Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia

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- Mohamed
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Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
OP - May 28, 2012, 03:03 PM

Who was "Allah" in Pre-Islamic Arabia? Is the name unique to Islam, or does it have origins in other traditions? Here's a excerpt I pulled off of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah#Pre-Islamic_Arabia
Quote
In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was used by Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity.[20] Allah was not considered the sole divinity; however, Allah was considered the creator of the world and the giver of rain. The notion of the term may have been vague in the Meccan religion.[8] Allah was associated with companions, whom pre-Islamic Arabs considered as subordinate deities. Meccans held that a kind of kinship existed between Allah and the jinn.[21] Allah was thought to have had sons[22] and that the local deities of al-ʿUzzā, Manāt and al-Lāt were His daughters.[23] The Meccans possibly associated angels with Allah.[24][25] Allah was invoked in times of distress.[25][26] Muhammad's father's name was ʿAbd-Allāh meaning "the slave of Allāh".[25]

Would anyone happen to know of any other sources that say the same thing? I know that this is is somewhat supported by numerous verses in the Quran (for example, 29:31-33), but I'm curious to see if there are any other sources to back these claims up.
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #1 - May 28, 2012, 03:33 PM

According to that article, the Aramaic word for God was also something similar: "Alahah". I would hazard a guess that this may be the origin of the word "Allah" in Arabic. Aramaic is a much older language than Arabic, it became the official language of the both the Assyrian and Persian Empires. It is well known that Muhammad was heavily influenced by the proselyting of Christianity that was going on during his life, presumably it was mainly done in Arabia by Aramaic speakers seeing as they were located nearby and their language is somewhat related to Arabic.

Also the Meccans are said to have had another name for their supreme diety: Hubal.

I would suspect that the word Allah came to Arabia via Aramaic, and Hubal was an older word for essentially the same thing. A chief God, sort of like the role that Zeus played in the Greek Pantheon.

Nevertheless, even Hubal may be of foreign origin, as it is clearly related to the Phoenician Baal, which was the chief male God of the Phoenicians/Caananites.

Interestingly, the name of the Ancient Greek supreme deity Zeus is similar to the modern Greek word for the Christian God (θεός).
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #2 - May 28, 2012, 03:38 PM

"They have but these two gods, to wit, Bacchus and Urania; and they say that in their mode of cutting the hair, they follow Bacchus. Now their practice is to cut it in a ring, away from the temples. Bacchus they call in their language Orotal, and Urania, Alilat. . . "

Herodotus 530 BCE
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/arabia1.asp

No mention of Zeus (Allah) at that time, must have been introduced through a later Jewish conspiracy.

"That it is indeed the speech of an illustrious messenger" (The Koran 69:40)
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #3 - May 28, 2012, 03:55 PM

Quote from: Alex Lam Meem on May 28, 2012, 03:38 PM
"They have but these two gods, to wit, Bacchus and Urania; and they say that in their mode of cutting the hair, they follow Bacchus. Now their practice is to cut it in a ring, away from the temples. Bacchus they call in their language Orotal, and Urania, Alilat. . . "

Oh yeah, I did forget about that. Herodotus did mention Allilat, which is the feminine form of Allah right? So clearly the word was used by the Arabs way back in the 6th Century BC. But it still could have come from Aramaic even so. When Herodotus was writing about Arabs it was the era of the Persian Empire, so most of his knowledge about them presumably came from the Arab tribes that were in close contact with the Aramaic speaking peoples of Mesopotamia and the Levant rather than those Arab tribes way down in the Hejaz and Yemen. So those tribes on the fringes of the desert probably had a lot of cultural and linguistic diffusion back and forth between Arabic and Aramaic.

Also all of these languages are Semitic, so Allah and Baal/Hubal may all be words that came from an older proto-Semitic language rather than developing later, who knows. But certainly it is worth mentioning that Herodotus does not mention either Baal or the masculine form of Allah as deities of the Arabs.
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #4 - May 28, 2012, 04:00 PM

Some of those stuff which made me think a lot when I was a Muslim was the name of Muhammad's father: Abdallah...

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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #5 - May 28, 2012, 04:13 PM

I once spent sleepless nights on the issue only to come to realization that thanks to the true deen we can collect one and a half pages of questionable facts on it and our knowledge of jahiliyyah is destined to be in perpetual jahiliyyah.

"That it is indeed the speech of an illustrious messenger" (The Koran 69:40)
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #6 - May 28, 2012, 04:57 PM

Quote from: Alex Lam Meem on May 28, 2012, 03:38 PM
"They have but these two gods, to wit, Bacchus and Urania; and they say that in their mode of cutting the hair, they follow Bacchus. Now their practice is to cut it in a ring, away from the temples. Bacchus they call in their language Orotal, and Urania, Alilat. . . "

Herodotus 530 BCE
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/arabia1.asp

No mention of Zeus (Allah) at that time, must have been introduced through a later Jewish conspiracy.

Lol, Islam must be the most unoriginal religion ever created.
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #7 - May 28, 2012, 04:59 PM

Quote from: Alex Lam Meem on May 28, 2012, 04:13 PM
I once spent sleepless nights on the issue only to come to realization that thanks to the true deen we can collect one and a half pages of questionable facts on it and our knowledge of jahiliyyah is destined to be in perpetual jahiliyyah.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #8 - May 29, 2012, 07:53 PM

Quote from: Mohamed on May 28, 2012, 04:57 PM
Lol, Islam must be the most unoriginal religion ever created.

I think Muhammad picked and chose cleverly on order to keep his followers under his thumb. Too bad he couldn't pick up some Buddhist traits or Shinto which does not focus on appeasing a deity for benefits in the afterlife. Comparing Monotheistic religions with Asian ones is quite fascinating. It makes you rethink it.

***~Church is where bad people go to hide~***
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Re: Allah in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Reply #9 - May 29, 2012, 09:01 PM

Quote from: Sakura02 on May 29, 2012, 07:53 PM
Too bad he couldn't pick up some Buddhist traits or Shinto which does not focus on appeasing a deity for benefits in the afterlife. Comparing Monotheistic religions with Asian ones is quite fascinating.

Well maybe he would not have gotten many followers if he told people to do good just for the sake of doing good, without the carrot and stick of an afterlife. Buddhism had already been tried in the West and it failed. Ashoka the Great sent Buddhist missonaries to all the Greek Kings during the Hellenistic Age. But they were too busy waging war with each other to listen to any of it.

Buddhist proselytism at the time of king Ashoka (260–218 BCE):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edicts_of_Ashoka#Proselytism_beyond_India
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