Ok, I know next to nothing about Islam. Is there any truth to this?
When Muhammad claimed to have had his vision and revelation from Gabriel he chose al-ilah (the moon god) as the god to build his army around. Legend (in Arabia at the time) has it that the moon god mated with the sun god and had two daughters, both of whom were worshipped as goddesses. Muhammad shortened the name, al-ilah, to Allah, and declared that he alone should be worshipped. He forbade the worship of the daughters. To this day, a crescent moon can be found at the front of every mosque, acknowledging that Allah was, and is the moon god.
no.
Put down the Jack Chick and walk away.
IIRC, “Allah” tranlates as “The God”.
Sort of.
There may have been a moon god in the early pagan Arab pantheon by that name. It also likely that the name itself has the earlier origins of the same root as the Hebrew Elohim. Or maybe the moon thing doesn’t have any thing to do with Allah. But there is certainly a connection between Elohim and Allah.
However, by the time of Mohammed the name Allah had already come to denote the one God. Pre-Mohammed Arabic Christians and Jews were using the name Allah when using the venacular (and still do so today).
As for the crescent, here is what the SD staff had to say:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcrescent.html
Jack Chick is not a reliable source. The word is simply Arabic for ‘God’ and has the same usuage as the English word. Yes there was centuries before Islam a moongod with a simlair name, but by the time of mohamed the word simply meant ‘god’/‘God’.
I heard the Crescent Moon was used because Islam follows a strictly lunar calendar (thus, the fast of the month of Ramadan moves ten days ahead each year), unlike Judaism which follows a lunar-solar calendar (lunar every year except that almost every three years, it adds a 13th month to keep it consistent with the seasons).
This website was really good, but does anyone have cite that is more secular?
For the record, the word “god” in Hebrew is el, and in Arabic is ilah. Numerous Canaanite deities had El plus an epithet as their appelations, as apparently did a moon god in part of Arabia. (I’m under the impression, with no idea of its accuracy, that the moon god worship centered was in the Abu Dhabi area of Arabia.)
As the worship of YHVH as the sole god coalesced in the Holy Land, titles derived from the El+epithet such as El Shaddai and El Elyon were used as alternate names for Him. Similarly, Mohammed, preaching a single god who is utterly other than His creation, used the derivative of ilah plus the article al, “the,” as the appelation to be used of that deity.
In a country where the year has relatively little significance – no great seasonal changes – the phases of the moon, marking weeks and months, take on greater significance. The beginning and end of Ramadan are officially when the thin crescent marking the New Moon is first seen.
How about the Encyclopædia Britannica?
There are few secular sites that bother to address the issue, recognizing that Morey has an agenda and that Robertson and those others who follow Morey are interested only in polemics. That leaves it to Muslim sites to address the bad scholarship (and warped perspective) of the sites put up by the Religious Right.
Sure. One of the very sources Morey misuses - Caesar E. Farah’s Islam:Beliefs and Observances :
He’s a U. of Minnesota history professor, a non-Muslim ( I think ) whose particular field of expertise is the 19th century Ottoman Empire. An excerpt from a review of one of his recent academic works in that area:
- Tamerlane
If I remember rightly, the original symbol for Islam (or more specifically, obesience to the teaching of the Prophet Muhammed)was displayed by nothing more than a black flag with a section of the Qur’an written on it.
The crescent moon seems much more a Turkish symbol then a Muslim one. IIRC, you didn’t start seeing moon symbolism in Islam until after the Turks became Muslim.
Polycarp: In a country where the year has relatively little significance – no great seasonal changes – the phases of the moon, marking weeks and months, take on greater significance. The beginning and end of Ramadan are officially when the thin crescent marking the New Moon is first seen.
Well, the start of any month corresponds to the first sighting of the lunar crescent not only in Islam, but in ancient Judaism and ancient Babylonian polytheism as well. And both of those cultures kept track of the solar year also, as did most other cultures that maintained a true lunar month. I don’t think it’s quite valid to say that the climate somehow made the solar year comparatively unimportant, since so many other cultures in the same region continued to use it.
Intercalation of a “leap month”, as the Babylonian and Hebrew and many other luni-solar calendars practice(d), was explicitly prohibited in the Qur’an (Sura 9:36–37). I’ve heard it suggested that this was because differences in the various intercalation schemes used by Arab tribes were sometimes exploited for unfair advantage in war. That is, since making war is prohibited in the four “sacred months”, when your calendar tells you that one of the sacred months has started, you stay peacefully at home—and the tribe next door pops over the hill saying “Surprise! We have an intercalary month before the sacred one so we’re allowed to fight!” Oops. So Muhammad put a stop to it.
As FEDEsq points out above, Cecil has a pretty good column on the adoption of the crescent as a symbol for Islam, which seems to have happened centuries after the time of Muhammad, and not to be particularly influenced by the importance of the moon in the Islamic calendar. (Heck, our own Western calendar is as exclusively focused on the sun as the Islamic calendar on the moon—we long ago gave up trying to keep true lunar months synchronized with days or years—but we don’t use a sun icon to symbolize that.)