Allah as a lunar deity

Allah as a Lunar deity refers to a historical postulation that 'Allah' (the name of God in Islam) originated as a moon god. The claim first arose in 1901 in the scholarship of archeologist Hugo Winckler, who identified the name Allah with a pre-Islamic Arabian deity known as Lah or Hubal, which he called a lunar deity. The general idea was widely propagated in the United States in the 1990s by Christian apologists, first via the publication of Robert Morey's pamphlet The Moon-god Allah: In Archeology of the Middle East (1994), eventually followed by his book The Islamic Invasion: Confronting the World's Fastest-Growing Religion (2001). Morey argued, slightly differently, that "Allah" was the name of a moon goddess in pre-Islamic Arabic mythology. Islam's use of a lunar calendar and the prevalence of crescent moon imagery in Islam have also been used to support the notion. Both iterations of the theory have been dismissed by modern scholars as entirely unevidenced. The ongoing propagation of the theory is regarded as an insult both to Muslims and to Arab Christians, who likewise refer to God as 'Allah'. Before Islam, the Kaaba contained a statue representing the god Hubal. On the basis that the Kaaba was also Allah's house, Julius Wellhausen considered Hubal to be an ancient name for Allah. The 20th-century scholar Hugo Winckler in turn claimed that Hubal was a moon god, though others have suggested otherwise. David Leeming describes him as a warrior and rain god, as does Mircea Eliade. More recent scholars have rejected this view, partly because it is speculation but also because of the Nabataean origins of Hubal, a non-native deity imported into the Southern Arabian shrine – one which may have already been associated with Allah. Patricia Crone argues that "If Hubal and Allah had been one and the same deity, Hubal ought to have survived as an epithet of Allah, which he did not. And moreover there would not have been traditions in which people are asked to renounce the one for the other.