Hubal

Hubal most prominently appeared at Mecca, where an image of him was worshipped at the Kaaba. According to Karen Armstrong, the sanctuary was dedicated to Hubal, who was worshipped as the greatest of the 360 idols the Kaaba contained, which probably represented the days of the year.^[2]

After defeat by Muhammad's forces at the Battle of Badr, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, leader of the Quraysh army, is said to have called on Hubal for support to gain victory in their next battle, saying "Show your superiority, Hubal".^[6] When Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630, he removed the statue of Hubal, along with the other 360 images at the Kaaba, and dedicated the structure to the Abrahamic God.^[7]

Origins of Hubal

There may be some foundation of truth in the story that Amr travelled in Syria and had brought back from there the cults of the goddesses

Mircea Eliade and Charles J. Adams assert that he was "a god of rain and a warrior god. Towards the end of the pre-Islamic era he emerged as an intertribal warrior god worshipped by the Quraysh and the allied tribes of the Kinana and Tihama."^[17] The view that he was a warrior rain god is repeated by David Adams Leeming.^[18]

John F. Healey in The Religion of the Nabataeans (2001) accepts the Nabataean origins of the god, but says there is little evidence of Hubal's mythological role, but that it is possible that he was closely linked to Dushara in some way. The one surviving inscription concerns a religious injunction to placate Hubal and others for violating a tomb.^[13]

Islamists have invoked the figure of Hubal in the ideological struggles of the post-Cold War era. In Islam, Hubal has been used as a symbol of modern forms of "idol worship". According to Adnan A. Musallam, this can be traced to one of the founders of radical Islamism,

Conversely, since monotheism does not mean the worship of the same one God, many, including evangelicals, have invoked Hubal by claiming that the worship of Allah as proclaimed by Muhammad was not a restoration of Abrahamic monotheism, but an adaptation of the worship of Hubal. Robert Morey's 1994 book Moon-god in the Archeology of the Middle East revives Hugo Winckler's identification of Hubal as a moon god, and claims that worship of Allah evolved from that of Hubal, thus making Allah a "moon god" too.^[23] This view is repeated in the Chick tracts "Allah Had No Son" and "The Little Bride", and has been widely circulated in evangelical and anti-Islamic literature in the United States. In 1996, Janet Parshall asserted that Muslims worship a moon god in syndicated radio broadcasts.^[24] In 2003 Pat Robertson stated, "The struggle is whether Hubal, the Moon God of Mecca, known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah God of the Bible is Supreme."^[25]

These views about Hubal as Allah have been called propaganda by Muslims, and dismissed by Islamic scholars.^[26][27] Farzana Hassan sees these claims as an extension of longstanding Christian evangelical beliefs that Islam is "pagan" and that Muhammad was an impostor and deceiver.

See also

• Allah as a lunar deity
• Al-Lat
• Al-'Uzzá
• Manāt
• Sin (mythology)

Notes