The northern populations of Arabia developed no ancient culture of their own. They had no system of writing and the only information about them comes from oral traditions, proverbs, legends and mostly poems that were orally transmitted down the decades. Most of these were later committed to writing two to three hundred years after the events that they were supposed to represent (822/922 CE).
During Al Jahiliyah, all Arab tribes throughout Al Jazeerah (The Peninsula) continually fought each other for either acquisition of (or access to) water resources, blood feuds and supremacy (or some combination thereof). Each individual Arab was known and identified by the name of the tribe to which he belonged. There was no sense of unity or nationalism. Each tribe was a separate and independent entity, with different dialects and religious beliefs and had no feeling of affinity or loyalty to any other except in terms of mutually beneficial and convenient alliances. The sense of the ‘Umma al Arabia’, the nation and people of Arabia, was achieved only after all of Arabia was subjugated and united under Muhammad.
In general, the pagan Arabs – the majority in Arabia – had a very primitive and simple astral and animistic religion of at least 360 gods and goddesses. Among the gods of the pagan Arabs, Allah was one of the most important. In Mecca, Allah was the principal though not the only deity. He had three daughters: Al Lat (Crescent); Al Uzzah (Venus) and Al Manah (Fate) (53:19/20). Besides the Ka’ba of Mecca, caves, trees, waterholes, wells, etc., were also venerated especially in the bleak, arid and desolate land the Jazeerah is composed of. There were other ‘holy’ sites also called Ka’ba besides the one in Mecca, such as the ones in Petra, Sana’ and Najran.
Although the sun was worshiped, it did not hold the same level of importance as the moon. Moon worship inherently lends itself to a nomadic and pastoral society, whereas Sun worship is invariably associated with an agricultural one. This would be obvious to anybody who's experienced the scorching furnace heat of the Arabian Desert; the Sun actually is an enemy to the nomads depriving them of pasture, shade and water. On the other hand, the moon is their friend and ally providing them with light, coolness of the night, dew and shade; and this is reflected in its greater importance as a deity for them.
Pagan Arabs built no temples or special structures for their gods. They developed no elaborate mythology, no structured theology and no cosmogony comparable to that of any of their neighbours. The pagan Ka’ba was a special but very simple cube-like building that housed a fallen black meteorite, which was venerated as a fetish. Because of its holiness, the area surrounding it was pronounced prohibited/sacred (Haram). Even before ‘Islam’, it was an object of annual pilgrimage and sacrifice.
Most of the ‘holy’ places of their other divinities were trees, wells, caves or fallen meteors. The pagan Arabs made sacrifices – both human and animal – to ‘Venus’ (Al Uzzah) and it is recorded that Muhammad participated in giving sacrifices to this goddess as a young man. The Bedouins also believed that the desert was full of living creatures/spirits called Jinn whose purpose was to blight their lives with mischief and difficulties. The nomadic Arabs buried their dead while on the move (instead of special final resting-places, i.e., cemetaries). As such no special reverence was held for the dead nor any concept of an afterlife, resurrection, a day of judgement, heaven and hell were developed; all of these concepts were formally established with the advent of ‘Islam’.
Until Muhammad there was no Arab civilization to speak of. There was no central government, administrative personnel, documentation, permanent cities (other than Mecca and Medina), art, sculpture, temples and priesthood, army, etc. Neither did the Arabs of Mecca and Medina have any of these attributes; they left posterity no monuments or temples and no records of their achievements. They had absolutely nothing remotely resembling either the Byzantine or Persian civilizations. No national epic or dramatic literary work of first-class importance was ever developed by the Arabians. That was in unfavourable contrast to the contemporary Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians or the Egyptians of the time who had a much more advanced literary, written and oral traditions; the Arabs were the least literate among all the peoples of the Middle East. Their greatest legacy was the Arabic language.
The Bedouins’ love of poetry was their only cultural asset and legacy. Their poets were held with great esteem and were extremely influential because of their mastery of the spoken word. They acted as the historians, propagandists and spokesmen for their tribes; they were in fact the equivalent of the modern news media reporters. Although poetry reigned supreme among the Arabs of Al Hijaz and Al Najd (north-western and northern Arabia), prose was not well represented in the Jahiliyah literature since no system of writing had yet been fully developed and no trustworthy record of any Arabic literature existed prior to the Quran.
Islamic apologists claim that the pagan Arabs referred to ALLAH as the One True God of Abraham and Ishmael, and the Lord of the Ka`aba. While the first part MAY have been true in certain cases, I believe Allah was more often than not the God of gods to the pagan Arabs (and Lord of the Ka'aba intimated presiding above the other 359 deities). Islamic apologists also claim that the pagan religion was originally pure monotheistic in nature (devotion wholly to Allah), and that the pagan Arabs, however, tainted this simple monotheistic religion by resorting to worship of idols as intercessors to Allah. It is claimed the pagans would stand by an idol and, using it as an intercessor, worship Allâh through the idol. I'm skeptical. I believe the pagan Arabs were polytheistic in the full sense of term, i.e., all 360+ idols represented actual entities, albeit wholly subservient to Allah.
Allâh, the paramount deity of pagan Arabia, was the target of worship in varying degrees of intensity from the southernmost tip of Arabia to the Mediterranean. To the Babylonians he was "Il" (god); to the Canaanites, and later the Israelites, he was "El'; the South Arabians worshipped him as "Ilah," and the Bedouins as "al-Ilah" (the deity).
Just like in Greek and Roman mythology, the pagan Arabic pantheon was organized somewhat in a heirarchy and heading that heirarchy was the supreme deity akin to Jupiter or Zeus. This deity went by various names, e.g., Sin, Hubul, Ilumquh, Al-ilah, Allah. No doubt the etymology of the latter term was al-ilah elided. For the pagan Arabs, Allah was the God of gods. When Muhammad came along, he made all that go away, replacing even the pagan Allah with the Allah of Islam. Now the connotation of the elided word Allah becoming The God from a purely modern monotheisic perspective (the One True God of Abraham and Ishmael, and the Lord of the Ka`aba). However, at this time Allah no longer presided over 359 other deities; his "Lordship" at Ka'aba now being analagous to that of the God of Israel indwelling the Temple at Jerusalem.
It must be understood, that the Arabic language didn't have a formal alphabet or script until the Quran was committed to paper almost 200 years after Muhammad's death. c. Rabin makes reference to a tri-lingual script found in Zebed of Northern Arabia. But as I've explained, those tribes had no writing whatsoever and each tribe throughout Arabia utilized a particular term in accordance to the specific dialect spoken by their tribe. That the Arabs had a definitive concept of God and god is without any doubt. Whether the Christian or primitive-monotheist pagan Arabs spoke the unelided al-ilah, or the elided Allah, or some other Semetic, Syriac, Coptic, Maronite, Aramaic, etc., variant (most likely used interchangeably), the connotations being understood probably entirely dependent upon the context within which a particular word was used.
Thanks for your excellent posts. However, I’d like to point out that the Coptic people and language are not Semitic, as your posts could be taken to imply. Whatever word Coptic Christians used for God in the pre-Islamic days, it is unlikely it had any relationship to Allah, unless imported from the related Hebrew or Aramaic languages.
The Coptic language, which is now used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church, is the descendant of ancient Egyptian. The Copts themselves are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who have not converted over the centuries to Islam. Those who converted quickly assimilated into the general Egyptian populaiton and now consider themselves Arabs.
It is probable the present-day Egyptian population as a whole is genetically descended more from the ancient non-Semetic Egyptians than from invaders from the Arabian Peninsula, ethnic Arabs. To the extent this may be relevant.
Again, thank you for taking time to write a very interesting post to FR!
Freegards