It would be easy to categorize Islam as worship of the moon-god. The flags of many Muslim nations feature a crescent moon and star, and the clock tower at the Abraj Al-Bait (“Towers of the House [of God—i.e., the Kaaba]”) in Mecca is topped by a golden crescent moon. So are the nine minarets that surround the Grand Mosque.
It’s hard to argue the point. The crescent moon atop the Makkah Royal Clock Tower makes the hotel beneath it the third-tallest building in the world. The Abraj Al-Bait, a government-owned hotel complex, is only yards away from the Great Mosque of Mecca, the world’s largest mosque and Islam’s holiest site. Since the complex was completed in 2012 (by the Saudi Bin Laden Group),[1] the lunar symbol is not a remnant of Islam’s early days. And it’s highly unlikely it was included in the design without the approval of the religious authorities of the Saudi kingdom.
Muslims reject the idea that their religion is based on older pagan cults that worshiped the moon. One prominent American convert to Islam, referring specifically to the claim that Allah was originally a moon-god, wrote that the idea “is not only an insult to Muslims but also an insult to Arab Christians who use the name ‘Allah’ for God.”[2]
This may surprise you, but we agree—Allah was not a moon-god. But it begs the question: If he’s not, then why isthat big crescent moon on top of the clock tower? Why are the star and crescent on so many Muslim flags, an ancient symbol that looks a lot like the Sîn and Ishtar (Moon and Venus) portion of the old Mesopotamian astral triad?
The truth is the star and crescent weren’t part of the iconography of early Islam. It’s an ancient symbol; something very like it is featured at the top of the Ur-Nammu Stela, found in the 1920s at the site of Ur in southeastern Iraq. The stela, a limestone slab that shows the moon-god Nanna (his name in ancient Sumer) receiving a drink offering from Ur-Nammu, the king of Ur around 2100 BC.[3] As we’ve noted, the moon and Venus (Nanna/Sîn and Inanna/Ishtar) are frequently featured with the sun-god as a triad in Mesopotamian art.
Use of the star and crescent appears to have spread westward over the centuries as the religion of Mesopotamia influenced the people of Anatolia and Greece. The kings of Pontus, a country in what is northern Turkey today, adopted the symbol in the early third century BC and introduced it to the Bosporus.[4] That’s the strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, and, more importantly, is the location of what was then called Byzantium.
The star-and-crescent symbol was still in use more than five hundred years later when the Roman emperor Constantine renamed the city Constantinople after himself and made it the capital of the eastern empire in 330 AD. It appears the Byzantines especially venerated the Titan Hecate, an ancient goddess linked to the moon, because they believed she’d protected them from the invading army of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC.[5]
It would be logical to assume that the star-and-crescent were simply adopted as a symbol of conquest by Mehmed the Conqueror when his Ottoman armies captured Constantinople in 1452. However, there is little evidence that the mainly Christian city used the symbol during the eleven hundred years between the name changes from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul,[6] and the symbol wasn’t adopted by the Ottoman Empire until 1844.
After the breakup of the empire in the early 1920s, some of its successor states (Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria) incorporated the symbol into their new flags, and a dozen national flags adopted in the twentieth century likewise feature the star and crescent, all representing countries that are predominantly Muslim.
To be fair, it should be noted that many Muslim scholars are aware that “the faith of Islam historically had no symbol, and many refuse to accept [the crescent moon].”[7] That’s why the Islamic State flies a variant of the Black Standard under which Muhammad went forth to conquer in the seventh century AD.
That brings us back to the question: If Islam has no symbol, why did the royal house of Saud, presumably with the approval of Islamic religious authorities in Mecca, put a golden crescent moon 1,972 feet in the air right next to the Kaaba?
We could just as well ask why the Roman Catholic Church installed an obelisk representing the missing piece of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, right in front of the Vatican in Saint Peter’s Square, or why so many government buildings here in the United States are topped by statues of pagan deities. The answer: The infernal council constantly whispers in our ears. All too often, we listen.
So, with crescent moons hanging over Islam’s holy of holies, why do we claim that Allah was not a moon-god? Simple. Islam is too big to be the work of just one small-g god. It’s the supernatural equivalent of a corporate merger—a new religion created by rebellious gods as a desperate response to the Resurrection.
In other words, Allah is essentially the chief executive officer of a supernatural corporation formed when the Fallen realized that the new faith of Jesus-followers was displacing their cults wherever the Gospel was preached. The moon-god played a key role in the ancient Near East, especially with Amorite and Arab nomads and pastoralists, but Sîn/Yarikh was only one member of a supernatural board of directors who were forced to put aside their mutual distrust and jealousy when they realized just how badly they’d been outplayed at Calvary. Islam is essentially “Allah, Inc.,” a partnership of ancient deities who banded together because they shared a single goal: To destroy the growing faith in Jesus Christ.
Well, that and staying out of the Lake of Fire.
When the new sect of Christianity began to spread from Jerusalem around the middle of the first century AD, the ruling authorities in Rome and Israel tried to exterminate it by killing as many believers as they could catch. Obviously, that didn’t work. By the beginning of the fourth century, when Constantine legalized Christianity, it had reached Britain in the west and may have spread as far as China in the east.[8]
By the early seventh century, Christianity was the majority religion in most of the Roman and formerly Roman world, as Germanic and Celtic peoples in western Europe and Britain converted to the faith from their polytheistic paganism. The eastern empire had been Christian for centuries, with the oldest centers of Christianity in the lands of the Bible—places like Antioch, Alexandria, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Missionaries had spread the gospel throughout most of northern Africa, Egypt, and the land on the west side of the Red Sea, the kingdom of Aksum in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.
Only in Arabia did Christianity fail to take root. Other than a short run during the sixth century in what is now Yemen, the tribes of Arabia remained faithful to the pagan gods of their ancestors.
It was from there that the counterattack came.
There had been hints at this developing coalition for centuries. We mentioned earlier the stela commemorating the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II that featured the symbols of his patron deities: Ashur, Assyria’s version of “the” god, El/Enlil; Sîn, the moon-god; Shamash, the sun-god; Ishtar, goddess of sex and war; and the storm-god, Adad, better known to you and me as Baal. Add the war-god Chemosh/Ares/Mars and the plague-god Resheph/Apollo, and there, thirteen hundred years before Muhammad, you’ve got the infernal council of Islam—Allah, Inc.
You may be wondering how “the” god, confined to the abyss until the Judgment, can still wield influence on earth. While even pagans believed the old god was confined to the netherworld, he’s still persuaded or intimidated humans for millennia to trade the lives of children for the promise of divine favor in everything from success in business to victory in war. Despite his imprisonment, statistics argue that his power is still felt in the natural realm. The number-one cause of death around the world in 2018 was abortion; nearly forty-two million unborn children were terminated, roughly one out of every four pregnancies worldwide.[9] There were more deaths by abortion than from malaria, HIV/AIDS, smoking, alcohol, and traffic accidents combined.[10]
But while this god still pulls the strings of human agents on the earth, he’s not alone in his rebellion. And he’s lent his title to the figurehead of the cause.
To recap from an earlier article: The god’s name, en-lil, comes from i-lu-lu, based on the Semitic root ʿl (“god”), repeated to emphasize that the title referred to “the god” (ʿlʿl = il-ilu = en-lil), or “god of (all) the gods.”[11]
It’s not a coincidence that the proto-Semitic word for “god,” ʿl, became the generic Hebrew word for a god, el—hence, elohim and the less common eloah. This is consistent with evidence that connects this old god, under the names Enlil, El, Dagan (later Dagon), Kumarbi, Baal-Hammon, Kronos, and Saturn with northwestern Mesopotamia. Although the oldest known writing on earth comes from Sumer, it appears that the god who emerged as the head of the Sumerian pantheon in the third millennium BC may have been known even earlier to the people of what is now Syria, Lebanon, and southern Turkey as El—“the” god.
Over time, beliefs change and so does language. The title “the god” was applied to various deities over the years. The divine name el of Northwestern Semitic spread throughout Mesopotamia and persisted through the centuries. It’s changed, but it’s still in use to this day. By the time of Muhammad, the word for “god” among the tribes of northern Arabia had been transformed from ilu to el to ilah.[12]
Derek argued in his book Bad Moon Rising that Allah is not a single entity but a sort of Wizard of Oz-like simulacrum created by the old gods of Mesopotamia who’d been caught off-guard by the resurrection of Jesus—namely, El or Enlil (whose Akkadian name Ellil, like Allah, is apparently related to Arabic al-ilah, “the god”); Hadad, the storm-god (Baal in the Bible, but better known as Satan);[13] Inanna/ Ishtar; Chemosh/Attar, the war-god; Sîn, the moon-god; Shamash, the sun-god; and Resheph, the plague-god called Nergal in Babylon and Apollo by the Greeks and Romans.
Of that group, only El—otherwise known as Enlil/Ellil, Kronos, Saturn, Dagon, and Molech—is in the abyss right now. The others were among the bene ha’elohim placed over the nations after the Tower of Babel incident. That suggests the old god still has influence with the second wave of rebellious elohim.
It’s our belief that the god called El, Enlil, Dagan, Kumarbi, or simply “king” (Molech/ Milcom) is Allah, and still tremendously powerful even while chained in the Abyss—maybe even more powerful than Satan.
[1] “Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel,” The Skyscraper Center(https://web.archive.org/web/20140328212835/http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/mecca/makkah-royal-clock-tower-hotel), retrieved 1/7/19.
[2] “Scholarly Pursuits: Joseph Lumbard, Classical Islam Professor.” BrandeisNOW, December 11, 2007 (http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2008/january/JosephLumbardstory.html), retrieved 1/8/19.
[3] Jeanny Vorys Canby, “A Monumental Puzzle: Reconstructing the Ur-Nammu Stela.” Expedition Vol. 29, No. 1 (1987), 54–64.
[4] Yulia Ustinova, The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1998), 270–274.
[5] Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Making of Christian Constantinople (London: Routledge, 1994), 126–127.
[6] John Denham Parsons, The Non-Christian Cross: An Enquiry into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., 1896), 95.
[7] Dr. Fiaz Fazili, “The Untold Story of Crescent Moon and Stars as Symbols, Logos, or Tattoos.” Crescent(September 2009), 42.
[8] Based on a reference by the early Christian apologist Arnobius, who wrote in Book 2 of his work Against the Pagans, shortly after AD 300, that the gospel had reached “the Seres,” an old Roman name for northern China. English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/06312.htm, retrieved 1/9/19.
[9] Dr. Thomas D. Williams, “Abortion Leading Cause of Death in 2018 with 41 Million Killed.” Breitbart, December 31, 2018 (https://www.breitbart.com/health/2018/12/31/abortion-leading-cause-of-death-in-2018-with-41-million-killed/), retrieved 1/9/19.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Feliu (2006), op. cit.
[12] Javier Teixidor, The Pagan God: Popular Religion in the Greco-Roman Near East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 83.
[13] Matthew 12:22–26 (Jesus identifies Beelzebul [“Baal the Prince”] as Satan), Revelation 2:13 (“where Satan dwells” is a reference to the Great Altar of Zeus, and Zeus was just the Greek form of Baal).