When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, Is It Allah?

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Apparently Pat Robertson is telling his followers that the God of Islam is actually a pagan moon god with no relation to the Judeo-Christian Biblical God. An internet search reveals that this silliness has become quite common on the Christian right.

Not being a Christian, Jew, or Muslim -- nor a worshipper of a moon god, for that matter -- I suppose I have no dog in this fight. (The one true god is of course Zeus, whom the Greek philosophers identified with reason or the logical structure of reality.) But c'mon!

The word"al-lah,""al-ilah," simply means"the god" in Arabic (thus mirroring the New Testament's term for God -- ho theos,"the god"). Christians and Jews writing in Arabic have always used the term"Allah" for the Judeo-Christian God; indeed, as the 6th-century Umm al-Jimal inscription in Jordan shows, Arabic Christians were using"Allah" as a term for God before Islam even arose."Allah" means God the One and Only. Period.

Now it may well be true that the term"Allah" was also used in pre-Islamic times for a less impressive deity, a member of a polytheistic pantheon. But so what? As is well known, exactly the same is true of the Hebrew terms"Yahweh,""El," and"Elohim," used in the Bible as names of God. Early Jewish tradition assigns Yahweh a wife, Asherah. The term"Yahweh" was used by the Moabites as another name for the Canaanite god Ba'al; indeed,"El,""-ilah," and"Ba'al" are all obvious cognates, and are recognised by Biblical scholars as having a common origin. And the word"Elohim" shows its polytheistic origins in its very structure: it is the result of adding a masculine plural ending to a feminine singular noun (thereby strangely deriving a masculine singular:"he is the goddess-men"). If Islam has pagan roots, so do Judaism and Christianity.

The fact that the Arabic term for God once referred merely to one god among many no more proves that Muslims today are worshipping a moon god than the fact that the Hebrew terms for God once referred merely to one god among many proves that Jews and Christians today are worshipping a tribal deity with many wives. Etymology is not theology. St. Paul had more sense than many of his modern followers when he accepted, as legitimate references to the Christian God, pagan Greek verses describing Zeus as an immaterial, monotheistic creator. What god one worships presumably has more to do with how one conceives of her than with what names one calls her. [For any Kripkeans who may be reading this: no, I'm not rejecting causal origin as irrelevant; I think it's one, but only one, element in the disjunctive complex that determines a term's meaning. But that's a story for another day.]

So how does Islam conceive of God? Do Muslims in any interesting sense worship a"moon god"? The answer lies in the Qur'an, verses 6.75-79:

Thus did we show Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, that he might be among those possessing certainty:

When the night grew dark upon him, he beheld a star. He said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: I love not things that set.

And when he saw the moon rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be one of those who have gone astray.

And when he saw the sun rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord! This is the greatest! But when it set he cried: O my people! Behold, I am no longer deceived by your false encumbrances.

For surely I have turned my face toward him who created the heavens and the earth, as one by nature upright, and I am not of the idolaters.

In other words: moon god my ass.