Who Was Allah Before Islam?

If you want to go deeper, join our Sufism reading group at religionep department.com/conferenceofthebirds.

The Quran describes Mecca at the time of Muhammad as a city full of mushri, usually translated as pagans or polytheists. They're Muhammad's main opponents, pushing back against his message, mocking his claims, refusing to worship Allah alone. But then the Quran makes a surprising claim about their beliefs. If you ask them who created the heavens and the earth, they will surely say Allah. Quran 43:87. If you ask them who created humans, they will say Allah. They also claim that Allah harnessed the sun and the moon and sends down rain from the sky.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. These are polytheists, right? And yet, according to the Quran, they already believed in a creator god named Allah. Well, the confusion may stem from that translation, polytheist or pagan. See, the word mushri can be translated more literally as those who associated others with God. In other words, they believed in Allah and even worshiped him, but they also assigned associates or partners to him. Some scholars even translate the term as associators or associationists. The Quran's criticism isn't that they lacked belief in Allah. It's that they didn't worship him alone. They apparently prayed to lesser deities, invoked intermediaries, and participated in a broader polytheistic system. Some apparently venerated the sun and the moon. Others venerated named pre-Islamic Arabian gods like Allat and Manat. But Allah in some sense remains supreme as the creator of heaven and earth even in this polytheistic system.

So this raises the question: how did these mushri already know about Allah? Well, the answer is there was already a god known as Allah in pre-Islamic Arabia. Check out this inscription from the deserts of Jordan by Riiel son of Assad: "and he camped here and kept watch for enemies and the rainclouds. So, oh ba al-samine send the winds and shakam and oh Allah and Allat blindness be to the one who affaces this inscription." This is basically a short prayer carved on stone. Apparently, an Arab nomad hundreds of years before Muhammad camped here and describes what he's doing. Watching for enemies, waiting for rain, and then calls on multiple gods for help. But alsin a storm god. Shy halm another local protective deity and then right alongside them Allah. See, long before the Quran was written down, ancient Arabs were carving the name Allah into stone, invoking him in prayers, embedding him into personal names. And if recent discoveries are correct, imagining him as a high god tied to light and creation itself.

So today, we're going to explore the pre-Islamic Allah. First, let's start with etymology because we can learn a lot just from what the word Allah even means. Most scholars today agree that it comes from a contraction of the Arabic al-Hah, which literally just means "the god." The word belongs to a much older Semitic root god, linguistically related to terms like l, the name of the high god in the Canaanite pantheon, or Elohim in the Hebrew Bible. And alilah can be understood in a generic sense as "the god," referring to any deity depending on the context. But it could also have a more elevated sense of "the god," the one God who stands above all others. As the scholar Nikolai Sinai puts it, it can carry the sense of "the god par excellence," a supreme deity within a broader religious system, including monotheism.

We can actually see this usage before Islam among Arab Christians. In the 500 CE, Arab Christians were already using the term alilah to refer to the Christian God. For example, this inscription from a Christian martyr shrine in northern Syria dated to 512 CE reads, "May the god remember Sergius." And the word used here is alilah. So here, the term clearly refers to the one god of Christianity. And scholars have pointed out that this probably reflects a direct translation from Greek-speaking Christians who commonly refer to God in Greek as hios, literally "the God." So when Christianity moved into Arabic-speaking contexts, Arab Christians appear to have adopted alilah as a kind of equivalent expression, a way of rendering hotheos in their own language.

But this kind of language is not limited to monotheism. Alilah can also make sense in terms of henotheism, a system where many gods are acknowledged to exist, but only one is elevated above the rest as supreme or uniquely worthy of worship. Now, we'll examine this more later in the video, but briefly, we can see this among the Nabotans, an ancient Arab people best known for their capital at Petra in modern-day Jordan. In Nabotian inscriptions, they refer to their top god Duchara in Aramaic as "the god," even though they were technically polytheists who recognized the existence of many gods.

Over time, in some regions, in some dialects of old Arabic, alah appeared to have contracted into a single word, Allah, the form that would later become standard in Islamic usage. And we can actually watch this sound change happening elsewhere in pre-Islamic Arabian religion. Take the goddess Alat, who shows up a lot in ancient Arabian inscriptions. Most scholars think her name derives from an earlier form alat. Basically, "the goddess," just as alilah means "the god." And we can catch a glimpse of that older form of her name in the work of the ancient Greek historian Heroditus. Writing in the 400s B.CE., Heroditus reports that the Arabs call Aphrodite alilot, which was probably his attempt to render alilot in Greek. But when we move forward several centuries, the shorter form a lot becomes standard. The middle vowel drops out, the phrase contracts, and what was once a descriptive title starts to function as a fixed name. So alotat becomes a lot, just as alilah becomes Allah.

So if Allah just derives from "the god," does it actually refer to a particular god? Like, is it a name or is it a title? The best way to answer that is to look at old Arabic inscriptions. From southern Syria all the way down into the Arabian Peninsula, archaeologists have found the name Allah carved into stone in different scripts. Now, these are not monumental inscriptions from temples or palaces. Most of them are basically graffiti, short texts left behind by herders, nomads, and people moving through the desert. They're very hard to date precisely, but most come from the first few centuries before Islam. And in the bulk of these inscriptions, Allah behaves like a name. So consider this one: "And so Ruda and Allah be with me and blind whoever affaces this inscription." Or this one: "Oh Allah and Darus, let there be blood, money, and retribution for those who were struck down." So in both of these examples, Allah appears beside other gods, Ruda and Darus, respectively. And remember at the start of this video, Allah appears beside a whole bunch of gods. But also in these inscriptions, Allah appears to be acting like a personal name, closer to names like Zeus or Thor. So even if the word originally developed from a generic phrase like "the god," in practice, people are using Allah to refer to a specific god.

So the question remains: who was this pre-Islamic Allah? Well, the bulk of our evidence comes from what are called Safaitic inscriptions. Safaitic being a script used by Arab nomads who left behind literally tens of thousands of short texts carved into stones. Stones found across the so-called Black Desert of Jordan, Syria, and northern Arabia. It's called the Black Desert because it's filled with these black basalt stones. The historian Dr. Ahmed al-Jalad and his team have conducted extensive surveys in this region and they found that Allah is invoked fewer than 50 times in the entire Safaitic corpus, which is about 50,000 texts. Compare this to over 1,400 invocations of the goddess Allat. So the first thing we can learn is that clearly Allah was not the most popular god for these nomads.

But the Safaitic inscriptions are surprisingly consistent. People invoked him for safety, relief, and survival in difficult conditions. They usually read like, "Oh Allah, grant relief to whoever comes to the waterplace." Or, "Oh Allah, grant rain." Or this one: "By Sakran, son of Shamat, son of Zakar. And he set off into the inner desert. So, oh Allah and Shycom, may he be kept safe." So notice here, Allah again appears beside another god, Shycom. And that phrase, "the inner desert," seems to refer to the deep, uninhabited interior of the Arabian desert. The kind of place where you're far from water, far from settlements, and really on your own in a hostile environment. So, better call upon the gods for help.

He also appears in Nabataean inscriptions, but generally only embedded in personal names. Names like Wahbah, "gift of Allah," or Abdullah, "servant of Allah." These are what scholars call theophoric names, names with a god's name embedded in them. This tells us that Allah was widely known and meaningful to the Nabataeans. You know, people were naming their kid after him. But on the other hand, when we look at actual religious inscriptions like dedications and prayers and temple texts, we mostly find other gods being directly invoked. Gods like Duchara, the main Nabataean deity.

So, we can say from these Safaitic and Nabataean inscriptions that Allah was known across northern Arabia from roughly the last few centuries B.C.E. into the early centuries CE. His name shows up in people's names. He was treated as a distinct deity, not just as a generic title like "the god." And he was occasionally invoked for protection and relief, but emphasis on occasionally. Allah was not the most prominent god in pre-Islamic Arabian paganism. Across Arabia, we find a wide range of deities. The goddess Allat who appears the most, as well as gods like Ruda and the storm god Ba'alšamem. But Allah, I mean, he's there, but he's relatively rare, which suggests we're not looking at the dominant cult deity in this region. This is especially true for the Nabataean kingdom, where we have a situation in which Allah appears frequently in names, but rarely in direct acts of worship.

Dr. Aljalad argues that this is consistent with the idea that pre-Islamic Allah was a remote god and not the primary object of veneration. Perhaps he was a kind of cosmic or overarching god acknowledged, respected, and even embedded in your own identity, but not the focus of daily ritual life. So, compared to other ancient gods like Zeus or Baal, we know very little about pre-Islamic Allah. No myths, no clear role in the pre-Islamic Arabian pantheon. That is until 2024, when we got a tiny, tiny glimpse of Allah's pre-Islamic theological profile.

Dr. Aljalad and his team came across a small stone installation when surveying the basalt desert of northeastern Jordan. Apparently, it was some sort of open-air ritual space with inscribed stones deliberately arranged around a central cairn, probably a burial. And on one of those stones, Dr. Aljalad documented a new Safaitic inscription dating to around year zero, the turn from BCE to CE. So, we're talking roughly 600 years before Muhammad. Now, the inscription is extremely difficult to translate, and Dr. Aljalad actually lays out several possible readings, but across all of the possible reconstructions, the basic picture is Allah is described as a creator that brings light into the world. One possible reconstruction reads, "Oh Allah, let there be light and protect against the darkness of his grave and grant him that light. Oh one of creation, and may he who has created grant him that light."

So what kind of god was Allah? Again, the Safaitic is very difficult to translate, but Dr. Aljalad is confident that we're getting a glimpse into the mythological profile of pre-Islamic Allah, a god that is a creator who brings the light and pushes back the darkness. This is a very big deal because until this discovery, the idea that the pre-Islamic Allah was a creator-type god was mostly an inference from the Quran. Remember, the mushri outright say that Allah created the heavens and the earth. But now we might have archaeological evidence that strongly points in that direction. And that opening line of the inscription probably reminded you of the famous phrase in Genesis 1:3, "Let there be light."

So, how do we explain this? Well, it's possible that this is evidence of Arabian pagans picking up on ideas from Judaism or Christianity. By late antiquity, Arab tribes were interacting with Jewish and Christian communities. Arabic was increasingly used in religious contexts, and it's entirely plausible that biblical ideas about creation and light were circulating in Arab communities long before the Quran. We might actually get another glimpse of this biblically influenced Allah. In another Safaitic inscription, it reads, "And he made a burnt offering and swore by Allah who is living that he shall lead bravely." So in this inscription, a man performs a ritual. He makes a burnt offering and swears an oath by Allah. And Allah is given a title, "the living." Now, that might not sound like much, but calling a god "living" is a pretty loaded idea. It can mean a god who has always been alive, unlike a god like Baal who dies in one of his most famous myths. It can also mean a god who is the source of life itself. And we see this kind of language in the Hebrew Bible itself when God is called "the living God." So we might be seeing a biblically influenced Allah who is a creator who brings light and life.

But Dr. Aljalad argues that we don't actually need to assume direct borrowing to explain this. Perhaps this is pointing to a shared Near Eastern way of imagining creation. Across the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia to the Hebrew Bible, creation is often described as an act of ordering chaos. And more specifically, creation happens through division. Genesis 1:4, God separates the light from the darkness. And in this inscription, we see the Arabic verb haka, usually translated as "to create," but it derives from an older Semitic root meaning "to divide" or "separate." So when this Safaitic inscription describes Allah as bringing the light and the one who created through division, it may be tapping into the same cosmological pattern stretching back centuries. Dr. Aljalad writes, "Ancient Allah was the creator and performed acts that made him immediately comparable to and interchangeable with the biblical God. The ancient Arabs could have easily found cosmological similarities with Christians and Jews without fully adopting their broader mythologies."

Another line of evidence pointing toward pre-Islamic Allah as a creator god comes from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Now, this is very tricky evidence because these poems were not written down at the time they were composed. They were preserved later. They were copied, collected, and transmitted by scholars in the Islamic period. So, in a way, it's kind of like a medieval monk in Europe quoting Homer's Odyssey. If we're taking Homer as a historical figure, he's the original poet living in ancient Greece around the 8th century B.C.E., the medieval monk in France is how the quotation gets preserved. So technically speaking, the quotation does give us a glimpse into that much earlier world of ancient Greece. But the quotation is filtered through the lens of a medieval writer. So a similar thing is happening here. The poets themselves lived before Islam or right around its beginnings. But the versions that we have now come from later collections. So we have to read this evidence carefully. Some lines may have been edited. Some may reflect later ideas, but scholars such as Nikolai Sinai argue that we can still get a pretty good sense of what ancient pre-Islamic Arabs believed about Allah.

So in this poetry, we often see Allah as a creator. For example, one pre-Islamic poet swears an oath by him, "the one who raised the heaven in its place and the full moon." Another pre-Islamic poet from Medina describes his beloved as "made by Allah. Allah ordained for her when the creator created her." Pre-Islamic poetry also depicts Allah as the bringer of the rain, which is something we saw earlier in Safaitic inscriptions. Also compare this to what the mushri of the Quran say. If you ask them who sends down water from the sky, they will say Allah. Pre-Islamic poetry also describes Allah as a god you can call upon in times of trouble. For example, one poem dating to the late 500s says, "We ask Allah to grant him enduring life." Another puts it even more bluntly: "He who asks of humans will only meet refusal, but he who asks of Allah will not be disappointed." Again, these line up closely with what we saw earlier in the Safaitic inscriptions. In those desert carvings, people are constantly invoking Allah for help. "Grant us safety." "Grant us relief." "Grant us rain." Short, direct appeals, often in dangerous situations.

In some ways, this cuts against the theory that he was a distant, inactive figure, a kind of philosophical high god who never intervenes. Even if Allah is not very well attested in pre-Islamic inscriptions, he apparently was viewed as a god that people expected to respond. Dr. Sinai writes, "The poetic understanding of Allah then is categorically not that of a quasi-deistic god who after creating the world has retired from all activity. The poets associate Allah with control over present goings-on."

This all brings us back to the mushri of the Quran. Remember how they're described? If you ask them who created the heavens and the earth, they will say Allah. If you ask them who created humans, they will say Allah. The Quran portrays Muhammad's main opponents as already recognizing Allah as a high creator God who harnessed the sun and the moon, who sends down rain from the sky. And looking at all of this evidence we've just explored, the Quran is probably preserving something historically real, as in it doesn't seem to be inventing a parody of these people. Across all of these sources, from the Safaitic inscriptions to the pre-Islamic poetry to the Quran itself, Allah is described as a creator, a rain-giver, supreme over the world, and actively involved in human life.

But on the other hand, the inscriptions portray a god who is not particularly central. Remember, he only shows up in 40 or so inscriptions compared to gods like Allat who shows up over a thousand times. So, how do we explain Allah looking relatively minor in early inscriptions, but much more important in later poetry and the Quran? It seems by the centuries just before Islam, in the 400s and 500 CE, inscriptions increasingly referenced just one God, Allah. What we might be seeing here is a late pre-Islamic monotheizing trend. And this is not happening in isolation. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, the idea of a single supreme god was becoming more and more popular, even among pagans.

Greek and Roman philosophers start talking about theos hypsistos, "the high god," and that the many different gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon are simply manifestations of that one high god. The philosopher Dio Chrysostom writes, "Apollo, Helios, and Dionysus are the same, and there are many who simply reduce all the gods to a single power." The philosopher Maximus of Tyre, writing around 150 CE, says, "The one doctrine upon which all the world is united is that one god is king of all, and that there are many gods, sons of God, who rule together with God." Elsewhere, Maximus argues that this supreme god is too elevated to come into direct relation with this base material world. So he needs the daemons, immortal beings dwelling between heaven and earth, mediators between human weakness and divine omnipotence. Then, writing in the 400s, the Neoplatonist Macrobius argues that the gods of the Greek and Egyptian pantheon were partial representations of one great solar god. So again, we're seeing a monotheizing trend.

And Arabian society was not isolated from this world. By the late 500 CE, when Muhammad was born, Arab tribes were increasingly connected to the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, and especially to Christianity. Christian and Manichaean missionaries had been active among Arabic-speaking populations for hundreds of years. And what you get is a cultural exchange. Dr. Nikolai Sinai argues that in this environment, Allah could have become something like a shared concept. Christians could hear Allah and think, "Ah, the God of the Bible." Pagans could hear Allah and think, "Ah, the high creator god we've been worshiping for centuries." Dr. Sinai writes, "It may well be this bidirectional intelligibility of pre-Islamic notions of Allah across the pagan-Christian divide that played a significant role in propelling him to prominence in the pre-Quranic centuries."

The scholar Patricia Crone goes so far as to argue that the Quranic Mushrikun were functionally pagan monotheists. They didn't deny Allah. They believed in him and they even acknowledged him as the creator. The problem wasn't disbelief. It was association. The Quran constantly criticizes them for recognizing or venerating lesser divine beings, sometimes described as pre-Islamic gods, sometimes as angels, and sometimes as sons and daughters of Allah. The Quran says they say, "God has begotten offspring. They falsely credit him with sons and daughters. How can he have offspring when he has no consort?" The Quran even explains their reasoning: "We only worship them, these lesser intermediary beings, so that they may bring us closer to God."

So what we're seeing here is a system where Allah sits at the top of a hierarchy. He is the supreme creator with other lower divine beings beneath him functioning as intermediaries through whom people approach God. Dr. Crone writes, "The pagan deities mentioned in the Quran had all been autonomous gods, yet all appear to have been downgraded to intermediary status." She argues the mushrikun may have viewed these beings as conceptually different from the high god, viewing them as manifestations, emanations, or aspects of the one true god. So the Quran's charge of association, or shirk, means that they were recognizing other superhumans alongside Allah, failing to worship him exclusively.

And there were also some crucial differences between the Allah of Islam and the Allah of the mushrikun. In both pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran's description of pagan belief, Allah is not an end-times judge. There's no resurrection, no final judgment, and no eternal reward or punishment. That's the part the Quran really emphasizes, and it's also the part that seems to have been most controversial to the mushrikun of Mecca.

So, we can see both continuity and change. Muhammad did not introduce Allah to the mushrikun. As the Quran itself says, pre-Islamic Arabs already believed in a god named Allah for centuries. And as we've seen in the Safaitic inscriptions, they invoked him for protection, swore by his name, and in at least one case linked him with light and creation. But the Quran redefines him, calling people to recognize Allah alone as the only one worthy of worship and as the one who will ultimately judge humanity.

If you're interested in how Islam evolved over time, I'm very excited to invite you to our upcoming reading group, "Reading Through the Conference of the Birds," a classic work of Sufi Islamic literature. Sign up at religiondepartment.com/conferenceofthebirds. "Conference of the Birds" tells the story of a group of birds who set out on a journey to find their king. They pass through a series of symbolic valleys, each representing stages of spiritual transformation: doubt, love, loss of ego, and ultimately a kind of radical rethinking of the self. It's an absolutely stunning display of Sufi thought. So, think of this like a weekly book club with an expert host. You'll meet every week with the scholar Dr. Patrick D'Silva, a specialist in Sufism. You'll read selections together, you'll unpack what's going on in real time, and get the kind of context that'll help you make sense of the text itself. We're hosting this through our learning community, the Religion Department. We've brought together some of the most compelling scholars of religion, and we're here to help you move past surface-level takes on religion. A lot of people talk about religion, and fewer people know how to study it. But at the Religion Department, through live classes, guided readings, and a growing library of lectures, we'll give you the tools to think more clearly about religion and start to understand how religion shapes culture, identity, and the whole world around you. So, if you're looking for a smarter way to think about religion, this is a great entry point. Join our Sufism reading group at religiondepartment.com/conferenceofthebirds. Thanks, everyone.