Allah as a lunar deity
Fringe historical claim related to the origins of Islam / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The postulation that Allah (God in Islam) originated as a moon god first arose in 1901 in the scholarship of archaeologist Hugo Winckler. He identified Allah with a pre-Islamic Arabian deity known as Lah or Hubal, which he called a lunar deity. This notion has been dismissed by modern scholarship as being without basis.
A similar notion was propagated in the United States in the 1990s by Christian apologists using a 1994 pamphlet The Moon-god Allah: In Archeology of the Middle East by the Christian pastor Robert Morey. This was followed by the 2001 book by Morey called The Islamic Invasion: Confronting the World's Fastest-Growing Religion. Morey argued that "Allah" was a moon goddess in pre-Islamic Arabic mythology, and pointed to Islam's use of a lunar calendar and the use of moon imagery in Islam as support.[1]
Modern scholars have dismissed the original theory and its popularized form as unevidenced. The whole notion is considered speculative and without basis in the archaeological record of the development of religion on the Arabian peninsula. It has also been labelled an insult both to Muslims and to Arab Christians, as the latter also refers to God as "Allah".[2][3]