Adelphiasophism
Yehouah, Sin, Allah and the Goddess—Christianity and Islam
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, July 22, 1999
Allah—a Pagan God?
Christians like to disparage Islam by pointing out that Allah was a pagan god in pre-Islamic times. Islam and its god Allah, they say, did not come from the Bible but from the paganism of the Sabeans of Yemen who worshipped the moon god, Sin, and his daughters. That is why a crescent moon sits on top of their mosques and minarets and a crescent moon is found on the flags of Islamic nations—it is the symbol of Islam. Before Mohammed founded Islam, these pagan worshippers of Sin prayed toward Mecca several times a day, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, circled the temple of the moon god called the Kabah, kissed the black meteoritic stone and cast stones at the devil. These curious customs are of course still preserved in Islam. Allah was the title given by Arabs to the moon god, and Moslems are therefore pagan idolaters.
Christians would do well to take a large beam from their own eyes before criticising others. Then they might see the similarities between the founding of Islam and the formation of their own religion. They fail to see that Islam is a syncretistic religion in which elements of Judaism, Christianity and paganism have been melded into a religion recognisably of the same ilk as Christianity. The pagan Arabs worshipped the moon god as a supreme deity in the Arab pantheon just as Christians and Jews worship Yehouah in the same capacity.
Many inscriptions show that Sin’s title was al-ilah—the god—showing he was the most high god among the gods. Al-ilah was shortened to Allah before Islam, and Allah was a common Arabic name even before Mohammed. Mohammed’s father and uncle were both called Allah amongst other names.
Mohammed, influenced by Jews and Christians, gave Al-Ilah, the characteristics of the god of the Jews and the Christians. By so doing he was able to unify the disparate elements of Arabian society and forge it into an irresistible force which before long conquered much of the known world. Mohammed was an Arab Zoroaster or an Arab Siddharta or even an Arab Paul. All were able to bring people who worshipped many different gods into the church of one god.
Allah not Yehouah?
Nevertheless, Christians deny that Islam in any way arose from the religion of the prophets and apostles or that Allah is the same god as the Hebrew god of the Bible. If Allah was the name of the moon god before Mohammed then, for Christians, Allah “is” the moon god! Never mind that the Hebrew god was originally a phallus, then a sun god and a storm god and on occasions a snake god. Never mind that Jesus was a seditionist justly (in terms of the law of the day) punished for his crimes, who was given the attributes of a sun god and also a pagan saviour god. Never mind that the the Moslem faithful have to accept the Law of Moses and the Christian gospels (Surah Al Imran 3:3):
It is He Who sent down to you in truth the Book confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law and the Gospel before this as a guide to mankind...
And (Surah Maida 5:49):
And in their footsteps We sent Jesus the son of Mary, confirming the Law that had come before him: We sent him the Gospel: therein was guidance and light, and confirmation of the Law that had come before him: a guidance and an admonition to those who fear God.
Christians are, and have always been ignorant bigots who burn books and rewrite history to suit themselves. Regrettably, whether Islam is worship of a moon god or not it has picked up the principle trait of Christianity from Mohammed’s Christian advisors—it too is supremely bigoted.
Temples to the moon have been found throughout the Middle East but centred on Mesopotamia where arguably it was for some time the dominant religion. Everywhere in the ancient world, the symbol of the crescent moon can be found on seal impressions, steles, pottery, amulets, clay tablets, cylinders, weights, earrings, necklaces and wall murals.
Moon Godd
The first people to use writing, the Sumerians, worshipped a moon god, symbolised as the crescent moon, under many different names including Nanna, Suen and Asimbabbar. Sir Leonard Woolley excavated a temple of the moon god and dug up many examples of moon worship in the Sumerian city, Ur of the Chaldees. The Stela of Ur-Nammu has the crescent symbol placed at the top of the register of gods because the moon god was evidently the most high god of the Sumerians. Bread was baked as croissants in devotion to the moon. Ur was called Nannar in some cuneiform tablets, suggesting the moon was the city’s official god. Harran was another centre of the moon cult.
Later the Semitic peoples who succeeded the Sumerians adopted moon worship under a variant of the name Suen—Sin. For the Eastern Semitic Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians, moon worship was among the most popular religions. In Syria and Canaan, the Western Semites also took to Sin, represented by the crescent moon or a full moon within a crescent to suggest the lunar fortnightly cycle. Sin was a good god, the protector of people at night, who provided light in the darkness, and the primeval creation god because night preceded day, darkness existed before light was created. The sun god, Shamash, and the stars, particular the morning star, Ishtar, were the children of Sin. Sin, Shamash and Ishtar were the Trinity.
In Old Testament times, Nabonidus (555-539 BC), the last king of Babylon, built Tayma, Arabia as a centre of moon god worship. After the second world war, archaeologists reported a Moon Temple in southern Arabia. Symbols of the crescent moon, twenty-one inscriptions of the name Sin and even an idol, possibly of the moon god himself were found. The temple seemed to have been used perhaps until the time of Mohammed. Archaeologists have discovered thousands of inscriptions from walls and rocks in Northern Arabia and other temples in Southern Arabia and Yemen. Reliefs and votive bowls used in worship of the “daughters of Allah” have also been found. The three daughters were depicted with a crescent moon above them. Worship of the moon god must have remained the main cult throughout Arabia until the Moslem conquests.
The sun god, Shamash, became the most important god in the watered and fertile regions but perhaps he could never have become supreme god in the midst of parched and arid regions where the sun seemed cruel rather than kind. So, when interest in the moon god waned in favour of the sun, the Arabs retained the moon god as the greatest of the 360 gods they eventually worshipped at the Kabah in Mecca. Indeed, Mecca was built as a shrine to the moon god which is why it was the most sacred pagan site of Arabia before Islam was invented. The importance of the god, Sin, to Arabs is shown by its presence in Arabic place names such as Sinai and the wilderness of Sin.
Ezra and Mohammed
Muhammad did not have to tell the Arabs who Allah was. He was raised in the religion of the supreme moon god, Allah, but tried to make Allah not only the greatest god but the only god. Ezra and his priests, doing what Mohammed was to do to a later nation of Semites, wanted to replace the Israelite pantheon with a single most high god. Instead of choosing the popular moon god, Sin, they chose the formerly phallic god, Yehouah, and they rewrote the scriptures to make worship of Sin into idolatry (Deut 4:19;17:3; 2 Kngs 21:3,5; 23:5; Jer 8:2; 19:13; Zeph 1:5).
Sin became a word for apostasy from the laws Yehouah gave Moses. The legend of the golden calf in the Exodus story was probably a warning against worshipping Sin. In Tell-el-Obeid, a copper calf was found with a crescent moon on its forehead, and an idol had the body of a bull and the head of man with a crescent moon inlaid on its forehead with shells. In a temple to the moon god excavated at Hazer in Palestine in the 1950s, two idols of the moon god were found, each a stature of a man sitting upon a throne with a crescent moon carved on his chest. Lest there was any doubt they were accompanied by inscriptions.
Mohammed let the pagan Arabs retain their old god, Sin, but changed his nature, moulding him into the god of the Jews and Christians under the old name. Christian missionaries often did just what Mohammed did. They allowed people to have their old gods but Christianised them, making them into saints who would intercede for their worshippers with the most high god who was too busy to listen to any creature as insignificant as human beings.
Deamons and ASngels
Mohammed failed, as religious reformers usually do in a strict sense. Islam has as many demons and angels as Christianity and Judaism and adds to them jinns. All are superhuman beings and therefore gods. Christians jeeringly point out that the first declaration of the Muslim creed is not, “Allah is great” but “Allah is the greatest”, implying there are other gods besides him. Yet, as we have just noted, Jews and Christians believe there are demons and angels. What are they, if they are not gods? If the Judaeo-Christian god is truly monotheistic, why do Christians get so neurotic about the Devil? Isn’t he a god? Why also does the Bible call God such names as Most High and Almighty? These titles imply that there are less high and less mighty gods. No Jew or Christian can criticise Islam on the grounds that it is not really monotheistic because neither is their own religion.
All have, of course, got it wrong because they were fooled into worshipping male gods. The Hebrew God suffered apoplexy when the poor people he had supposedly made with free will disobeyed him, so he sent plagues, conquering armies and so on and even eternally damned them, to punish them. It is certain that the moon was not originally male. The Semites, who took the patriarchal state to extremes not seen elsewhere, gave the moon goddess a sex change. Most cultures retained the moon as a goddess. The original instincts of mankind were to see the Most High as a goddess who gave birth to everything and all of us then nurtured us. The Goddess is the cosmos itself and therefore we are all part of her. Each of us has a spark of the divine. It is up to us to find it.
The pagan Arab belief that the moon god was the supreme god was a trace of the original supreme deity—the Goddess. What remains now though is anything but a trace of the Goddess. It is an extreme example of a Semitic patriarchal god which nominally reveres women for their procreational role but in practice forces them to be the slaves of their husbands, fathers and brothers. The god of the Christians and the Jews, who is the same god as Allah, whether Allah is a name of Sin or not, because his characteristics are the same, only seems less stern because Western society is gradually putting him in his place—where he can do no harm.
There seems more hope that the Christian countries will return to the Goddess than the Moslem world, where patriarchal attitudes are still entrenched. But in the Christian West, women are throwing off the yoke of patriarchal prudery only to adopt the bad habits of the patriarchs themselves, in the false belief that they are being liberated. Women might think they have equality with men when they can smoke, drink, curse, act coarsely and obnoxiously, strip for money and work all day. This is merely a type of cross-dressing. Not liberation. Women are dressing up in men’s bad habits to pretend they are free. In most cases men are happy to let them because patriarchal exploitation of women is not ceasing, but increasing.
So perhaps there will be a paradox in socio-religious development and the true feminine revolution will occur in the Islamic world. The women of Islam might come to be the true liberators of us all. Then the wages of Sin might be worth having.
© AskWhy! Publications 1997. All Rights Reserved. Comments by mail or e-mail are welcomed.
