Who Was Allah Before Islam?

The Quran describes Mecca at the time of Muhammad as a city full of mushrikin usually translated as pagans or polytheists. They are Muhammad is main opponents pushing back against his message mocking his claims refusing to worship Allah alone. But then the Quran makes a surprising claim about their beliefs. If you ask them who created the heavens and the earth they will surely say Allah. Quran . If you ask them who created humans they will say Allah. They also claim that Allah harnessed the sun and the moon and sends down rain from the sky. Wait wait wait wait. These are polytheists right? And yet according to the Quran they already believed in a creator god named Allah. Well the confusion may stem from that translation polytheist or pagan. See the word mushrikin can be translated more literally as those who associated others with God. In other words they believed in Allah and even worshipped him but they also assigned associates or partners to him. Some scholars even translate the term as associators or associationists. The Quran is criticism is not that they lacked belief in Allah it is that they didn’t worship him alone. They apparently prayed to lesser deities invoked intermediaries and participated in a broader polytheistic system. Some apparently venerated the sun and the moon. Others venerated named pre-Islamic Arabian gods like Allat and Manat. But Allah in some sense remains supreme as the creator of heaven and earth even in this polytheistic system. So this raises the question how did these mushrikin already know about Allah? Well the answer is there was already a god known as Allah in pre-Islamic Arabia. Check out this inscription from the deserts of Jordan by Rab el son of Assad and he camped here and kept watch for enemies and the rain clouds. So O Balsamin send the winds and Shaykh Awm and O Allah and Allat blindness be to the one who effaces this inscription. This is basically a short prayer carved on stone.

Apparently an Arab nomad hundreds of years before Muhammad camped here and describes what he is doing watching for enemies waiting for rain and then calls on multiple gods for help but also mean a storm god Shayhalcom another local protective deity and then right alongside them Allah. See long before the Quran was written down ancient Arabs were carving the name Allah into stone invoking him in prayers embedding him into personal names and if recent discoveries are correct imagining him as a high god tied to light and creation itself. So today we are going to explore the pre-Islamic Allah. First let us start with etymology because we can learn a lot just from what the word Allah even means. Most scholars today agree that it comes from a contraction of the Arabic al ilah which literally just means the god. The word belongs to a much older Semitic root god linguistically related to terms like El the name of the high god in the Canaanite pantheon or Elohim in the Hebrew Bible. And al ilah can be understood in a generic sense as the god referring to any deity depending on the context. But it can also have a more elevated sense of the god the one god who stands above all others. As the scholar Nicolai Sinai puts it it can carry the sense of the god par excellence a supreme deity within a broader religious system including monotheism. We can actually see this usage before Islam among Arab Christians. In the 500 CE Arab Christians were already using the term al ilah to refer to the Christian god. For example this inscription from a Christian martyr shrine in northern Syria dated to 512 CE reads May the god remember Sergius. And the word used here is al ilah. So here the term clearly refers to the one god of Christianity and scholars have pointed out that this probably reflects a direct translation from Greek speaking Christians who commonly refer to god in Greek as hotheos literally the god. So when Christianity moved into Arabic speaking contexts Arab Christians appear to have adopted al ilah as a kind of equivalent expression a way of rendering ho theos in their own language. But this kind of language is not limited to monotheism. Al ilah can also make sense in terms of henotheism a system where many gods are acknowledged to exist but only one is elevated above the rest as supreme or uniquely worthy of worship.

Now we will examine this more later in the video but briefly we can see this among the Nabataeans an ancient Arab people best known for their capital at Petra in modern day Jordan. In Nabataean inscriptions they refer to their top god Dushara in Aramaic as the god even though they were technically polytheists who recognized the existence of many gods. Over time in some regions and some dialects of old Arabic al ilah appear to have contracted into a single word Allah the form that would later become standard in Islamic usage. And we can actually watch the sound change happening elsewhere in pre-Islamic Arabian religion. Take the goddess Allat who shows up a lot in ancient Arabian inscriptions. Most scholars think her name derives from an earlier form al ilat basically the goddess just as al ilah means the god. And we can catch a glimpse of that older form of her name in the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Writing in the 400s BCE Herodotus reports that the Arabs call Aphrodite Allilat which was probably his attempt to render al ilat in Greek. But when we move forward several centuries the shorter form Allat becomes standard. The middle vowel drops out the phrase contracts and what was once a descriptive title starts to function as a fixed name. So al ilat becomes Allah just as al ilah becomes Allah. So if Allah just derives from the god does it actually refer to a particular god?

Like is it a name or is it a title? The best way to answer that is to look at old Arabic inscriptions. From southern Syria all the way down into the Arabian Peninsula archaeologists have found the name Allah carved into stone in different scripts. Now these are not monumental inscriptions from temples or palaces. Most of them are basically graffiti short texts left behind by herders nomads and people moving through the desert. They are very hard to date precisely but most come from the first few centuries before Islam. And in the bulk of these inscriptions Allah behaves like a name. So consider this one. And so Rudaw and Allah be with me. And blind whoever effaces this inscription. Or this one. Oh Allah and Dusares let there be blood money in retribution for those who are struck down. So in both of these examples Allah appears beside other gods Rudaw and Dusares respectively. And remember at the start of this video Allah appears beside a whole bunch of gods but also mean the goddess Allat. And in these inscriptions Allah appears to be acting like a personal name closer to names like Zeus or Thor. So even if the word originally developed from a generic phrase like the god in practice people are using Allah to refer to a specific god. So the question remains who was this pre-Islamic Allah? So the bulk of our evidence comes from what are called Safaitic inscriptions. Safaitic being a script used by Arab nomads who left behind literally tens of thousands of short texts carved into stones. Stones found across the so called Black Desert of Jordan Syria and northern Arabia. It is called the Black Desert because it is filled with these black basalt stones. The historian Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad and his team have conducted extensive surveys in this region and they found that Allah is invoked fewer than 50 times in the entire Safaitic corpus which is about 50,000 texts. Compare this to over 1,400 invocations of the goddess Allat. So the first thing we can learn is that clearly Allah was not the most popular god for these nomads. But the Safaitic inscriptions are surprisingly consistent. People invoked him for safety relief and survival in difficult conditions. They usually read like Oh Allah grant relief to whoever comes to the water place. Or Oh Allah grant rain. Or this one by Sakran son of Shamash son of Zakar. And he set off into the inner desert.

So oh Allah and Shay al-Qawm may he be kept safe. So notice here Allah again appears beside another god Shay al-Qawm. And that phrase the inner desert seems to refer to the deep uninhabited interior of the Arabian desert. The kind of place where you are far from water far from settlements and really on your own in a hostile environment. So better call upon the gods for help. He also appears in Nabataean inscriptions but generally only embedded in personal names. Names like Wahballah gift of Allah or Abdallah servant of Allah. These are what scholars call theophoric names. Names with a god is name embedded in them. This tells us that Allah was widely known and meaningful to the Nabataeans. You know people were naming their kid after him. But on the other hand when we look at actual religious inscriptions like dedications and prayers and temple texts we mostly find other gods being directly invoked. Gods like Dushara the main Nabataean deity. So we can say from these Safaitic and Nabataean inscriptions that Allah was known across northern Arabia from roughly the last few centuries BCE into the early century CE. His name shows up in people is names. He was treated as a distinct deity not just as a generic title like the god. And he was occasionally invoked for protection and relief. But emphasis on occasionally. Allah was not the most prominent god in pre-Islamic Arabian paganism. Across Arabia we find a wide range of deities. The goddess Allat who appears the most as well as gods like Rudaw and the storm god Ba al Shamin. But Allah I mean he is there but he is relatively rare which suggests we are not looking at the dominant cult deity in this region. This is especially true for the kingdom where we have a situation which Allah appears frequently in names but rarely in direct acts of worship. Dr. Al-Jallad argues that this is consistent with the idea that pre-Islamic Allah was a remote god and not the primary object of veneration. Perhaps he was a kind of cosmic or overarching god acknowledged respected and even embedded in your own identity but not the focus of daily ritual life. So compared to other ancient gods like Zeus or Baal we know very little about pre-Islamic Allah. No myths no clear role in the pre-Islamic Arabian pantheon that is until 2024 when we got a tiny tiny glimpse of Allah is pre-Islamic theological profile. Dr. Al-Jallad and his team came across a small stone installation when surveying the basalt desert of northeastern Jordan. Apparently it was some sort of open air ritual space with inscribed stones deliberately arranged around a central cairn probably a burial. And on one of those stones Dr. Al-Jallad documented a new Safaitic inscription dating to around year zero the turn from BCE to CE. So we are talking roughly 600 years before Muhammad. Now the inscription is extremely difficult to translate and Dr. Al-Jallad actually lays out several possible readings.

But across all of the possible reconstructions the basic picture is Allah is described as a creator that brings light into the world. One possible reconstruction reads Oh Allah let there be light and protect against the darkness of his grave and grant him that light. Oh one of creation and may he who has created grant him that light. So what kind of god was Allah? Again the Safaitic is very difficult to translate but Dr. Al-Jallad is confident that we are getting a glimpse into the mythological profile of pre-Islamic Allah a god that is a creator who brings the light and pushes back the darkness. This is a very big deal because until this discovery the idea that the pre-Islamic Allah was a creator type god was mostly an inference from the Quran. Remember the Mushrikin outright say that Allah created the heavens and the earth but now we might have archaeological evidence that strongly points in that direction. And that opening line of the inscription probably reminded you of the famous phrase in Genesis 1:3 Let there be light. So how do we explain this? Well it is possible that this is evidence of Arabian pagans picking up on ideas from Judaism or Christianity. By late antiquity Arab tribes were interacting with Jewish and Christian communities. Arabic was increasingly used in religious contexts and it is entirely plausible that biblical ideas about creation and light were circulating in Arab communities long before the Quran. We might actually get another glimpse of this biblical influenced Allah in another Safaitic inscription. It reads And he made a burnt offering and swore by Allah who is living that he shall lead bravely. So in this inscription a man performs a ritual. He makes a burnt offering and swears an oath by Allah and Allah is given a title the living. Now that might not sound like much but calling a god living is a pretty loaded idea. It can mean a god who has always been alive unlike a god like Baal who dies in one of his most famous myths. It can also mean a god who is the source of life itself and we see this kind of language in the Hebrew Bible itself when God is called the living God. So we might be seeing a biblically influenced Allah who is a creator who brings light and life. But Dr. Al-Jallad argues that we do not actually need to assume direct borrowing to explain this. Perhaps this is pointing to a shared Near Eastern way of imagining creation.

Across the ancient Near East from Mesopotamia to the Hebrew Bible creation is often described as an act of ordering chaos and more specifically creation happens through division. Genesis 1:4 God separates the light from the darkness. And in this inscription we see the Arabic verb halaqa usually translated as to create but it derives from an older Semitic root meaning to divide or separate. So when the Safaitic inscription describes Allah as bringing the light and the one who created through division. It may be tapping into the same cosmological pattern stretching back centuries. Dr. Al-Jallad writes Ancient Allah was the creator and performed acts that made him immediately comparable to and interchangeable with the biblical God. The ancient Arabs could have easily found cosmological similarities with Christians and Jews without fully adopting their broader mythologies. Another line of evidence pointing toward pre-Islamic Allah as a creator God comes from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Now this is very tricky evidence because these poems were not written down at the time they were composed. They were preserved later. They were copied collected and transmitted by scholars in the Islamic period. So in a way it is kind of like a medieval monk in Europe quoting Homer is Odyssey. If we are taking Homer as a historical figure he is the original poet living in ancient Greece around the 8th century BCE. The medieval monk in France is how the quotation gets preserved. So technically speaking the quotation does give us a glimpse into that much earlier world of ancient Greece. But the quotation is filtered through the lens of a medieval writer. So a similar thing is happening here. The poets themselves lived before Islam or right around its beginnings but the versions that we have now come from later collections. So we have to read this evidence carefully. Some lines may have been edited some may reflect later ideas but scholars such as Nikolai Sinai argue that we can still get a pretty good sense of what ancient pre-Islamic Arabs believed about Allah. So in this poetry we often see Allah as a creator. For example one pre-Islamic poet swears an oath by him The one who raised the heaven in its place and the full moon. Another pre-Islamic poet from Medina describes his beloved as made by Allah. Allah ordained for her when the creator created her. Pre-Islamic poetry also depicts Allah as the bringer of the rain which is something we saw earlier in Safaitic inscriptions. Also compare this to what the mushrikin of the Quran say If you ask them who sends down water from the sky they will say Allah. Pre-Islamic poetry also describes Allah as a God you can call upon in times of trouble. For example one poem dating to the late 500s says We ask Allah to grant him enduring life. Another puts it even more bluntly He who asks of humans will only meet refusal but he who asks of Allah will not be disappointed. Again these line up closely with what we saw earlier in the Safaitic inscriptions. In those desert carvings people are constantly invoking Allah for help. Grant us safety. Grant us relief. Grant us rain.

Short direct appeals often in dangerous situations. In some ways this cuts against the theory that he was a distant inactive figure a kind of philosophical high god who never intervenes. Even if Allah is not very well attested in pre-Islamic inscriptions he apparently was viewed as a god that people expected to respond. Dr. Sinai writes The poetic understanding of Allah then is categorically not that of a quasi deistic god who after creating the world has retired from all activity. The poets associate Allah with control over present goings on. This all brings us back to the mushrikun of the Quran. Remember how they are described? If you ask them who created the heavens and the earth they will say Allah. If you ask them who created humans they will say Allah. The Quran portrays Muhammad is main opponents as already recognizing Allah as a high creator god who harnessed the sun and the moon who sends down rain from the sky. And looking at all of this evidence we have just explored the Quran is probably preserving something historically real. As in it does not seem to be inventing a parody of these people. Across all of these sources from the Safaitic inscriptions to the pre-Islamic poetry to the Quran itself Allah is described as a creator a rain giver supreme over the world and actively involved in human life. But on the other hand the inscriptions portray a god who is not particularly central. Remember he only shows up in 40 or so inscriptions compared to gods like Allat who shows up over a thousand times. So how do we explain Allah looking relatively minor in early inscriptions but much more important in later poetry and the Quran? It seems by the centuries just before Islam in the 400s and 500s CE inscriptions increasingly reference just one god Allah. What we might be seeing here is a late pre-Islamic monotheizing trend. And this is not happening in isolation. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East the idea of a single supreme god was becoming more and more popular even among pagans. Greek and Roman philosophers start talking about Theos Hypsistos the high god and that the many different gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon are simply manifestations of that one high god. The philosopher Dio Chrysostom writes Apollo Helios Dionysius are the same and there are many who simply reduce all the gods to a single power. The philosopher Maximus of Tyre writing around 150 CE says The one doctrine upon which all the world is united is that one god is king of all and that there are many gods sons of god who rule together with god. Elsewhere Maximus argues that this supreme god is too elevated to come into direct relation with this base material world. So he needs the daimones immortal beings dwelling between heaven and earth mediators between human weakness and divine omnipotence. Then writing in the 400s the Neoplatonist Macrobius argues that the gods of the Greek and Egyptian pantheon were partial representations of one great solar god. So again we are seeing a monotheizing trend. And Arabian society was not isolated from this world.

By the late 500s CE when Muhammad was born Arab tribes were increasingly connected to the Roman Empire the Persian Empire and especially to Christianity. Christian and Manichaean missionaries have been active among Arabic speaking populations for hundreds of years and what you get is a cultural exchange. Dr. Nicolai Sinai argues that in this environment Allah could have something like a shared concept. Christians could hear Allah and think Ah the God of the Bible. Pagans could hear Allah and think Ah the high creator God we have been worshipping for centuries. Dr. Sinai writes It may well be this bidirectional intelligibility of pre-Islamic notions of Allah across the pagan Christian divide that played a significant role in propelling him to prominence in the pre-Quranic centuries. The scholar Patricia Crone goes so far as to argue that the Quranic mushrikun were functionally pagan monotheists. They did not deny Allah they believed in him and they even acknowledged him as the creator. The problem was not disbelief it was association. The Quran constantly criticizes them for recognizing or venerating lesser divine beings sometimes described as pre-Islamic gods sometimes as angels and sometimes as sons and daughters of Allah. The Quran says They say God has begotten offspring. They falsely credit him with sons and daughters. How can he have offspring when he has no consort? The Quran even explains their reasoning We only worship them these lesser intermediary beings so that they may bring us closer to God. So what we are seeing here is a system where Allah sits at the top of a hierarchy. He is the supreme creator with other lower divine beings beneath him functioning as intermediaries through whom people approach God. Dr. Crone writes The pagan deities mentioned in the Quran had all been autonomous gods yet all appear to have been downgraded to intermediary status. She argues the mushrikun may have viewed these beings as conceptually different as the high God viewing them as manifestations emanations or aspects of the one true God. So the Quran is charge of association or shirk means that they were recognizing other superhumans alongside Allah failing to worship him exclusively. And there were also some crucial differences between the Allah of Islam and the Allah of the mushrikun. In both pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran is description of pagan belief Allah is not an end times judge. There is no resurrection no final judgment and no eternal reward or punishment. That is the part the Quran really emphasizes and it is also the part that seems to have been most controversial to the mushrikun of Mecca. So we can see both continuity and change. Muhammad did not introduce Allah to the mushrikun. As the Quran itself says pre-Islamic Arabs already believed in a god named Allah for centuries. And as we have seen in the Safaitic inscriptions they invoked him for protection swore by his name and in at least one case linked him with light and creation. But the Quran redefines him calling people to recognize Allah alone as the only one worthy of worship and as the one who will ultimately judge humanity.