Myths of the Fertile Crescent series
Mesopotamian mythology
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Names of God in the Hebrew Bible
Pre-Islamic Arabian gods
Ēl, Ilāh "God" Bēl, Baʕl, Bēl-Šamīn Aglibol al-Lāt, al-'Ilāhat Astarte Atargatis (Syrian) Ištar, Athtar Beltis? Bes (Egypto-Arabic) Manāt Manaf Nergal	Nabū, Nebo Orotalt Qawm Sīn, Nanna-Suen Shams, Samas ʕUzzā Wadd Yaghūth Yarhibol/Malakbel astral & local deities demons
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Hubal (هبل) was a god worshipped in pagan Arabia, notably at Mecca before the arrival of Islam. The Religions of the Ancient Near East were mostly polytheistic, with some early examples of emerging Henotheism (Akhenaton, early Judaism). ... Image File history File links Palm_tree_symbol. ... Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq, Syria and Turkey. ... Arabian mythology is the ancient beliefs of the Arabs. ... In the Levantine pantheon, the Elohim are the sons of El the ancient of days (olam) assembled on the divine holy place, Mount Zephon (Jebel Aqra). ... At the bottom of the hands, the two letters on each hand combine to form יהוה (YHVH), the name of God. ... Arabian mythology is the ancient beliefs of the Arabs. ... Ä’l (אל) is a Northwest Semitic word and name translated into English as either god or God or left untranslated as El, depending on the context. ... Bel, signifying lord or master, is a title rather than a genuine name, applied to various gods in Babylonian relgion. ... Palmyrene deities: from left to right: the lunar god Aglibôl, the supreme god Beelshamên, the sun god Malakbêl, 1st century CE, found near Bir Wereb, Wadi Miyah, Syria, Louvre Museum. ... Al-Lat was a pre-Islamic Arabian fertility goddess. ... Astarte on a car with four branches protruding from roof. ... Atargatis, in Aramaic ‘Atar‘atah, was a Syrian deity, more commonly known to the Greeks by a shortened form of the name, Derceto or Derketo (Strabo 16. ... Ishtar is the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the cognate northwest Semitic goddess Astarte. ... The god Bes. ... Anthem: Bilady, Bilady, Bilady Capital (and largest city) Cairo Official languages Arabic, Masri (spoken) Government Republic  - President Hosni Mubarak  - Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif Establishment    - First Dynasty c. ... Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), Manāt was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ... Manaf is one of the pre-Islamic polytheist gods of Mecca [1]. Category: ... The name Nergal (or Nirgal, Nirgali) refers to a deity in Babylonia with the main seat of his cult at Cuthah represented by the mound of Tell-Ibrahim. ... It has been suggested that Nebo (god) be merged into this article or section. ... Al-Qaum (القوم), the Nabataean god of war and the night and guardian of caravans. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Shamash or Sama, was the common Akkadian name of the sun-god in Babylonia and Assyria, corresponding to Sumerian Utu. ... Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), al-Ê•uzzā the Mightiest One (derived from the root Ê•zy) was a pre-Islamic Arabian fertility goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ... Wadd was the Minaean moon god. ... Yaghuth is an idol referred to in the Quran (71:23) as being worshipped in ancient Yemen. ... Palmyrene deities: from left to right: the lunar god Aglibôl, the supreme god Beelshamên, the sun god Malakbêl, 1st century CE, found near Bir Wereb, Wadi Miyah, Syria, Louvre Museum. ... St. ... The Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula is a mainly desert peninsula in Southwest Asia at the junction of Africa and Asia and an important part of the greater Middle East. ... This article is about the city in Saudi Arabia. ... Islam (Arabic:  ) is a monotheistic religion based upon the teachings of Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure. ...

Hubal and the Kaaba

One notable center of Hubal-worship is said to have been at the Kaaba at Mecca, where his was said to be the grandest of the idols. As an infant, Muhammad was brought before Hubal by his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, at-Tabari records in The History of the Prophets and Kings 1:157. When Muhammad conquered Mecca, he ended the Quraysh's tradition of idol-worship by smashing the statue of Hubal along with the 360 idols at the Kaaba. The effigy of Hubal was the largest at Mecca circa the advent of Islam in the region. The statue stood the highest and was made of granite. It arrived in Mecca as a gift from Syria. The Kaaba (Arabic: ‎ translit: ), also known as al-Ka‘abatu’l-Musharrafat ( ‎), al-Baytu l-‘Atīq ( ‎ The Primordial House), or al-Baytu’l-Ḥarām ( ‎ The Sacred House), is a large cuboidal building located inside the mosque known as al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. ... This article is about the city in Saudi Arabia. ... For other persons named Muhammad, see Muhammad (name). ... Abdul Muttalib was the grandfather of the prophet Mohammad, whom he raised after his mother died. ... Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (Arabic الطبري, AD 838-AD 923), was an author from Persia. ... The History of the Prophets and Kings (Arabic: تاريخ الرسل والملوك Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, popularly Tarikh al-Tabari) is a history by Tabari from the Creation to AD 915, and is renowned for its detail and accuracy concerning Arab and Muslim history. ... This article is about the city in Saudi Arabia. ... Quraish (sura) is also the name of a Surah in the Quran. ... Quarrying granite for the Mormon Temple, Utah Territory. ...

Hubal and Allah

Attempts to identify "the Muslim god" (i.e. Allah) with Hubal have been popular among evangelical Christians. Some acknowledge that this hypothesis is speculative[1] and others argue that the Islamic-period texts from which most knowledge of pre-Islamic Arab religion suggest otherwise. This allegation of "moon-worship" is rejected by Muslims [2][3][4]. For other uses, see Allah (disambiguation). ...

At face value, the hypothesis that Hubal was originally the proper name of Allah suffers from serious difficulties. In the Battle of Uhud the distinction between the followers of Allah and the followers of Hubal is made clear by the statements of Muhammad and Abu Sufyan. Ibn Hisham narrates in the biography of Muhammad: Combatants Muslims Quraysh-led Coalition Commanders Muhammad Abu Sufyan Strength 700 3,000 Casualties 70 dead 22 The Battle of Uhud was fought on 23 March, 625, between a force from the small Muslim community of Medina, in what is now north-western Arabia, and a force from Mecca, the... For other persons named Muhammad, see Muhammad (name). ... Abu Sufyan ibn Harb was the leader of the Banu Abd Shams clan of the Quraish tribe, and was the chieftain of the entire Quraish tribe, making him one of, if not the most powerful men in Mecca during the lifetime of Muhammad. ... Ibn Hisham, Abu Muhammad Abd al-Malik (d. ... For other persons named Muhammad, see Muhammad (name). ...

When Abu Sufyan wanted to leave he went to the top of the mountain and shouted loudly saying, "You have done a fine work; victory in war goes by turns. Today in exchange for the day (of Badr). Show your superiority, Hubal," i.e. vindicate your religion. The apostle told ‘Umar to get up and answer him and say, God [Allah] is most high and most glorious. We are not equal. Our dead are in paradise; your dead are in hell.[5]

In fact, Arab Jews and Arab Christians referred to God as Allah before the arrival of Islam [6] [7] and still continue to do so today. This article deals with those Jewish communities indigenous to the Middle East. ... Arab Christians are people who are ethnically Arab or culturally and linguistically Arabized and who follow the religion of Christianity. ... This article discusses the term God in the context of monotheism and henotheism. ... For other uses, see Allah (disambiguation). ... Islam (Arabic:  ) is a monotheistic religion based upon the teachings of Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure. ...

Also etymology of the word puts Allah, as the joining of the words, "Al" (the) and "Ilah" (God). Other claims compare Al-lat to be the only Allah, a female diety. Al-Lat was a pre-Islamic Arabian fertility goddess. ...

Hubal in Mesopotamia

Tracing the origins of ancient gods is often tenuous. If the name Hubal is related to an Aramaic word for spirit, as suggested by Philip K. Hitti^[1], then Hubal may have come from the north of Arabia. Philip Khuri Hitti (1886 - 1978), born in Shimlan, Lebanon, was a Western scholar of Islam. ...

In Sumer, in southernmost Mesopotamia north of Arabia, the moon-god figures in the Creation epic, the Enuma Elish; in a variant of it, Hubal is chief among the elder gods. According to Hitti, a tradition recorded by Muhammad's early biographer ibn Ishaq, which makes ˤAmr ibn-Luhayy the importer of an image of Hubal from Moab or Mesopotamia, may have a kernel of truth insofar as it retains a memory of such an Aramaic origin of the deity. Enûma Elish is the creation epic of Babylonian mythology. ... Ibn Ishaq (or ibn Ishaq), (d. ... Moab (Hebrew: מוֹאָב, Standard Tiberian  ; Greek Μωάβ ; Arabic مؤاب, Assyrian Muaba, Maba, Maab ; Egyptian Muab) is the historical name for a mountainous strip of land in modern-day Jordan running along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. ... Mesopotamia refers to the region now occupied by modern Iraq, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and Southwest Iran. ...

Outside South Arabia, Hubal's name appears just once in a Nabataean inscription; ^[2] there Hubal is mentioned along with the gods Đu sh-Sharā (ذو الشراة) and Manawatu—the latter, as Manat, was also popular in Mecca. On the basis of such slender evidence, it has been suggested that Hubal "may actually have been a Nabataean" ^[3], but the Nabataeans were cosmospolitan traders who drew on many traditions in every aspect of life. Petra, the Nabataean capital The Nabataeans, a people of ancient Arabia, whose settlements in the time of Josephus gave the name of Nabatene to the border-land between Syria and Arabia from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. ... Dhu l-Sharā Lord of the Mountain, also known in Greek transliteration as Dusares, was worshipped at Petra (of which city he was the patron deity) by the Nabataeans. ... Manat is: The currency unit of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan; see Manat (Azerbaijan) and Manat (Turkmenistan). ...

According to Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar,Muhammad The Holy Prophet (1969),

About four hundred years before the birth of Muhammad one ˤAmr ibn Lahya ibn Harath ibn ˤAmru l-Qays ibn Thalaba ibn Azd ibn Khalan ibn Babalyun ibn Saba, a descendant of Qahtan and King of the Hijaz, more usually called Amr ibn Luhayy, had put an idol called Hubal on the roof of the Kaˤabat. This was one of the chief deities of the Quraysh before Islam."

The actual date for this quasi-legendary leader of the Quraysh are disputed, with dates as late as the end of the fourth century CE suggested, but what is quite sure is that the Qurayshiyya became the protectors of the ancient holy place, supplanting the Khuza'a. There may be some foundation of truth in the story that Luhayy had travelled in Syria and had brought back from there the cults of the goddesses ˤUzzā' and Manat, and had combined it with that of Hubal, the idol of the Khuza'a. (Maxime Rodinson, 1961). Hejaz (also Hijaz, Hedjaz) is a region in the northwest of present-day Saudi Arabia; its main city is Jeddah, but it is probably better-known for the holy city of Mecca. ... Quraish (Arabic: ‎ translit: ) is the Meccan tribe that the Islamic prophet Muhammad belonged to before he received the revelations of Islam. ... Islam (Arabic:  ) is a monotheistic religion based upon the teachings of Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure. ... Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), al-Ê•uzzā the Mightiest One (derived from the root Ê•zy) was a pre-Islamic Arabian fertility goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ... Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), Manāt was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ...

An earlier reference to this legend records that he

"brought with him [to Mecca] an idol called Hubal from the land of Hit in Mesopotamia... So he set it up at the well inside the Kaaba and ordered the people to worship it. Thus a man coming back from a journey would visit it and circumambulate the House before going to his family, and he would shave his hair before it. Muhammad ibn Ishaq said that Hubal was cornelian pearl in the shape of a human. His right hand was broken off and the Quraysh made a gold hand for it. It had a vault for the sacrifice, and there were seven arrows cast [on issues relating to] a dead person, virginity and marriage. Its offering was a hundred camels. It had a custodian (hajib)" (Al-Azraqi, died 834 CE, an early commentator).

According to Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols,

"The Quraysh had several idols in and around the Kaaba. The greatest of these was Hubal. It was made, as I was told, of red agate, in the form of a man with the right hand broken off. It came into the possession of the Quraysh in this condition, and they therefore made for it a hand of gold. The first to set it up was Khuzaymah ibn-Mudrikah ibn-al-Ya's' ibn-Mudar. Consequently it used to be called 'Khuzaymah's Hubal'.

"It stood inside the Kaaba. In front of it were seven divination arrows. On one of these arrows was written "pure" (sarih), and on another "consociated alien" (mulsag). Whenever the lineage of a new-born was doubted, they would offer a sacrifice to it [Hubal] and then shuffle the arrows and throw them ... It was before [Hubal] that 'Abd-al-Muttalib shuffled the divination arrows [in order to find out which of his ten children he should sacrifice in fulfilment of a vow he had sworn], and the arrows pointed to his son ˤAbdu l-Lāh, father of the Prophet.

"In 624 at the battle called 'Uhud', the war cry of the Qurayshites was, 'O people of ˤUzzā', people of Hubal!' By the end of that war, the victorious Abū Sufyān ibn-Harb cried, 'O Hubal be exalted, O Hubal be exalted!'"

"The Prophet answered him: 'God is the highest and the most exalted.'"

Julius Welllhausen^[4] indicates that Hubal was regarded as the son of al-Lāt and the brother of Wadd. Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), al-Ê•uzzā the Mightiest One (derived from the root Ê•zy) was a pre-Islamic Arabian fertility goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ... Mentioned in the Quran (Sura 53:20), Allāt (a contraction of pre-Arabic *al-ilāhat the Goddess) was a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. ... Wadd was the Minaean moon god. ...

Hubal and al-Qaeda

Many non-Muslims have as of recently encountered references to Hubal without knowing it: the term is used by some adherents of the Wahhabi movement as a metaphor for secularized ("Western") mores, most prominently by Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Translations of al-Qaida press releases will often contain the phrase "the idol of this/our/the age". In the original Arabic version, the word used for "idol" is Hubal, and al-Qaeda statements released in English (e.g. as-Sahab Productions, 2006), apparently to distinguish the term "idol" as in "idolatry" from the more common meaning, give the phrase as "the Hubal (idol) of this age". Wahhabism (sometimes spelled Wahabbism or Wahabism) is a movement of Islam named after Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703–1792). ... This article concerns secularity, that is, being secular, in various senses. ... Group photo of Ayman Al Zawahiri, Usama Bin Laden & Abu Hafs Prosecution Trial Exhibit from the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri (Arabic: ‎) (born June 19, 1951) is a prominent member of the al-Qaeda group, a physician, author, poet, and formerly the head of the militant organization... Arabic ( or just ), is the largest member of the family of Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic, and Aramaic. ... Idolatry is a major sin in the Abrahamic religions regarding image. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Notes

1. ^ Hitti, History of the Arabs 1937, pp. 96-101.
2. ^ Corpus Inscriptiones Semit., vol. II: (189 or 198?); Jaussen and Savignac, Mission Archéologique en Arabie, I (1907) pp.169f
3. ^ Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, 1961, translated by Anne Carter, 1971, p 38-49
4. ^ Wellhausen, 1926, p 717, an unidentified English translation? as quoted by Hans Krause

History of the Arabs is a book writen by Philip Khuri Hitti in 1937. ...

External links

• Kitab al-Asnam in the original Arabic (description on p. 5)
• Is Hubal the same as Allah?
• Pre-Islamic Arabia and Its Socio-Religious Conditions
• Hubal is not Allah
• Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, 1961, translated by Anne Carter, 1971
• as-Sahab Productions (2006): Knowledge is For Acting Upon (The Manhattan Raid) part 1. [8]