Allāh Derived From Allāt? Exposing Another Afrocentrist Anti-Islam Myth

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD © 2012 Wesley Muhammad

(Excerpt from Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam)

It is popular in some Afrocentrist circles to claim that Allah is a patriarchal corruption of the paramount Arabian goddess Al-Lat/Allāt. This claim is largely based on a suggestion by Dr. Yusef Ben Jochannan. According to ben-Jochannan the Islamic god Allāh was “launched” in Arabia by the Arabian prophet Muhammad b. ‘Abd Allāh, who apparently (according to ben-Jochannan) converted the female goddess Allāt into the male god Allāh.[1] The implication is of course that before Muhammad replaced the female deity Allāt with his own creation, the male god Allāh, no one worshipped the latter.[2] Hindu nationalist Purushottan Negesh Oak likewise suggests that the male Allāh derived from the early goddess.[3] This is a most unfortunate historical reconstruction in that, while it is completely disproven by linguistic, epigraphic and historical data, it nonetheless is frequently repeated. But as pioneering Canadian scholar of Islam Arthur Jeffrey points out:

"The name Allah¼ 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."[4]

The male and female pair Allāh/Allāt coexisted in Arabia before Muhammad's time, with Allah receiving recognition as supreme creator deity. Western Islamicist and historian from the University of Minnesota, Caesar E. Farah, affirms that

"Allah, the paramount deity of pagan Arabia, was the target of worship in varying degrees of intensity from the southernmost tip of Arabia to the Mediterranean."[5]

Samuel M. Zwemer notes as well:

"But history establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that even the pagan Arabs, before Muhammad's time, knew their chief god by the name of Allāh, and even, in a sense, proclaimed his unity."[6]

British Islamicist William Montgomery Watt has shown that  Allāh, before the time of Muhammad, was what students of comparative religion know as a “high god.” This means that while only one of several gods whose existence was acknowledged, Allāh was the supreme deity over the others.[7] One of these subordinate gods was in fact the goddess Allat, who was considered both the feminine complement of the male Allāh and his “daughter.” Thus Jacques Ryckmans, French historian of Pre-Islamic Arabia, writing on the gods of Pre-Islamic North Arabia notes:

"Al-Ilāt or Allāt ("the Goddess"), was known to all pantheons. She is daughter or a consort, depending on the region, of al-Lāh or Allāh, Lord of the Ka’bah in Mecca.”[8]

To suggest that Muhammad somehow 'converted' the female deity Allāt into the male Allāh is completely without warrant.

Prophet Muhammad did not 'launch' Allāh or his worship in Arabia. Second century CE inscriptions from Sumatra Harabesi in the Tektek mountains, Edessa Syria, document this. At an Arab sanctuary the “governor of the Arabs” left the following inscription dated to 165 CE:

                        

 (2) I, Tiridates, son of Adona, governor of ‘Arab, (3) built this altar and set up a pillar for Mār 'Allāhā, 'Lord Allah'.[9]

These inscriptions are 400 years prior to the beginning of Muhammad's reform movement in Mecca. But there are more, earlier examples as well. Evidence of the worship of Allah in ancient Arabia has been found in both the Northern and Southern portions of the peninsula. It is most documented for the Lihyan tribe in Northern Arabia. Four hundred Lihyanite and Dedanite inscriptions dating back to the fifth century BCE were found in the Nejd (Central Arabia). In these inscriptions are invocations to Allah. For example:

                       

                                                                         H'lh 'btr bk hsrr
                                              'O Alah, (god) without offspring; in Thee be joy'[10]

F.V. Winnet, who has translated these inscriptions, lists others in his article, "Allah Before Islam."

O Allah, permit me to accomplish salvation¼

O Allah, God without offspring, greeting

O Allah, guide me that I may attain prosperity¼

O Allah, God without offspring, knower of men¼[11]

Allāh is called in these inscriptions "The Exalted": Give favor to this rock, O Exalted Allah.[12]

This Lihyanite inscriptional material gives evidence of an early Allah cult center 1100 years before Muhammad. And who were the Banu Lihyan? According to al-Tabari the Banu Lihyan were the survivors of Jurhum, one of the twelve original Kushite tribes in Mecca.[13] They were a division of the ancient tribe Hudhayl in the northern vicinity of Mecca and al-Tāʾif, of whom the Encyclopedia of Islam describes:

"Their skins were black and shinning; their looks¼were not hollow but round and teeming."[14]

This was an ancient center of Black worshippers of the male Allāh that preceded Muhammad in Arabia by over a millennium. The evidence for the cult of Allāh in Arabia, however, does not begin with the Lihyanites, but goes back to the Proto-Semites.  

Notes

                             

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[1] Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan and George Simmonds, The Black Man's North and East Africa (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2005 [1971]) 25; Yosef ben-Jochannan, African Origins of the Major "Western Religions" (The Black Man's Religion, Volume I; Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1991 [1970]) 212, 213.

[2] Wayne B. Chandler advances the same claim, quoting from the non-Arabist and non-Islamicist Amaury de Riencourt's critique of feminism, Sex and Power in History (New York: Dell Publishing, 1974). See Chadler's article "Ebony and Bronz: Race and Ethnicity in Early Arabia and the Islamic World," in Rashidi and Sertima, African Presence, 272.

[3] P.N. Oak, World Vedic Heritage: A History of Histories, 2 vols. (3rd Edition; New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003) I:696.

[4] Islam: Muhammad and His Religion (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1958) 85.

[5] Caesar E. Farah, Islam: Beliefs and Observances (Hauppauge, NY: Barron's, 2003 [1965]) 28.

[6] Samuel M. Zwemer, The Muslim Doctrine of God (1924) 24.

[7] Montgomery W. Watt, "The Qur'ân and Belief in a High God," Der Islam 56 (1979): 205-211; idem, "Pre-Islamic Arabian Religion in the Qur'an," 15 (1976): 73-79; idem, "Belief in a 'high god' in pre-Islamic Mecca', Journal of Semitic Studies, 16 (1971): 35-40.

[8] Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 s.v. Arabian Religion by Jacques Ryckmans. See further: F. V. Winnett, "The Daughters of Allah," Moslem World 30 (1940): 113-130.

[9] Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 441, 616 n. 5; Han J.W. Drijvers and John F. Healey, The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene: Texts, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 104.

[10] F.V. Winnett, A Study of the Lihyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1937) Plate IV.

[11] F. Winnet, "Allah Before Islam," The Moslem World 28 (1938): 243.

[12] F. Winnet, A Study of The Lihyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1937) 27.

[13] Ed. de Goeje, Annales, 749.

[14] “Hudhayl,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 3:540.

Allah No Moon-God (Exposing the Christian and Afrocentrist Myth)

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD. © 2012 Wesley Muhammad

(Excerpt from Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam)

It has become popular in Christian polemical literature as well as some Afrocentric scholarship and discourse to claim that the deity ʾAlmaqah or ʾAlah Muqah of ancient South Arabia, and therefore the Allah of Islam, was a moon-deity and therefore an illegitimate 'pagan god.'[1] Such claims are based on a misrepresentation of the data, a fact that more sober Christian missionary writers have even pointed out:

“It has been claimed that Almaqah (i.e. Alah Muqah) was a moon god, but there is no solid evidence for this, and scholars now think Almaqah was a sun god…there is no clear evidence that moon-worship was prominent among the Arabs in any way or that the crescent was used as the symbol of a moon god, and Allah certainly was not the moon-god’s name…The crescent had been a symbol used in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and was used on the flag of the Byzantine Empire, which proclaimed itself to be Christian…But when the Turks conquered Constantinople and the rest of the Middle East in the 15th century, they kept the Byzantine symbol of empire. In fact, they affixed crescent symbols atop public buildings throughout their empire as a symbol of their rule…Once the crescent no longer represented Turkish imperial rule in its former colonies, it was reinterpreted as a symbol of Islam, which is it’s modern significance. So the crescent symbol has not been passed down through Islam from a supposed ancient Arabian moon religion but is a symbol imposed by Ottoman Turks for political reasons.”[2]

While it is true that it was at one time the going scholarly opinion that ʾAlmaqah was a moon- god,[3] more recent scholarship has abandoned this view because it was based on an incorrect pretense. The trend, going back to Ditlef Nielsen in the early 20th century,[4] to reduce all of early Arabian religion to a triad of nature deities (Venus, moon, sun) has now been rightly rejected as being oversimplifying and unsupported by current data.[5] Regarding ʾAlmaqah or ʾAlah Muqah, Arabist and historian Alfred F. L. Beeston confirms that “there is nothing to indicate lunar qualities.”[6] Frankfort scholar Werner Daum, in his important work Ursemitische Religion agrees:

 “According to popular opinion, 'Almaqah is a moon-god. For this opinion, derived from Mesopotamian parallels, there is no South Arabian proof.”[7]

Bill Glanzman, a professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, and American Foundation for the Study of Man field director during the last four years of work at the Awwām or so-called 'Moon Temple' of ancient Arabia rightly rejects this designation. International journalist Joël Donnet reports:

“Almaqah was the main god of the Sabeans¼Associated with fertility, agriculture and irrigation, it was first represented by a bull, and possibly by an ibex. It was also often associated with a moon crescent, which led numerous archaeologists - including Abdu Ghaleb and Dr. Yusuf Abdullah, the president of the General Organization of Antiquities, Museums and Houses of Manuscripts- to call it the Moon-God, and therefore to name Mahram Bilqis the Moon Temple. But Bill Glanzman disagrees with this vision, as he considers the moon as only one symbol of Almaqah, and certainly not the most important one, according to the numerous inscriptions from the site recovered during the 1950s and the last four years of the AFSM's fieldwork: ‘So far, the moon isn't even mentioned in the texts, and we have found only a few examples of Almaqah's crescent moon in artwork. We very commonly find the bull (thawran) associated with Almaqah in the inscriptions (emphasis mine-WM).”[8]

The nature of the Sabaean deity ʾAlah Muqah was studied in great detail by J. Pirenne[9] and G. Garbini[10] in the 1970s. They demonstrated that the motifs associated with this deity - the bull, the vine, and also the lion's skin on a human statue - are solar rather than lunar attributes. The Bull in fact was associated first with the sun-god, in Mesopotamia and Egypt,[11] only later being conscripted into the service of the moon-deities in third millennium BCE Mesopotamia.[12] There is thus a growing consensus among scholars that this South Arabian deity was rather a sun-god: “Almaqah was a masculine sun-god,” affirms Jean-François Breton, scholar with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.[13] So too Jacques Ryckmans:

“Until recently Almaqah was considered to be a moon god, under the influence of a now generally rejected conception of a South Arabian pantheon consisting of an exclusive triad: Father Moon, Mother Sun¼and Son Venus. Recent studies underline that the symbols of the bull's head and the vine motif that are associated with him are solar and Dionysiac attributes and are more consistent with a sun god, a male consort of the sun goddess.”[14]

That the moon was only one of ʾAlah Muqah's symbols is a fact  Christian polemicists overlook. For example, Joël Nathan, in his tome Moon-o-theism: Religion of a War and Moon God Prophet, quotes the following statement from Wendell Phillip regarding the Awwām Temple that he excavated:

"Near the top of the delicate stone shaft is a beautifully covered circular sun with a crescent moon".

From Ancient Bar'an Temple of Alah Maqah, near Marib, Yemen. Notice the crescent and solar orb.

(2^nd millennium BCE)

When the crescent moon did appear on ʾAlah Muqah's temples it was conjoined with the solar orb, connoting the dual nature of this deity (diurnal=luminous and nocturnal=dark). Yet, Nathan concludes from Phillip and others who point to this solar orb and crescent moon symbol that,

"this suggests that Almaqah and Syn were moon-gods, not sun- gods."[15]

How does a symbol with the sun and moon conjoined indicate a moon-god? Clearly such a conclusion is dogmatic rather than academic, and born no doubt from a desperate desire to make 'Almaqah a moon-deity for polemical purposes. Unfortunately, many Afrocentrist scholars have adopted this Christian polemic that has no critical scholarly foundation today.  

Notes

---

[1] See esp. Robert Morey, The moon-god Allah in the archeology of the Middle East (Newport, PA : Research and Education Foundation, 1994); Yoel Natan, Moon-o-theism: Religion of a War and Moon God Prophet, 2 volumes (Lulu.com, 2006)

[2] Rick Brown, “Who is Allah?” International Journal of Frontier Missions 23 (2006): 79-80.

[3] Even Yusuf Abdullah, the president of the General Organization of Antiquities, Museums and Houses of Manuscripts, Yemen, labeled the Awwām Temple the 'Moon Temple' on account of this old but mistake belief.

[4] Handbuch der altarbischen Altertumskunde I (Copenhagen, 1927) 177-250.

[5] See e.g. Alfred F. L. Beeston "The Religions Of Pre-Islamic Yemen" in J. Chelhod

(Ed.), L'Arabie Du Sud Histoire Et Civilisation Volume I: Le Peuple Yemenite Et Ses Racines (Paris, 1984) 260.

[6] Beeston "The Religions Of Pre-Islamic Yemen," 263.

[7] Daum, Ursemitisch Religion (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1985). 30.

[8] Joël Donnet, "Looking for the Queen of Sheba," http://pagesperso-orange.fr/joel.donnet/News115.htm. Accessed August 15, 2009.

[9] "Notes D'Archéologie Sud-Arabe," Syria, 49 (1972): 193-217.

[10] "Il Dio Sabeo Almaqah," Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, 48 (1973-1974): 15-22.

[11] Conrad, Horn and Sword, 39; Donald B. Redford (ed.), The Ancient Gods Speak: A Guide to Egyptian Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30 s,v. Bull Gods by Dieter Kessler. It was the sun-god - An, Utu, Ra, etc., - who incarnated in the bull.

[12] Dominique Collon, "The Near Eastern Moon God," in Diederik J.W. Meijer (ed.), Natural Phenomena: Their Meaning, Depiction and Description in the Ancient Near East (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1992) 19; Gudrun Colbow, "More Insights into Representations of the Moon God in the Third and Second Millennium B.C.," in I.L. Finkel and M.J. Geller (edd.), Sumerian Gods and their Representations (Cuneiform Monographs 7) (Groningen: STYX Publications, 1997) 25-26; Tallay Ornan, "The Bull and its Two Masters: Moon and Storm Deities in Relation to the Bull in Ancient Near Eastern Art," Israel Exploration Journal 51 (2001): 3-4.

[13] Breton, Arabia Felix, 120. On Almaqah as a sun-god see further Beeston, "Saba'," 664-665; idem, "The Religions Of Pre-Islamic Yemen" in J. Chelhod (Ed.), L'Arabie Du Sud Histoire Et Civilisation (Le Peuple Yemenite Et Ses Racines), 1984, Volume I:263.

[14] Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 s.v. Arabian Religion by Jacques Ryckmans.

[15] Moon-o-Theism, I:342-342.

The African Origin of Islam: An Open Letter to the Africa-Centered Community

“since the Afro-centrists have fought so long to protect the African contribution to the civilization of Egypt…why not protect the total cultural contribution that Africa has made to Arabia?”

Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour

“Africans were involved in Islam’s creation…But, the Moslem Arabs…have been for some time recently teaching a sort of religious history in which the indigenous Africans find themselves omitted from the historical role they played in Islam’s origins. They are also excluded from the highest posts of the administration of Islam in Mecca, which they had traditionally held from the beginning of Islam with the Prophet Mohamet, and Hadzart Bila Ibn Rahab…Islam was no better than Judaism and Christianity, as its modern administrators attempted to eliminate its indigenous African founders from the eyes of the faithful, and the world in general. But history, written history, once more acted in her own way, and mannerism, as it clamoured, once again, for Islam’s indigenous African originators.” Dr.  Yosef Ben-Jochannan.

"the student's obligation was to build upon the previous generation's work, to find what is missing, omitted (intentionally or not), neglected, and flat-out incorrect, so we can make the necessary changes for the following generation.." 

 John Henrick Clarke.

It has been two years now since I launched a campaign to academically demonstrate the African origins of the religio-cultural tradition called Islam. This campaign began with a debate invitation to Bro Walter Williams, author of the book, The Historical Origins of Islam. After accepting the invitation, and then backing out of the debate, I went to Trenton, New Jersey in March 2009 and delivered my first lecture on the subject entitled, “The Origin of Islam and End of Ghetto Scholarship.” Since that day, I have given several public lectures on the subject; I have engaged in three live debates on the subject – with Doctors, Babas, and Captains; I have done blogtalk debates disguised as interviews; I have written two books and numerous articles on the subject.  And the bottom line is this: I and others have demonstrated beyond all shadow of reasonable doubt that Islam IS an African religion: it was created by Africoid peoples in Arabia and spread to the corners of the earth by them. This Islam of Prophet Muhammad and the early Ummah – who were Black Arabs or African-Arabians – was the genetic descendent of the religious tradition of ancient Black Arabia (Kushite Arabia). I have demonstrated that this indigenous ‘African Islam’ was eventually usurped by white converts and made – like everything else – a tool of White Supremacy.  It has been demonstrated that Islam is Africa’s ‘Other Stolen Legacy’. Not a single person has been able to impeach the evidence that has been presented and none have been able to disprove the basic point.  It is time to declare an end to all hostilities. There are no more debates to be had, except with those who have a vested interest in preserving the White Supremacy that has been enthroned within Islam.  

It is in my opinion a very sad state of affairs that the most ferocious opposition to the revelation of these facts have come not from those vested in the maintenance of Islamic White Supremacy, but from members of the Africa-centered/Afrocentrist community, the very community which one would have expected to be the first and most eager receivers of this information. After all, it was the great Cheikh Anta Diop and Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan who laid the base for this demonstration. My book, Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam, simply puts flesh on a skeletal narrative that began with Diop’s, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa and Dr. Ben’s The African Origin of the Major ‘Western’ Religions. This effort to reclaim Arabia and Islam from the prison of White Supremacy is akin to the earlier efforts that resulted in the reclamation of Kemet and Ma’at from that same prison. We in the Africa-centered community enthusiastically received the works of Prof George G.M. James and Prof Martin Bernal who advocated and established the African origin of Greek Philosophy. In as much as we can embrace the fact that Kemet and so-called ‘Greek’ Philosophy are among our ‘stolen legacies’ whose reclamation we celebrate, the fierce resistance to the reclamation of Arabia and its contributions – pre-Aryanized Islam included – as another stolen legacy is somewhat bewildering. It can only be explained as an ideological reaction on the part of those who, for one reason or another, feel they must reject the documented African origins of Islam despite the evidence.

The sometimes ferocious resistance from members of the Africa-centered community – of which I too am a proud member – is truly overkill. It has gotten at times so nigga-ish and clownish that it is embarrassing. Personal assaults and disrespect more often than not are a characteristic feature of this resistance. Admittedly, it is the more youthful and less scholarly ones of the community that exhibit this behavior and give Africa-centered intellectuality a bad look. But unfortunately, the reception by the more established figures of this community has been lukewarm: while some have shown public appreciation of my work; many more have privately done so, while being publically quite as the debate rages on. That is certainly their prerogative and this is only an observation, not a criticism. But the overall resistance to this fact of the African origins of Islam exposes much of the current Africa-centered community as a community that, despite its scholarly pedigree, can fall victim to religious and ideological dogmatism.  The reasons given for the rejection of my thesis are most often so flimsy and contorted that they prove the ideological nature of this rejection. My work on Black Arabia and the African origins of Islam seems to be exorcizing the dogmatic demons that lurked deep in the Africa-centered communal consciousness.  My prayer is that we as an intellectual community can grow from this by looking in the mirror and freeing ourselves from these dogmatic demons that we too often have passed off as ‘revolutionary intellectualism.’

Because the reaction to my work on the African Origin of Islam is so ideological now, I have discontinued engaging the resistance from the Africa-centered community. I will continue to teach and publish on the subject; I will debate with those from the Muslim world who (consciously or subconsciously) have a vested interest in preserving the hegemony of White Supremacy in Islam which I am trying to help dismantle. But I will no longer debate so-called Afrocentrists on this issue. There is something very disturbing about the very idea of two alleged Afrocentrists or Africa-centered Black intellectuals debating whether Islam was originated by Blacks or Whites. That discussion is better had with a Black and a White intellectual. So I will no longer entertain in any way the so-called challenges or debate invitations from ideological Afrocentrists on this subject. All are free to write scholarly critiques of my work, and those critiques that are credible and done with integrity will be addressed in one of my many forthcoming publications on the subject. But I will simply ignore everything and everyone else.  If you come to my Facebook page hoping for an impromptu debate, you will be ignored. If you persist, you will be deleted. And be clear: my past and future decision to ignore you and my refusal to engage you – whoever you may be or have been – is not because I fear you. It is frankly because I do not respect you; not as an intellectual with any integrity.

So I believe that the discussions that have taken place up to this point have their value and have served their purpose. It is now time to move on though. It is at least time for me to move on.

Scholarship means nothing to me. Scholarship with integrity means everything. SMH at those who know not the difference.

Peace to all the Africa-centered scholars with integrity: you are the true intellectual warriors. I pray that one day I can be found worthy to join your ranks.

Wesley Muhammad, PhD.

        

 1/09/12