Who is Allah? Where did he come from?

If Allah is not merely Jehovah repackaged under a new name, then who is he? Who is this Allah to whom nearly a fifth of the world's population bows down and gives reverence? The answer is somewhat surprising to those unfamiliar with the pre-Islamic history of the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East.

Belief in Allah was widespread across the Arabian peninsula prior to the rise of Mohammed. However, the Allah worshipped in those days was not the monotheistic Allah who Muslims know today. Rather, Allah was just one of many gods, most often considered to be the highest or supreme god among many in a henotheistic system that developed in Arabia over the centuries prior to Islam.

“The name Allah, as the Quran itself is witness, was well known in pre-Islamic Arabia. Indeed, both it and its feminine form, Allat, are found not infrequently among the theophorous names in inscriptions from North Arabia.” 24
“Allah was known to the pre-Islamic Arabs; he was one of the Meccan deities.” 25

Watt states concerning the pre-Islamic Arabian religious situation,

“In recent years I have become increasingly convinced that for an adequate understanding of the career of Muhammad and that of Islam great importance must be attached to the existence in Mecca of belief in Allah as a ‘high god’. In a sense this is a form of paganism, but it is so different from paganism as commonly understood that it deserves separate treatment.” 26
However, when remarking that Allah was viewed as a "high god" in Arabia, this must not be understood to mean that he was the only god worshipped by the pre-Islamic Arabs. Watt elsewhere states,


"The use of the phrase “the Lord of this House” makes it likely that those Meccans who believed in Allah as a high god – and they may have been numerous – regarded the Ka’ba as his shrine, even though there were images of other gods in it. There are stories in the Sira of pagan Meccans praying to Allah while standing beside the image of Hubal."

Zwemer tells us,

“But history establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt that even the pagan Arabs, before Mohammed’s time, knew their chief god by the name of Allah and even, in a sense, proclaimed his unity. In pre-Islamic literature, Christian or pagan, ilah is used for any god and Al-ilah (contracted to Allah), i.e. the god, was the name of the Supreme. Among the pagan Arabs this term denoted the chief god of their pantheon, the Kaaba, with its three hundred and sixty idols.” 28
While it is typical to think of "Allah" as a name, it originally was not. In fact, the term "Allah" was a title, a contraction of Arabic words meaning "the god", indicating the general sense in which "Allah" was used prior to the rise of Islam. MacDonald states about al-ilah, which appeared frequently in pre-Islamic poetry,

"By frequency of usage, al-ilah was contracted to allah, frequently attested to in pre-Islamic poetry (where this name cannot in every case have been substituted for another), and then became a proper name (ism 'alam).”
This is corroborated by Peters,

"The cult of the deity termed simply ‘the god’ (al-ilah) was known throughout Syria and Northern Arabia in the days before Islam -- Muhammed’s father was named ‘Abd Allah’ (Servant of Allah) -- and was obviously of central importance in Mecca, where the building called the Ka’bah was indisputably his house. Indeed, the Muslims’ ‘shahada’ attests to precisely that point: the Quraysh, the paramount tribe of Mecca, were being called on by Muhammed to repudiate the existence of all the other gods save this one. It seems equally certain that Allah was not merely a god in Mecca but was widely regarded as the ‘high god’, the chief and head of the Meccan pantheon, whether this was the result, as has been argued, of a natural progression toward henotheism, or of the growing influence of Jews and Christians in the Arabian peninsula....Thus Allah was neither an unknown nor unimportant deity to the Quraysh when Mohammed began preaching his worship at Mecca.”

Indeed, the fact that Allah was at one time a single god among many in the pagan Arabian pantheon is accepted by orthodox Islam, which refers to the pre-Islamic period as the Jahiliya, the "times of ignorance". However, Islam's traditional teaching about the times of ignorance differs from the facts established by investigation into the history and archaeology of the ancient Near East. Islam recognizes that these other gods were at one time worshipped alongside Allah (termed shirk, or associationism). However, Islamic dogma also holds that Allah is the same God who appears in the Bible, in other words, the original monotheistic being with whom mankind later associated false gods out of ignorance and rebellion. Yet, as will be shown below, there does not seem to have ever been a time when Allah (al-ilah) was conceived of as purely monotheistic prior to the rise of Islam, and further, al-ilah, as a title, was at various times applied to false gods whose origins are found in the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia, and from whom the path to the current Arabian conception of Allah can be traced.

The Ka'bah, known as beit allah, the "house of Allah", is believed to have been a center of pagan worship in the Hijaz region of Arabia for centuries prior to the appearance of Islam. Scholars recognize that it has served as a house of idolatrous worship for its entire traceable history. Gilchrist writes,

“There is no corroborative evidence whatsoever for the Qu’ran’s claim that the Ka’aba was initially a house of monotheistic worship. Instead there certainly is evidence as far back as history can trace the origins and worship of the Ka’aba that it was thoroughly pagan and idolatrous in content and emphasis.”
Van Ess further states,

"In pre-Islamic days, called the Days of Ignorance, the religious background of the Arabs was pagan, and basically animistic. Through wells, trees, stones, caves, springs, and other natural objects man could make contact with the deity. The heavenly bodies, so familiar to pastoral people, were revered; the moon, the shepherd's friend, was worshiped, though the sun, the Bedouin's terror, was placated. At Mekka, Allah was the chief of the gods and the special deity of the Quraish, the prophet’s tribe. Allah had three daughters: Al Uzzah (Venus) most revered of all and pleased with human sacrifice; Manah, the goddess of destiny, and Al Lat, the goddess of vegetable life. Hubal and more than three hundred others made up the pantheon. The central shrine at Mekka was the Qaabah, a cube-like stone structure which still stands though many times rebuilt. Imbedded in one corner is the black stone, probably a meteorite, the kissing of which is now an essential part of the pilgrimage."

Indeed, there were many "al-ilahs" existing throughout the Semitic world, down to the time of Islam's development. When the Arab Empire extended its control, first over Syria and Palestine, and later over Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the whole of the Arabian peninsula, it became necessary to fold the various religious beliefs among its new subjects into the bosom of the developing religion of Islam. For the pagan Arabian tribes, this included the assimilation of their various high gods with the "al-ilah" which had been established as the monotheistic god of Islam. Speaking of the various Arabian tribes, Wellhausen originally noted,

“At first Allah was the title used within each individual tribe to address its tribal deity instead of its proper name. All said 'Allah', but each one had its own deity in mind. The expression 'the god' (al-ilah), which became the only usage, became the bridge to the concept of an identical god which all tribes had in common."

While it is unlikely that Mohammed actually existed, at least in the role to which Islam assigned him in later centuries, there is a strong case to be made for the assimilation of the many pagan "al-ilahs" into Islam that is ascribed to Mohammed by these above. This Allah was the key which the early Muslims used to bring the pagan Arabians firmly into the fold. They introduced to these tribes a monotheistic version of the god al-ilah that they had already been worshipping for centuries, as the title for various gods differing by locality. As Nöldeke notes,

“In the Nabataean inscriptions we repeatedly find the name of a deity accompanied by the title Alaha, 'the god'. Hence, Wellhausen argues that the Arabs of a later age may also have applied the epithet Allah, 'the god', to a number of different deities, and that in this manner Allah, from being a mere appendage to the name of a great god, may gradually have become the proper name of the Supreme God. In any case it is an extremely important fact that Mohammed did not find it necessary to introduce an altogether novel deity, but contented himself with ridding the heathen Allah of his companions, subjecting him to a kind of dogmatic purification and defining him in a somewhat clearer manner.”

Allah became the bridge for the Muslims to link all the Arabian tribes together under their new religion, Islam. Allah was a generic expression for the idols of Arabia, used by each tribe for its own particular high god, and these became amalgamated into the al-ilah of the state-sponsored religious system of the new Arab Empire.

Where did the "al-ilahs" of the tribes come from, and what were the deities to which these titles referred? What sort of gods were these deities? To begin to trace the development of the deity now known as Allah, we must look to Mesopotamia.