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PROGRESS TOWARDS ISLAM AND ITS GOD

THE ORIGIN

Islam claims to be the last, the true belief system in the line of the Abrahamic doctrine. Who is Abraham? What was his belief system? Has he really lived? If he has really lived was it around 1900 BC. as the Book tells us? If he has really lived in the region he is said to have lived could he have been a Sabian, worshipping moon and the stars? There are many unknowns and all of them are fundamental. No one knows the answers to these questions. To worsen the dilemma the Arabs place Abraham in a much earlier time bracket, 2300s BC. whereas the Old Testament puts him around 1900-1800 BC. Which period is the right one? The bottom line is: What we are told about Abraham is not definite. Guesswork is needed.

Anyway, if a belief system purports to be the last in line of a series of predecessors, a lot of borrowings from the earlier ones is only natural as Qoran shows. Also, since the three Abrahamic belief systems shared the same region, the same mixture of cultures, concepts, and ideas there must be a cross-fertilization between them and the Qoran. One can spot it in the stories told in Qoran and of course in the stories and the narrations (although edited and superficial) about the past messengers and their people. So one won’t be off the mark if one says that Qoran, like the earlier books, carries all the legends and myths of the region as well.

Let us start with the concept of God, because the conceived ‘supreme being’ is the central factor in any belief system. The concept of a higher being/a creator/an overseer who can influence the lives and destinies of mankind on earth, with an addendum of basic laws, prohibitions, and the concept of sin, has begun with totemism (Check the page on Totemism in this site). Therefore it will be our starting point. The concept of a supreme being ‘out there’ goes back to time immemorial. The following underlined and italic sections show the beginning and the progression of the concepts of a supreme being, a divine law, permitted and prohibited things, and sin which all ended with the omnipotent God of Islam.

TOTEM

Here is the attributes of the totem (the supreme entity):

• Totem is an object serving as the symbol of a family, a clan or a tightly knit group.
• Relationship with the totem is pivotal and comes even before the membership of the tribe and all kinds of blood ties.
• Totem is not attached to any place.
• Totem law prohibits sexual relations and marriage between the persons belonging to the same totem. This is a taboo. This principle is called ‘exogamy.’ Here totem functions as a blood relationship.
• Totem protects and warns the members of its clan. Loyal members of its clan get advance information on the future, and guidance from the totem.
• Members of the totemic clan believe that there is a kinship between themselves and the totem animal.
• There is the all important ‘clan totem’ which envelopes the whole clan and is transferred between generations via inheritance. There is also the personal totem which belongs to a single person and is not inherited (can you detect the beginnings of an ‘all-enveloping supreme entity’ and the personal deities?).
• Totem’s religious aspect involves the relationship between the totem and a person; its social aspect applies to the relations among the members of the clan and with the members of other clans (Can you detect the distant beginnings of the concepts of an organized belief system; the choosing of Abraham as the Patriarch; and the concept of the ‘chosen people’?)

Now let us deal with the subject of taboo, because totem and taboo go hand in hand. Without one there wouldn’t be the other, like the concepts of the supreme being and sin in our day.

TABOO

• Taboo is a prohibition, a ban.
• Taboo has the meaning of an ‘unapproachable thing.’
• Taboo corresponds to the ‘divine-heavenly fear’ we have today, the breaking of which in many ways will be like committing a ‘sin’ nowadays. The restrictions are not tied to a divine command and described as ‘the oldest unwritten laws of humanity.’ When taboo was in full force there was neither the idea of a supreme being in its present context, nor a belief system. Therefore taboo like totem could be said to be older than the notion of supreme being.
• The most ancient punishment systems of humanity could be tied to taboo. Avoidance of the dangers created by the violation of a taboo may be possible by penance and purification. In other words, by paying something, by refraining from certain things and by cleansing yourself (Can you detect the beginnings of the concepts of expiation, ablution, abstinence and fasting?).
• The primitive communities were subjected to a series of prohibitions. They didn't know why. They didn’t think of asking questions.
• Taboo was accepted as if it is an open truth and the violation of it is believed to be punished automatically (Echoes of the accepted attitudes today?).
• Taboos do not co-exist with individualism and personal freedoms, which should be eradicated. (Precursors of the belief systems?).
• Prohibitions are kept alive by an inner necessity; they are connected to the danger of contamination from the banned object; and necessitated ceremonial acts (like the belief systems of our day).
• All the taboos were ancient prohibitions imposed externally and by force.
• The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: ‘Don’t kill the totem animal’ (it could be extended to the ‘kin’ as well) and ‘avoid sexual relations with the opposite sex of the same clan.’
• The individual is asked to sacrifice his/her instinctual satisfactions to the ‘supreme being’ who has declared: “I’ll take your revenge.” This is important because in the development of the early ‘belief systems’ we could see that many things which were relinquished by humanity (because they were ‘sins’) were turned over to the ‘supreme being’ and became permissible in his name. This gave ‘earthlings’ the opportunity to save themselves from the domination of their evil and socially harmful instincts.
• We are certain that the primitive people living long before the imposition of laws by the gods had this command or the moral rule: You should not kill.. This is a rule the violation of which shouldn’t go unpunished. The isolation of professional executioners for a set period or temporarily originates from this superstition. The appeasement ceremonies, sacrifices, restrictions, isolation period, atonement and purification ceremonies in the belief systems and also following a battle in primitive communities all originate from one superstition: Thou shalt not kill !. This must be familiar. It is the sixth command among the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:2-17. All the commands except the sixth are the rules brought about by the Mosaic Law. Only the sixth predates the religion.
• Atonement in taboo ceremonies is much more fundamental than purification.
• Taboo aims at the most powerful expectations and desires.
• Taboo is also the typical method of legislation imposed by the chiefs and priests whose purpose is to preserve their assets and privilege.

GOD OF THE PRIMAL RELIGIONS

Next we have the concept of god in the primal belief systems. Most of these primal religions have a creator god. This god is,

• too great, very powerful and too distant to be worshipped directly; whenever there is something extraordinary he is called upon (Exactly like today);
• believed to be all-seeing (A clue to one of the characteristics of the supreme being of our times?);
• unbound by time, unbound by place and has no end (Three basic attributes of the God of Islam);
• compassionate, but unpredictable (Compassion and unpredictability brings to mind certain aspects of the Elohim and afterwards the YHWH of the Old Testament. Compassion is one of the attributes of the God of Islam);
• ‘Earthlings’ needed intermediaries with the superior being, because man could not get close to him (They needed sort of go-betweens/modems/interfaces like archangels, angels and messengers as do believers of today. Any change since then?).

SUMERIAN GODS

It’s time to come closer to the present. The first pantheon with a multitude of gods and a source for the ‘belief systems of the Book’ of our time was in Sumer. Here on top of the pantheon was;

• the king-god, who was the head of the council of gods (This concept will show itself in the Sabian belief system as ‘Rabb-el Erbab’ and in the so called monotheistic Old Testament as ‘Lord of Hosts’ and as the supreme council, al me’le-ul-a’la, in Islam).
• In the forefront of this council there were four ‘creator’ gods - An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursag, and seven most eminent gods who were the ‘determiners of destinies’, and then there were fifty ‘great gods’.
• All the supreme entities in Sumer acted as they pleased. In order to know what a supreme overseer thought about a certain action, one had to go to the temple, make a sacrifice, pray and go to sleep (Many cultures of the Middle East, especially devout Moslems kept this practice of praying and going to sleep, hoping to dream, which will be a pointer as to whether a certain action or an event would be beneficial or harmful).

Sumerian universe was called An-Ki (Sky-Earth). They called the sea surrounding the land Apsu-Abzu. Ki (Earth) was floating freely on this sea. The unseen canopy underneath the sea was considered to be an ‘opposite-sky’ which covered the nether-world (hell) called Kur. Lil, which is air, breath, spirit or wind was the third component. The Sumerian thinkers felt the need to explain the source of these cosmic components and to establish a lineage among them. The following are their conclusions:

• There should have been a beginning.
• The first thing that existed in the beginning was the endless primeval ’mother-ocean’ (Remember the Zarathustran, Judaic and Islamic concepts of the primeval sea in the ‘beginning’?).
• Sumerian thinkers invented from this ‘mother-ocean’ a first-cause, a ‘first-mover.’ (This is the origin of the concept of a prime-mover/a first cause in the ‘belief systems of the Book’).
• This ‘sea’ (Apsu-Abzu), the first-cause, gave birth to the universe.
• An-Ki (Sky-Earth God) was born.
• An-Ki created the Sky and the Earth.
• Enlil separated the Sky and Earth.
• Sky and Earth brought into being other gods.
• Goddess Nammu, whose name is written with the pictogram denoting ‘sea’ is described as the “mother who gave life to Sky and Earth.”

Then the Sumerian cosmogony was as follows:

There was the primeval ocean (Mother-Sea) in the beginning (There is no information on its origin and how it came into being). This Mother-Sea produced the Cosmic-Mountain which was formed by the unseparated Sky and Earth, An-Ki. Sky (An) was male and Earth (Ki) was female, the union of which produced Enlil. Enlil separated Sky and Earth. An took the sky. Enlil took his mother Ki (Earth). Union of Ki and Enlil established the basis for the ordered universe. This union was the starting point and the source of man, animals, plants and the institution of civilization. The universe was created by the first cosmic gods: The creator gods, Sky, Earth, Air, Water. Since the creator gods were the organizers of the universe which they hold in their hands, the existence, development and survival of vast kingdoms have depended on them. This was the fundamental ‘truth of itself’ for the Sumerians. These gods did not reveal themselves to the mortals. Each god was in charge of a different corner of the universe.

• Sumerians have invented the ‘kingdoms in the sky’ with assorted supreme beings in charge of various things.
• Their universe was necessarily supervised, cared for, administered and controlled by living, anthropomorphic superior beings.
• Gods were invisible but they had their statues in the temples.
• Their gods were immortal but they needed food.
• They were thought of as very very powerful because they governed the universe.
• They were thought as immortals because their death may mean the loss of the order of the universe and consequently life may end.
• Gods in the Sumero-Babylonian Creation stories were not creators in a transcendental sense, they were an integral part of the universe and a product of its creative process.
• Enki, the God of Apsu-Abzu (God of unfathomable deep) and also the god of visdom was looking after earthly affairs working harmoniously with Enlil.
• Enlil was designing the general plan and Enki was carrying it out. (There is always a chief deity with surrounding lesser deities. Starting with the Zoroastrianism, archangels appared around the chief deity, and they were borrowed by the Mosaic belief system and Islam).
• Everything was tied to Enki’s creative effect. The judgement was ‘Enki did it’ or ‘Enki did it and organized it so’ (This is exactly the conviction of the Jews and Moslems).
• Gods preferred morality to immorality.
• Sumerians exalted the Goodness, equity, candidness and honesty of gods.
• But at the same time Sumerians believed that gods embedded in mankind equal amounts of evil, lie, cruelty and tyranny.
• Gods have invented ‘me’s. A ‘me’ is a principle invented and signed by the gods with the aim of ensuring the trouble-free functioning of the universe (This must be the origin of the present day concept of destiny).
• Gods had so many important things to do, they did not involve themselves in earthly matters.
• Mankind needed a mediator to make himself heard by gods. Hence consulting ‘personal supreme overseers’  was widespread; these became protective angels connected to the leader of the family.
• Sacrifices and offerings were made to these deities in the temples called Ziggurats.
• Deities were believed to be organizing and controlling everything.
• The Sun-god Utu was an all-seeing supreme entity ensuring justice and equity, and helping mankind.

In later sources going back to 2500 BC. we see Enlil playing the role of the chief deity. He has taken An’s place. The oldest comprehensible documents describes him as the ‘father of gods’, ‘king of sky and earth’, ‘king of all countries’. Later myths and hymns tell us that Enlil was a benevolent god who was responsible for the design and creation of the universe and also furnishing it with all the best things. He was the source of almost everything. In the Sumerian tablets read and published since 1930s hymns and myths present Enlil as a friendly and fatherly god who safeguarded the security and well-being of mankind generally and Sumerians especially (The concept of ‘chosen people’?).

The underlined sections in italic will provide the inquisitive mind with the vital clues to the origins of the myths, legends, and the fundamental doctrines of the Abrahamic belief systems.

Egypt needs attention in our quest for the origins of the Semitic-Abrahamic belief systems of our day, because some of the fundamental doctrines were borrowed from there. In that sense the first real attempt at monotheism in Egypt by Akh-en-aten, and the Memphite theology are very important.

The roots of monotheism in Egypt could be found in earlier times. During the reign of Amenhotep III (The father of Akh-en-Aton) worship of the sun-god seems to have achieved some degree of popularity. A very ancient name of the sun-god, Aten, Aton regained importance. And the young king Amenhotep IV (later changed his name to Akh-en-aten/Akh-en-aton became a loyal follower.

• Akh-en-Aten worshipped the sun not as an object but as a symbol of a divine being whose energy is manifested as rays of light;
• Akh-en-Aten described himself as ‘first prophet of Re-Horakhte’;
• The high priest of Aton was called the ‘greatest of seers’.
• Akh-en-Aten introduced for the first time the ‘exclusion factor’ which transformed the doctrine of a universal god into monotheism. In one of the hymns he says: “O, sole god, there’s no other god beside you!” (An identical impression could be found in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam).
• According to Akh-en-aten, what was said about the other gods were all lies, and deception.
• He totally rejected the illusion of life after death (When Israel came out of Egypt they did not have the concept of afterlife. It came later, after the exile).
• Aton/Aten’s belief system banned everything connected to myths, magic, and witchcraft.
• Jinns, satans, monsters, spirits, demi-gods, demons, (even Osiris) were burned to ashes.
• There was no other representation or a personal image of the Sun-God Aten/Aton. Akh-en-aton did not allow the making of the idols or images of the Sun-God (Jews and Moslems can you detect now one of the origins of the bans in your belief systems?)
• The real god has no form, and kept his position until the end of his life (This has become the incorporeality of the God of Judaism following the exile. It is also, and naturally, the attribute of the god of Islam).

Egyptian pharaoh Akh-en-aton is the first registered real monotheist in the history of mankind. Here is a hymn which expresses the basics of the Aton/Aten cult:

“..How manifold it is, what you have made!...

O sole god, like whom there is no other!

You created the world according to your desire,

While you were alone;

All men, cattle and wild beasts,

Whatever is on earth, going on its feet,

And whatever is on high flying with its wings.

The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt,

You settled every man in his place,

You supplied their necessities,

Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned.

Their tongues are separate in speech,

And their natures as well;

Their skins are distinguished,

As you distinguished the foreign peoples...

...there is none other that knows you,

Save your son Nefer-kheperu-Re Wa-en-Re,

For you have made him well versed in your plans and in your strength.”

Believers of the Judaism and Islam might find some of the exact attributes of their god in this hymn. The idea of monotheism which reached its peak with Akh-en-aten had to stay in darkness for a long time after him. Some scholars find the origin of the sole god, the father-god of the code books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Aton/Aten belief system. Some western historians maintain that Moses had got the idea of sole god from Akh-en-aten (Check the pages on Egypt in this site).

THE MEMPHITE THEOLOGY AND ITS GOD - PTAH

The Memphite theology is about the god Ptah, the power of word, and the belief about heart being very important and the seat of conscience:

• The word ‘be’ is the only ‘thing’ a God needs for the creation of whatever is willed. ‘The Almighty’ wills and ‘it’ comes into being at that moment. In Sumer it was sufficient for the creator god to make a plan, and utter the appropriate word, his wishes were believed to be realized at that instant. According to the ‘code books’ of the Abrahamic religions - the Old Testament, the New Testament and Qoran - the utterance of a simple word or a few words has started the creation. Remember the command “Let there be light!” Read Qoran 16:40: “When we will something we simply say ‘be’ and it comes into being.” Now you know where it comes from: Sumerian mythology and Egyptian Ptah.
• Here is the Egyptian origin of the ‘power of the word’. Ptah and the Memphite Theology transformed the Heliopolitan Ennead by giving the primacy in the activity of creation to Ptah.
• Ptah is the creator of the universe and maker of things.
• Ptah is equated with Nun, the primeval ocean, and is presented as bringing Atum and all the gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead into existence by his ‘divine word ’.
• Ptah also brings order out of chaos; (Like Marduk) fixes the destinies, provides food for mankind.
• Description of Ptah’s creative activities closes with the words “..And so Ptah rested (or was satisfied), after he had made everything”. (Sounds familiar? Yes! The God of Moses did(!) the same. And the account of creation in Genesis closes with an almost identical sentence. One can also find this time scale of creation in Qoran).
• Ptah also gave birth to the gods.
• In Egyptian thinking the heart and tongue represent thought and speech. Ptah the Great is the heart and tongue of the Egyptian Ennead.
• By his thought and speech Ptah brings the gods into existence.
• Ptah was always represented in purely human form.

The belief about heart as the seat of conscience also has its roots in Sumer. The heart and tongue issue could be found also in the Mosaic belief system and also in Islam, because they all got it from the Sumerians and from one another. Qoran has tens of suras - which I would not quote here - in the verses of which there is a reference to heart as the seat of knowledge, feelings, sentiments, appreciation, fear etc., Those of you who are curious enough to bear reading repetitions of stories are referred to Qoran. In Islam, especially the members of the sect founded by Abu Hanifa believe that in order to become a Moslem one has to believe by heart and announce it by tongue. This is exactly the formula the human mind invented about creation in Sumer and Egypt.

• This myth about heart and tongue and the power of the word came to light with a stone (Check the pages on Bible in this site) the inscription on which read “God said let there be light, and there was light”. The original text was written 2000 years earlier than the Book of Genesis (An identical expression appears in Genesis 1:3).
• In this Memphite text, God’s (Ptah’s) heart is presented as the ‘initiator’ of everything, and the God’s tongue is described as the repeater/echoer of the things thought by the heart: “Every single sacred word was created by the thinking of the heart and by the order of the tongue.. When the eye sees, the ear hears, and the nose breathes in, they let the heart know. It is the heart which does everything and the mouth which repeats/echoes the thoughts of the heart. All the gods are created thus, even Atum(Atum is the God of the city of On, Heliopolis) and the Ennead" (2850 BC.).
• The symbol of the ‘creator word’ in the Memphite theology is the power of the tongue of Ptah.
• All the gods are the functioning parts of a bigger whole (These were turned into deities, archangels, angels etc. in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
• Ptah, the enveloping whole, the totality, exists in them as the infinite life force and their ‘ka’
• Thus heart and tongue have become sovereign on all the members.
• He (Ptah) is in the bodies and tongues of all the gods, in all the living humans (Qoran 50:16 describes this condition as God being “closer to man than his aorta”), wild animals, reptiles and everything living”.
• The Sumerian concept of a self creating/producing and consuming/destructing god seen in the Sumerian seals dating 3500 BC. is almost identical with the Ptah myth. Ptah “..thinks everything as He pleases and governs them.. His Ennead is in his teeth and tongue. These correspond to Atum’s sperm and hand. As opposed to Atum’s Ennead being created by his sperm and fingers, Ptah’s (Ennead) were brought into being by the teeth and tongue of Ptah’s mouth which can say the names of everything..
• Through the orders thought up in the heart and spoken by the tongue he (Ptah) is the one who gives life to the peaceful and death to the one who oversteps the limit.
• He (Ptah) is the one who directs and gets completed every deed/act, every art, the movements of arms and legs and all the organs”.

THE SABIAN GOD - RABB

Now let us have a look at the Sabian belief system because it is earlier than the Abrahamic-Semitic belief systems and thought to have had the strongest influence on the rituals of Islam. First of all these Sabians should not be confused with the Sabaeans, who were the pre-Islamic inhabitants of the kingdom of Saba/Sebe, in southwest Arabia. Don’t mix Sabians with the Mandaeans either, who were the gnostic sect surviving in Southern Iraq and Khuzistan, known to Arab and Iranian neighbours as Subba - ‘Dippers’ - who practiced baptism by water and are often mixed wrongly with the Sabians (Check the pages on Sabian belief system in this site). The name ‘Christians of St. John’ was given to Mandaeans by the medieval travelers because their priests claimed that John the Baptist was a member of their sect (the Nasoreans), and Jesus to them was a false Messiah. They are claimed by some to be the ‘real Sabians’, and these claimants called the people who lived in Harran the ‘pagan inhabitants of Haran.’

The tradition has it that, the 9^th century moon worshippers of Haran laid claim to Sabianism in order to be granted by the Moslems the same religious privileges as Jews and Christians. Modern scholars call this group as the pseudo-Sabians. These Sabians made Haran a flourishing center of learning in the 9^th and 10^th centuries. If Abraham - the Patriarch of both Hebrews and Moslems - had existed and was a Sabian prophet, his belief system should have predated both Judaism and Islam. This is to say that the Sabian belief system, most probably, has acted as a major source for the belief systems in the Middle East and the neighboring lands. The Sabians are mentioned in various sections of Qoran together with Jews and Christians.

Star, planet and mainly sun and moon worship was widespread among the communities of the region in early ages. One of the renowned Islamic historians Masudi (d. 957) makes an interesting quote according to which Sabians have ‘seven temples’ all of which were built for the worship of sun, the moon and the five planets. One of them is Ka’ba in Mecca. Three of them are in Esfahan and Khorasan, in Iran. Fourth is in Sa’na, Yemen. Sixth is in India, and the seventh in China. In Khorasan we have two temples; one of them the sun-temple in Fergana and the other is the moon-temple in Balkh. The renowned Islamic historian writes:

• “Temples of the Sabians of Haran are dedicated to the ‘entities of reason’ and the ‘stars’.” Among these temples there are some which have names like the ‘temple of the first cause’ (‘First reason’ is considered as the first cause) and the ‘temple of reason.’ ” Masudi gives us information on the temples dedicated to the stars, according to which the sun temple was a square. Mohamed is reported to have said that Ka’ba in Mecca was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael (Sabian temple?). We are told that the sun temple was a square, and according to Islamic sources Ka’ba was given the name it has because of its shape. In some of the Islamic dictionaries Ka’ba is described as ‘a square house.’ So, Ka’ba most probably was a temple for the sun.
• In the Sabian belief system Planets of the solar system are considered the angels and the bodies of the spiritual entities who are the intermediaries with the god (One comes across a similar concept of ‘celestial spiritual entities’ in Qoran). Sabians in the days of the prophet Abraham believed that intermediaries are needed to reach the God; these intermediaries should be spiritual beings; these spiritual beings do move, but this movement does not take place in an actual location (not attached to a certain place). These spiritual beings don’t change, but they create, and they generate change. They relay God’s power and influence down to the inferior physical creatures. They are the governors/administrators of the planets, and their duty is to make these ‘spheres’ move, and they have an influence on the physical realm by doing this. These entities govern all the physical beings. They issue power to and establish laws for the whole of the beings which could be seen and heard.

Those who say that worshipping the moon, sun and the stars on the one hand and the ‘sole god’ on the other is a contradiction, should be reminded the existence of all the other ‘higher entities’ who surround the ‘sole god’ and share the same divine realm with him. These are described by the ‘belief systems of the Book’ as the superior and inferior angels, satans and demons.

The ‘sole god’ and the existence of angels around him since the time of the Sabian Belief system and Zoroastrianism are not seen as something conflicting with monotheism. The Old and New Testaments and Qoran is the proof of this.

Now we are ready to look into the Sabian belief system. The story of Abram/Abraham gives us the indications to the ‘Sabian’ belief system. Patriarch Abraham predates the Judaism (going back to 1900-1800 BC. according to the Jews, or to 2300 BC. according to the Arabs). Therefore his faith could not be later than the ‘belief systems of the book’ but on the contrary, earlier than all of them.

“Belief system of the Sabians is the oldest faith in ages and their language is the most widespread among the world languages ” writes Ibn Hazm (994?). In some Islamic sources the Syriac community is described as the oldest among others and the language of Adam and his sons is claimed to have been Syriac; the religion of this community is called the Sabian faith. Although it predates the ‘belief systems of the Book’ the Sabian belief system of the Syriacs could not be the oldest religion on earth. Sabians knew writing. They had works of civilization, and their belief system had borrowed many aspects of animism and totemism predating it. Sabian belief system has given its dogmas to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moslem scholars acknowledge this fact. Books of the Sabians are said to have included the stories of the creation, the forbidden tree, the nudity of Adam and the question of his covering himself, all of which also exist in the code books of Judaism and Islam.

Sabians believe in God. They believe that the good and the bad deeds by every person would be settled in another world after death. Therefore they feel obliged to stick to a proper conduct. This applies to the Jews and Moslems as well.

Here is what the Sabians think of their God according to Ibn Nadim (909-987?):

• The universe has an eternal reason (the first cause - God).
• It is the only one with no other .
• It does not proliferate.
• It does not take the character of the things it caused (created).
• It made compulsory the recognition of its Godhood for the ones - among the creatures it brought into being - who attained the ability to choose good from the bad (persons having wisdom).
• It has shown everybody the right way and sent them prophets to show them the right way.
• Prophets are under the obligation to demonstrate the evidence of God.
• God commanded the prophets to call everybody to His way which would make them happy; and to announce that everybody should save themselves from His wrath; those who heed His warnings would reach an endless blessing (paradise); those who do not heed His edicts would be penalized in proportion with what they deserved.”

This is basically what the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam thought also about their God. The underlined sections are some of the fundamentals of the God of Islam.

The origin of the Arabic namus (honour) is nomos, which means ‘law’ in Greek. Therefore the people of faith are accepted as having ‘honour’, in other words they are ‘honourable’. To find the clues to the origins of the ideas related to the concept of honour/namus of the ‘belief systems of the book’ and especially of Islam we have a book written by Zayn’ud Din Ibn’ul Verdi (Tetummet’ul Muhtasar Fi Akhbar’il Beşer), where he refers to a page that he has seen on ‘namus’/honour, which he says is of Sabian origin:

• “Refrain from doing anything to your brother that you would not like to have done to you.
• Do not boast, do not boast by mentioning your self and virtues.
• Do not swear oaths on God’s name when you are lying, and never start making vows right away to make someone believe.
• Stick to honesty so that in your words yes will be a real yes, and no will be a real no.
• Refrain from making liars swearing oaths on the name of God. Otherwise you will become a part of their sins, especially when you know that they will go back on their words.
• Refer everything in you and everybody to God who knows all the secrets. He will be to you a just judge and defender who shows you the solutions.
• Avoid uttering hollow, wrong and negative words.
• Do not cooperate with the persons who are lead astray.
• Do not joke too much and laugh too much.
• Do not criticize or reproach anybody. Do not utter negative words when you are angry, because this will put you in disgraceful situations and will bring on you shame and disregard, sin and trouble.
• He who conquers his anger, knows his word, purifies his thoughts, and keeps his self honest will be able to defeat all kinds of evil and wickedness.
• Be conscious of the blessing.
• Turn to piety.
• Make dignity and maturity your habit.
• Try to decorate yourself with good and agreeable manners.
• Be balanced in everything you do. Do not rush especially to punish the guilty.
• Each one of you should separate oneself immediately from those who take the wrong path, and does bad, strange things. One should not think that he might save himself while his relations with those persons continue. Let us suppose that he managed to cover up his doings in this world; but he should not feel the slightest of doubt that his guilt will come out into the open in front of verybody in the ‘day of religion’ (in the nether world).

The underlined sections are adopted by Islam,

..and here is how the Sabians addressed their God according to Omar Ibn’ul-Verdi (an Islamic historian):

“You are such an eternal being that all the chiefs and administrators depend on you. You are the God of all the creatures who are thought of and who exist in the region of senses. You are the chief of the worlds and the shepherd of ‘realms.’ You are the ‘Rabb’ of all the angels and their superiors. Wisdom originate from you and reach the governor of the earth. Because you are the first cause. Your might envelops all those who exist. You are a boundless ‘oneness.’ You are the unfathomable ‘one.’ You are the supervisor of the celestial sovereigns and the sources of light whose lights are eternal. You are the sovereign of sovereigns who dictates all the good and who forewarns of everything through revelations and signs. The creation and development of all the creatures is caused by you. The order takes the right path with your signal. The lights emanate only from you. You are the oldest cause existing before everything. We request you purify our selves (spirits). We wish to succeed in winning your blessings. Now and always. Till eternity. O! God who is pure of all kinds of pollution/blemish make our reason sound, and give us health free of all kinds of ailments. Turn our worries into joy. We take refuge in you only, and fear only you. We beg of you to let us succeed in expressing your immensity which could only be expressed by manifestations. This immensity cannot be expressed by words. Everybody and everything comes from you; everything and realization of every success depends on you. You are the desire and hope of the worlds. And you are the supporter of all mankind.”

The underlined sentences are the attributes of the God of Islam as designated by the believers. These sentences are almost identical with what a devout Moslem says in his/her daily recitation. The echoes here are of the ancient Greek thought, because the Syriac community which included the Sabians, was familiar with the ancient Greece as early as the Antiquity. When the Arabs were under the dark cover of ignorance and bigotry the Syriac community including the Sabians is claimed to have established the ties between the Arabs and the west which ended up in softening the Arab/Moslem thought.

Now a glance at how the Sabians practiced their faith:

• Sabians prayed three times daily; before sunrise, at noon, and at sunset. These were obligatory. Islam in the beginning also had three daily prayers. Qoran 11:114 orders: “Pray on the two sides of the day (meaning in the morning and the afternoon) and at the hours close to night.” According to Qoran 17:78-79 Moslems are again ordered to pray three times daily. Whereas a loose interpretation of 20:130 may be taken as an increase in the number of prayers. When we read 30:17-18 the number seems to be four: ..”when you enter the evening, when you reach the morning, at the end of the day and at noon.” But later on the number was increased to five times daily. Qoran 2:238 warn especially to “keep the middle prayer (the one at noon)”.
• Sabians had daily prayers with units, bowing down and prostration which is adopted by Islam. Sabians had three more prayers which were not obligatory but thought of ‘proper’ to perform.
• Sabians started their daily prayers by expressing their intention to pray, which is adopted by Islam.
• Their prayer at the funerals is without bowing down and prostration, which is adopted by Islam.
• Sabians had the ‘call’ to prayer, which is adopted by Islam.
• Sabians of Haran turned to the north pole while praying. While there were other Sabians who turned to Ka’ba. Islam adopted also this practice of turning towards a certain direction, and established ‘Al-Kuds’ (Jerusalem) as the direction to turn to in the beginning, and when Mohamed was enraged by the behaviour of the Jews, he changed the direction to Ka’ba (Qoran 2:142-150).
• Sabians needed purification of the body before each prayer. In other words, an ablution; the general word for cleanliness/purification is called ‘taharoth’ in Judaism and ‘taharat’ in Islam.
• Sabian belief system necessitated ablution also following a sexual intercourse. Sabians were obliged to immerse themselves fully in the flowing water to get this bodily cleaning. Both ablution before each prayer by either water or clean earth, and the full-body cleaning is adopted by Islam (Qoran 4:43; 5:6).
• Urinating, passing bowels, breaking wind, and bleeding of the nose necessitated ablution in the Sabian belief system. This practice (when sick, when travelling, after urinating or passing bowels, after touching women) is adopted by Islam. Sabians had to clean themselves after touching a woman having a period, and touching a woman in the forty-day period following the childbirth.
• There is fasting in the Sabian belief system. It lasts a lunar month. This period is tied to the movement of the Moon. Their rule is ‘see the moon and start fasting, see the moon and start rejoicing.’ Islam borrowed the period of fasting, and the rule of ‘fasting-rejoicing’ cycle exactly. Qoran says nothing definite about the period of fasting in 2:184-187. Islam maintains that the period of fasting, Ramadan, was the period when Qoran was thought to have been given to Mohamed. But Qoran 97:2 says that Qoran was revealed on the night of ‘Qadr’, which may be taken as the initiation of the revelation. The revealing of Qoran is said to have started sometime in the years 609-10-11. The Book is said to have been completed over a period of 20-25 years (Fahr-al-din Razi says 23 years). Its your choice.
• Islamic scholars, especially Ab-ul Fida, writes that Sabians showed great respect towards the ‘House of God’ in Mecca and the Temple in Haran and visited them periodically, which is adopted by Islam in the form of yearly Hacc (Qoran 2.158; 3:97; 22:26-29).
• Some orientalists point out that amongst the traditions of Hacc as accepted by Islam, there exist customs originating from the ceremonies of the sun cult. They claim that the ‘stoning of the devil’ adopted by Islam has originated from the practice of driving away the ‘ifrit’ (jinn, satan) which pesters the sun. Visiting the site of a god has its origins in the days of totemism and primal religions. Ka’ba was most probably a sun temple and people were paying periodical visits to this place already before the arrival of Islam.
• Sabians have sacrificial offerings. They use the name ‘Rabb’ especially for the Moon God Sin. It is clear that Sin symbolizes the true ‘sole God’. One kind of sacrificial offering, ‘offering of the first-born’ child, is very important in the Sabian belief system. Here let us refresh our memories on messenger Abraham and his attempt to offer his son Isaac. Abraham’s making an altar, arranging the logs in an orderly fashion, then tying up his son and laying him down on this pile of wood is in full compliance with the Sabian tradition (Check the pages on Abraham in this site). Therefore if Abraham has really attempted to sacrifice his son (Isaac is the name given in the Old Testament), it must have been because of his faith. Being a Sabian he had to comply with the tradition. Islam adopted this story but Qoran gives the son’s name as Ishmael. The reason behind this discrepancy is the fact that Ishmael’s name is given in Talmud, which is not a divine(!) book but an authoritative source that deals in the main with legal matters, halakhot, which is based on the Oral Law (Mishnah); and the non-legal part of it is called the haggadah (‘saying’, ‘narrative’) because it includes the written form of the oral tradition and commentaries on it. Therefore the writers of Qoran must have considered the Talmud as a divine book, and borrowed this version of the story. This practice of blood-spilling, in the form of human or animal sacrifice (which appears as a rule in the code books of Judaism and Islam also) is from the days of darkness which Spenta Mainyu is trying to lead you out. It is the most primitive way of expecting a favorable response from a higher entity the existence of which is visualized by the mankind.
• There is ‘swearing on something’ in the Sabian Belief System. The God of Qoran likes very much to swear on many things like we read in Qoran 79:1-9; 91:1-8 and 95:1-3. Especially 91:1-8 is important because there we have the God of Islam swearing on the sun, the light of the sun in mid-morning, the moon, the night etc. Can you imagine the ‘most high’, ‘the almighty’ taking oaths on the beings he has created? I can’t. This must be a remnant from Abraham’s belief system - star worship/Sabianism - which the writers of Qoran must have overlooked while writing the Book. The verse in Qoran 16:63 is unbelievable, where God of Islam swears on Allah!
• The Sabians in Haran and those Sabians which tow the line of Haran believe in the marriage with a single women. But among the Sabians elsewhere, marriage with more than one women is possible if ‘all the women are treated equally.’ Christianity adopted the first solution; ancient Judaism and Islam adopted the second solution. This expression, ‘if all the women are treated equally’ is borrowed intact by Islam (Read Qoran 4:3).
• Marriage bond in Sabianism was finalized in front of witnesses. Islam has borrowed this rule.
• Adultery is one of the fundamental prohibitions in the Sabian belief system. Judaism and likewise Islam have set very heavy penalties including death for adultery and all kinds of sexual acts (Qoran 4:15-16,19, 24-25; 5:5; 17:32; 24:2-11, 33; 25:68; 60:12; 65:1; 70:29-31).
• Among the Sabians living in Haran and the Sabians who recognize the authority of Haran, divorce is considered impossible without adultery or without the concrete proof of it. But for those Sabians among whom ownership is understood to have developed, theft, not washing during menstruation and not carrying out daily prayers were also considered as causes for divorce. In addition to adultery Islam cites some more reasons like disgust and aversion in 4:19-20; and open shamelessness in 65:1.
• Circumcision is a very important social imperative among Hanifs/Hanifiyya/Hunefa (This is how Sabians are called in Qoran. The term Sabian appears in Qoran also) who are recognised as the ‘people of the Book’ by Qoran, and also called as the ‘Sabians of Abraham’. This Sabian practice of circumcision is adopted exactly by Islam.
• There are animals the flesh of which are forbidden to eat according to the Sabian belief system. These are all kinds of carcasses; all animals killed without the blood flowing out; all kinds of carnivors with two canine teeth; especially pigs and dogs, birds of prey and donkeys. When we come to Islam, carcasses, blood, pig, and those animals which are not slaughtered in the name of God are ‘haram/herem’ (Qoran 2:173; 5:3). The pig ban predates the Old Testament. It has its origin in the Sabian belief system. Another possible origin is a totem ban. Pig is a totem animal. That is why this animal should not be killed, and its flesh should not be consumed (Check the page on Taboo and Totemism in this site). According to Herodotus, in Egypt pig was the animal of a god who was the enemy of Osiris. And that God was actually called ‘pig.’ It was the God of night and evil. So pig meat prohibition may also be deriving from the realm of totems and taboos and has nothing to do with the trichina worm. Prohibition of eating the blood is the ‘animism’ taboo of the primitive communities. The God of Hebrews prohibits the eating of the blood and the reason is given in the Old Testament (Leviticus 17:11): “For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul.” So that’s that! The taboo left over from animism has become a taboo for the Sabians and Hebrews, and Qoran has adopted it.
• Interest, and interest-based-profits are definitely banned in the Sabian belief system. This ban was taken over by the writers of the Old Testament. The orthodox Jews classified as outcasts the murderers, thieves, extortionist and prostitutes, as well as those involved in organizing gambling, those who had purchased the right to collect taxes, and those who lent money and charged interest. The writers of Qoran inserted the ban on interest into their belief system (Qoran 2:275-278; 3:130). Here we need to explain what is not allowed and what should be acceptable. This interest, or interest-based-profit is called ‘ribâ ’ in Arabic. This practice called ribâ incurred a disproportionate responsibility on the borrower when it was time to pay the interest. Since this disproportionate part was not in return for something ‘real’ it is decreed haram/herem and is banned. In the Arab community before Islam a person who was unable pay back in time had to pay a second ribâ . Thus he was made to pay more than he borrowed. This made the rich richer, and the poor poorer. Today the interest paid by the banks in return for deposits has nothing to do with this. Money has a cost. Those who use this money for their purposes must pay the cost. Today’s interest is this cost of money, it has nothing to do with the Arabs’ ribâ .

Around 4000 BC. writing was invented in Sumer. Some of the basic characteristics of the present day ‘belief systems of the book’ were instituted there. Then came the Semitic Akkads. In 2000 BC. Amorites destroyed the Sumer-Akkad civilisation. They established Babylon as their capital city, and 500 years later Assyrians settled in near-by Ashur, and in the end invaded Babylon in 800 BC. What is called ‘the Babylonian tradition’ was established, which had a deep influence on the myths of Canaan. Canaan was Israel’s ‘Promised Land.’ Like all the peoples of the region Babylonians as well tied their development and the cultural level they achieved to their gods. They believed that these gods have revealed and taught their order to the mythical ancestors of the Sumerians. According to them Babylon was an exact reflection of the divine order, the palaces in the city were the exact copies of the palaces of the gods. People living in the city of Babylon felt themselves in touch with the divine power (The concept of a ‘sacred city’ was adopted by the Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well). They preferred to believe that there was a divine connection between the order out there and the order here on earth. This connection was celebrated every year at the New Year Festivals. The tradition was formed at 1700 BC. The celebrations were held in the sacred month of Nisan (April) in Babylon. Babylon’s civilization depended on the sacred mana - the sacred power. On the fourth day of the festival Enuma Elish would be read at the Great Temple because Enuma Elish was thought to be the appropriate account of the creation. This Assyro-Babylonian ‘creation’ story is now the first chapter of the Genesis story in the Old Testament.

It is exciting to follow the circulation of ideas and works among the ancient civilizations from Sumer to Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Hurrites, and Aramaeans. It is clear that Sumerians had no influence on Hebrews, because they left the stage of history long before the arrival of Hebrews. But we meet the traces of the Sumerian concepts in the Old Testament, because Sumerians had a deep influence on the Canaanites, who are the predecessors of Jews in Palestine. This is the factor behind the similarities between the Sumerian texts and the Old Testament. This phenomenon, cultures deriving certain aspects from each other, applies to the concept of god as well. Therefore we must discuss the Canaanite deities who are the immediate predecessors of the Hebrew God, or rather Gods (You will see why). Why Hebrew God you might ask? Because the Mosaic belief system had two concepts of god, one before the Babylonian exile and the other following the exile; an anthropomorphic god before and a transcendent and omnipotent one after; this came about with the intervention by Ezra the priest.

Assyria-Babylonia is our next stop.

• Babylonian God Shamash has the supreme authority.
• Babylonian God is involved in the destiny of mankind.
• Every person has daily prayers to God Shamash (‘Shams’ in Arabic, meaning the ‘Sun’).
• Each and every Assyrian and Babylonian had his/her own God. The relationship between the believer and the personal God was direct, and there were no intercessors/intermediaries. People would present their problems to their personal gods, and become a headache for this personal God if they decided that they were given the cold shoulder.
• Babylonians were the first to take a step towards monotheism but the operation involved only the names. They gave the names of 50 Sumerian gods to their God Marduk which they had invented The God of Islam in like manner has 99 names.

THE 'SOL INVICTUS' MITHRA  - THE UNCONQUERABLE SUN MITHRA

The cult of Mithra took its final shape in the Eastern Asia Minor (Anatolia) where the Persian traditions survived the longest.

• Mithra was probably subordinate both to the first principle Zurvan Akarana (infinite time) and to Ahura Mazda. Mithra as the creator and mediator between man and the higher gods was clearly the chief deity of the cult as practised.
• Ahriman-Angra Mainyu was the power of death and darkness, who was perhaps regarded as the prince of this world.
• Mithra became the creator of life, and by his other exploits he was its protector against evil.
• Mithraism professed to explain the origins of the universe and also its end; and Mithra who had created once and was now man’s defender and helper, would in those final days inaugurate a new order in which the faithful would enjoy forever a blessed immortality (This story appears in Christianity as the coming of the Messiah, and in Islam as the appearance of Mahdi).
• Mithra like other oriental supreme beings offered man deliverance, but unlike such others as Attis and Osiris also served as an ideal, a heroic leader for man to follow and be more successful in the struggle against evil.
• Mithra is not mentioned in the Gathas. Which shows that he was deliberately ignored in the monotheistic reforms of Zoroaster-Zarathustra. Later Zoroasrianism found room for him but only as a subordinate to the ‘supreme god’ Ohrmazd/Ahura Mazda/Hormuz.

The Avestan hymns, the scriptures of Zoroastrianism, depict Mithra as;

Vedic India worshipped Mithras (the Indian version of Mithra) as;

• a patron of human relationships,
• the preserver of heaven and earth
• a combatant of lies and error.

In Persia Mithra,

• was the messenger of Ahura Mazda, the god of light, he appeared in the sky at dawn and then crossed the firmament in a chariot drawn by four white horses (this is Sun),
• was visualized as a mediator between the worlds of light and darkness, as humanity’s ally in the struggle against evil and as the soul’s guide in its ascent to eternal life,
• was soon identified as the redeemer prophesied by Zarathustra as the Sun-god who would appear as a human being at the end of time (Here is the source of the concept of the Messiah in Christianity and the Mahdi in Islam).
• finally became the supreme godhead and started his triumphal progress across the greco-roman world - at the same time as the Buddhist saviour Maitreya in the East.

According to Buddhism Maitreya (the Buddhist version of Mithra),

• is the saviour of the Buddhists whose future coming was promised by Sakyamuni.
• as a name is related to the Aramaic meshia-the Messiah that the Jews continue to hope for as their Saviour. Both Maitreya and meshia/Messiah are expected to come in the future to save the mankind and establish the ‘divine’ rule. Used as a personal name Maitreya means ‘Son of Mithra’. Like Maitreya, Mithras is said to be waiting in heaven for the end of time, when he will descend to earth to awaken the dead and pass judgment. The legend does not specify whether this birth is a past or future event.

GOD OF ABRAM - EL, RABB, EL SHADDAI, HAY, YHWH, AL-LAH OR ALLAH?

In Mesopotamia and Sumer everyone had a personal God. Every family had a special God (Please check the pages on Sumerian myths, Mesopotamian myths, Sabianism, and Prophet Abraham in this site). This rule must have applied also to Abram/Abraham the Patriarch, and he must have had a ‘personal supreme overseer’ when arrived in the land of Canaan to whom his supposed children referred as ‘Our father’s God’ and/or ‘Abraham’s God’. Let us look into this personal supreme overseer of Abram:

• This supreme overseer shows himself either in a human form or in a dream. He is an anthropomorphic god, in other words he is a human-like being.
• Tribes and individuals in the pre-Islamic era in the region have reportedly established a blood tie with their supreme overseers by making a sacrifices.
• Tribes wished to worship and made that supreme entity either the ancestor or the supreme overseer of that tribe.
• People had the habit of putting the statue or image of that supreme overseer in a special place in their homes and used it as an intermediary in their prayers (This practice continues in Christianity with the cross, and the icons, statues, and images of Jesus and Miryam).
• Each tribal supreme overseer stayed in its place as the tribe moved to another site. All the tribes worshipped their supreme overseers and also those belonging to other tribes.
• When a tribe moved to another site, they adopted the supreme overseer of that site. And the tribe which moved to another place used to come back once a year at their festivals to visit their previous supreme overseer. (Keeping in mind the connection between Abram and Islam as claimed by the Arab Prophet, the yearly ‘Hacc’ of the Moslems could be the continuation of this practice established long long ago when people came back periodically to Ka’ba to visit the stone, ‘Al-Hadjar Al-Aswad’). The most peculiar thing is that, this concept of a ‘personal supreme overseer’ continues even in the monotheist Qoran, in the form of all kinds of angels but the prominent ones are as follows:

- ‘Guardian angels’ (Qoran 6:61; 13:11; 72:8; especially 82:10 is very expressive where it is written: “There is no doubt that there are guardians and sentries on you.” But the best is 86:4: “There does not exist a being upon whom there does not exist a guardian.”);

- ‘guiding and helping angels’ (3:124-125; 9:26,40; 33:9,43; 41:30; 66:4);

          - ‘recording angels’ (Qoran - 3:18; 4:166; 34:40-41; 43:80; 50:17-18; 70:4);

          - ‘killer angels’ (4:97; 6:61, 93; 7:37; 8:50; 16:28-33; 32:11; 47:27).

This personal God of Abram calls himself “I am the Almighty God, walk before me and be perfect” in Genesis 17. Genesis 28:2 has the God of Abram say: “..And God Almighty bless you..” We know that erecting stones is a Canaanite practice. Suddenly we read that members of the Abram’s family start erecting stones. If we have to go by what is written in Genesis 28:12-22, Jacob has a dream where Lord calls himself “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac”. Dream goes on, Jacob rises early in the morning, sets a stone for a pillar, pours oil on top of it, and calls the name of that place Beth-EL (House of EL).. But we are told that the alleged God of Abram is jealous of other Gods, especially the local Gods, of which EL is the most famous one. So, EL must have been the god of Jacob. When we reach Genesis 31:11 we read that Jacob was dreaming again and the ‘angel of God’ speaks to him. In 31:13 this ‘angel of God’ calls himself the “God of Beth-EL, where you anointed the pillar” (would you believe this story of this jealous God giving His arch rival’s name as His?). The writers of the Old Testament must have made a mistake. If he was the God of Abram, he should not have associated himself with EL. But he did. So who was this God? In Genesis 35:9-14 God appears to Jacob again, calling himself the ‘God Almighty’ and changes Jacob’s name to Israel etc. Jacob sets up a (stone) pillar in the place where he talks with him, and he pours a drink offering and oil thereon, and Jacob calls the name of the place where God spoke to him, Beth-EL. In Genesis 32:9 Jacob calls the supreme being as the “God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac”. In Genesis 33:18-20 we read that Jacob comes to Shalem, buys a plot of land, pitches his tent, and erects an altar there, and calls it ‘EL-elohe-Israel ’ (Israel’s Lord EL). One would have thought that this name would be infuriating for YHWH and Israel, but apparently it is not, because all these stories are invented and the editors of the Old Testament were not attentive even to the fundamental points). Here, the Canaanite God EL (Baal/Bel) becomes Isra-EL’s God. In Genesis 35:1 God commands Jacob to go to Beth-EL and dwell there and “make an altar there unto God that appeared to you when you fled from Esau your brother.” Here the supreme being is the one which showed itself to Jacob.

There were personal Gods, family Gods, tribal Gods, national Gods, regional Gods, and the Gods of the nations living in the lands around this region. Genesis 46:1 and 48:15 also refer the the God of Isaac and Abraham. Rachel’s story in Genesis 31:34 also tell us that there were personal and family gods around.

We cannot be sure of the name Abram has given to his supreme overseer but we may look into the attributes of this god. If Abram was a Sabian then his god could have been called Rabb with the attributes cited in relation to what the Sabians visualized their God according to Ibn Nadim.

According to the Sabians’ address to their god, He,

• is an eternal being
• is the God of all the creatures who are thought of and who exist in the region of senses.
• is the chief of the worlds and the shepherd of ‘realms.’
• is the ‘Rabb’ of all the angels and their superiors.
• is the first cause.
• is pure of all kinds of pollution
• is the oldest cause existing before everything.
• is a boundless ‘oneness.’
• is the unfathomable ‘one.’
• is the supervisor of the celestial sovereigns and the sources of light whose lights are eternal.
• is the sovereign of sovereigns who dictates all the good and who forewarns of everything through revelations and signs.
• is the one whose might envelops all those who exist.
• is the one who caused the creation and development of all the creatures.
• is the one upon whose signal the order takes the right path.
• is the one who is the only source of lights.
• is the one whose immensity could only be expressed through manifestations. This immensity cannot be expressed by words.
• is the source of everybody and everything.
• is the one upon whom everything and realization of every success depend.
• is the desire and hope of the worlds. He is the supporter of all mankind.
• is the source of wisdom which reaches the governor of the earth.

These are almost exactly the attributes of the God of Islam.

Sometimes another name confronts us: ‘hay’. This name appears also in Islam. According to Islamic reference books ‘hay/hayy’ means, alive, living, everliving, robust, vigorous. When Abram took his female slave Hagar and her son out to the desert and left them there, the son was thirsty, Hagar found water in a well there and called that well ‘Beer la-hay’ or ‘Hay’s well ’. Moslems call this ‘Zemzem well’. Canaanites’ sacrificing their children to the God Baal in a river bed, in a pit or by the head of a sacred well, was an ancient and widespread practice. According to some researchers the well called ‘Beer la-hay/Zemzem’ could well have been one of those wells. In Samuel 14:39 we see the expression, “for the sake of the ever-living God’ which tells us that this supreme entity is ‘hay’. In Hosea 1:10 we read: “You are the sons of the living God.” Here the ‘living God’ gives the meaning of ‘hay’. In Hosea 4:15 Rabb/God/Lord orders: “Do not swear on the name of God who is hay.” According to Hosea 1:10 God has become a tribal God, and he is trying to stop the believers from swearing on the name of Abram’s personal God. Moslems have the same practice: swearing oaths on the name of Allah, or the casual usage of the name of Allah is forbidden. Is ‘hay’ a name or an attribute? Don’t forget, Israel’s God is Islam’s God. The God of the The Old Testament is the God of Qoran. The names are different: Rabb, YHWH, Elohim, Al-lah, Allah.. That’s all!

So let us check Qoran. The name/attribute ‘hay’ appears also in Qoran as ‘Hayy’ in 2:255: “There is no other God accept Allah.. He is Hayy, ever-living. He is Qayyum, source of unlimited authority.” According to this expression ‘hayy’ is an attribute and means ‘alive-vigorous’. There is another name in the Old Testament: ‘Shaddai’ (El Shaddai means ‘EL of the Mountain’). It means ‘of the mountains’. This must be an Akkadian name brought by Abram’s family from Mesopotamia. The Abram family brought with them, their local moon-God Sin’s wife Ningal and this name was deteriorated to Nikkal at their destination. Sin does not exist in Canaan, because there is another moon-God there: Yarih.

Exodus 6:2 tells us the story of how the writers of the Old Testament transformed Abram’s personal God to a ‘God of the nation’. This God declares elsewhere in the Old Testament that he was the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac. So the authors of the Old Testament seem to be in an effort to link YHWH with Abraham’s God to establish a continuity in time, which was done by the Arab prophet, Mohamed as well. This God will become a ‘sole’ and ‘universal’ God later on.

Qoran 14 has the story of Abraham, but apart from a few details the story is re-written with manyfacets presenting the story from Islamic angle.

CANAANITE GODS - IL, EL, BEL, BAAL, ETC. A MULTITUDE..

Now we are in Palestine in the land of Canaan. The first and foremost supreme deities we meet there are EL and Baal which are the prototypes of YHWH.

Ugarit lay within the sphere of influence of both Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations, and these north Canaanite myths show clear signs of both Akkadian-Babylonian and Egyptian mythologies. But the Babylonian mythologies have a dominant influence. It has also been established that Canaanite mythology has left distinct traces in Hebrew poetry and mythology. The Ugaritic texts were instrumental in our understanding of the Canaanite belief systems. The people living in the land of Canaan were western Semites. They had numerous ‘supreme beings.’

• El (Canaanite version of the Sumerian Enlil) is the chief God. He is called ‘Bull EL’, the Father of the Gods..
• Elohim of the Old Testament is a parallel entity to Ilani in the Nuzi texts, and means the figure of the ‘God of the household’ or teraphim. EL is ILU in Akkadian. IL in Canaan is also EL and ILU. El is; EL/Elohim in Hebrew, EL/Elah in Aramaic, IL among southern Arabs, el-Lah among classic Arabs (in later periods it was changed to Allah of our day).
• EL’s wife is Asherah the lady of the sea.
• EL married his three sisters, one of whom was Astarte/Ashtoreth, the wife of EL and mother of gods, she is frequently referred to in the Old Testament as Ashtaroth.
• EL not only killed his brother but also his own son: He cut off his daughter’s head, castrated his father, castrated himself and compelled his confederates to do the same.
• In Canaan in those days the cult of sensuality was regarded as the worship of the gods, men and women prostitutes were accepted as ‘sacred’ by the followers of the religion, the rewards for their ‘services’ went into the temple treasuries as ‘offerings for the God.’ It was only natural for the Old Testament gods and later on for YHWH to come out against the fertility cults and the general sensual indulgence of the peoples of the region.
• The despised and accursed religion of ancient Canaan has helped us reach a new understanding of Biblical statements about the religion of the Patriarchs. The Biblical fathers called upon,

- El-Elyon (the ‘all highest’),

- El-Olam (the ‘ancient of ancients’ - the ‘eternal’),

- El-Roy (‘he who appears’, ‘he who sees me’ )

- El-Shaddai (‘the highest’ or ‘the almighty’ - the ‘God of the mountain’ )

on various occasions. But in actual fact, their prayers were directed, as many scholars believe, to the chief Canaanite God EL’s local variants.

• El and Baal were the divine kings of the Canaanite Pantheon. They were later replaced by YHWH, the God of the ‘chosen people’ of the Old Testament. Yet there were certain differences. EL was static, at rest, unapproachable, while Baal in contrast was dynamic, active, actual. It is obvious that the God of the Old and New Testaments, beside whom there was no place for another God, even in a subservient role, was naturally incompatible with the myth which had numerous other gods.
• EL’s son is called Baal, the god of fertility. Baal is the God of rain and storm. Baal is called also the ‘rider of the clouds and provider of rain’ and the ‘ruler of the earth.’ (The God of wisdom in Sumer, En-ki, carries the same title).
• Baal is equal of the sky-God whose name is An in Sumer and Anu in Akkad. Baal has three daughters. Pidai (light), Arsal (earth and ground), Talai (humidity and ground). These three daughters were thought to have been borrowed by the pre-Islamic Arabs as Lat, Manat, and Uzza - daughters of the God.
• As the god of lightning and thunder Baal is sometimes called Hadad, who is the equivalent of Adad in Sumer and Akkad. Adad burns because he uses the lightning and is benevolent because he brings rain.
• According to a myth castrated priests clothed like a woman used to serve Hadad and the fertility Goddess Atargathei (Astarte) accompanying him in the Temple built over a rift into which flowed the waters of the Flood.
• Baal’s wife is Anath the Goddess of war (She is called Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar in Akkad, Anat or Astarte in Canaan, Athar in southern Arabia, and Astar in Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia).
• Athar and Astar are male and the rest are female This must be due to the character of the societies. The Arab and Abyssinian societies are patriarchal. Canaanite societies were matriarchal, and fertility cult is very important, like Sumer.
• There is the god of seas and rivers, Yam-Nahar. There is a feud between Baal and Yam-Nahar. El favors Yam-Nahar and Baal revolts against his father El. Other figures are, the craftsman-god Kothar-u-Khasis; the son-goddess often called the torch of the gods Shapash (the Ugaritic form of the Akkadian Shamash); This Baal myth was taken over by the Hebrew mythology and Baal was transferred to YHWH, when they settled in Canaan. Yam-Nahar represents the hostile aspect of the sea and rivers, while Baal is the beneficient aspect as rain.
• In another form of the myth Baal’s victory over the forces of disorder and chaos is depicted as the killing of the seven-headed dragon Lotan (Lotan is the Leviathan of the Old Testament). Baal declares his supremacy and announces that he will not send tribute to EL’s new favourite, the god Mot, the god of sterility and the underworld. The next episodes of this myth are all about the conflict between Baal and Mot. Baal is the God of life, Mot is the God of death. They are in perpetual conflict. When Baal dies Mot is born; when Baal is born Mot dies. This repeats itself every seven years. With Baal there is abundance, with Mot there is famine. This new conflict also symbolizes the threat posed by the encroachment of the barren steppe - personified by Mot - to the fertile earth. So the underlying theme was nature, fertility, and agriculture.
• There is another god, Sheol the god of underworld. We meet his name again in the Old Testament as the name of the Jewish ‘nether-world’.
• All the Canaanite belief systems are based on the fertility cult. Prostitutes dedicated to the fertility Goddess were working at the Temples of the fertility Goddess in Canaan. There were also male priests wearing woman’s clothes in these Temples. Priestesses working as prostitutes, and homosexual males were present in the Temples in Sumer. These prostitutes had to cover their heads. It is known also that in the earlier periods there were whores among the Jews, some of whom were having sexual intercourse in the name of God. (Hence the orders in Deuteronomy 23:17: “There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel”; and 23:18: “You shall not bring the hire of a whore (..) into the house of the Lord your God.”) These Jewish prostitutes used to cover their faces and their bodies with a veil/vail.

So this is the Canaanite stew of gods and their names. It looks complicated, but it is not. Look around yourself, follow the seasons, watch the rain and storms, add the sexual urges to that mixture, assign each of them a character, put yourself right in the middle of this stage, and start producing scenarios. You’ll definitely end up with something like the Canaanite cults.

GOD OF ZARATHUSTRA - AHURA MAZDA, THE LORD OF LIGHT

Zarathustra’s belief system and his supreme creator is very important from the angle of the Abrahamic-Semitic belief systems, because the fundamentals of this system were borrowed,

- by Ezra the priest when he was re-writing certain sections of the Old Testament;

- by Paul when he was writing his letters and establishing the basics of Paulinism (Christianity);

- by the authors of the code book of Islam.

Zarathustra/Zoroaster’s teachings are linked to Mithraism. Mithra is the ancient Persian god of light. So a comparison with the closely related Vedic belief system will give us an idea. Vedic Indians have Indo-Iranian origins as well. The first thing we know is that the Indo-Iranian belief system was polytheistic.

• Among the supreme beings called daivas or devas in Sanskrit (‘heavenly ones’) there were those (like Mithra and Varuna) called ‘lords’ or Asuras (Ahuras in Iranian) who had distinct ethical personalities. These supreme beings were established in accordance with the caste system in the society and each one of them was the supreme overseer of a caste.
• Zarathustra rejected the cults of all the supreme beings accept Asura (Ahura in Iranian) and Ahura Mazda who is transcendent, immanent and impersonal. In his transcendence he is beyond all creation, yet the cosmos depends upon him for existence. In his immanence he is within all creation. But he is not identical with that creation. Creation is not his body. He has no spatial position. Moslems will be able to detect their ‘supreme creator’s basic characteristics in this definition.
• Zaratusthra thought that the belief in the supreme entity should be an extremely intense personal experience - like his - and should not require priestly interpretations, so he sacked all the priests This belief shows itself in Islam - exactly as it was formulated by Zarathustra. There is no class of priests in Islam, and the ‘belief system’ does not allow any intercessor between the human being and the supreme creator. Although that is changed to a considerable extent and heads of Islamic sects and groupings, and powerful and convincing imams became in actual fact the intercessors between the believer and the believed; they are showing the way; they are interpreting the divine(!) message as if Qoran is not there as the code book of their belief system. The Arab nationalism and imperialism is the main culprit behind this situation.
• Zarathustra is said to have had seven revelations or ‘visions from up there.’ Many of these visions were brought by angels and archangels which later had similar functions(!) in Judaism and Islam. These visions formed the basis of his belief system.
• Zoroastrianism is the belief system of Ahura Mazda who is the one and only source of creation, a creation that has neither beginning nor end.
• Zarathustra declared that one all-wise lord and sovereign ruler of universe (Ahura Mazda) was the sole creator and sustainer of creation.
• Ahura Mazda is eternal, not created, wise, good, benevolent, and just. He is the creator of all the spiritual and material worlds.
• The wise and all-seeing God of Zarathustra could see(!) everyone’s heart(!), and could talk not only to the priests but to everybody. This belief about heart being all-important and the seat of conscience comes from Sumer. This ‘conversing supreme being’ later on progressed towards a distant, separate, unreachable etc. creator and overseer.
• In him the primal pre-cosmic twin spirits of good or righteousness and evil (Angra Mainyu-Druj-Ahriman) meet in a higher unity.
• The eternal polarism however was not originally cosmic or absolute dualism of good and evil because the twin spirits had no independent existence apart from Ahura Mazda and in the end his righteous will was destined to prevail.
• But in later Avestan (Zend/Zand Avesta) literature Ahura Mazda is considered to be the creator of only that which is good. He is in perpetual conflict with Ahriman, now considered to be the creator of all that is evil. Ahriman is represented by a serpent.
• The existence of evil in Zoroastrianism is formulated by the two sons of Ahura Mazda choosing good or evil at creation. This is the dualism aspect of the belief system. Spenta Mainyu chose the ‘good’ and was associated with life, truth and justice. Angra Mainyu (lie) chose the evil and was associated with destruction, injustice and death which are all related to evil.
• Having good and evil at creation opposing each other leads us to dualism, which is the main characteristic of Zoroastrianism. Zarathustra has preached and spread monotheism. But uncertainty and the real debate starts at this point: Was the evil spirit (Angra Mainyu) primordial? In other words did it exist before time, thus an equal of Ahura Mazda? Because Ahura Mazda did exist before time as the creator of all? Or was Spenta Mainyu the opposite and equal of the evil spirit Angra Mainyu? Both Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu are at a lower level than Ahura Mazda, then if Spenta Mainyu represents the good spirit in mankind, Angra Mainyu must be the evil side of mankind.
• The first notion (Angra Mainyu being primordial) takes us to a pure cosmic dualism, which makes both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu not created, eternal, and the opposite of each other. Consequently good and evil are primordial powers, which existed before time. They are in a constant conflict with each other.
• Furthermore, since man was created in supreme being’s image, and supreme being would not create evil, man cannot be evil by nature. Evil is external and manifests itself in the shape of Angra Mainyu.
• Second notion (Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu being equal and created) leads us to an ethical dualism. It presupposes monotheism. Ahura Mazda is supreme, the Highest Light. All that is good emanates from Ahura Mazda. Evil is produced by human activity and is called Angra Mainyu. So this is a moral dualism existing in the human mind only.
• Dualism exists in man’s daily life and it is about the choice he must make between two moral directions. Many people consider this definition and understanding as the real Zoroastrianism. They say that dualism is ethical, the only creator is the supreme being (Ahura Mazda), those who were created has to decide between the two opposites - good and evil, and this dualism manifests itself in physical and intellectual spheres.
• Zarathustra had rejected all the other Ahuras. Around Ahura Mazda (the father of gods) there were six Amesha Spentas - divine entities also called as the ‘Beneficient (or Holy) Immortal Ones’ or ‘Bounteous Immortals’. These divine entities also appear as archangels and angels in the Old Testament and in Qoran.
• All of these qualities are also present in the world and in the human spirit. The seventh one Ahura Mazda created was the sacred spirit, Spenta Mainyu, who was in reality the greatest of all powers, the Sublime Constructive Force.
• Spenta Mainyu is the driving force behind constructiveness, creativity and positiveness, and these are shared only with the human spirit. If these qualities are shared only with the human spirit and Spenta Mainyu’s association in nature is man then man becomes a co-creator (Since he was associated with man in nature, here may be the origin of the Islamic belief that man is the pinnacle of creation. What do you think?). In other words, as it is summarized by the priests in every mass, Spenta Mainyu represented the god incarnate in man (can you detect the possible origin of the holy spirit in Christianity and Jesus’ descending to earth as god incarnate in man?). If mankind is the co-creator and has the free will, then obeying Asha (The set of rules for living a life in line with God’s eternal law) is obligatory. What is this Asha? It is “the law, eternal and immutable, that governs both the physical and spiritual realms. Selfless service for the preservation and development of the world is essential. The ultimate aim is to remove injustice, inequality and evil from the earth by battling ignorance which is the source of all error.” Failing to do that will bring evil to the world. It means that every man and woman has to make a choice between the good and evil.
• Zarathustra preached that earth would be destroyed shortly as a result of a huge conflagration, only those following the ‘good’ would survive and take part in the ‘recreation’.
• Man is the crowning act of creation (Islam upholds this idea as well), the whole cycle of existence having been called into being to enable him to soar higher and higher and at last enjoy eternal bliss.
• Those who do good deeds will undoubtedly rise to the sky, and those who chose the evil deeds and evil thoughts will inevitably fall to the hell.
• There is agreement in two matters: Man is a co-worker with the supreme being and ultimately good will triumph over evil. In daily lives application of dualism boils down to a moral choice.
• Zarathustra declared that the ‘Wise Lord’ should be worshipped by virtuous acts and not by meaningless ceremonies; by selfless love and not by the spilling of the blood. These points are all shared by Islam except the animal sacrifices.
• This is what Ahura Mazda thought of Zarathustra, as it is told in the scriptures: “O Zarathustra! I have created no one better than you in the world, and I shall likewise not create one better after you are gone. You are my chosen one and I have made this world apparent on account of you.” Here one can detect the possible origins of the ideas of ‘chosen’ prophets and ‘chosen’ peoples, like we see in Hebrew and Islamic mythologies.
• Zarathustra took care to separate mythology and theology. But he preserved the presentation of fire. Because fire was the symbol of truth, order, and the original light of god. Ahura Mazda within the ‘light’ and Angra Mainyu down below in ‘darkness’ ruled in Zurvan Akarana (endless time).
• Ahura Mazda always created ‘good’ and Angra Mainyu-Ahriman ‘evil.’
• There would be a moral deterioration following the death of Zarathustra. In the end of one of the sons of Zarathustra would come as a saviour. Do you want to know how? Well! Ahura Mazda would impregnate three virgins one at a time, who would bathe in the very same lake where his seeds were preserved. The son of the first virgin would be a ‘messenger’ and would put things right in a short period of time. A second ‘messenger’ would come after him and a third and last ‘messenger’ would follow. The third and the last saviour, Saoshyant-Saoshyans will bring about the final judgement. At his time dead would rise out of their tombs.
• Then the last war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu would start. The God of evil would be destroyed and Ahura Mazda would be supreme.
• The greatest opponents of the dualist Mazdaist-doctrine were the Zurvanites who went back to beginning to explain the dualism, and envisaged an endless supreme entity. This was their great ancestor Zurvan.
• Only Zurvan existed in the beginning (The word Zurvan -‘time- seems like a word which was known since the prehistory but had never been in the forefront until the Sassanian period). According to the Zurvanite theology Zurvan who was the personification of the endless time (Zurvan Akarana-Zeroana Akerne) made animal sacrifice for a 1000 years to have a child who will create the world. But the doubt he had about whether this would bear a fruit at the end of this period landed him with an evil son - Ahriman (previously Angra Mainyu). At the same time due to the power of the sacrifices, the ‘shining and perfumed’ Ohrmazd (previously Ahura Mazda) was created.
• These two - Ahriman and Ohrmazd - shaped the world. Zurvan took no part. But as ‘god of time and fate’ he remotely influences human destinies, appearing under two aspects: As Limitless Time (eternal lord); and Time of Long Dominion (lord of the existing world).

Following the death of Zarathustra his belief system spread southwards into the present day Afghanistan and westwards to the land of Med and Pers;

• There Magis began to incorporate some of their pre-Zoroastrian beliefs into the religion. They brought back some of the old Gods. Sacrificing bull, and presenting haoma to Mithra and Anahita (deities in Vedic religion) started again;
• Then they turned various attributes of Ahura Mazda into beings. Ahura Mazda was identified gradually with Spenta Mainyu, and he became coeval with Angra Mainyu - no longer infinite.
• In the Pahlavi texts Ahura Mazda is changed to Ohrmazd and Angra Mainyu to Ahriman. Angra Mainyu - which was a state of mind originally - was turned into a being. It was given a new name - Ahriman, Ehriman. Ohrmazd’s good creation became evenly opposed with an evil creation instigated by Ahriman, the evil being.
• Character of the Saoshyant was transformed as well to a few messiahs who would come at the time of the final battle between good and evil.
• Today Zarathustra’s belief system is referred to as the Parsee-Parsi religion.  Let Spenta Mainyu refresh your memory: Didn’t Zarathustra sack all the priests in the beginning? Yes, but with the Sassanians/Sassanids the priests became sovereign again. These priests reintroduced the Yazatas. By transforming the monotheist Zoroastrianism into a polytheist belief system where every household had its own supreme overseer, these priests took power into their hands. Therefore it would not be wrong to say that the present day rules of the Parsees are the rules established and practiced at the Sassanian/Sassanid period and have nothing to do with the earlier rules of the belief system.

GOD OF ISRAEL : EL, ELOH, ELOHIM   --    GOD OF JEWS : YHWH

As the official version of the events tells us in he Old Testament, Jacob takes two daughters of a tribal chief called Laban, and he gets 12 sons from these two women and from some of his concubines. So he becomes the father of the twelve tribes, and the Patriarch of Isra-el. His God enters into a contract, a ‘covenant’ with Jacob. Jacob calls the place where this happens Beth-EL (‘EL’s house’/‘EL’s place’). Once again, this EL is the God of the Canaanites. Scholars have proved that this section of the Old Testament was written in the days of the kings of Judah. There is a very strange part of the Jacob’s story (Genesis 32:22-32) which shows the primitive origin of the beliefs of Israel and the concept of God they had in the beginning: Jacob leaves Laban, and starts off with his two wives and eleven sons, they leave the Jabbok pass behind, he was alone (“he sent the others over the brook” ), he wrestled with ‘someone’ until daybreak, this ‘someone’ was unable to defeat Jacob so he touched the “hollow of his thigh”, Jacob was injured, but he survived, called the place ‘Peni-El’ (‘I have seen EL face to face’). In memory of this God called EL touching the thighbone muscle, the sons of Israel don’t eat the muscle over the femur. But this god EL is the god of the Canaanites. What happened to YHWH you might ask. There are those who try to save the situation by claiming that the word EL stands for God in an all-enveloping context and not for the god of the Canaanites. To no avail of course. The Genesis story in the Old Testament is a strange piece of literature which still carries the traces of the ancient myths of Israel’s predecessors - the Semitic tribes. These tribes were far from the concept of a ‘sole’ God either for themselves or for the world. There were still Elohim (Gods). EL is the chief of the Gods. Gods were thought as coming down to earth, appearing as humans, and conversing with man. Gods were thought to have created mankind in their image, because the inventors of this concept had no reference around except themselves to shape their gods. They descended from and ascended to their celestial abodes. One of them wrestled(!) with Jacob. They sat down(!) and ate(!) together with mankind. They were thought to be jealous of the mankind since the beginning because of man having an intellect. The only thing which separated Gods and mankind was (and still is) immortality. But even immortality would be irrelevant if mankind had managed to eat a bit of the ‘tree of life’, which he did according to the Old Testament. This is naiveté at the extreme. Naiveté not for the people of those days but for us! After all those years and the development of the human intellect, if these stories are still the substance of a belief system what can one say without being impolite: Only naiveté!

In the Old Testament one comes across the description, ‘Lord of Gods’. Which means that the God of the Sabians Rabb-el Erbab’, the New Testament’s God and the Rabb-el Erbab (God of Gods) of Qoran is not different but the same ‘Lord of Gods’. In other words the authors of these Books must still have been of the opinion that there is not a ‘sole’ God, but a group of Gods or, at the least, a group of supreme overseers. This is polytheism. But Moses ben Maimonides (Moses ibn Maimon - Jewish thelogian) maintained that this description should be understood as the ‘Lord of Angels’. If we are to adopt this explanation, the description in the Old Testament makes angels Gods. But Maimonides maintains that the word ‘god’ used for the angels is a metaphor. Again there are other expressions in the Old and New Testaments literally meaning the ‘God of Gods’. Maimonides understands these expressions as the Lord of the Heavens, Lord of the Stars, because Maimonides considers layers of heavens and the stars as angels. If angels are in there on the same level with the Gods, how could one accuse the Sabians of heathenism, whose belief system is the predecessor of the ‘belief systems of the book’, and one of the main sources for all the other regional belief systems. Yes, these Sabians were accused of heathenism because they called the stars and planets ‘İlah’, ‘Rabb’ (God, Lord) with the hope that these might be instrumental in taking them closer to their real(!) God. Angels in Qoran are visualized to be on par with God or share the same realm with Him in a covert fashion. When we have God speaking in the first person singular in Qoran about the things He has done, he says ‘we’ and not ‘I’, When God is made to speak about himself He uses ‘I’. The implication is there: angels are partners to the deeds of God. The archangels do co-operate with Him, carry His messages, work as warriors, guides, helpers, admonishers, note takers, scribes and life-takers/killers etc., don’t they? Writers of Qoran had written so!

Now let us go back to the belief system of the Sons of Israel:

• Joshua says Israel were polytheists in Egypt.
• They had the images of the golden calf before them when they danced naked on the slopes of the Mount Sinai.
• Moses made a graven image of a serpent (Numbers 21:9, 2 Kings 18:4).
• Before entering Israel Joshua felt the need to ask his followers to put away their Gods (Joshua 24:2, 24:20).
• Period of the Judges was a period of wide spread polytheism (Judges 6:25, 11:24, 13:1, 17:5), so was the period of Kings.
• Temple of Solomon had two pillars which represented the fertility cult of Asherah. Asherah was the Lady of the Sea - a Goddess - of the Baal cult and was considered the wife of YHWH.
• Until Hezekiah (Hiskia) destroyed them YHWH’s ark in the Temple stood among others, side by side with Moses’ brazen serpent Nehustan (II Kings 18:4).
• YHWH had to share his Temple with Baal, Asherah and the heavenly bodies like the sun (II Kings 23:4-7).
• Jeroboam set up cultic bulls.
• Manasseh built altars to the sun, moon, and stars in the Temple (Kings 21:3-5).
• Ahab worshipped heifers 100 years after Solomon (Josephus 8:13).
• Ahab’s wife Jezebel was a devotee of Melkaart (a Canaanite god).

Talmudic Judaism believes that this God has a continuous effect via His creative force and calls Him ‘ever living’ (Hayy) God. This God has shown His power to the world and mankind by saying ‘be!’ and they ‘became.’ Judaism stays away from the philosophical thoughts like whether God has created the world ex nihilo or via a material transformation. Judaism believed that good and evil came from God (Remember the dualism in Zoroastrianism?). The Christian idea of evil emanating from Satan did not exist in Judaism. Everything becomes and develops according to the purpose of God. Another doctrine which appears beside the soleness of God is His omnipotence. One of the conditions of the Jewish confession of faith says that God is ever-present and all-seeing. This never means that God is one with the world and bound by it. Talmud says, ‘God is the abode of the world but the world is not His abode.’ One of the attributes of God is that ‘He knows everything.’ He knows even the most secret acts and thoughts. Another attribute: ‘God is ever-living and has no beginning or end.’ Judaism also has the idea of the ‘kingdom of God’ which could be established by the work of mankind under the leadership of God. In this kingdom all personal and social injustices will be eradicated. This is the key to the existence of and the mystery surrounding the Jewish nation. Jews deriving on their historical traditions believed that the founders of this ideal state would be God and themselves. The Heavenly Kingdom will be founded by the coming of the Messiah.

• Deutero-Isaiah was the first one to have a statement on the ‘universal’ sole God. Here the concept of the false Gods is introduced also for the first time. Declaring all the other Gods as ‘false’ is fundamental for monotheism (Remember Akh-en-aten who said that the other gods were all lies, and deception?).

At this point Spenta Mainyu would like to point out again that Judaism has always experienced a tension between the Jewish nationalism and monotheism, which could not co-exist. Why? Because Hebrews were polytheists, and Israel were polytheists. They had their own local Gods, and the implant of monotheism resulted in a contradiction between these local Gods of a ‘chosen people’ and their omnipotent God excluding all the other Gods. It took them 800 years to accept monotheism. The pre-exilic God was a bloodthirsty, vengeful, jealous, anthropomorphic tribal God, spreading fear. The last sections of the Old Testament were written after the Babylonian exile. Perhaps the most important effect the exile had was about their understanding of God. Post-exilic God is completely different. This God is so far away, so high-up, so removed from this world that, he needs interfaces (go betweens, messengers) to communicate. This is not the tribal God YHWH anymore, He is the perfect universal ‘supreme creator’, the Zarathustran God, Ahura Mazda.

Following are the few turning points of the encounter between YHWH and his predecessors - the local gods, and YHWH’s progress:

• In Hosea 13:2 we are told that Israel has gone back to their old Gods: “And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, let the man that sacrifice kiss the calves”
• In Hosea 13:4 Israel’s God addresses His people: “Yet I am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt and thou shalt know no God but me: for there is no saviour beside me.”
• Israel's God is still fighting to become the only God of his people. In Hosea 14:3-4 Israel is addressed: “Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our Gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy”
• In Amos 3:2 Israel’s God warns His people: “I have known you only of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” This also shows us that YHWH considers Himself still a tribal God.
• In the third section from the end (Zephaniah 1:2-4) God says: “..I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord..I will also stretch mine hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place, and the name of the Chemarims with the priests.”
• In the penultimate section, in Zechariah 14:9 (In the second year of Darius' reign) the fundamental change in the Jewish thinking about their God is evident: “And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one.”

Israel’s God is on the way to becoming the God for all.

• In Malachi 1:10-11 the writer of the section signs and seals this fundamental change in their understanding of God: “..I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord of hosts, neither will I accept an offering at your hand... my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen..”

This is the final word: Israel’s God has won His battle against the other Gods; those other Gods must be abandoned (they are not, yet); Israel’s God will become the ‘sole’ God. Again this ‘sole’ should not be understood as the ‘only’ God, there are still other Gods, but this God is the God for Israel. The author or the authors of this section, mankind, has decided so!

The Babylonian exile for the Jews was the beginning of new hopes for a New Heaven and a New Earth. The Jews were separated for the first time from their God during the exile. They had a covenant with their God; they were the ‘chosen people’ of their God; their God had promised them a ‘Promised Land’; their God had identified Himself with them; their God fought for them and with them against their adversaries. Now it is unthinkable to suggest that this God, their God, had abandoned them. But here they are in exile.. There is no Temple, no offerings.. They are able to keep only the Sabbath. So Jews had no choice but to start thinking about their God in different terms. A more universal God seemed more reasonable. This God could not be confined to one geographical area. His exclusive identification with one ethnic group is doubtful. This God is the God of all mankind but Jews were the ones who were preferred.

At that point, “about half a century after Ezekiel, there lived in Babylonia the anonymous prophet of consolation and Israel’s national restoration, usually referred to as deutero-Isaiah (second Isaiah).” Scholars assign chapters 40-65 of the Book of Isaiah to him (Check the pages on the Old Testament in this site).

• This unknown master ideologue, the ‘second-Isaiah’ elevated YHWH, for the first time, to the seat of the Creator of the Universe and everything in it. Here is Isaiah 45:5-8:

“I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me... I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things... Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the Lord have created it.”

Zarathustra/Zoroaster had celebrated Ahura Mazda in Yasna 31:8 in a remarkably similar fashion: “Yes, although Thou are the First One, I realized Thee to be (ever) young in mind, Wise One, when I grasped Thee in a vision to be the Father of good thinking, the real Creator of truth, (and) the Lord of existence in Thy actions.”

The section of Isaiah which includes the verse above was written after the exile. Before Isaiah Jews seldom thought of YHWH as the God of all the tribes, let alone all of the Hebrews. Beelzebub/ Baalzebub was the God of Ekron. Ammon had Milcom as their God. Moabites believed in Chemosh. Spenta Mainyu knows that some people out there will read this and say that there is nothing strange here, because these names represented the ‘sole’ creator himself, only the names differ from community to community. No way! What about the attributes of each of them? What about all those different stories about different Gods’ dealings with their believers? No way! These are all concepts invented by the mankind in accordance with their needs.

A supreme being showing itself to human beings was normal in the beginning. They were only superior to mankind, therefore more powerful. That was all. They created the mankind as their servants, and shared their environment with them. Abraham even sat down for a meal with his God(!) in ancient Mamre, Hebron, and suddenly realized that one of the visitors (there were three) was his God. Could any one of you imagine anything like this? A God sharing a meal with a human being? This is ridiculous. Later this concept of God revealing himself to mankind became an anathema for Israel. Following the Babylonian exile the concept of God of the Mosaic belief system was amended: God became an entity “the divine presence of whom could only be seen as an afterglow.” This ‘divine presence’ is called by the writer as ‘the glory (kavod) of YHWH’. The ‘Priestly Tradition’ was not very happy with an anthropomorphic God, so instead of YHWH accompanying Israel during the Exodus they changed the story to the ‘glory’ of YHWH filling the tent where he met Moses. This Priestly Tradition (Check the pages on the Old Testament in this site) ‘P’ had his most important contribution to the Old Testament in the form of the ‘account of creation’ in the first chapter of Genesis.

Jehovah-YHWH was most probably a volcano God. This superior entity entered the scene with the famous stories of Exodus and the ‘Law giving.’ Egyptians could not have worshipped him, because there are no volcanoes in Egypt, active or inactive, young or ancient. The authors imagining the people in front of the Mount Sinai did not know YHWH before, or they had forgotten him long time ago. The two names used in the Old Testament for God, Elohim and YHWH, may be taken as an evidence supporting this assumption. Elohim appeared in the beginning, later on YHWH replaced Elohim. According to a widespread opinion YHWH was the God of the Kenites (A Semitic tribe). He might have been or not. The concept was there, and that is what counts. It was impossible to see this supreme entity, and the making of his effigy was forbidden. Our hero, the greatest of the prophets - Moses - is seemingly imgined as adopting this God as his and trying to impose him as the ‘sole’ God on the nomadic tribes that set off towards the Jordan Valley to settle there. YHWH might as well have been brought over by Moses, or have been the God of a small community and made the ‘sole’ God of the new community by Moses.

Now the attributes of this god of Israel: The God of the Sons of Israel,

• did not take part in His act (the creation).
• is endless, not like His creation.
• is not created therefore he must have a time and place particular to him.
• made himself known under the names like Elohim (EL), Eloah, EL Shaddai, YHWH, YHWH Sabaoth, Adonai, and Shekinah (in the Cabbalistic context).
• is a jealous and dreadful God.
• is a wholly divisive and differentiating God.
• differing from the other gods, did not express himself in a cosmic, but in a historical time scale with an absolute beginning and end.
• was the only designer and organiser of the daily life, history and politics of the Jews.

All kinds of humanly decisions and judgements could inevitably contradict Him, even if they do not violate the Law of the God; nothing could be added to or subtracted from God’s creation; man’s duty in this world is summarized in Ecclesiastes 12:13: “..Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

• Jews are required only ‘to know what God has done, not to intepret it’ (Remember the Sumerian belief about Enki’s creative effect. The judgment was ‘Enki did it’ or ‘Enki did it and organized it so.’)
• Since word is God’s, interpretation/exegesis is God’s prerogative as it is written in Genesis 40:8; but in Genesis 40:12 Joseph interprets the dream anyway.
• Interpretation of God’s actions is considered sedition. One should remember here, that Islam has also prohibited the interpretation of the Law - Qoran - and branded this action as equating oneself with God. But nevertheless there are numerous interpreters of both the Old Testament and Qoran, who consider themselves ‘guides’ showing(!) or leading(!) the way to God. These actions should be considered sedition as well. Don’t you think so?
• These seditious acts would create discord between the God and the Jews. Since these seditious acts could be considered sins, they exactly fall into the description in Isaiah 59:2: “..your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”
• The gods of the Pagans, the man made effigies and idols were branded as the ‘symbols of evil’ by the Jews (Moslems now know where the ban on images in Islam comes from).
• Jews were acquiring their names and their communal identity within their alliance with the God.
• A Jew is the servant of his God. He is like a worker on contract on the Promised Land, because according to the Law the land belongs to the God (The original concept belongs to the Sumerians. They thought that supreme beings have created mankind to serve them (supreme beings). In Sumer land belonged to their gods and they looked after these lands on behalf of their gods.
• Israel’s God was also ‘good’ and involved with his people. A dialogue has been going on between the God and the mankind since the time of Abraham, the Jews believed.
• He was the ‘God of Armies’ because Israel had to fight their way towards a new homeland. God of Islam has armies as well.

GOD OF CHRISTIANITY : FATHER  -- GOD INCARNATE IN MAN FROM GALILEE : YSHUA

Christianity; the most difficult amongst the Abrahamic belief systems. The God is YHWH. The people is Israel and the gentiles. There is no divine(!) revelation. There is no Book. In fact it is not a belief system but a cult. Why? Who can quote another example of a belief system where God is the ‘father’; messenger is the son; a virgin impregnated by a divine(!) being is the mother; which all add up to a ‘holy’ family called Trinity; with the son ‘coming down’ to earth as the ‘god incarnate in man’ or ‘God in flesh’ to pay for the ‘original sin’ of the mankind; who gives his life; is resurrected intact(!), bodily; and raised(!) to his father’s realm, the heaven; only to wait there until the judgment day, to come back down to earth to judge the living and the resurrected dead, and to establish the ‘kingdom of God’. This is the story around which an organized belief system or to be more precise a cultic system was built.

Start with the supposed prophecies in the Old Testament, add to it a bit of Egyptian stuff, a bit of Sabianism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, a great deal of Mithraic cult, and other cults of the region and you get Paulinism which is known as Christianity.

The Old Testament is a Book about the ‘God’, but the New Testament texts are about a man, Jesus. He could be an invented character or a Jewish preacher from rural Galilee. He could be mythical or historical. It could well be that Jesus was a historical person re-created with additional characteristics and presented to us as the Messiah. But this would make historicity meaningless because so many things were borrowed and put together from so many myths, legends and stories that even this historical person is lost beyond retrieval. So we have not much to do but to go by the collection of these writings called the New Testament which is about a ‘God incarnate in man’, a ‘God in flesh’. Until Paul interfered, the Jesus movement, probably for a very brief period, had had the chance to develop into a coherent teaching with its roots in the past. But Paul’s intervention changed the whole scene completely. Paul was well versed in the cults of his times from Mithraism in the East to the Graeco-Roman world which was his environment. He was living in Tarsus (in the south of Asia Minor). Cult of Adonis in Byblus and Paphos; cult of Tammuz in Babylonia; cult of Osiris in Egypt; and the cult of Attis were his environment. In his immediate surroundings there was the celebrations for the ‘awakening of Heracles/Hercules’ in Tarsus. These concepts of cultic deities must have given him the ideas of the resurrected deities, born of virgin mothers etc. So in this Jew’s mind all the components of a new belief system were ready. All he needed was to write his first letter to create a new cultic system and a myth (For more information please check the pages on Jesus and Bible in this site). He has never known Jesus. Jesus didn’t have a book, a canon of his own. But through his writings Paul did introduce his own canon, which consists of seven documents:

• Romans, I & II Corinthians, Galatians, I Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon.
• As his writings betray he was never interested in the historical Jesus, and went on without hesitation with his creation of the concept of divine(!) ‘Lord Jesus Christ’, A Son of God, and a ‘God’. So the collection of texts called the New Testament is about a ‘God’(!) and his ‘brief existence(!) on earth.’

There are passages in the texts written by Paul where, almost as a throwaway remark, he puts Jesus and God together. These are the examples:

• “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
• “For us there is one God and father from whom are all things, and for whom we exist,

and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist.”

This statement by Paul shows that in his monotheism,

• he combines the God (father) and Jesus (son).
• he is a Jew and a ‘God-and-Jesus monotheist’ (as if that is possible!).
• Jesus was thought to be the God’s long-expected act of mercy.
• Jesus was offering forgiveness to sinners, thus claiming that he had the power to exercise the God’s prerogative.
• But he died not a redeemer, nor a Messiah, but a ‘sinner’.
• If the story was left there, there would not have been Christianity. But as told by Paul “a divine intervention took place and Jesus had resurrected(!).” Hence the Christianity.

Paul’s efforts ended up in Jesus, being elevated to the position of divinity by the Christians of the day 20 years after his death. Research on the New Testament, also, is said to show the divinity of Jesus arriving after his death. The Q source (Quelle - Check the page on Jesus in this site) which is accepted as what Jesus or the person called by that name, has taught and the ‘Q movement’ which has existed before Christianity

• includes no birth narrative or resurrection.
• portrays Jesus as a teacher of Wisdom.
• contains no hint of a select group of disciples.
• has no program to reform the religion or politics of Judaism.
• has no dramatic encounter with the authorities in Jerusalem.
• has no martyrdom for the cause.. much less a martyrdom with saving significance for the ills of the world..
• has no mention of a first church in Jerusalem.
• shows that neither Jesus nor the people of Q were Christians.
• shows Jesus’ first followers had little in common with this cult of Christ.

Amongst the collection’s most important components, parts of the Sermon on the Mount; and other Q1 passages are closely related to Jesus’ moral teachings, and Q1 was preserved as the only Gospel until the period of the Jewish War (66-73AD).

What is called Christianity, should in reality be called Paulinism. Because Christianity is not based on the message of Jesus anymore. The doctrine as we now know it, rests in all its main points on the totally different teaching of Paul.

• Jesus as we know (!) him pursued the creation of an immediate link between God and mankind, he never wanted to set up bureaucratic channels to go through.
• The followers of Jesus in those days didn’t think of Jesus as a god; he was just a kingly figure that will liberate them and reinstate the old tradition of Judaism.
• The claim that he was resurrected is the central point of the faith, because at this point Jesus the man ends and we enter the carefully organized stage of the Christian Church with the mythically glorified Christ playing the ‘star’.
• Paul’s understanding of Jesus, and his specific inventions ended with a dogmatic belief system far away from the teachings of the Jewish preacher and the prophet from Galilee - yshua.

According to Paul, “all are under the wrath of god from the start; and are lost without exception; all are without hope and without God; for Satan has power over all. There is a judgment of damnation by god against everyone without exception.” This wrath of God (which also applies to the newborn babies) according to Paul can only be averted by the death and the blood of Jesus, and only the death and the blood of Jesus can atone for the ‘original guilt’ (Colossians 1:22) “..and without shedding of blood (there) is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). By adopting this idea of vicarious sacrifice of the first born son, which is rooted in the primitive culture of the prehistoric semitic religions Paul turns Jesus’ teaching of salvation upside down, and opposes his reforming ideas; instead of the original joyous eu-angelion, the Pauline message of threats was developed. Paul teaches that the human individual is unable to attain salvation and atonement before God by any good works of his own, or by any change however good (Romans 3:24, 3:28; 9:11; 9:16; 1 Corinthians 1:29; Galatians 2:16). “For by grace are ye saved through faith. it is the gift of God.” Thus the precondition for the action of God’s grace is the acceptance of the Pauline teaching on grace; which means membership of the Church of Paul.

We have three main characteristics which Paul employed to lure the ignorant people.

Believe in Paulinism and;

1. Become immortal (do not fear of death, have a God-like existence).

2. Absolve yourself of your sins (so have a chance to live in the realm of Gods in after-life).

3. Release your inner tensions (don’t think about sex anymore, mankind did it once and

Jesus paid for it, didn’t he?).

One of the things - in addition to resurrection - which makes Christianity especially complicated is the doctrine of Trinity: Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. How can a god be one and three at the same time? The answer: One God is revealed in three persons. Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are “three persons in the same substance” and as such are united - but yet separate (please check the pages on the Supreme Being in this site). When one tries to explain the trinity by attributing a divine character to God, or defining the three different personalities as the three different manifestations of God, the endlessness and incomprehensibility of God comes to an end. This is the problem facing Christianity.

After this inevitable summary we are left with concepts like the Father; Son, Holy Ghost; Trinity; Three in one; Lord Jesus Christ; Messiah; Redemption; Salvation; St. Paul; God incarnate in man; God in flesh; Original Sin; Immortality etc. etc. These are the products of the unhealthy mind of Paul, which are also pieces of a fairy-tale for the credulous people. Therefore we must move on to a much firmer territory.

The later monotheists, especially Christians in the western world were influenced mainly by the Aristotle’s idea of God, which could be summarized as follows:

• There was the ‘Unmoved Mover’ at the top.
• It was a pure being; eternal, immobile and spiritual.
• It was pure thought; thinker and thought at the same time, engaged in an eternal moment of contemplation of himself, the highest object of knowledge.
• In contrast to ‘it’ matter is imperfect and mortal, therefore there could not be a material element in God.
• Each movement must have a cause that can be traced back to an antecedent, that antecedent to another antecedent, eventually ending up in a ‘single’ source.
• The Unmoved Mover is the source which causes all the motion and activity in the Universe.
• This Unmoved Mover activates the world by a process of attraction, because all beings are drawn towards Being itself.

Man is different. He is in a privileged position. Why? Because human soul has the divine gift of intellect. By having this intellect he becomes a kin to God; he has some of the qualities and attributes of the divine nature, and because of this divine capacity of reason he is above the plants and animals. Man is a microcosm of the whole of universe, and it is his duty to become immortal and divine by purifying his intellect. Wisdom (sophia) is the highest of all human virtues, and when man contemplates he imitates something which the Unmoved Mover does all the time. So man becomes divine(!).

THE OMNIPOTENT GOD OF ISLAM : ALLAH

Now we are about to enter the domain of Islam which is visualized by its believers as the completion of the divine revelation, the last belief system, introduced by the last of the prophets, Mohamed, after whom there would be no other.

The Jewish God is male. Christians and Moslems also worship a male God in fact supposedly the same God. Name given to the God of Islam is Allah. This name was known to Arabs and to the peoples of the region long before Islam. The probable etymology is the contraction of ‘al-ilah’. The Aramaic words ‘alaha’ or ‘aloho’ are proposed also as possible origins of the name. Hebrew word el (and its plural elohim) is another probable root which derives from the semitic root alah which could be translated as ‘the great power’. The word which describes this holy, miracle-working omnipotent power is thought to have derived from the same source as the word for god. In the Hebrew original of the Old Testament the name of God is given as either ‘elah/eloh’ (singular) or ‘elahim/elohim’ (plural). ‘IL’ is used to denote el-lah. EL, il, alaha, elah, elahim, eloh, elohim are the names of God in the Semitic language. “Some scholars say that the root of the word for the God of Islam, Allah, is the Aramaic alaha,” writes the Encyclopedia of Islam. Syriac is accepted as a branch of Aramaic. The word Allah is Syriac, and may have its root in Aramaic aloho. So the name of the God of Islam is not Arabic, it comes from a non-Arabic root.

The word ‘God’ appears in some inscriptions found in Safa (a place near Mecca). The words al-Lah, hal-Lah appear together with the name of one of the idols in Nabataean, but the word al-Lah appears alone in the Safa inscriptions. The origin of Allah, according to people of Kufa is ilah. According to Basrans it is lah. The assumption is that, in order to magnify ilah, el is added. The ‘l’ of el and ‘I’ of ilah became too heavy to pronounce; ‘i’ is dropped; and the resultant word became ellah. The same applies to Lah. To exalt the word, most probably, el was added and the final word became el-Lah. There are those among the Islamic scholars who say that the word God is general than el-Lah/al-Lah of the Arabs who reportedly “had the habit of calling each one of their idols as al-lah in addition to its name”. A similar usage could be seen in relation to Teng-ri of the central Asian Turks and Tanrı of the Turks of our time, both of which have their origin in the Sumerian word for god - dengir, dingir which is not the name as such but a general appellation.

With the arrival of Islam, suddenly Allah became the name of the greatest God. Since the word Allah is the name of the greatest God, and there is only one greatest God, it has no plural. From the standpoint of Islam the other gods cannot be called Allah or ‘elah/ilah’. Allah is the ‘greatest name’ because it belongs to Him.

The concept of al-Lah/el-Lah among the pre-Islamic Arabs was amazingly similar to the concept of Allah in Islam. Qoran is at a loss as to why such a correct understanding of God had not led the infidels to accept the new reality. These pre-Islamic Arabs believed that el-Lah/al-Lah;

• is the ‘the creator of the world’,
• is ‘the One who brings rain’,
• is ‘the One who gave life to everything on earth’.

The only thing which makes Qoran feel uneasy towards them is the fact that though they knew God as;

• ‘the One who created the sky and earth’, they did not end up with the conclusion that He was the only one to worship.

According to Islam;

• Allah is first and last because He existed before everything and He will exist after everything ceased to exist.
• Everything will end, only Allah is permanent.
• Allah is above everything.
• There is none higher than Allah.
• Allah is in everything.
• Allah is closest to everything.

Here is the all inclusive formula in Islam:

In this short story of human mind’s progress towards the concept of an omnipotent creator  and His belief system, we can see that everybody has borrowed from each other as they wished and needed. Check the attributes of the ‘sole’ God of Islam, the omnipotent universal God of the universe, you will find that there is nothing original in  their thinking of the supreme overseer. The attributes that different peoples have  visualized in relation to their particular concepts and images of god have culminated in an aggregate understanding of the highest entity, up there somewhere. That's all.

grand chronology