However, there is also evidence that Allah and Hubal were two distinct deities. According to one hypothesis, which goes back to Julius Wellhausen, Allah (the supreme deity of the tribal federation around Quraysh) was a designation that consecrated the superiority of Hubal (the supreme deity of Quraysh) over the other gods. The term may have been vague in the Meccan religion. Some authors have suggested that polytheistic Arabs used the name as a reference to a creator god or a supreme deity of their pantheon. Pre-Islamic Meccans worshiped Allah alongside a host of lesser gods and those whom they called the "daughters of Allah." Islam forbade worship of anyone or anything other than God. Pagans believed worship of humans or animals who had lucky events in their life brought them closer to God. According to the Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir, Arab pagans considered Allah as an unseen God who created and controlled the Universe. Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in pre-Islamic polytheistic cults. Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic inscriptions. The unusual Syriac form is likely an imitation of the Arabic. It is written as ܐܠܗܐ ( ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ ( ʼAlāhā) in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply "God". The corresponding Aramaic form is ʼElāh ( אלה), but its emphatic state is ʼElāhā ( אלהא). Ĭognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. An inscription using the Ancient South Arabian script in Old Arabic from Qaryat al-Fāw reads, "'to Kahl and lh and ʿAththar' ( b-khl w-lh w-ʿṯr)". The use of "Allah" as the name of a deity appears as early as the first century. The majority of modern scholars subscribe to the latter theory, and view the loanword hypothesis with skepticism. Indeed, there is "the interchangeability of al-ilāh and allāh in early Arabic poetry even when composed by the Christian ʿAdī ibn Zayd". Most considered it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- "the" and ilāh " deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the deity, the God". Others held that it was borrowed from Syriac or Hebrew. Grammarians of the Basra school regarded it as either formed "spontaneously" ( murtajal) or as the definite form of lāh (from the verbal root lyh with the meaning of "lofty" or "hidden"). The etymology of the word Allāh has been discussed extensively by classical Arab philologists. Similar usage by Christians and Sikhs in Peninsular Malaysia has recently led to political and legal controversies. It is also often, albeit not exclusively, used in this way by Bábists, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, Indonesian and Maltese Christians, and Sephardi Jews, as well as by the Gagauz people. Allah has been used as a term for God by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab), Judaeo-Arabic-speaking Jews, and even Arab Christians after the term " al- ilāh" and "Allah" were used interchangeably in Classical Arabic by the majority of Arabs who had become Muslims. Muhammad used the word Allah to indicate the Islamic conception of God. The pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped a supreme deity whom they called Allah, alongside other lesser deities. The word Allah has been used by Arabic people of different religions since pre-Islamic times. The word is thought to be derived by contraction from al- ilāh, which means "the god", and is linguistically related to the Aramaic words Elah and Syriac ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlāhā) and the Hebrew word El ( Elohim) for God. In the English language, the word generally refers to God in Islam. l ɑː/ Arabic: الله, romanized: Allāh, IPA: ( listen)) is the common Arabic word for God.
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