atmosphere. This verb would be cognate with the Hebrew verb calah
As such, there is not
necessarily a direct, genetic connection between the Akkadian Il/Ilu (and thus,
the Sumerian Lil from which came the Akkadian) and the West Semitic El/Eloah.
Hence, we cannot necessarily say with confidence that El came from the
Mesopotamian Il. We can,
however, say this about the Arabian Il/Ilah, for which genetic link there is
much attestation in the relevant literature.
The "il/lil"
root appeared widely throughout Semitic Mesopotamia. It appears in the Semitic
name for Babylon Mesopotamia as far forward as the
Persian period, beginning with the conquest of Babylon
"Allah
[al-ilah, remember] himself was ancient - a thousand years before Mohammed the
Persians wrote 'Allah is exalted' - but he was only one of many deities." 45
Thus, the god-name
"il", often lengthened to "ilah" (remember,
"al-ilah" = allah) in northern Arabian languages spoken by Arab
tribes who had spread even into southern Mesopotamia by this time, was spreading from its Mesopotamian origins. Indeed,
scholars have provided evidence that the origin of the Arabian use of god-names
with "il/lil", and hence the origin of "al-ilah", is
Mesopotamian. Winnett and Reed observed a number of appearances of
"il/ilah" bearing names in northern Arabian epigraphic finds dated as
far back as the 5th century BC. They noted Thamudian epigraphs from the area
around al-Jawf which bore the god-name Ilat (such as Ham'ilat), the feminine
counterpart to Il, and a number of inscriptions with both Il and Allah were
found at the site 46. The feminine counterparts - Ilat and Allat - were also found, with
Winnett and Reed attributing Ilat to being the original Arab name, only later
appearing as Allat due to Syrian influences47. At another site in North
Arabia , al-Ula, they found a number of
Lihyanite and Dedanite (early Arab groups) inscriptions containing names such
as Mar'Allah and Adar'il concurrently48. Hence we see that the LIL/IL names were found in northern Arabia millennia after their
appearance in Mesopotamia , with Arabian forms concurrent with the older Mesopotamian form.
Thus the term for deity
based upon the "il" root became firmly established in Arabia , and many times was
used as a personal name, rather than a titular epithet. That it did so to the
detriment of the western Semitic term "El" used by the Hebrews,
Aramaeans, Canaanites, and others in the Syria-Palestine region (familiar to us
from Biblical names such Israel, Gabriel, etc.) is apparent from
the earlier appearances of El in Northern Arabian artifacts which were
gradually supplanted by Il,
"Among
the Northern Arabs of early times, particularly in the region of Safa, the word
El "God" was still very commonly used as a separate name of the
Deity."49
Names containing The
Il/Ilah formations came much later. Nöldeke notes the appearance of names like
Wahb El, which appeared among Arabs of a later day as Wahbil. This suggests
that El was used by the Arabs at one time as the name of God, but later was
supplanted by Il/Ilah. This name spread further to South Arabia as we will see, where
he again appeared as a high god in their pantheons, just as he was in early Mesopotamia .
This same
differentiation between El and Il/Ilah is made by Negev , whose discussion of
names of deity even among the much later Nabataeans presents a clearly seen
distinction between Il/Ilah/Allah and El50. Many Muslim apologists will attempt to associate the God of the Bible
with Allah upon the basis of an argument that Allah is basically the same term
as the Eloah of Biblical Hebrew (an intensive form of El) and the Alaha of
Aramaic. However, what is forgotten is that Allah itself comes directly from
"al ilah", so the "al" in "Allah" comes from the
article, and is not a part of the Arabic term for "god" itself. This
is not the case with Eloah and Alaha, neither of which contain an article, and
which are self-contained terms meaning "god". Further, as has been
shown above, the El related terms for deity in the Western Semitic areas are
not directly related to the Il/Ilah of Mesopotamia and Arabia . Hence, no direct connection between El/Alaha can be made with Il/Ilah.
Further, the fact that Christian Arabs today use the term “Allah“ when
referring to the Biblical God is of little importance, for that term is simply
the word denoting deity in the Arabic language, which Christian Arabs
(naturally) use. Despite this commonality, the only connection between the two
is that of general reference to a deity, not any specific connection, either
personally or conceptually, between the Biblical El and the quranic Allah
(whose evolutionary development from pre-Islamic paganism, as will be seen,
places him far afield from the God of the Bible). El and Allah are two
different beings, from the standpoint of both linguistic and conceptual
divergence.
Enter the Moon God
We now turn to another
line of development that led to the Allah of Islam - ancient Near Eastern lunar
idolatry. As is often the case when intercourse between proximate cultures
occurs, conceptions of deity and even the deities themselves can be exchanged,
syncretized, and amalgamated. The case of the ancient Near Eastern moon gods,
their spread throughout the Fertile
Crescent , and their ultimate
development in Arabia is no different.
Again, we must turn to Mesopotamia for a starting point.
In Sumeria and Akkad , the god of the moon was Nanna, known also by the name Sin (a Semitic
name probably derived from the Sumerian "Su-En", also an epithet for
Nanna). Nanna was traditionally considered to be the son of Enlil. Nanna/Sin
was one of the most important deities in ancient Mesopotamia , and was one of the
gods that were widely and generally worshipped throughout the region.
“Yet
others, though more especially worshipped in certain towns, were by virtue of
their nature the objects of a general cults. Such were, for instance, the
moon-god Nanna (called Sin by the Semites), the patron-god of Ur, and his son
the sun-god Utu (Semitic Shamash), the patron-god of Sippar and Larsa.” 51
However, as commonly
occurs with gods which were widely revered, the conception of Nanna/Su-En
developed far beyond the primitive view of him as just a moon god. In
Mesopotamian mythology, he took on a plethora of divine properties, as shown by
the titles which he accrued. Lambert has noted that Nanna/Sin bore titles such
as "the fruitful life" (referring to his furthering of the well-being
of cattle), "the lord of the fates", "the splendor of
heaven", and "the universal lord"53. Among many groups, Sin the moon god was often exalted to the position
of highest god, and a number of properties were ascribed to him that were not
connected with his position as lord of the moon. He was the unfathomably wise
god, the guardian and leader of mankind, the judge of heaven and earth, the
lord of destinies, and the originator of life54. His power of illumination was shown in the epithets he received, such
as "the lamp of heaven" and "the luminary of heaven and
earth", but his power of illumination went beyond the mere physical - to
the later Mesopotamians, he was viewed as the oracle of the gods, the provider
of enlightenment and of the knowledge of the will of the gods55. In many respects, the conception of Sin as the high god overtook the
earlier dominance of Enlil. This makes sense, as his center of worship was at Ur Ur Ur Arabia and the Semitic Near
East, as will presently be shown.
One other interesting
aspect of the moon god's sphere of influence is the development of fertility
symbolism associated with his iconography in Mesopotamia . The crescent
associated with the moon was connected with the horns of the bull - a
widespread symbol of male fertility, and from that, male political power. Green
says,
"The
masculine gender of the moon in Mesopotamian cultures allows the establishment
of a connection between the deity's dual functions in both the worlds of nature
and human experience, for the moon god serves as a divine bridge between male
fertility and male political power. The most frequent iconographic
representation of the moon is the lunar crescent, which is linked to the sphere
of masculine sexuality by its further transformation into the horns of the
bull, a universal symbol of male generative power; it is the animal that is
most frequently sacrificed to the Moon god. His Sumerian title of En-Su
designates him as "Lord Wild Bull," whose horns are mirrored in the
crescent of the moon."56
This is important
because, as we will see later, there is a connection between the moon god and
atmospheric/fertility deities such as Baal and much later, Hubal, which was
already seen in his evolution from Enlil. Sin - whose title En-Su, or Su-En,
from which the name is contracted, represents the joining of atmospheric,
astral, and fertility powers. This conjoining of attributes is traceable all
the way down to the pre-Islamic Allah. Even into the Islamic era, the moon was
still worshipped by the pagans at Harran by means of the sacrifice of bulls and through fasting for an entire
month57.
Devotion to the moon
god was prevalent all over the Near
East , and was intimately connected with
the symbology of the crescent moon, which seems to have radiated outward from Mesopotamia throughout the region.
The Canaanite city of Jericho was named after the Canaanite moon god Yarih,
who can be directly traced to the Mesopotamian Sin by the fact that he was
associated with a female consort, Nikkal, who is the same consort (also known
as Ningal) 58 assigned to Sin in the Mesopotamian myths. An excavation of a major
temple to the moon god carried out at the Canaanite site of Hazor in Palestine Syria Canaan , the moon god was usually represented with the symbol of a crescent
moon. In many places in the ancient Near East, his wife or consort was the
sun-goddess, and their children were the stars. For instance, in a stelae of the
Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, Bath Nikkal ("daughter of Nikkal") is
identified with the planet Venus through the sign of the morning star, and is
linked to the moon god and to the sun via the lunar and solar symbols found
with her sign60. This corroborates with the Arabian depiction of Allah with his three
daughters, one of whom was Al-Uzza who corresponds to Venus, the brightest
“star” in the night sky. Depictions of the moon god from Egypt Persia Ugarit Syria Arabia was as steeped in lunar idolatry as any place in the ancient Near East,
perhaps more so. It was to Arabia that Nabonidus in the 6th century BC turned
in his religious reforming efforts in which he sought to set the moon god at
the head of the Neo-Babylonian pantheon (in place of Marduk). He was involved
in building the great center of moon-worship in northern Arabia at Tayma.
One center of
moon-worship, in particular, is of interest to us here - Harran . Harran was a city early
devoted to and placed under the protection of the moon god Sin. In Harran as elsewhere, Sin
evolved into a high god whose spheres of influence extended far beyond the
original boundaries of his position as a lunar deity. What makes Harran somewhat unique in our
study is that in the Islamic era, Harran ’s devotion to the moon god was exploited (according to the traditions)
by a group known as the Sabians, a sect that combined elements of astral
religion with the transcendent aspects of the neo-Platonic theologies of
Plotinus and Porphyry. It was in this syncretism that the highest form of
transcendent astral religion was achieved before the rise of Islam. Even after
its conquest by the Muslims in the 7th century, Harran remained an important
center of neo-Platonic learning and theology. Its influence in the Caliphate
was such that one important Islamic sect, the Isma’ilis, developed their
heterodox theology largely from this Neo-Platonism found in Harran and other centers of
study that had been conquered by the expanding Islamic empire61. Allah in the Qur’an certainly does not exhibit some of the more
peculiar theological traits found in the neo-Platonic conception of deity, such
as creation through eternal and ongoing emanations coming out from himself.
However, the possibility of influence by the transcendent view of deity held by
the Harranians upon the developing theology of the early Arab religion that
eventually became Islam must be entertained. This view of the remoteness of
deity and its lack of personal concern for the created world, coupled with the very
real astral element to their worship, suggests the Harranians may have had a
stimulating effect on the transformation of Allah from henotheistic high god to
transcendent, all-powerful (yet originally astral) supreme god in the emerging
Islamic monotheism.
The worship of astral
deities (those associated with the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies) was
common-place in Arabia and the Near East . Green notes the moon god played an important part in the religion of
both the Nabataeans and the Bedouin, Arab groups located in the northern part
of the peninsula and in the deserts skirting Syria-Palestine and Mesopotamia 62. In discussing the commonality of this sort of worship in Semitic paganisms,
Henninger records,
“According
to D. Neilsen, the starting point of the religion of the Semitic nomads was
marked by the astral triad, Sun-Moon-Venus, the moon being more important for
the nomads, and the sun more important for the settled tribes.” 63
Neilsen is widely
recognized to have overestimated the importance of astral triads in the religion of the nomadic Bedouin
peoples of Arabia (but not necessarily of astral religion itself), though he was closer
to the truth concerning the religion of settled Arabian peoples, especially in
the South, but also in more northerly centers of settlement such as Mecca.
Particular to Arabia , Coon elucidates on this phenomenon of astral preference,
"Among
the northern Semites the sun was the most important, as the promoter of
fertility in vegetation; in southern Arabia , where the sun is too hot for comfort, and scorches and withers, the
night is the time for coolness, and, in the moonlight, the time for travel and
work. Nomads travel much at night, and the moon with its phases gives them
their yardstick for measuring time. Thus, whereas the sun was the important god
to the northern Semites, the moon was supreme among the southern groups, including
not only the southern Arabian peoples, but also the pre-Islamic Arabs proper,
who lived farther north in the peninsula."64
There is much evidence
to connect Allah (an Il/Ilah derived deity) with the worship of the moon god in
Arabia . The moon god, whether by the name of Sin or by some other, was
worshipped in temples all across the peninsula. At Khirbet Tannur, a Nabataean
stele was found that was dedicated to a god called Qos-Allah65. Negev likewise notes epigraphic evidences from the Nabataean period for the
personal theophorous name Qos'-allah - "Qos is allah"66. Qos, in turn, is identified with Qaush, a god worshipped by the
Edomites who inhabited the region around Petra before being displaced and
absorbed by the Nabataean tribes between the 4th-2nd centuries BC. Qaush has
been recognized as a lunar deity from an Edomite seal found near Petra that was
dedicated to him, and bore the typical crescent and star symbology of the
ancient Near East moon gods67. Among the Sabaeans of South Arabia, Allah appears to have derived from
an earlier moon god. Sykes, in his description of Allah, says this,
"Islamic
name for God. Is derived from Semitic El, and originally applied to the moon;
he seems to have been preceded by Ilmaqah, the moon god." 68
While Sykes is
incorrect in his derivation of the name from the west Semitic El (as noted
above, the Arabian Il/Ilah names, while related to the west Semitic El/Alaha,
are evolutionarily derived through the Mesopotamian Lil/Il/Ilu), he does note
that in South Arabia (where Ilmaqah was the moon god and national high god of
the Sabaeans), Allah derives from a god of the moon, and in fact the name was originally
applied to the moon before it became the name for high/only god. In all
likelihood, the conception of Allah as a high god, preceded by Ilmaqah the moon
god, demonstrates yet again the development of the high god "ilah"
from the earlier local high gods of the various Arabian people groups. This
same sort of argument can be applied to Landau's statement concerning the Ka'bah in Mecca
"Now
there dwelt in Mecca
The moon god was called
by various names, one of which was Ilah. Guillaume has noted that certain
scholars believe that Ilah in pre-Islamic Arabia was a title of the moon god,
"The
oldest name for God used in the Semitic world consists of but two letters, the
consonant 'l' preceded by a smooth breathing, which was pronounced 'Il' in
ancient Babylonia, 'El' in ancient Israel. The relation of this name, which in
Babylonia and Assyria became a generic term simply meaning ‘god’, to the
Arabian Ilah familiar to us in the form Allah, which is compounded of al, the
definite article, and Ilah by eliding the vowel ‘i’, is not clear. Some
scholars trace the name to the South Arabian Ilah, a title of the Moon god, but
this is a matter of antiquarian interest...it is clear from Nabataean and other
inscriptions that Allah meant ‘the god’."70
He states that this
identification is of "antiquarian interest", since this view of Ilah
as a moon god existed prior to the development of the conception of Ilah as
high god in these Arabian cultures. Gray, likewise, notes that Il was a South
Arabian moon god71. Further, al-Ilaha, a sun goddess, was paired with Allah in several
places in the Arabian peninsula , including in South Arabia , where it is said that 'lhtn(with
the typically South Arabian suffixed article "n"),
We know that 'lhtn correlates with the more northern
Ilat/Allat, therefore 'lhn most likely corresponds to the
Ilah/Allah who is often associated with Allat. Ilat/Allat as a sun goddess
would then be paired with Ilah/Allah as a moon god, per the typical South
Arabian astral arrangement. Further, a Hadramautic inscription on Delos was dedicated to Sin
Dhu Ilim, roughly "Sin he of the gods"73, suggesting that in later periods, Sin was understood as a high god
among Arabians. Further, Thompson uncovered a spectacular temple to the moon
god in southern Arabia . In discussing her work, she revealed that the symbol of the crescent
moon and 21 inscriptions made with the name “Sin” were found in this temple,
along with a statue which she tentatively identified as the moon god74. Her findings were later corroborated by other scholars75. This finding is important in light of the fact that, as has been found
in numerous inscriptions both at this Arabian site and elsewhere, while the
name of the moon god was "Sin", his title was “al-ilah”, the same al-ilah which was glossed to form
"Allah" over time in Arabia .
Alfred Guillaume noted
that, in much of Arabia , the sun was viewed as a female goddess and the moon as the male god76, which follows the Mesopotamian conception of the moon god as male, but
alters the gender of the sun, which was also male in Sumero-Akkadian mythology.
It has often been argued that ascribing to the Arabians the view of the moon as
male and the sun as female is questionable due to the variance of this state of
affairs from the male sun/female moon found in some Semitic mythological
systems. However, Smith noted that it is common within Semitic mythologies to
find female deities being adapted to take on the male gender77. Finegan also points out that Allat, a northern Arabian moon-goddess,
corresponded to the moon deity (male) in South Arabia, known under various
names such as Sin, Almaqah, 'Amm, and Vadd78. Also, Henninger noted that in both South
Arabia and among the Beduoin, the planet
Venus was originally viewed as a masculine deity, only later becoming feminine
in aspect79. Indeed, the gender of astral deities throughout the Semitic world is
often changeable, and a process of "solarization" has been noted in
some ancient Near Eastern mythological systems, whereby moon gods and sun
goddesses switch genders, becoming moon goddesses and sun gods. Müller
demonstrated the early solarization of several celestial goddesses in ancient Egyptian
mythology80. Dirven provides a likely late example of this phenomenon among the
Palmyrenes, when she notes that Iarhibol (Yarhibol), a sun god associated with
Bol (discussed below), could originally have been a moon god who later adopted
solar characteristics, based upon an interpretation of his name as "new
moon of Bol."81 Green points out that in Mesopotamian mythos, the moon could take on both genders, depending on which aspect of
the lunar cycle was in view.
"Despite
the clearly masculine character of the moon deity in myth, there seems to be
evidence for a feminine aspect of the moon in Mesopotamia which manifests itself
only in the full moon. Those cultures which traditionally have seen the moon as
feminine in gender have connected its cycles with those of female fertility:
the moon's appearance of growing fullness is a manifestation of woman's
fecundity. If the crescent of the moon is the symbol of male virility and
sexual power, the full moon may be seen to portray the gravidity of a woman
about to give birth thus, within the moon's periodic nature there is a constant
cycle of alternation between male and female. The moon is born and dies in its
masculine form, but it is as female that it reaches its fullness."82
Due to the patriarchal
nature of Arabian societies, it is not surprising that the moon which they
reverenced more than the sun, and viewed as the more powerful source of life,
would take on male gender. The appearance of the crescent moon symbology in
Arabian and west Semitic iconographies suggests that in these societies, the
male aspect of the moon predominated, but no statement can be made that the
moon in ancient Near Eastern mythologies only took on one gender. Further, it has
become apparent in the light of more recent archaeological and epigraphic
discoveries that the moon deity in Arabia was (most often) unquestionably male. Even Islamic sources recognize
this, with the popular translator and commentator of the Qur'an, Yusuf Ali,
noting about the pre-Islamic Arabian paganism,
"It
will be noticed that the sun and the moon and the five planets got identified
with a living deity, god or goddess, with the qualities of its own....Moon
worship was equally popular in various forms....It may be noted that the moon
was a male divinity in ancient India; it was also a male divinity in ancient
Semitic religion, and the Arabic word for the moon (qamar) is of the masculine
gender. On the other hand, the Arabic word for the sun (shama) is of the
feminine gender. The pagan Arabs evidently looked upon the sun as a goddess and
the moon as a god."83
Bel, Baal, and Hubal
Let us now turn
to another line of development for Allah, this one also originating in Mesopotamia . Among the epithets applied to
Enlil in Akkad , one stands out in importance for future religious development in the
ancient Near East: Bel. In Semitic Mesopotamia, Enlil was often known as
"Bel", meaning "lord"84. MacKenzie noted that Enlil was known as "the older Bel" so
as to distinguish him from the later Bel Merodach of Babylon Arabia , Bel of Nippur originally had Allat as his consort87, which further suggests the connection between Enlil/Ellil and
Il/Ilah-derived deities, as well as the evolutionary relationship between Bel
and Allah. In the process of time, this title was transferred to the Babylonian
deity Marduk (Merodach), who was generally identified with Enlil, and to whom
was ascribed a sovereignty and omnipotence indicative of monotheizing
tendencies. At the same time, Marduk and Sin were also sometimes identified
with each other in later myths - one of Sin's epithets was "Marduk who
illuminates the night"88. Not surprisingly then, Marduk also was associated with astral
religion, as Ringgren notes,
"In
the ritual for the New Year Festival in Babylon Marduk is identified with a
series of astral deities, and the prayer ends with the words" 'My lord is
my god, my lord is my ruler, is there any lord apart from him'?"89
Thus, we again see the
familiar association of Mesopotamian henotheism, of the high god, with astral
deities, which would include the moon god. Later, in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods, the worship of Bel spread to Palmyra Syrian desert . The population of Palmyra Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions brought the reverence for Bel with them. In
Palmyra Palmyra
Closely related to the
Mesopotamian Bel was a titular deity found in the Syro-Palestinian pagan
systems - Baal. "Baal" is merely the west Semitic cognate of the
Assyro-Babylonian "Bel", and among the western Semites the term was
put to similar use, as much a title or epithet as a proper name. Indeed, the
term "Baal" was often used to describe local high deities who were
revered as high gods by local groups. For instance, we find Baal-Peor of the
Moabites, Baal-Zebul of the Philistines, Baal-Shamin of the native Syrian
Palmyrenes, and so forth. Evidence from the Al-Amarna documents and Ugaritic
texts indicate that by the sixteenth or fifteenth centuries BC, Baal had taken
on a broader scope than just as a title for local deities, and had grown to be
understood as a god in his own right93. One interesting thing we should note about Baal is that in the Ras
Shamra texts, an early witness to Baal, he was associated with three daughters,
much as Allah would be later94. One of these daughters of Allah - al-Uzza - is identified with the
Arabic goddess Ruda by Lundin, who points out that the root behind that name, 'RD, can be linked with the
Ugaritic Ars.ay, one of these daughters of Baal95.
The local Baals were
most likely understood to be localized manifestations of this Baal, perhaps as
tutelary personifications particular to each individual city or region. These
Baals usually took on the characteristics of atmospheric, vegetation, and
fertility deities (see the discussion below of the equivalence of Baal with
Hadad/Adad), but in later periods also were identified with astral spheres of
influence. This astral character generally took on solar overtones96, but could at times also be lunar. Smith notes that in Phoenician
mythology, even after the gods had become more pronounced in their astral
character, they still retained their more primitive functions as the givers of
rain and other atmospheric phenomena97. This broadly parallels the religious development in Mesopotamia from the original view
of the storm and weather god Enlil as the highest god toward the exaltation of
Sin, the moon god, into the role of high god, with a concurrent usurpation of
much of Enlil's former provenance. Indeed, Roberts notes that in the Ugaritic
mythologies, Dagan was analogous to Enlil (both being weather deities), while
Ba'al (Dagan's son, also a weather and fertility god) was analogous to
Sin/Nanna (Enlil's son, the moon god)98. Like the moon god, Baal was represented by the bull, a symbol of male
sexuality and fertility. Further, the Baal title could be applied directly to
the astral deities. For instance, Teixidor notes that in Harran , the city in
Paddan-Aram devoted to the moon god which was discussed briefly earlier, Sin
was known as the Baal of Harran99. This frequent merging of astral with atmospheric and fertility
functions in the gods will be revisited shortly.
Earlier, we saw that a
god called Mar-Allah was recognized from inscriptional evidences in northern Arabia . We see a probable
appearance of this deity again in inscriptions found at Sumatar Harabesi, a
site located about 25 miles northeast of Harran . This site contains a number of inscriptions in Syriac that are dated
to the mid-to-late 2nd century AD and were made by or on behalf of certain
rulers "of the Arab". A number of dedications to Sin, coupled with
the typical crescent moon symbology, are found here. As well, however, are a
number of inscriptions dedicated to Mrlh'.
In Green's discussion of these inscriptions100, she reports that Drijvers transcribes the name as Marelahe, "The
Lord of the gods", which is equivalent to the Mesopotamian
"Bel-ilani", and that while the title itself can denote the chief god
of any pantheon, here at Sumatar Harabesi, it was applied to Sin the moon god
of Harran, who is the only god mentioned by name at the site. Segal, on the
other hand, transcribes the name as Marilaha,
"the Lord god", and suggested it as an epithet of Ba'alshamen, a name
that had by this period come to designate any god who was seen as the possessor
of the heavens (as was the case with Sin the moon god in the later Mesopotamian
myths, as seen above). Either way, we see a clearly identified moon god
referred to as a Bel or Baal, and Green sees these inscriptions as evidence for
the continuation of Sin's role as bestower of political power101.
In Arabia , Baal (Ba'l) was
introduced into the settled agricultural centers, likely being borrowed from
the Semitic groups north of Arabia at the same time that the arts of agriculture were introduced102. On the peninsula, Baal was more widely known in later periods as Hubal
(meaning "the lord"). There is some controversy over whether Hubal
was a traditional deity in Arabia , or if he was introduced at some point in the 3rd century or
immediately thereabouts, finding his way to the Ka'bah at Mecca
"Hobal
[Hubal] was in the form of a man and came from Syria
Some scholars view
Hubal as a newcomer to the Ka'bah,
based upon the tradition that Amr ibn Luhayy, a 3rd century Arab, brought the
statue of Hubal to the Ka'bah from Syria
"Having
asked the local inhabitants what was the justification of their idols, `Amr b.
Luhayy is said to have received the following reply: .. these are the lords
(arbab) whom we have chosen, having [simultaneously] the form of the celestial
temples (al-hayakil al-`ulwiyya) and that of Human beings. We ask them for
victory over our enemies and they grant it to us; we ask them for rain, in time
of drought, and they give it to us". In the Ka'ba, Hubal must have
preserved this original character of a stellar deity; but his most
characteristic role was that of a cleromantic divinity. Indeed, it was before
the god that the sacred lots were cast. The statue stood inside the Ka'ba,
above the sacred well which was thought to have been dug by Abraham to receive
the offerings brought to the sanctuary. Another somewhat surprising fact
indicates a connection with Abraham: in the mural paintings of the pre-islamic
Ka'ba, Hubal, represented as an old man holding arrows, seems to have been
assimilated with Abraham."104
Hence, after his
appearance in Mecca Mecca
"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."106
Hence, it must be
understood that much of what is said about the late arrival of Hubal to the Ka'bah, and the attempts to
disconnect him from lordship over that House, is suspect because of the
tendency of scholars in the earlier days of Islamic studies to rely upon
Islamic sources themselves for information pertaining to the Jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic
pagan period. Peters, mentioned above, makes his arguments with the dichotomy
of Allah versus Hubal in mind. Yet, the possibility must be explored that Allah was Hubal, and that the initial
understanding of Hubal as the local al-ilah falls right into line with the
tendency, mentioned above, for the developing Arab monotheism to incorporate
local high gods into the state sponsored high god. It was shown above that
Allah "was preceded" by the moon god Ilmaqah in South Arabian, that
Ilah was "originally a phase of the moon" and later became a term for
the high god in Southern Arabia , and even that Allah "replaced" Hubal as the Lord of the Ka'bah. What if these are all
vestiges of these various Arabian high gods becoming "al-ilah", the god, in developing henotheistic
systems that eventually led to the monotheistic Allah of Islam?
With the advent of
independent information obtained from direct archaeological and epigraphic
studies, it is being more widely recognized that Hubal was not a late arrival
to the Ka'bah, but was
instead long resident there and was himself the Lord of the Ka'bah, probably arriving not
long after the Christian era began. On the originality of Hubal at the Ka'bah, Rodinson writes,
"The
Ka'ba at Mecca
Ruthven states further,
"Although
originally under the aegis of the pagan god Hubal, the Makkan haram which centred around the well of
Zamzam, may have become associated with the ancestral figures of Ibrahim and
Isma'il as the Arab traders, shedding their parochial backgrounds sought to
locate themselves within the broader reference-frame of
Judeo-Christianity."108
According to Fahd, the
earliest appearance of Hubal in the epigraphic record is in an inscription from
Nabataea Arabia , including present-day Jordan Mecca Jordan
There is ample evidence
to suggest that Hubal was the "Lord of the Ka'bah". Armstrong
provides an interesting piece of information, though she still tends to be too
reliant upon Islamic tradition instead of scientific facts,
"By
the time he began to preach in Mecca
The question which must
logically be asked is whether this dedication of the Ka'bah to the high god al-Ilah perhaps was
not "despite" the presiding effigy of Hubal, but rather because of it? As noted before,
"Hubal" is really a title (considered by many to be of Aramaic origin
and imported into the early Arabic dialects) which simply means "the
lord", and as such, is no different from the usage of the Baal/Ba'l
terminology found all over Syria, Palestine, and northern Arabia. This
association of Hubal with Baal is noted by al-Saeh,
“As
well as worshipping idols and spirits, found in animals, plants, rocks, and
water, the ancient Arabs believed in several major gods and goddesses whom they
considered to hold supreme power over all things. The most famous of these were
Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, Manat, and Hubal. The first three were thought to be daughters
of Allah (God) and their intercessions on behalf of their worshippers were
therefore of great significance. Hubal was associated with the Semitic god
Ba’al and with Adonis and Tammuz, the gods of spring, fertility, agriculture
and plenty....Hubal’s idol used to stand by the holy well inside the Sacred
House. It was made of red sapphire but had a broken arm until the tribe of
Quraysh, who considered him one of their major gods, made him a replacement in
solid gold.” 112
It seems very likely
that this "al-Ilah" to which the Ka'bah was dedicated was known also by the
titular name Hubal, especially as the presiding idol of that house was Hubal's,
and it was before Hubal that decisions requiring oracular resolution were
brought. Indeed, an excerpt from Ibn Ishaq (an early Muslim biographer of
Mohammed, 704-767 AD), in a garbled and oblique manner, seems to suggest the
validity of this view. He relates the following story about Mohammed's
grandfather 'Abd'ul Muttalib,
"It
is alleged, and God only knows the truth, that when 'Abdu'l-Muttalib
encountered the opposition of Quraysh when he was digging Zamzam, he vowed that
if he should have ten sons to grow up and protect him, he would sacrifice one
of them to God at the Ka'ba. Afterwards when he had ten sons who could protect
him he gathered them together and told them about his vow and called on them to
keep faith with God. They agreed to obey him and asked what they were to do. He
said that each one of them must get an arrow, write his name on it, and bring
it to him; this they did and he took them before Hubal in the middle of the
Ka'ba. (The statue of) Hubal stood by a well there. It was that well in which
gifts made to the Ka'ba were stored.
“Now beside Hubal there
were seven arrows, each of them containing some words. One was marked
'bloodwit'. When they disputed about who should pay the bloodwit they cast lots
with the seven arrows and the one on whom the lot fell had to pay the money.
Another was marked 'yes', and another 'no', and they acted accordingly on the
matter on which the oracle had been invoked. Another was marked 'of you';
another mulsaq, another 'not of you'; and the last was marked 'water'. If they
wanted to dig for water, they cast lots containing this arrow and wherever it
came forth they set to work. If they wanted to circumcise a body, or make a
marriage, or bury a body, or doubted someone's genealogy, they took him to
Hubal with a hundred dirhams and a slaughter camel and gave them to the man who
cast the lots; then they brought near the man with whom they were concerned,
saying, 'O our god this is A the son of B with whom we intend to do so and so;
so show the right course concerning him'. Then they would say to the man who
cast the arrows 'Cast!' and if there came out 'of you' then he was a true
member of their tribe; and if there came out 'not of you' then he was an ally;
and if there came out mulsaq he had no blood relation to them and was not an
ally. Where 'yes' came out in other matter, they acted accordingly; and if the
answer was 'no', they deferred the matter for a year until they could bring it
up again. They used to conduct their affairs according to the decision of the
arrows.
“'Abdu'l-Muttalib said
to the man with the arrows, 'Cast the lots for my sons with these arrows', and
he told him of the vow which he had made. Each man gave him the arrow on which
his name was written. Now 'Abdullah was his father's youngest son, he and
al-Zubayr and Abu Talib were born to Fatima d.'Amr b.'A'idh b.'Abd b.'Imran b.
Makhzum b.Yaqaza b. Murra b. Ka'b b.Lu'ayy b.Ghalib b.Fihr (113). It is alleged
that 'Abdullah was 'Abdu'l-Muttalib's favorite son, and his father thought that
if the arrow missed him he would be spared. (He was the father of the apostle
of God). When the man took the arrows to cast lots with them, 'Abdu'l-Muttalib stood by Hubal
praying to Allah. Then the
man cast lots and 'Abdullah's arrow came out. His father led him by the hand
and took a large knife; then he brought him up to Isaf and Na'ila (T. two idols
of Quraysh at which they slaughtered their sacrifices) to sacrifice him; but
Quraysh came out of their assemblies and asked what he was intending to do.
When he said that he was going to sacrifice him, they and his sons said 'By
God! you shall never sacrifice him until you offer the greatest expiatory
sacrifice for him. If you do a thing like this there will be no stopping men
from coming to sacrifice their sons, and what will become of the people then?'
Then said al-Mughira b. 'Abdullah b. 'Amr b. Makhzum b. Yaqaza, 'Abdullah's
mother being from his tribe, 'By God, you shall never sacrifice him until you
offer the greatest expiatory sacrifice for him. Though his ransom be all our
property we will redeem him'. Quraysh and his sons said that he must not do it,
but take him to the Hijaz for there was a sorcerer who had a familiar spirit,
and he must consult her. Then he would have liberty of action. If she told him
to sacrifice him, he would be no worse off; and if she gave him a favorable
response, he could accept it. So they went off as far as Medina Mecca
Thus we can see that
this man was essentially praying to the idol of Hubal, while praying to Allah.
As Hubal was the "Lord of the Ka'bah"
and the tutelary deity of Mecca, it is instructive to note that after the rise
of the Arab Empire, Allah seems to have maintained his place as the Lord of
that “House”, even if under a different name and with an innovative conception
of deity. Indeed, the Ka'bah was often known by the name beit Allah, "house of
Allah", even though it was presided over by Hubal.
Interestingly, we
should note the early interest among the Muslims in (re-)establishing the
original religion of Abraham, at least as they conceived it. Arabic lore,
extending into the period before Islam, held that Abraham himself had built the Ka'bah, dug its well, and
established its worship. In the centuries before the rise of the Arab Empire,
there were many Arabs who, while accepting neither Christianity nor Judaism,
did conceive of the idea of establishing a pure monotheism to replace the
paganism of their day. Many of these groups could have been called
"Abrahamic", as they desired to renew the deen, the religion, of Abraham.
This Abrahamism emphasized its link to Abraham as its putative founder, and its
followers were described by the Christian historian Sozomenus, writing circa
450 AD, as Ishmaelite monotheists who followed a loose analog of Judaism114. Indeed, Pines notes evidence for Abrahamists as early as the time of
Tertullian (~200 AD), who disputed with a group of them115. The Abrahamists were one of many groups of hanifiyya, emergent
monotheists who preceded Islam in Arabia . The monotheism of these groups engendered the belief in a high god who
was without partners. It is likely that these hanifiyya,
who were more or less independent of Judaism and Christianity, were the next
natural step in the progression from pure paganism to the henotheistic belief
in a "high god" to monotheism. As a result, it is likely that their
views were arrived at by elevating one of their native gods at the expense of
the others, and accepting him as the "only" god. That this seems to
have been the case, at least with those who revered the Ka'bah as the "house of Allah"
(including, of course, local groups of Abrahamists), seems evident in the
association with Abraham of the oracular method of divination through Hubal.
Rubin notes that the ritual of casting arrows before Hubal was itself Abrahamic
(referring to the pre-Islamic religious system, not to the Biblical Abraham),
and that when Mohammed conquered Mecca
This understanding of
the "lord of the Ka'bah"
as a high god again points to the familiar pattern of henotheism that can be
found all across the Semitic world. Wellhausen considered Hubal to be an
ancient name for Allah117. In this is meant the sense that he believed Allah to be an abstraction
which originated in the many local gods (one of whom was Hubal), and gave rise
to a common word for the high god. This view has been judged as inadequate by
many later scholars118. I would note, however, that much of the later impetus against
Wellhausen's initial view stems from the over-reliance of scholars upon Islamic
sources for information concerning the period ofJahiliyya, the pagan
period prior to Islam. It would seem natural that Islamic traditions, produced
two centuries or more after the fact, would present an artificially sanitized
view of the pre-Islamic period. As noted previously, this was common in early
Muslim works for polemical purposes. We have seen earlier that it was common
for cultures in the ancient Near East to hold up a high god, and to attribute
to him various spheres of influence, depending on the prior nature of the
henotheized deity. This would seem to support the arguments made above and by
Wellhausen that the high god of the Arabs was not one original deity, but
rather became such by the synthesis of the various local high gods of Arabia and the regions conquered
by the Arabs.
As has been alluded,
Hubal seems to have also had a variety of characteristic spheres which he
dominated. Zwemer above identified Hubal as a god of rain, which correlates
well with the typical station of Baal among the Arabs' northerly neighbors.
Hubal also, however, had several marked astral stations among the Arabs. Hommel
tells us that in southern Arabia , Hubal was to be identified with the planet Venus, understood by these
groups to be male. In northern Arabia , including the region of Mecca
“First
of all, as regards the religion of the South
Arabians , as we find it in
their inscriptions, it is a strongly marked star-worship, in which the cult of
the moon-god, conceived as masculine, takes complete precedence of that of the
sun, which is conceived as feminine. This is shown in the clearest fashion by
the stereotyped series of gods (Minaean: ‘Athar, Wadd, Nakruh, Shams;
Hadramawtic: ‘Athar, Sîn, Hol, Shams; Qatabanian: ‘Athar, ‘Amm, Anbai, Shams;
Sabaean: ‘Athar, Hawbas, Al-maku-hu, Shams); here we find throughout, a. ‘Athar
(the planet Venus conceived as masculine...as symbol of the sky) the god of the
heavens mentioned first, b. Wadd or as the case may be, Sîn, ‘Amm or Hawbas the
real chief god i.e. the moon; c. Nakruh (the planet Saturn or Mars), or Hol,
Anbai (messenger of the gods, Nebo) or Almaku-hu, his (the moon’s) servant or
messenger, and finally, d. Shams, the daughter of the moon-god to whom women
may have appealed by preference and who therefore stands at the end of the
whole enumeration. Besides these, a certain part was played by a great
Mother-goddesses, the mother and consort of the moon-god conceived as a
personified lunar station, the Minaean Athirat, who was called Harimtu among
the Sabaeans and who was in all probability universally known as Ilat (e.g. as
a component part in names of persons, also in the shortened form Lat). We may
also mention various lesser ‘Athar deities (confined later to the part played
by Venus as morning or evening star), and among the West Sabaeans Ta’lab, a god
of the bow who also bears merely the epithet Dhû Samawî ‘lord of the heavens’,
and to whom especially camels (ibil) are sacred (hence in Midian but probably
in South Arabia Habul or Hubal etc.). It is a particularly favourite
mode of thought to conceive the two chief aspects of the moon (waxing and
waning moon) as twin deities, in which connection sometimes the one and
sometimes the other phase is specially favoured according to the locality....In
North West Arabia from Mekka onwards to Petra and further onwards to the Syrian
desert (Palmyra) and the Hawran, the same ideas prevailed, partly even
appearing under the old names partly with new designations. Here we have
especially to do with the cults of Mekka and of the whole Hidjaz shortly before
Muhammad (al-Lat and Hubal, in certain cases also al-Lat, and Wudd, in addition
al-‘Uzza, a feminine form of...Aziz-Lat, the goddess of death Manat, a god Ruda
and others) and at an earlier period the still more important cult of the
Nabataeans. Among the latter also we find the moon divided into twin deities:
Dhu Shara (‘He of the mountain’) and his Kharisha (the sun), the former
especially in Petra
Other scholars have
also noted the place of Hubal as the moon god. Concerning Hubal Glassé writes,
Occhigrosso further
illustrates,
"Before
Muhammad appeared, the Kaaba was surrounded by 360 idols, and every Arab house
had its god. Arabs also believed in jinn (subtle beings), and some vague
divinity with many offspring. Among the major deities of the pre-Islamic era
were al-Lat ("the Goddess"), worshiped in the shape of a square
stone; al-Uzzah ("the Mighty"), a goddess identified with the morning
star and worshiped as a thigh-bone-shaped slab of granite between al-Taif and
Mecca; Manat, the goddess of destiny, worshiped as a black stone on the road
between Mecca and Medina; and the moon god, Hubal, whose worship was connected
with the Black Stone of the Kaaba."121
Once again, we see that
the high god of this locality was thus a moon deity, and yet also strongly
connected with the realm of atmospheric phenomena and fertility through his
being a bringer of rains and storms. The astral aspects of the Ka'bah, over which Hubal ruled,
have been noted by scholars. Occhigrosso notes that the black stone in the Ka'bah was said by the pre-Islamic Arabs to
have come from the moon122. The fact that the number of idols in the pre-Islamic Ka'bah is repeatedly said to be 360 is viewed
by some as having astronomical overtones related to the worship of the heavenly
bodies,
"The
earliest Muslim sources suggest that the pre-Islamic cult of the Ka'ba had some
astronomical significance. The historian Mas'udi (896-956) stated that certain
people had regarded the Ka'ba as a temple dedicated to the Sun, Moon and the
five visible planets (making up the mythical figure of seven, the number of
circumambulations required for each tawaf). The story that there were exactly
360 idols placed round the temple also points to an astronomical significance.
Among the votive gifts said to have been offered to the idols were golden suns
and moons."123
This connection of the
Islamic religion with a site sacred to the moon god is not unique to the Ka'bah. Speaking of the ancient
temple to the moon god Sin located at Harran (who, as we saw above, was the "Baal of Harran"), Green says
this,
"It
is most likely that it was on the site of his great temple that the Muslim
rulers of the city constructed the Great Mosque."124
Dushara - Proto-Islamic
Arabian High God
Let us now turn
to yet another pre-Islamic Arab god with close associations, both conceptual
and through lineage, to the deities previously mentioned as precursors to
Allah. This deity is Dushara, a god worshipped primarily in Nabataea Arabia . Dushara, whose name appears in
many cases to be an epithet, rather than a proper name, was worshipped as the
supreme god among the Nabataeans, but may have been known by several other
names125. Indeed, Healey notes that scholars are still trying to find the true
name of the supreme god to whom this epithet applied126. The name/title Dushara is commonly understood to mean "he of the
mountain", indicating a local geographic extent as a mountain-god (but
which also recalls the place of Enlil as a lord of mountains, seen above). In
this vein, Browning identifies the name as Dhu-esh-Shera, “He (Lord) of Shera
(Seir)”, thus placing Dushara as a local deity based around Mount Seir Edom Arabia as a moon goddess131. The name itself is traced by some even further back than the
Nabataeans, to the Mesopotamian divine name "Du-shar-ra" found in
cuneiform records from Mesopotamia . It has been suggested that this name entered into West Semitic
mythology from Assyro-Babylonia132.
Among the Nabataeans
and other Northern Arab tribes, Dushara was often known simply as 'lh', "the god", par excellence133. For the Nabataeans, this accorded to Dushara the role of high god, as
Healey states,
"On
this basis Dushara (or the god behind the title....) was regarded as the god par excellence and this would in part explain why the
name of Dushara appears rather rarely in theophoric personal names, while
derivatives of 'lh', 'the
god' ('lhy, etc.) appear quite often. 'The god' in the Nabataean context
meant 'the one and only significant god, also known as Dushara'."134
There appears to have
been the same tendency to both develop him into a high god, and to associate
both lunar and fertility/atmospheric spheres together into his character, which
parallels this same phenomenon as it occurred all across the ancient Near East.
Indeed, among this Arabian tribe, Dushara was associated with a consort, Allat,
placing him firmly within the Arabian Allah-Allat milieu. Healey questions the
view that Allat was the consort of Dushara however, instead suggesting that she
may have been viewed as his mother, and that she and another goddess, al-Uzza
(also found in the Islamic descriptions as a “daughter of Allah”) were
originally the same deity, later diverging to separate deities at some time
prior to the rise of Islam135. Further, references to other deities previously associated with Allah,
such as Manat and al-Uzza, and also Baal, had been found among the Nabataean
remains136. Dushara is mentioned alongside Hubal and Manawat (Manat) in a
Nabataean inscription found in Edom
Hadad/Rimmon and the Islamic
Rahman
Another aspect
of this overall conjoining of astral, atmospheric, and fertility spheres is to
be found with the deity known in Sumeria as Ishkur, and in the Semitic world as
Adad or Hadad. This deity also was a storm, thunder, and weather god, and at
various points in time was worshipped as the high or highest god in some
pantheons, especially among the Aramaeans. Adad appears in many cases to have
been synonymous with Baal (another storm god), being also called Hadd at
various points and associated in parallel with Hadad at one point in the Ras
Shamra texts141. Kapelrud notes from texts from Ras Shamra that Ba'l as a name was
applied to and eventually was used virtually in place of the name Hadad/Haddu142. Adad was understood in Babylonian texts not simply to be a fearsome
god of storms, but also as the "lord of abundance, the controller of the
floodgates of the earth" (because of his role as a weather god) 143. There naturally would seem to be a strong conceptual connection
between the weather/storm sphere of a god's influence, and his capacity for
producing fertility and agricultural abundance, especially in many places in Syria Palestine
Corroboration for the
joining of astral and vegetation/fertility spheres in Hadad/Adad is found in
Arabian evidences from North Arabia and the Transjordan region. Later iconographic evidence from the Nabataean temple site at
Khirbet Tannur is identified by Knauf144 as denoting Dushara-Zeus-Hadad, and there is ample evidence from
Nabataean inscriptions to indicate the integration of the Nabataean high god,
Dushara, with Zeus, the high god of the Hellenistic Greeks who were present in the
region from the time of Alexander’s conquests onward145. Gleuck identified the main deity of the temple at Tannur as Zeus-Hadad146 (so-called because of the combination of Hellenistic and Semitic
characteristics) on the basis of the “eagle” iconography associated with the
images of the main deity in the complex, suggesting this god to be an
atmospheric deity, though as has been previously noted, this deity was Dushara.
Healey, following Starckey, instead identifies this deity as Qos based upon the
fact that Qos is the only god mentioned in the inscriptional evidence from the
site. This connection is also made, however, on the basis of the
lightning/storm iconography associated with the god in this temple, which
suggests an association with Zeus-Hadad147. Either way, whether this god was Qos or Dushara, the evidences from
Tannur clearly connect him with the atmospheric god Hadad (associated in
Hellenistic times with Zeus). Qos, as was seen earlier, very clearly had lunar
attributes (and was directly coupled with Allah), and Dushara was also
associated with astral idolatry as well. The evidence for the conjoining of
astral and fertility spheres given by Tannur is strengthened through the
appearance of a grain (and dolphin!) goddess, thought by Gleuck to be
Atargatis, with the main god of that temple148.
Another point of
evidence for the joining of astral and weather traits is in the South Arabian
god known as Almaqah/Ilmaqah, who was suggested above as a South Arabian
antecedent to the more generally known Allah. Ringgren notes that Baal, also
called Hadd, sits enthroned upon his mountain, and that the iconography of Baal
included his being surrounded by seven lightning flashes, among other details149. Elsewhere, we see that the symbol often associated with Adad is a
fork-shaped flash of lightning150, emphasizing his role as a storm and weather god. Almaqah, the national
god of the South Arabian Sabaeans, is also widely recognized as a moon god151. Almaqah, however, also demonstrates iconographic evidences which
suggest a storm/weather role. The Sabaeans symbolized this god using a cluster
of lightning flashes and a weapon that looks like a slightly-bent capital S152, which is quite similar to the symbology used with Adad and Teshub (an
analogous Hurrian storm god).
Just as Sin and other
moon gods were often associated with Shamash (the sun) and Ishtar (representing
Venus, and also a fertility goddess), so was Adad/Hadad153, known also by the epithet Rimmon (meaning "pomegranate").
This suggests a link between Sin and Adad/Rimmon, probably another example of
assimilation rather than a direct attribution of lunar province to Adad. Both
were high gods worshipped in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the northern and western Semitic areas, and thus it is
natural that both would essentially become the same deity, even if not
specified as such, in the minds of their followers. Hence, this could suggest
an association of the Rimmon/Hadad deity with lunar idolatry, a tendency which
has been shown above for several weather and/or fertility gods.
But what of the
potential connection between Rimmon and Rahman (which is presented as an
epithet for Allah at several points in the Qur'an)? Some Muslim apologists will
attempt to deny the association of Rahman with Rimmon/Rammanu. It is argued
that Rahman (from the rhm root, having the meaning
“compassionate“) cannot be related to Rimmon or Rammanu (from the rmn root, meaning “pomegranate”). They
will argue that because the Semitic triconsonantal roots are different, there
cannot be a connection between Rahman and the ancient Syro-Babylonian storm god
Rimmon/Rammanu. However, this argument does not take into account the fact that
languages can change over time, diverging and converging, and that phonemes may
evolve, causing words and roots to change over time. This can be seen in the
comparison of the Arabic and Hebrew roots meaning “compassion”. In Arabic, the
root is rhm, with
the hindicating the letter h’aa, which has a sound
approximated by a heavy, open “h” sound made from the soft palate at the back
of the throat. In Hebrew, the root is rchm,
where ch denotes the letter cheth, which has a sound
approximated by the “ch” in the Scots pronunciation of “loch”. Same root, yet a
somewhat different phoneme. Further, the apologetic argument ignores the fact
that similar words can have divergent and/or multiple meanings across different
cultures and time periods.
In the linguistic case
of Rimmon and Rahman, it is important to first note that Rimmon/Rammanu
was also known by the name “Ragimu” among Mesopotamian Semitic groups154. This is enlightening because both the “g” and “h“ are sounds
with very similar articulation. Both of these phonemes are velar sounds,
produced by pushing air over the velum, or the soft palate that sits right in
front of the uvula. The primary difference between these sounds is that the “g”
is a stop (meaning that the flow of air is stopped after the initial sound is
made), while the “h“ is a fricative sound produced by forcing air
through a narrow opening between the tip of the tongue and the velum, and hence
can be extended. The shift from "g" to "h" would be
the result of a process in Semitic phonetic development called
"spirantization", in which a stop consonant changes into a fricative
consonant. The point to this linguistic digression is that it is certainly very
possible (and perhaps even likely from a phonetic standpoint) for the “g” in
Ragimu to have developed into the “h“ of Rahman in the course of
the development of the set of Arabian languages from their Mesopotamian Semitic
precursors. After all, we see that Ragimu is related to Rammanu, probably
developing through a process of epenthesis (a process in which a phoneme is
inserted into the middle of a word to clarify or simplify pronunciation), so
the theory proposed above is certainly not at all unlikely. The dropping of the
final “n” in the course of the development from rmn --> rgm --> rhm is easily explained by noting that
nasal sounds (such as “n”) tend to drop out from the end of words which find
common use or have a systematic history of development, a form of apocope (a
process where word final phonemes are dropped). This is seen in English,
whereby many words ending in “ing” (the “ng” is a single nasal sound) tend to
either lose that final “ng” completely, or else become the softer “n” sound, in
everyday or hurried speech. Thus, the Muslim arguments against the
identification of the very ancient Rimmon/Rammanu with the much later Rahman
are not necessarily valid.
Scholars have noted
that the rhm root, usually said to mean
"compassionate", may have an earlier and/or alternative meaning.
Ringgren notes that the epithet rhm can stress youthfulness, as well as
the powers of life and generation, traditional roles of Ancient Near East
fertility deities. He connects it with the Hebrew rechem, a cognate word
meaning "womb"155. It is likely that the later attachment of the ideas of mercy and
compassion to rhm sprang forth from these earlier
fertility aspects. It is entirely logical to postulate that a god who was
responsible for bringing in the rains and causing the earth to bring forth
fertility (as was the function of Rimmon/Rammanu and the implication of his
name meaning “pomegranate”) would evolve into a god whose name was associated
with compassion. One of the most compassionate things a god in the arid Near
East could do was bring in the rains with some regularity. The connection of
this epithet with Allah is natural, then, and the appearance of Allah as a
rain-bringer in pre-Islamic Arab myth is well-known156.
Indeed, this sort of
connection between the rain/storm god Rimmon/Adad and the compassionate god
Rahman is made in the literature,
"...If
this were Umm-ar-Rahma, we would not hesitate for a moment to choose the first
solution; but the antiquated or archaic reading of Umm-Ruhm, specified by the
authors, causes us to see in Ruhm a vestige of the old Semitic religion. Indeed,
its Semitic root r'/h/hm puts us face to face with one of the oldest Semitic
names of the god Adad, expressing what characterizes it primarily, namely the
rain which makes "soft" and "tender" the ground, the
vegetation and, by analogy, the hearts of humans, and also the thunder, source
of rain, which symbolizes it. From the double significance of the root there
occurs the two series of names which are given to him, on the one hand, Ramman,
Rihamun, Ramimu and Ragimu, expressing roaring thunder and the howling of the
bull which symbolizes this aspect of it; on the other hand, Rh/hm, Rhman (Akk.
remenu), which expresses the grace and the mercy of Ba'l of the sky. But, in
this last sense, this epithet applied to other gods."157
Fahd notes the dual
development of Rahman and Rimmon from this common Semitic root, even
stating that Rahman is the Akkadian "remenu". Fahd
goes further, showing that the rhm root was a specific epithet applied to
a number of ancient Near East gods,
"The
use of the root rhm in Arab paganism, to qualify the divinity, is
attested, in addition to the testimony of Ibn Durayd, by another no less
important, provided by the Palmyrene epigraphy, where a god RHM is named
at the side of Allat. In addition, within Thamudic onomastics, a theophore,
Raham'il, confirms the existence of this use in Northern Arabia. These weak
indications for the name were to enjoy in Islam a very great expansion, in
particular in the two forms of Abd ar-Rahman and Abd ar-Rahim, and are the
echoes of an ancient usage, going back to Assyro-Babylonia, one of the
principal hearths of Semitic paganism, where the epithet 'merciful' or the
invocation 'have mercy upon me' was joined to the names of principle gods, such
as Marduk, Ishtar, Sin, Shamash, Adad, and Assur. In the isolated state,
Ri-mi-nu-u became an epithet of Marduk."158
Again, the equation of rhm with rmn is taken for granted. Rahman
was applied to many deities, including both Adad the storm god, Sin the moon
god, and Marduk, another name for Bel (identified by Fahd further above as
Ba'l). Indeed, the god-name Ri.ha.mun appears on ancient god lists from
ancient Assyro-Babylonia, attesting the antiquity of rhm far before the appearance of this god
in Arabian mythology159. In one of these appearances, the name is accompanied by a descriptor
meaning "he who holds the nose/bridle for Utu". Utu was an archaic
Sumerian name (though apparently still being used in Babylonia at the time) for
the sun-god Shamash. The description seems to indicate Ri.ha.mun as
being in an inferior position, holding the horse of his master Utu/Shamash.
This same combination of Rahim with the sun god is noted much later in Palmyra
By the Roman period,
the transition had been made of rhm from fertility/compassion deity to a
more abstracted idealization of mercy and compassion. Rahim was a god of
mercy in the Palmyrene, Dura-Europan, and Safaitic pantheons, and Rahman
was a god of compassion in the South Arabian pantheon of this period. Rahman
in the South gradually was raised to the position of being an epithet for the
unique god appearing in the nascent South Arabian monotheism, and would seem to
be a strong candidate for the entrance of this deity into the developing
Islamic belief system after the Arabs had cemented their hold on the Arabian
peninsula and needed a cohesive religious system to unify their conquests.
Healey has postulated that the traditional South Arabian epithet rhmn (with the suffixed South Arabian
articular n) appearing in
the monotheizing cult of the Merciful One in South Arabia could easily have
arisen from earlier pagan usage, as he notes that the worship of the Merciful
One was widespread throughout Syria in the first century AD in a non-Christian
and non-Jewish context, instead tracing to Mesopotamian cultural influences161. The appearance of the same sort of cult in South Arabia (as well as
elsewhere in Arabia, including the Nabataeans), suggests the natural
development of this view of rhmn applied to emergent native monotheism.
It would further then seem natural that this Rahman would be adopted
into the theology of Islam as a way of bringing his worshipers in Southern
Arabia into the fold of the developing monotheistic state religion. Indeed,
both Rahman and Rahim appears as epithetic names for Allah in the
Qur'an in numerous places.
What Does It All Mean?
Essentially, we must
understand and accept that Allah of the Islamic religion is not the same as the God of the Bible.
Allah can be traced backwards through ancient Near Eastern religious history as
the latest development in a series of astral and atmospheric deities in the
ancient Semitic world, all the way back to very ancient Mesopotamia, the
original seat of both civilization, and also idolatry. Muslims, when they
worship Allah, are not worshipping the true Creator God, but are rather
worshipping a false god, one whose worship is condemned in the Bible:
“...And
hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either, the sun, or moon,
or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded.” (Deuteronomy 17:3)
"And he put down
the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in
the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about
Jerusalem; them all that burned offering unto Baal, to the sun, and to the
moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven.” (II Kings 23:5)
For the Muslim
who wished to deny or ignore this evidence, the question is posed: Why does
Islam have such a fixation with the crescent moon symbol, a symbol which is
intimately and widely associated with the worship of the moon god throughout
history, under whatever name, in Sumer, Akkad, Syria, Persia, Canaan, Egypt,
and Arabia? Though some Muslim apologists will argue that the crescent moon
symbology entered Islam very late as a result of Turkish influence in the 15th
century, this is simply not the case. The physical evidence for the crescent
moon as a religious symbol in Islam goes back to 75 AH (696 AD), where it is
used as a symbol on Islamic coins162. Why do many mosques and other Islamic religious buildings have
depictions of the crescent moon on their spires and pinnacles? Why do the flags
of twelve Muslim nations (Algeria, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Comoros, Malaysia,
Maldives, Mauritania, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan)
go so far as to include this crescent moon symbol? Why is the knowledge of the
timing of thehilal, the crescent moon, so important for starting the
Muslim holy month of fasting, Ramadan? All the evidence points to the fact of
the moon symbol being important to the early Arabs among whom the religion of
Islam gradually developed, and that this pre-Islamic pagan symbol was imported
into Islam, along with the rest of the ancient trappings.
For the Muslim to be
free of idolatry means, ultimately, that he or she must turn from Islam, with
its worship of this created god, and turn to the True Creator God of the Bible,
who has said that He will not share His glory with other “gods” (Isaiah 42:8).
In short, the notion
that Allah is the same as the God of the Bible, and that Allah is just the
fullest revelation of God who had previously been revealed in the Torah and the
Bible, must be rejected. As Caesar Farah has said in his book about Islam,
"There
is no reason, therefore, to accept the idea that Allah passed to the Muslims
from the Christians and Jews". 163
The God of the Bible is
not the same as the Allah worshipped in Islam. Instead, the roots of Islam's
deity are found in Middle Eastern mythology, and as such represent the latest
manifestation of idolatry in that region, and wherever Islam has spread.
End Notes
(1)
- F. Shehadi, Ghazali's Unique
Unknowable God, p. 37
(2) - I. al-Faruqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da`wah: Proceedings of the Chambèsy Dialogue Consultation, pp. 47-48
(3) - M. Youssef, America, Oil, and the Islamic Mind, pp. 74-75
(4) - S. Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, p. 181
(5) - W. Pannenberg, “Eternity, Time, and the Trinitarian God”, Reflections, annual anthology of public lectures given by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Vol. 3, 1999
(6) - W. Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, pp.35-36
(7) - N. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, p. 387
(8) - F.A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, p. 98
(9) - S.A.A. Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, p. 27
(10) - Youssef, op. cit., p. 82
(11) - Ibid., p. 88
(12) - W.R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 62
(13) - M. Rodinson, Mohammed, p. 17
(14) - Hisham ibn al-Kaldi, Kitab al-Asnam, trans. N.A. Faris, p. 17
(15) - J. Henninger, "Pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion", Studies on Islam, ed. M.L. Swartz, p. 8
(16) - K. Dussaud, La Pénétration des Arabes en Syrie avant l'Islam, p. 41
(17) - P.K. Hitti, History of Syria, p. 385
(18) - Ibid., p. 312
(19) - S. Fick, Religionsgeschichte Syriens: von der Frühzeit bis zur Gegenwart, Eds. P.W. Haider, M. Hutter, and S. Kreuzer, p. 195
(20) - A.A. Shorrosh, Islam Revealed: A Christian Arab’s View of Islam, p. 179
(21) - Ibn al-Athir, Al-Nihaayah fi Ghareeb al-Athar, entry for sala'h
(22) - S. Shamoun, "The ‘Mystery’ of PBUH Revealed: Allah's Prayers For Muhammad Examined", found at http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Menj/pbuh.htm
(23) - See e.g. the discussion of Sumerian mythos in S.N. Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, pp. 112-164, where this motif appears frequently
(24) - A. Jeffrey, Islam: Mohammed and His Religion, p. 85
(25) - L. Gardet, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, C. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 1, p. 406
(26) - W.M. Watt, Muhammad’s Mecca, pp. 31-32
(27) - Ibid., p. 39
(28) - S.M Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, pp. 24-25
(29) - D.B. MacDonald, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, C. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 3, p. 1093
(30) - F.E. Peters, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. J.L. Esposito, Vol. 1, pp. 76-77.
(31) - J. Gilchrist, The Temple, The Ka’aba, and Christ, p. 16
(32) - J. Van Ess, Meet the Arab, p. 29
(33) - J. Wellhausen, Reste Arabischen Heidenthums, p. 218
(34) - T. Nöldeke, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, eds. J. Hastings and J.A. Selbie, Vol. 1, p. 664
(35) - H. Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East, trans. J. Sturdy, p. 6
(36) - T. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, p. 20
(37) - Many scholars provide Illil as an alterative transliteration for the Akkadian form of the name. This does not directly affect the derivation of the word "il/ilu", since this comes from the LIL, but it does serve to illustrate a parallel transliteration issue from which there is a good deal of confusion introduced into the rendering of this god-name into our alphabet, which contributes, in turn, to confusion when the direct equation of the Mesopotamian and Arabian Il/Ilah and the western Semitic El/Eloah/Alaha is attempted. For some works, both recent and antique, which give Illil as an alternative rendering of the name, see W.R. Gallagher, Sennacherib's Campaign to Judah: New Studies, p. 88; Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans. S. Dalley, p. 321; A. Woods, <="" a="">The Contribution Ancient Near East Background Material Makes to Understanding and Interpreting Isaiah 14:12-15, publ. online; R.L. Litke, A Reconstruction of the Assyro-Babylonian God-Lists, An:dA-Nu-UM and An:Anu Sha Ameli, p. 37; J.C. Poirier, "Illuminating Parallels to Isaiah XIV 12", Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 49, Fasc. 3 (July 1999), p. 372, n. 4; A.T. Clay, "Ellil: The God of Nippur", American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 23, No. 4 (July 1907), pp. 269, 271; and esp. J.G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, Vol. 1, p. 113, n. 5, where Frazer gives Illil as the preferred rendering for the name
(38) - Jacobsen, op. cit., p. 117
(39) - A. Guillaume, Islam, p. 7
(40) - J.B. Scott, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, eds. R.L. Harris, G.L. Archer, and B.K. Waltke, Vol. 1, p. 42
(41) - I. Shahid, Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs, p. 139
(42) - Shendge gives ilu as a transliteration for this verb, M.J. Shendge, The Language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit, p. 204
(43) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 131
(44) - J.M.M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon, throughout
(45) - H.J. Muller, The Loom of History, p. 264
(46) - F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, Ancient Records From North Arabia, pp. 78-79
(47) - Ibid., p. 78
(48) - Ibid., p. 127
(49) - T. Nöldeke, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, eds. J. Hastings and J.A. Selbie, loc. cit.
(50) - See A. Negev, Nabataean Archaeology Today, pp. 12-14
(51) - G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 92
(52) - T.M. Green, The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions in Harran, p. 24
(53) - M. Lambert, "La Littérature Sumérienne", Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archéologie Orientale, Vol. 55 (1961), p. 180
(54) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 56
(55) - Green, op. cit., p.33
(56) - Ibid., p. 25
(57) - Ibid., p. 153
(58) - This identification is quite plausible. Devocalization of the g --> k is common, and the assimilation of the n before a consonant to give a doubling of the consonant (nC to CC) is well-attested in Northern Semitic languages, including in loan words - see M. Southern and A.G. Vaughn, "Where Have All the Nasals Gone? nC > CC in North Semitic", Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. 42 (1997), Autumn, pp. 263, 282. Another possible example of this type of phoneme change between Sumerian and western Semitic may be the Sumerian ingal to Hebrew ’ikkar.
(59) - Y. Yadin, Hazor: Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible, pp. 44-45
(60) - Green, op. cit., p. 59
(61) - I.R. Netton, "Neoplatonism in Islamic Philosophy", Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Ed. E. Craig, Vol. 6, pp. 806-807
(62) - Green, op. cit., p. 63
(63) - Henninger, op. cit., p.7
(64) - C. Coon, "Southern Arabia: A Problem for the Future", The Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institute, 1944, p. 399
(65) - N. Glueck, Deities and Dolphins, pp. 514-515
(66) - Negev, op. cit., p. 12
(67) - I. Browning, Petra, p. 28
(68) - E. Sykes, Everyman's Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology, p. 7
(69) - R. Landau, Islam and the Arabs, p. 13
(70) - A. Guillaume, Islam, p.7
(71) - J. Gray, The Legacy of Canaan: The Ras Shamra Texts and their Relevance to the Old Testament, Supplement to Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 5 (1957), p. 123
(72) - M. Maraqten, "An Inscribed Amulet from Shabwa", Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Vol. 7 (1996), p. 91
(73) - G. Ryckmans, Les Religiones Arabes Préislamiques, p. 43
(74) - G. Caton-Thompson, The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha, p. 49, also G. Ryckman's discussion of Thompson's epigraphic finds, pp. 157-173, which in addition to the numerous dedications to Sin, also demonstrated one dedication to Almaqah, another South Arabian moon god.
(75) - R.L.B. Bowen and F.P. Albright, Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, p. 78; Ryckmans, op. cit., pp. 28, 43
(76) - Guillaume, loc. cit.
(77) - Smith, op. cit, p. 52
(78) - J. Finegan, The Archaeology of World Religions: The Background of Primitivism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, etc., p.483
(79) - Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(80) - W.M. Müller, Mythology of All Races, Vol. 12, pp. 29-30
(81) - See L. Dirven, The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos, p. 48, n. 37; this interpretation seems likely, given the close similarity of Yarhibol's name with Yarih, a moon god among the Canaanites and Syrians
(82) - Green, op. cit., p. 26
(83) - A.Y. Ali, The Holy Qur'an: Arabic Text with an English Translation and Commentary, p. 1621
(84) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 54
(85) - D.A. MacKenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, p.35
(86) - Frazer, loc. cit.
(87) - M. Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 104
(88) - Green, op. cit., p. 33
(89) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 67
(90) - H.J.W. Drijvers, The Religion of Palmyra, p.9
(91) - T. Kaizer, The Religious Life of Palmyra, pp. 71-72
(92) - J. Teixidor, The Pantheon of Palmyra, pp. 2-3
(93) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 131
(94) - See A.S. Kapelrud, Baal in the Ras Shamra Texts, pp. 80-82
(95) - See A.G. Lundin, "Die Arabischen Göttinnen Ruda und al-Uzza", Al-Hudhud: Festschrift Maria Höfner zum 80. Geburtstag, Ed. R.G. Stiegner, pp. 211-218
(96) - 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.
(97) - Smith, op. cit., p. 106-107
(98) - Roberts, op. cit., p. 19
(99) - Teixidor, op. cit., p. 43; see also Green, op. cit., p. 153, n. 14 where Sin is identified as "the Bel of Harran".
(100) - Green, op. cit., pp. 66-69
(101) - Ibid., p. 69
(102) - Smith, op. cit., p.110
(103) - S.M. Zwemer, The Influence of Animism in Islam, p. 5
(104) - T. Fahd, The Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 3, p. 537
(105) - See F.E. Peters, Hajj:The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, p. 25
(106) - Coon, op. cit., p. 398
(107) - M. Rodinson, op. cit., p. 40
(108) - M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, p. 17
(109) - T. Fahd, The Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, loc. cit.
(110) - Peters, op. cit., p. 365, n. 59
(111) - K. Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, pp. 68-69
(112) - K. al-Saleh, Fabled Cities, Princes and Jinn From Arab Myths and Legends, pp. 28-29
(113) - The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume, pp. 66-68
(114) - Sozomenus, Ecclesiastical History, Bk. 6, Ch. 38.3
(115) - S. Pines, "Notes on Islam and on Arabic Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity", Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 4 (1984), p. 143
(116) - U. Rubin, "Hanifiyya and Ka'ba: an Inquiry into the Arabian Pre-Islamic Background of Din Ibrahim", Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 13 (1990), p. 104
(117) - Wellhausen, op. cit., p. 75
(118) - E.g. see F. Buhl, Das Leben Mohammeds, p. 94; Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(119) - F. Hommel, First Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. M.T. Houtsma, T.W. Arnold, R. Basset, and R. Hartmann, Vol. 1, pp. 379-380
(120) - C. Glassé, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 185
(121) - P. Occhigrosso, The Joy of Sects, p. 398
(122) - Ibid., p. 399
(123) - Ruthven, op. cit., p. 18
(124) - Green, op. cit., p. 14
(125) - J.F. Healey, The Religion of the Nabataeans, p. 83ff
(126) - Ibid., p. 85
(127) - Browning, op. cit., p. 44
(128) - Healey, op. cit., p. 88; following F. Zayadine, "Die Götter der Nabatäer", Petra und das Königreich der Nabatäer, ed. M. Lindner, p. 115
(129) - Ibid., p. 93
(130) - Ibid., p. 128
(131) - Hitti, op. cit., p. 385
(132) - See e.g. G. Lacerenza, "Il dio Dusares a Puteoli", Puteoli: Studi di Storia Antica, Vols. 12-13, p. 120
(133) - Healey, op. cit., p. 92
(134) - Ibid., p. 85
(135) - Ibid., pp. 110, 113
(136) - Negev, op. cit., pp. 11, 14-15
(137) - A. Jaussen and R. Savignac, Mission Archéologique en Arabie, Vol. 1, pp. 169ff
(138) - Healey, op. cit., pp. 132-134
(139) - Browning, loc. cit.
(140) - N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 213
(141) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 132-133
(142) - Kapelrud, op. cit., pp. 50-51
(143) - H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon, p. 335
(144) - See E.A. Knauf, "Die Herkunft der Nabatäer", in Petra: Neue Ausgrabungen und Entdeckung, ed. M. Lindner, pp. 78
(145) - See Healey, op. cit., pp. 101-102
(146) - N. Gleuck, Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans, p. 86; The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 221
(147) - Healey, op. cit., p. 127
(148) - N. Gleuck, The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 222
(149) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 133-134
(150) - Ibid., p. 162
(151) - Despite a few recent attempts to interpret him as a sun god, which are not generally accepted by the relevant scholarship.
(152) - M. Lurker, Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons, p. 18
(153) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 61
(154) - T.G. Pinches, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 6,79; can be viewed online in Adobe Acrobat format athttp://www.semantikon.com/theologica/religionbabyloniasyria.pdf
(155) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 142-143
(156) - See C. Brockelmann, "Allah und die Götzen, der Ursprung des islamischen Monotheismus", Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Vol. 21 (1922), pp. 107-108; Smith, op. cit., p. 111; Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(157) - T. Fahd, Le Pantheon De L'Arabie Centrale A La Veille De L'Hegire, p. 220-221; translation from the French is mine
(158) - Ibid., p. 141; translation from the French is mine
(159) - Litke, op. cit., pp. 134, 232
(160) - J. Teixidor, op. cit., pp. 54, 62
(161) - Healey, op. cit., p. 96
(162) - R. Ettinghausen, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, op. cit., p. 381; indeed, the article notes that the hilal motif of a crescent moon with stars was widely used in Islam before the rise of the Ottoman Empire
(163) - C. Farah, Islam: Beliefs and Observances, p. 28
(2) - I. al-Faruqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da`wah: Proceedings of the Chambèsy Dialogue Consultation, pp. 47-48
(3) - M. Youssef, America, Oil, and the Islamic Mind, pp. 74-75
(4) - S. Akhtar, A Faith for All Seasons, p. 181
(5) - W. Pannenberg, “Eternity, Time, and the Trinitarian God”, Reflections, annual anthology of public lectures given by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Vol. 3, 1999
(6) - W. Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, pp.35-36
(7) - N. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, p. 387
(8) - F.A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, p. 98
(9) - S.A.A. Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, p. 27
(10) - Youssef, op. cit., p. 82
(11) - Ibid., p. 88
(12) - W.R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 62
(13) - M. Rodinson, Mohammed, p. 17
(14) - Hisham ibn al-Kaldi, Kitab al-Asnam, trans. N.A. Faris, p. 17
(15) - J. Henninger, "Pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion", Studies on Islam, ed. M.L. Swartz, p. 8
(16) - K. Dussaud, La Pénétration des Arabes en Syrie avant l'Islam, p. 41
(17) - P.K. Hitti, History of Syria, p. 385
(18) - Ibid., p. 312
(19) - S. Fick, Religionsgeschichte Syriens: von der Frühzeit bis zur Gegenwart, Eds. P.W. Haider, M. Hutter, and S. Kreuzer, p. 195
(20) - A.A. Shorrosh, Islam Revealed: A Christian Arab’s View of Islam, p. 179
(21) - Ibn al-Athir, Al-Nihaayah fi Ghareeb al-Athar, entry for sala'h
(22) - S. Shamoun, "The ‘Mystery’ of PBUH Revealed: Allah's Prayers For Muhammad Examined", found at http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Menj/pbuh.htm
(23) - See e.g. the discussion of Sumerian mythos in S.N. Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, pp. 112-164, where this motif appears frequently
(24) - A. Jeffrey, Islam: Mohammed and His Religion, p. 85
(25) - L. Gardet, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, C. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 1, p. 406
(26) - W.M. Watt, Muhammad’s Mecca, pp. 31-32
(27) - Ibid., p. 39
(28) - S.M Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, pp. 24-25
(29) - D.B. MacDonald, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, C. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 3, p. 1093
(30) - F.E. Peters, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. J.L. Esposito, Vol. 1, pp. 76-77.
(31) - J. Gilchrist, The Temple, The Ka’aba, and Christ, p. 16
(32) - J. Van Ess, Meet the Arab, p. 29
(33) - J. Wellhausen, Reste Arabischen Heidenthums, p. 218
(34) - T. Nöldeke, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, eds. J. Hastings and J.A. Selbie, Vol. 1, p. 664
(35) - H. Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East, trans. J. Sturdy, p. 6
(36) - T. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, p. 20
(37) - Many scholars provide Illil as an alterative transliteration for the Akkadian form of the name. This does not directly affect the derivation of the word "il/ilu", since this comes from the LIL, but it does serve to illustrate a parallel transliteration issue from which there is a good deal of confusion introduced into the rendering of this god-name into our alphabet, which contributes, in turn, to confusion when the direct equation of the Mesopotamian and Arabian Il/Ilah and the western Semitic El/Eloah/Alaha is attempted. For some works, both recent and antique, which give Illil as an alternative rendering of the name, see W.R. Gallagher, Sennacherib's Campaign to Judah: New Studies, p. 88; Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans. S. Dalley, p. 321; A. Woods, <="" a="">The Contribution Ancient Near East Background Material Makes to Understanding and Interpreting Isaiah 14:12-15, publ. online; R.L. Litke, A Reconstruction of the Assyro-Babylonian God-Lists, An:dA-Nu-UM and An:Anu Sha Ameli, p. 37; J.C. Poirier, "Illuminating Parallels to Isaiah XIV 12", Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 49, Fasc. 3 (July 1999), p. 372, n. 4; A.T. Clay, "Ellil: The God of Nippur", American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 23, No. 4 (July 1907), pp. 269, 271; and esp. J.G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, Vol. 1, p. 113, n. 5, where Frazer gives Illil as the preferred rendering for the name
(38) - Jacobsen, op. cit., p. 117
(39) - A. Guillaume, Islam, p. 7
(40) - J.B. Scott, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, eds. R.L. Harris, G.L. Archer, and B.K. Waltke, Vol. 1, p. 42
(41) - I. Shahid, Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs, p. 139
(42) - Shendge gives ilu as a transliteration for this verb, M.J. Shendge, The Language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit, p. 204
(43) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 131
(44) - J.M.M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon, throughout
(45) - H.J. Muller, The Loom of History, p. 264
(46) - F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, Ancient Records From North Arabia, pp. 78-79
(47) - Ibid., p. 78
(48) - Ibid., p. 127
(49) - T. Nöldeke, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, eds. J. Hastings and J.A. Selbie, loc. cit.
(50) - See A. Negev, Nabataean Archaeology Today, pp. 12-14
(51) - G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 92
(52) - T.M. Green, The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions in Harran, p. 24
(53) - M. Lambert, "La Littérature Sumérienne", Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archéologie Orientale, Vol. 55 (1961), p. 180
(54) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 56
(55) - Green, op. cit., p.33
(56) - Ibid., p. 25
(57) - Ibid., p. 153
(58) - This identification is quite plausible. Devocalization of the g --> k is common, and the assimilation of the n before a consonant to give a doubling of the consonant (nC to CC) is well-attested in Northern Semitic languages, including in loan words - see M. Southern and A.G. Vaughn, "Where Have All the Nasals Gone? nC > CC in North Semitic", Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. 42 (1997), Autumn, pp. 263, 282. Another possible example of this type of phoneme change between Sumerian and western Semitic may be the Sumerian ingal to Hebrew ’ikkar.
(59) - Y. Yadin, Hazor: Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible, pp. 44-45
(60) - Green, op. cit., p. 59
(61) - I.R. Netton, "Neoplatonism in Islamic Philosophy", Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Ed. E. Craig, Vol. 6, pp. 806-807
(62) - Green, op. cit., p. 63
(63) - Henninger, op. cit., p.7
(64) - C. Coon, "Southern Arabia: A Problem for the Future", The Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institute, 1944, p. 399
(65) - N. Glueck, Deities and Dolphins, pp. 514-515
(66) - Negev, op. cit., p. 12
(67) - I. Browning, Petra, p. 28
(68) - E. Sykes, Everyman's Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology, p. 7
(69) - R. Landau, Islam and the Arabs, p. 13
(70) - A. Guillaume, Islam, p.7
(71) - J. Gray, The Legacy of Canaan: The Ras Shamra Texts and their Relevance to the Old Testament, Supplement to Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 5 (1957), p. 123
(72) - M. Maraqten, "An Inscribed Amulet from Shabwa", Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Vol. 7 (1996), p. 91
(73) - G. Ryckmans, Les Religiones Arabes Préislamiques, p. 43
(74) - G. Caton-Thompson, The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha, p. 49, also G. Ryckman's discussion of Thompson's epigraphic finds, pp. 157-173, which in addition to the numerous dedications to Sin, also demonstrated one dedication to Almaqah, another South Arabian moon god.
(75) - R.L.B. Bowen and F.P. Albright, Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia, p. 78; Ryckmans, op. cit., pp. 28, 43
(76) - Guillaume, loc. cit.
(77) - Smith, op. cit, p. 52
(78) - J. Finegan, The Archaeology of World Religions: The Background of Primitivism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, etc., p.483
(79) - Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(80) - W.M. Müller, Mythology of All Races, Vol. 12, pp. 29-30
(81) - See L. Dirven, The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos, p. 48, n. 37; this interpretation seems likely, given the close similarity of Yarhibol's name with Yarih, a moon god among the Canaanites and Syrians
(82) - Green, op. cit., p. 26
(83) - A.Y. Ali, The Holy Qur'an: Arabic Text with an English Translation and Commentary, p. 1621
(84) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 54
(85) - D.A. MacKenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, p.35
(86) - Frazer, loc. cit.
(87) - M. Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 104
(88) - Green, op. cit., p. 33
(89) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 67
(90) - H.J.W. Drijvers, The Religion of Palmyra, p.9
(91) - T. Kaizer, The Religious Life of Palmyra, pp. 71-72
(92) - J. Teixidor, The Pantheon of Palmyra, pp. 2-3
(93) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 131
(94) - See A.S. Kapelrud, Baal in the Ras Shamra Texts, pp. 80-82
(95) - See A.G. Lundin, "Die Arabischen Göttinnen Ruda und al-Uzza", Al-Hudhud: Festschrift Maria Höfner zum 80. Geburtstag, Ed. R.G. Stiegner, pp. 211-218
(96) - 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.
(97) - Smith, op. cit., p. 106-107
(98) - Roberts, op. cit., p. 19
(99) - Teixidor, op. cit., p. 43; see also Green, op. cit., p. 153, n. 14 where Sin is identified as "the Bel of Harran".
(100) - Green, op. cit., pp. 66-69
(101) - Ibid., p. 69
(102) - Smith, op. cit., p.110
(103) - S.M. Zwemer, The Influence of Animism in Islam, p. 5
(104) - T. Fahd, The Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, Vol. 3, p. 537
(105) - See F.E. Peters, Hajj:The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, p. 25
(106) - Coon, op. cit., p. 398
(107) - M. Rodinson, op. cit., p. 40
(108) - M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, p. 17
(109) - T. Fahd, The Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, loc. cit.
(110) - Peters, op. cit., p. 365, n. 59
(111) - K. Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, pp. 68-69
(112) - K. al-Saleh, Fabled Cities, Princes and Jinn From Arab Myths and Legends, pp. 28-29
(113) - The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume, pp. 66-68
(114) - Sozomenus, Ecclesiastical History, Bk. 6, Ch. 38.3
(115) - S. Pines, "Notes on Islam and on Arabic Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity", Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 4 (1984), p. 143
(116) - U. Rubin, "Hanifiyya and Ka'ba: an Inquiry into the Arabian Pre-Islamic Background of Din Ibrahim", Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 13 (1990), p. 104
(117) - Wellhausen, op. cit., p. 75
(118) - E.g. see F. Buhl, Das Leben Mohammeds, p. 94; Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(119) - F. Hommel, First Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. M.T. Houtsma, T.W. Arnold, R. Basset, and R. Hartmann, Vol. 1, pp. 379-380
(120) - C. Glassé, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 185
(121) - P. Occhigrosso, The Joy of Sects, p. 398
(122) - Ibid., p. 399
(123) - Ruthven, op. cit., p. 18
(124) - Green, op. cit., p. 14
(125) - J.F. Healey, The Religion of the Nabataeans, p. 83ff
(126) - Ibid., p. 85
(127) - Browning, op. cit., p. 44
(128) - Healey, op. cit., p. 88; following F. Zayadine, "Die Götter der Nabatäer", Petra und das Königreich der Nabatäer, ed. M. Lindner, p. 115
(129) - Ibid., p. 93
(130) - Ibid., p. 128
(131) - Hitti, op. cit., p. 385
(132) - See e.g. G. Lacerenza, "Il dio Dusares a Puteoli", Puteoli: Studi di Storia Antica, Vols. 12-13, p. 120
(133) - Healey, op. cit., p. 92
(134) - Ibid., p. 85
(135) - Ibid., pp. 110, 113
(136) - Negev, op. cit., pp. 11, 14-15
(137) - A. Jaussen and R. Savignac, Mission Archéologique en Arabie, Vol. 1, pp. 169ff
(138) - Healey, op. cit., pp. 132-134
(139) - Browning, loc. cit.
(140) - N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 213
(141) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 132-133
(142) - Kapelrud, op. cit., pp. 50-51
(143) - H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon, p. 335
(144) - See E.A. Knauf, "Die Herkunft der Nabatäer", in Petra: Neue Ausgrabungen und Entdeckung, ed. M. Lindner, pp. 78
(145) - See Healey, op. cit., pp. 101-102
(146) - N. Gleuck, Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans, p. 86; The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 221
(147) - Healey, op. cit., p. 127
(148) - N. Gleuck, The Other Side of the Jordan, p. 222
(149) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 133-134
(150) - Ibid., p. 162
(151) - Despite a few recent attempts to interpret him as a sun god, which are not generally accepted by the relevant scholarship.
(152) - M. Lurker, Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons, p. 18
(153) - Ringgren, op. cit., p. 61
(154) - T.G. Pinches, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 6,79; can be viewed online in Adobe Acrobat format athttp://www.semantikon.com/theologica/religionbabyloniasyria.pdf
(155) - Ringgren, op. cit., pp. 142-143
(156) - See C. Brockelmann, "Allah und die Götzen, der Ursprung des islamischen Monotheismus", Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Vol. 21 (1922), pp. 107-108; Smith, op. cit., p. 111; Henninger, op. cit., p. 12
(157) - T. Fahd, Le Pantheon De L'Arabie Centrale A La Veille De L'Hegire, p. 220-221; translation from the French is mine
(158) - Ibid., p. 141; translation from the French is mine
(159) - Litke, op. cit., pp. 134, 232
(160) - J. Teixidor, op. cit., pp. 54, 62
(161) - Healey, op. cit., p. 96
(162) - R. Ettinghausen, Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, op. cit., p. 381; indeed, the article notes that the hilal motif of a crescent moon with stars was widely used in Islam before the rise of the Ottoman Empire
(163) - C. Farah, Islam: Beliefs and Observances, p. 28
Go Back to Myth #2 - The Qur'an is
Allah's Perfect and Complete Word -- Continue to Myth #4 - Muslims Reverence Jesus
Christ
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