One of the favourite arguments of the Christian missionaries over many years had been that Allah of the Qur'an was in fact a pagan Arab "Moon-god" from pre-Islamic times. The seeds of this argument were sown by the work of the Danish scholar Ditlef Nielsen, who divided the Semitic deities into a triad of Father-Moon, Mother-Sun and Son-Venus.[1] His ideas (esp., triadic hypothesis) were used uncritically by later scholars who came to excavate many sites in the Near East and consequently assigned astral significance to the deities that they had found. Since 1991 Ditlef Nielsen's views were given a new and unexpected twist by the Christian polemicist Robert Morey. In a series of pamphlets, books and radio programs, he claimed that "Allah" of the Qur'an was nothing but the pagan Arab "Moon-god". To support his views, he presented evidences from the Near East which can be seen in "Appendix C: The Moon God and Archeology" from his book The Islamic Invasion: Confronting The World's Fastest-Growing Religion and it was subsequently reprinted with minor changes as a booklet called The Moon-God Allah In The Archeology Of The Middle East.[2] It can justifiably be said that this book lies at the heart of missionary propaganda against Islam today. The popularity of Morey's ideas was given a new breath of life by another Christian polemicist Jack T. Chick, who drew a fictionalised racially stereotyped story
entitled "Allah Had No Son".
Morey's ideas have gained widespread popularity among amenable Christians, and, more often than not, Muslims find themselves challenged to refute the 'archaeological' evidence presented by Morey. Surprisingly, it has also been
suggested by some Christians that Morey has conducted "groundbreaking research on the pre-Islamic origins of Islam." In this article, we would like to examine the two most prominent evidences postulated by Morey, namely the archaeological site in Hazor, Palestine and the Arabian "Moon temple" at Hureidha in Hadhramaut, Yemen, along with the diagrams presented in Appendix C of his book The Islamic Invasion: Confronting The World's Fastest-Growing Religion (and booklet The Moon-God Allah In The Archeology Of The Middle East) all of which he uses to claim that Allah of the Qur'an was a pagan "Moon-god".[3]
Morey's claim that the moon worship was dominant in Arabia, especially in the south, can be summed up with a quote from his book:
During the nineteenth century, Amaud, Halevy and Glaser went to Southern Arabia and dug up thousands of Sabean, Minaean, and Qatabanian inscriptions which were subsequently translated. In the 1940's, the archeologists G. Caton Thompson and Carleton S. Coon made some amazing discoveries in Arabia. During the 1950's, Wendell Phillips, W.F. Albright, Richard Bower and others excavated sites at Qataban, Timna, and Marib (the ancient capital of Sheba)...
The archeological evidence demonstrates that the dominant religion of Arabia was the cult of the Moon-god...
In 1944, G. Caton Thompson revealed in her book, The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha, that she had uncovered a temple of the Moon-god in southern Arabia. The symbols of the crescent moon and no less than twenty-one inscriptions with the name Sin were found in this temple. An idol which may be the Moon-god himself was also discovered. This was later confirmed by other well-known archeologists.[22]
Let us now look into the so-called "amazing discoveries" made in Southern Arabia which led Morey to claim that the archaeological evidence "demonstrates" that the dominant religion in Arabia was the cult of a Moon-god.
To begin with, the South-Arabian pantheon is not properly known. Its astral foundation is indisputable. As in most contemporary Semitic cults, the southern Arabs worshipped stars and planets, chief among whom were the Sun, Moon and ‘Athtar, the Venus.[23] The relation to the divine was deeply rooted in public and private life. The concept of State was expressed through the "national god, sovereign, people". Each of the South Arabian kingdoms had its own national god, who was the patron of the principal temple in the capital. In Sheba, it was
Ilmaqah (also called
Ilumquh or
Ilmuqah or
Almaqah or
Almouqah), in the temple of the federation of the Sabaean tribes in Marib. In Hadramaut (or Hadhramaut),
Syn (or
Sayin) was the national god and his temple was located in the capital Shabwa. In Qataban, the national god was called
‘Amm ("paternal uncle"), who was the patron of the principal temple in the capital Timna‘.
‘Amm was seen as a protector of the Qatabanite dynasty, and it was under his authority that the ruler carried out various projects of the state. In Ma‘in, the national god was
Wadd ("love") and it originated most probably from Northern Arabia. He was sometimes invoked as
Wadd-Abb ("Wadd is father").[24]
In order to understand the religion and culture of Southern Arabia, it must be borne in mind that the monuments and inscriptions already show a highly developed civilization, whose earlier and more primitive phases we know nothing about. This civilization had links with the Mediterranean region and Mesopotamian areas - which is evidenced by the development and evolutionary trends of its architecture and numismatics. This exchange certainly influenced the religious phenomena of the culture and it is primarily here we should look to illuminate the theological outlook of the Sheba region; certainly not among the nomadic bedouin of the centre and north of the Arabian peninsula. It was the failure to take into account these crucial principles that led Ditlef Nielsen into his extravagant hypothesis that all ancient Arabian religion was a primitive religion of nomads, whose objects of worship were exclusively a triad of the Father-Moon, Mother-Sun and the Son-Venus star envisaged as their child.[25] Not only was this an over-simplified view based on an unproven hypothesis, it is also quite absurd to think that over a millennium-long period during which paganism is known to have flourished, there was not substantial shifts of thinking about the deities. Not surprisingly, Nielsen's triadic hypothesis was handed a devastating refutation by many scholars (a detailed discussion is available
below), albeit some of them still retained his arbitrary assignment of astral significance to the deities.[26] While discussing the pantheon of South Arabian gods and its reduction to a triad by Nielsen, Jacques Ryckmans says:
Many mention of gods are pure appellations, which do not allow defining the nature, or even the sex, of the deities names. This explains why the ancient claim of D. Nielsen to reduce the whole pantheon to a basic triad Moon-father, Sun-mother (sun is feminine in Arabia), and Venus-son, has continued to exert negative influence, in spite of its having been widely contested: it remained tempting to explain an unidentified feminine epithet as relating to the Sun-goddess, etc.[27]
The crude logic of the proponents of Nielsen's hypothesis is that since
Shams ("Sun") is feminine in epigraphic South Arabian, the other principal deity must be masculine and this was equated with the moon. The relationship between Father-Moon and Mother-Sun produced Son-Venus star, their child. How did this erroneous interpretation affect the data from Southern Arabia where some "amazing discoveries" were made? We will examine this is the next few sections.
For his evidence of a Moon-god cult in Northern Arabia, Morey starts of by saying:
Thousands of inscriptions from walls and rocks in Northern Arabia have also been collected. Reliefs and votive bowls used in worship of the "daughters of Allah" have also been discovered. The three daughters, al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat are sometimes depicted together with Allah the Moon-god represented by a crescent moon above them.[116]
For Southern Arabia Morey told us about alleged Moon-god worship everywhere and he furnished us with names of discoverers, dates of discoveries, names of discovery sites, and lots of pictures to boot. Why is it that when it comes to Northern Arabia he offered not a shred of evidence? The only authorities he quotes to support his statement that the "three daughters, al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat are sometimes depicted together with Allah the Moon-god represented by a crescent moon above them", are Isaac Rabinowitz,[117] Edward Lipinski[118] and H. J. W. Drijvers.[119]
To begin with, none of these scholars even mention that Allah was a Moon-god in their works. Rabinowitz's two papers in the Journal Of Near Eastern Studies deal with mention of Han-'Ilat on vessels from Egypt. The pagan goddess A
tirat, who was widely worshipped in the Middle East, was discussed by Lipinski. There is no mention of al-‘Uzza and Manat in his paper, let alone they being the daughters of "Moon-god" Allah. As for the work of Drijvers, he discusses extensively the iconography of Allat in Palmyra. If there was something significant in these writings, Morey would have made direct quotation. The fact is that none of these works mention Allah was a Moon-god. Once again, Morey shows himself adept at fabricating evidence.
In Short: Missionaries wanted to show that Allah was not the same God. They faked evidence, used flawed logic and not so seldom straight out lied.
And if you want to go into the history of our "previous" beliefs? Almost everything in the bible can be linked to previous gods and religions as is most of our traditions like the fact that Jesus birthday just happends to be on the same day as the previous sun gods celebration.
Note that I am in no way saying that christianity is false or the anything along the lines. But just as Islam has previous history so do Christianity. The ideas did not just pop up out of nowhere.
(whether you want to put this down to previous human tribes having recieved flawed divine guidance or pure coincidence it's your choice.)
The entire article can be found at
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Sources/Allah/moongod.html
and parts borrowed from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_god
While yes it can be said that using islamic awareness to counter christian propaganda is evil or heretical the article is scientific and can support it's claim based on science and logic unlike the accusation that "allah is a moon god" that people seem to be fond of.
