I used the Jesus-Muhammad phrase here yesterday. Over the coming weeks we will examine this dead prophet and his religion as the world seems to cower before the present Islamist Jihad. Historic sources on Muhammad and Islam are not nearly as reliable as the historic sources on God, the Holy Bible, Judaism and Christianity. Without exception I will use sources that I have comfort with.

Allah is not the God of the Holy Bible

Today let’s learn how Allah became the god of Islam. Let us say that again. Allah did not choose Muhammad, Muhammad chose Allah. Here is the story as told at The History of Jihad (choice of capitalization is theirs):

Pre-Islamic Bedouin Arab society was highly matriarchal as is evident from the worship of many goddesses like Allat, Al Uzza, Mannat. But Arab society had strong patriarchal elements too, as evident in the naming tradition according to which every Arab is known by his father’s name, and not his mother’s.

Having lost his father, the posthumous orphan Mohammed wanted to perpetuate his father’s memory. His father’s name Abdallah was conjugated from Abd-Allah which translates as “Slave of Allah”. This is the reason why Mohammed chose Allah among the many pre-Islamic Arab deities to be the only deity to be worshipped by the Muslims! Not many historians have discerned this fact why it was allah who became the centerpiece of Islam and not any other pre-Islamic Arab male deity like Bēl, Bēl-Šamīn, Abgal, Aglibol, Wadd, and Yaghūth (the last two are in fact referred to in the Qur’an (71:23) as gods of the era of the Prophet Noah).

Even Baal (alternatively known as Hubal) who in fact was the most important deity in pre-Islamic Mecca, found no place in Islam. Only Allah survived in Mohammed’s Islam. So Allah did not choose Mohammed, it was the other way round. Mohammed chose Allah! Allah was chosen by Mohammed as his father was named after allah! Some historians identify Hubal and allah to be the same deity. But, to the best of our knowledge, no historians have discerned this fact why it was allah who became the centerpiece of Islam.

So Muhammad, who is dead, chose Allah, among all the Arab false gods, to be the one god of Islam. It is important to know, since Muhammad is dead, is Allah, the God he picked, alive? If you determine that Allah lives you must have absolute clarity that this is not the living God of heaven and light; the creator and sustainer of all creation. This Allah, if a living god, is the god of some other place.