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Who Was Allah Before Islam · Abide Meditation App

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  Speaker 1: If you want to go deeper, join our Sufism reading
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: group at Religion Department dot com slash Conference of the Birds.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: The Koran describes Mecha at the time of Muhammad as
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  Speaker 1: a city full of mushakin, usually translated as pagans or polytheists,
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  Speaker 1: the Muhammad's main opponents, pushing back against his message, mocking
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  Speaker 1: his claims, refusing to worship Allah alone. But then the
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  Speaker 1: Koran makes a surprising claim about their beliefs. If you
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  Speaker 1: ask them who created the heavens and the earth, they
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  Speaker 1: will surely say Allah Kuran forty three eighty seven. If
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  Speaker 1: you ask them who created humans, they will say Allah.
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  Speaker 1: They also claim that Allah harnessed the sun and the
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  Speaker 1: moon and sends down rain from the sky. Wait wait, wait, wait,
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  Speaker 1: these are polytheists, right, and yet according to the Koran,
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  Speaker 1: they already believed in a creator God named Allah. While
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  Speaker 1: the confusion may stem from that translation polytheist or pagan, see,
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  Speaker 1: the word mushra kin can be translated more literally as
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  Speaker 1: those who associated others with God. In other words, they
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  Speaker 1: believed in Allah and even worshiped him, but they also
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  Speaker 1: assigned associates or partners to him. Some scholars even translate
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  Speaker 1: the term as associators or associationists. The Qoran's criticism isn't
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  Speaker 1: that they lacked belief in Allah, it's that they didn't
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  Speaker 1: worship him alone. They apparently prayed to lesser deities, invoked intermediaries,
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  Speaker 1: and participated in a broader polytheistic system. Some apparently venerated
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  Speaker 1: the sun and the moon. Others venerated named pre Islamic
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  Speaker 1: Arabian gods like Alat and Manat. But Allah, in some
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  Speaker 1: sense remains supreme as the creator of heaven and earth
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  Speaker 1: even in this polytheistic system. So this raises the question
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  Speaker 1: how did these mushra kin already know about Allah? Well,
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  Speaker 1: the answer is there was already a god known as
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  Speaker 1: Allah in pre Islamic Arabia. Check out this inscription from
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  Speaker 1: the deserts of Jordan by Ribiel, son of Asad. And
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  Speaker 1: he camped here and kept watch for enemies and the
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  Speaker 1: rain clouds. So o b Alsamin, send the winds in
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  Speaker 1: shaihakkam and oh Allah and Alat. Blindness be to the
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  Speaker 1: one who effaces this inscription. This is basically a short
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  Speaker 1: prayer carved on stone apparently in Arab Nomad hundreds of
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  Speaker 1: years before Mohammad camped here and describes what he's doing,
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  Speaker 1: watching for enemies, waiting for rain, and then calls on
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  Speaker 1: multiple gods for help but also mean a storm god,
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  Speaker 1: Shai Halkalm, another local protective deity, and then right alongside
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  Speaker 1: them Allah. See long before the Koran was written down,
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  Speaker 1: ancient Arabs were carving the name Allah into stone, invoking
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  Speaker 1: him in prayers, embedding him into personal names, and if
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  Speaker 1: recent discoveries are correct, imagining him as a high god
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  Speaker 1: tied to light and creation itself. So today we're going
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  Speaker 1: to explore the pre Islamic Allah. First, let's start with etymology,
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  Speaker 1: because we can learn a lot just from what the
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  Speaker 1: word Allah even means. Most scholars today agree that it
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  Speaker 1: comes from a contraction of the Arabic al Illah, which
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  Speaker 1: literally just means the God. The word belongs to a
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  Speaker 1: much older Semitic root god linguistically related to terms like
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  Speaker 1: el the name of the high God and the Canaanite
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  Speaker 1: pantheon or Elohim in the Hebrew Bible, and Alillah can
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  Speaker 1: be understood in a generic sense as the God, referring
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  Speaker 1: to any deity depending on the context, but it could
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  Speaker 1: also have a more elevated sense of the God, the
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  Speaker 1: one God who stands above all others. As the scholar
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  Speaker 1: Nikolai Sinai puts it, it can carry the sense of
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  Speaker 1: the God par excellence, a supreme deity within a broader
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  Speaker 1: religious system, including monotheism. We can actually see this usage
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  Speaker 1: before Islam among Arab Christians. In the five hundred CE,
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  Speaker 1: Arab Christians were already using the term al illah to
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  Speaker 1: refer to the Christian God. For example, this inscription from
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  Speaker 1: a Christian martyr shrine in northern Syria dated a five
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  Speaker 1: twelve CE reads, may the God remember Sergius, and the
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  Speaker 1: word used here is al illah. So here the term
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  Speaker 1: clearly refers to the one God of Christianity, and scholars
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  Speaker 1: have pointed out that this probably reflects a direct translation
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  Speaker 1: from Greek speaking Christians, who commonly refer to God in
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  Speaker 1: Greek as Hotheos, literally the God. So when Christianity moved
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  Speaker 1: into Arabic speaking contexts, Arab Christians appear to have adopted
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  Speaker 1: al illah as a kind of equivalent expression, a way
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  Speaker 1: of rendering Hotheos in their own language. But this kind
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  Speaker 1: of language is not limited to monotheism. Al Illah can
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  Speaker 1: also make sense in terms of henotheism, a system where
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  Speaker 1: many gods are acknowledged to exist, but only one is
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  Speaker 1: elevated above the rest as supreme or uniquely worthy of worship.
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  Speaker 1: Now we'll examine this more later in the video, but briefly,
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  Speaker 1: we can see this among the Nabataeans, an ancient Arab
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  Speaker 1: people best known for their capital at Petra in modern
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  Speaker 1: day Jordan. In Nabatian inscriptions, they refer to their top god,
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  Speaker 1: Dushara in Aramaic, as the God, even though they were
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  Speaker 1: technically polytheists who recognize the existence of many gods. Over
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  Speaker 1: time in some regions, in some dialects of old Arabic,
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  Speaker 1: al illah appear to have contracted into a single word allah,
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  Speaker 1: the form that would later become standard in Islamic usage,
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  Speaker 1: and we can actually watch this sound change happening elsewhere
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  Speaker 1: in pre Islamic Arabian religion. Take the goddess alt, who
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  Speaker 1: shows up a lot in ancient Arabian inscriptions. Most scholars
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  Speaker 1: think her name derived from an earlier form al Ilat,
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  Speaker 1: basically the god, just as al Illah means the god,
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  Speaker 1: and we can catch a glimpse of that older form
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  Speaker 1: of her name in the work of the ancient Greek
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  Speaker 1: historian Herodotus, writing in the four hundreds BCE, Herodotus reports
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  Speaker 1: that the Arabs call Aphrodite Alilat, which was probably his
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  Speaker 1: attempt to render Alilat in Greek. But when we move
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  Speaker 1: forward several centuries, the shorter form a lot becomes standard,
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  Speaker 1: the middle vowel drops out, the phrase contracts, and what
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  Speaker 1: was once the descriptive title starts to function as a
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  Speaker 1: fixed name. So Alilat becomes a lot, just as al
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  Speaker 1: Illah becomes Allah. So if a laws derives from the God,
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  Speaker 1: does it actually refer to a particular god like? Is
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  Speaker 1: it a name or is it a title? The best
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  Speaker 1: way to answer that is to look at old Arabic
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  Speaker 1: inscriptions from southern Syria all the way down into the
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  Speaker 1: Arabian Peninsula. Archaeologists have found the name Allah carved into
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  Speaker 1: stone in different scripts. Now, these are not monumental inscriptions
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  Speaker 1: from temples or palaces. Most of them are basically graffiti,
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  Speaker 1: short texts left by by herders, nomads, and people moving
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  Speaker 1: through the desert. They're very hard to date precisely, but
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  Speaker 1: most come from the first few centuries before Islam and
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  Speaker 1: In the bulk of these inscriptions, a law behaves like
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  Speaker 1: a name. So consider this one, and so Rudau and
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  Speaker 1: Allah be with me and blind whoever effaces this inscription
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  Speaker 1: or this one oh Allah and Dusaris, let there be
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  Speaker 1: blood money in retribution for those who were struck down.
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  Speaker 1: So in both of these examples, a law appears beside
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  Speaker 1: other gods, Rudeau and Dusaris, respectively. And remember at the
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  Speaker 1: start of this video, a law appears beside a whole
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  Speaker 1: bunch of gods, but also mean goddess a lot. And
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  Speaker 1: in these inscriptions, a law appears to be acting like
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  Speaker 1: a personal name, closer to names like Zeus or thor So,
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  Speaker 1: even if the word originally developed from a generic phrase
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  Speaker 1: like the god, in practice, people are using a law
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  Speaker 1: to refer to a specific god. So the question remains,
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  Speaker 1: who was this pre Islamic a law. So the bulk
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  Speaker 1: of our evidence comes from what are called Safayetic inscriptions.
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  Speaker 1: Safayetic being a script used by Arab nomads who left
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  Speaker 1: behind literally tens of thousands of short texts carved into
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  Speaker 1: stones stones found across the so called Black Desert of Jordan, Syria,
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  Speaker 1: and Northern Arabia. It's called the black desert because it's
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  Speaker 1: filled with these black basalt stones. The historian doctor affanel
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  Speaker 1: Jalad and his team have conducted extensive surveys in this
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  Speaker 1: region and they found that Allah is invoked fewer than
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  Speaker 1: fifty times in the entire safae Ata corpus, which is
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  Speaker 1: about fifty thousand texts. Compare this to over one thousand,
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  Speaker 1: four hundred invocations of the goddess Alt. So the first
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  Speaker 1: thing we can learn is that clearly Allah was not
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  Speaker 1: the most popular god for these nomads. But the Safiata
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  Speaker 1: conscriptions are surprisingly consistent. People invoked him for safety, relief,
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  Speaker 1: and survival in difficult conditions. They usually read like oh
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  Speaker 1: Allah grant relief to whoever comes to the water place,
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  Speaker 1: or oh Allah grant reign, or this one by Saccrn
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  Speaker 1: son of Shamat, son of Zakar, and he set off
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  Speaker 1: into the inner desert. So oh Allah in shail Kom,
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  Speaker 1: may he be kept safe. So notice here a law
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  Speaker 1: again appears beside another god, shy al Kom, and that
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  Speaker 1: phrase the inner desert seems to refer to the deep,
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  Speaker 1: uninhabited interior of the Arabian desert, the kind of place
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  Speaker 1: where you're far from water, far from settlements, and really
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  Speaker 1: on your own in a hostile environment, so better call
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  Speaker 1: upon the gods for help. He also appears in Nabatian inscriptions,
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  Speaker 1: but generally only embedded in personal names names like Balah
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  Speaker 1: gift of Allah, or Abdullah servant of Allah. These are
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  Speaker 1: what scholars call theophoric names, names with a god's name
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  Speaker 1: embedded in them. This tells us that Allah was widely
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  Speaker 1: known and meaningful to the Nabataeans. You know, people were
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  Speaker 1: naming their kid after him. But on the other hand,
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  Speaker 1: when we look at actual religious inscriptions like dedications and
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  Speaker 1: prayers and temple texts, we mostly find other gods being
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  Speaker 1: directly invoked, gods like Dushara, the main Nabtian deity. So
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  Speaker 1: we can say from these Safiatic and Nabutan inscriptions that
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  Speaker 1: Allah was known across northern Arabia from roughly the last
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  Speaker 1: few centuries into the early century see his name shows
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  Speaker 1: up in people's names. He was treated as a distinct deity,
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  Speaker 1: not just as a generic title like the god, and
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  Speaker 1: he was occasionally invoked for protection and relief, but emphasis
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  Speaker 1: on occasionally a law was not the most prominent god
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  Speaker 1: in pre Islamic Arabian paganism. Across Arabia, we find a
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  Speaker 1: wide range of deities, the goddess a Lot who appears
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  Speaker 1: the most, as well as gods like Rudau and the
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  Speaker 1: storm god. But Alsamine but a Law I mean, he's there,
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  Speaker 1: but he's relatively rare, which suggests we're not looking at
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  Speaker 1: the dominant cult deity in this region. This is especially
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  Speaker 1: true for the Navitaean Kingdom, where we have a situation
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  Speaker 1: in which a Law appears frequently in names but rarely
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  Speaker 1: in direct acts of worship. Doctor al Jilat argues that
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  Speaker 1: this is consistent with the idea that pre Islamic Allah
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  Speaker 1: was a remote god and not the primary object of veneration.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps he was a kind of cosmic or overarching god, acknowledged,
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  Speaker 1: respected and even embedded in your own identity, but not
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  Speaker 1: the focus of daily ritual life. So compared to other
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  Speaker 1: ancient gods like Zeus or b All, we know very
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  Speaker 1: little about pre Islamic Allah, no myths, no clear role
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  Speaker 1: in the pre Islamic Arabian pantheon. That is until twenty
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  Speaker 1: twenty four, when we got a tiny, tiny glimpse of
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  Speaker 1: Allah's pre Islamic theological profile. Doctor Algeld and his team
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  Speaker 1: came across a small stone installation when serving the basalt
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  Speaker 1: desert of northeastern Jordan. Apparently it was some sort of
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  Speaker 1: open air ritual space with inscribed stones deliberately arranged around
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  Speaker 1: a central cairn, probably a burial, and on one of
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  Speaker 1: those stones, doctor Algelad documented a new Safiata conscription dating
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  Speaker 1: to a round year zero, the turn from BCE to CE,
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  Speaker 1: so we're talking roughly six hundred years before Muhammad. Now,
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  Speaker 1: the inscription is extremely difficult to translate, and doctor Aljalod
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  Speaker 1: actually lays out several possible readings, but across all of
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  Speaker 1: the possible reconstructions, the basic picture is a law is
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  Speaker 1: described as a creator that brings light into the world.
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  Speaker 1: One possible reconstruction reads, oh Allah, let there be light
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  Speaker 1: and protect against the darkness of his grave, and grant
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  Speaker 1: him that light, O one of creation, And may he
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  Speaker 1: who has created grant him that light. So what kind
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  Speaker 1: of God was a law? Again? The sophaiatic is very
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  Speaker 1: difficult to translate, but doctor al Jilad is confident that
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  Speaker 1: we're getting a glimpse into the mythological profile of pre
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  Speaker 1: Islamic a law a god that is, a creator who
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  Speaker 1: brings the light and pushes back the darkness. This is
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  Speaker 1: a very big deal because until this discovery, the idea
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  Speaker 1: that the pre Islamic Alaw was a creator type god
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  Speaker 1: was mostly an inference from the Kuran. Remember the musher
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  Speaker 1: Kin outright say that a law created the heavens and
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  Speaker 1: the earth. But now we might have archaeological evidence that
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  Speaker 1: strongly points in that direction. And that opening line of
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  Speaker 1: the inscription probably reminded you of the famous phrase in
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  Speaker 1: Genesis one three, let there be light. So how do
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  Speaker 1: we explain this? Well, it's possible that this is evidence
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  Speaker 1: of Arabian pagans picking up on ideas from Judaism or Christianity.
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  Speaker 1: By late antiquity, Arab tribes were interacting with Jewish and
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  Speaker 1: Christian communities, Arabic was increasingly used in religious contexts. It's
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  Speaker 1: entirely plausible that Biblical ideas about creation and light were
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  Speaker 1: circulating in Arab communities long before the Koran. We might
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  Speaker 1: actually get another glimpse of this Biblical influenced Allah in
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  Speaker 1: another Sphaiata conscription. It reads, and he made a burnt
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  Speaker 1: offering and swore by allaw who is living, that he
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  Speaker 1: shall lead bravely. So in this inscription, a man performs
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  Speaker 1: a ritual, He makes a burnt offering and swears an
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  Speaker 1: oath by a law, and a law is given a
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  Speaker 1: title the Living. Now that might not sound like much,
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  Speaker 1: but calling a God living is a pretty loaded idea.
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  Speaker 1: It can mean a God who has always been alive,
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  Speaker 1: unlike a god like Baal who dies in one of
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  Speaker 1: his most famous myths. It can also mean a God
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  Speaker 1: who is the source of life itself, and we see
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  Speaker 1: this kind of language in the Hebrew Bible itself when
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  Speaker 1: God is called the Living God. So we might be
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  Speaker 1: seeing a biblically influenced Allah who's a creator who brings
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  Speaker 1: light in life. But doctor al Jlad argues that we
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  Speaker 1: don't actually need to assume direct borrowing to explain this.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps this is pointing to a shared Near Eastern way
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  Speaker 1: of imagining creation across the ancient Near East, from Mespatia
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  Speaker 1: to the Hebrew Bible. Creation is often described as an
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  Speaker 1: act of ordering chaos, and more specifically, creation happens through division.
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  Speaker 1: Genesis one four, God separates the light from the darkness,
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  Speaker 1: and in this inscription we see the Arabic verb hlakkah,
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  Speaker 1: usually translated as to create, but it derives from an
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  Speaker 1: older Semitic root meaning to divide or separate. So when
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  Speaker 1: the Saphiata conscription describes Allah as bringing the light and
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  Speaker 1: the one who created through division, it may be tapping
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  Speaker 1: into the same cosmological patterns stretching back centuries. Doctor al
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  Speaker 1: Jelad writes ancient Allah was the creator and performed acts
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  Speaker 1: that made him immediately comparable to and interchangeable with the
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  Speaker 1: biblical God. The ancient Arabs could have easily found cosmological
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  Speaker 1: similarities with Christians and Jews without fully adopting their broader mythologies.
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  Speaker 1: Another line of evidence pointing toward pre Islamic Allah as
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  Speaker 1: a creator god comes from pre Islamic Arabic poetry. Now
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  Speaker 1: this is very tricky evidence because these poems were not
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  Speaker 1: written down at the time they were composed. They were
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  Speaker 1: preserved later. They were copied, collected, and transmitted by scholars
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  Speaker 1: in the Islamic period. So in a way, it's kind
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  Speaker 1: of like a medieval monk in Europe quoting Homer's Odyssey.
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  Speaker 1: If we're taking Homer as a historical figure, he's the
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  Speaker 1: original poet living in ancient Greece around the eighth century BCE.
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  Speaker 1: The medieval monk in France is how the quotation gets preserved.
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  Speaker 1: So technically speaking, the quotation does give us a glimpse
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  Speaker 1: into that much earlier world of ancient Greece, but the
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  Speaker 1: quotation is filtered through the lens of a medieval writer,
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  Speaker 1: so a similar thing is happening here. The poets themselves
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  Speaker 1: lived before Islam or write around its beginnings, but the
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  Speaker 1: versions that we have now come from later collections, so
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  Speaker 1: we have to read this evidence carefully. Some lines may
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  Speaker 1: have been edited, some may reflect later ideas, but scholars
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  Speaker 1: such as Nikolai Sinai argue that we can still get
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  Speaker 1: a pretty good sense of what ancient pre Islamic Arabs
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  Speaker 1: believed about a law. So in this poetry we often
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  Speaker 1: see a law as a creator. For example, one pre
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  Speaker 1: Islamic poet swears an oath by him the one who
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  Speaker 1: raised the heaven in its place and the full moon.
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  Speaker 1: Another pre Islamic poet from describes his beloved as made
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  Speaker 1: by a law, a law ordain for her when the
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  Speaker 1: creator created her. Pre Islamic poetry also depicts a law
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  Speaker 1: as the bringer of the rain, which is something we
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  Speaker 1: saw earlier in Safaeta conscriptions. Also compare this to what
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  Speaker 1: the musher kin of the Kuran say. If you ask
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  Speaker 1: them who sends down water from the sky, they will
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  Speaker 1: say a law. Pre Islamic poetry also describes a law
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  Speaker 1: as a god you can call upon in times of trouble.
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  Speaker 1: For example, one poem dating to the late five hundred
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  Speaker 1: says we ask a law to grant him enduring life.
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  Speaker 1: Another puts it even more bluntly. He who asks of
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  Speaker 1: humans will only meet refusal, but he who asks of
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  Speaker 1: a law will not be disappointed. Again, these line up
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  Speaker 1: closely with what we saw earlier in the Safaeta conscriptions.
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  Speaker 1: In those desert carvings, people are constantly invoking a law
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  Speaker 1: for help, grant us safety, grant us relief, grant us rain,
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  Speaker 1: short direct appeals, often in dangerous situations. In some ways,
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  Speaker 1: this cuts against the theory that he was a distant,
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  Speaker 1: inactive figure, a kind of philosophical high god who never
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  Speaker 1: intervenes even if a law is not very well attested.
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  Speaker 1: In pre Islamic inscriptions, he apparently was viewed as a
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  Speaker 1: god that people expected to respond. Doctor Sinai writes the
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  Speaker 1: poetic understanding of a law, then, is categorically not that
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  Speaker 1: of a quasi deistic god who, after creating the world,
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  Speaker 1: has retired from all activity. The poets associate a law
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  Speaker 1: with control over present goings on. This all brings us
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  Speaker 1: back to the musha kin of the Koran. Remember how
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  Speaker 1: they're described. If you ask them who created the heavens
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  Speaker 1: and the earth, they will say a law. If you
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  Speaker 1: ask them who created humans, they will say a law.
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  Speaker 1: The Koran portrays Muhammad's main opponents as already recognizing a
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  Speaker 1: law as a high creator god who harnessed the sun
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  Speaker 1: and the moon, who sends down rain from the sky.
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  Speaker 1: And looking at all of this evidence we've just explored,
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  Speaker 1: the Koran is probably preserving something historically real, as in,
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  Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to be inventing a parody of these people.
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  Speaker 1: Across all of these sources, from the Safieta conscriptions to
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  Speaker 1: the pre Islamic poetry to the Koran itself, a law
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  Speaker 1: is disc as a creator, a rain giver, supreme over
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  Speaker 1: the world, and actively involved in human life. But on
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  Speaker 1: the other hand, the inscriptions portray a god who is
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  Speaker 1: not particularly central. Remember he only shows up in forty
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  Speaker 1: or so inscriptions compared to gods like a Lot who
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  Speaker 1: shows up over a thousand times. So how do we
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: explain a law looking relatively minor in early inscriptions but
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: much more important in later poetry. In the Koran, it
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: seems by the centuries just before Islam and the four
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: hundreds and five hundred CE inscriptions increasingly reference just one
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: god a law. What we might be seeing here is
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: a late pre Islamic monotheizing trend, and this is not
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: happening in isolation. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean and eur East,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: the idea of a single supreme God was becoming more
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: and more popular, even among pagans. Greek and Roman philosophers
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: start talking about theos Hepsistos, the high God, and that
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: the many different gods of the Greco Roman pantheon are
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: simply manifestations of that one high God. The philosopher Diochristicism
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: rites Apollohelios and Dionysios are the same, and there are
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: many who simply reduce all the gods to a single power.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: The philosopher Maximus of Tire, writing around one FIFTYCEE, says,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: the one doctrine upon which all the world is united
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: is that one God is king of all, and that
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: there are many gods sons of God who rule together
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: with God Elsewhere. Maximus argues that this supreme God is
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: too elevated to come into direct relation with this base
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: material world, so he needs the daemones, immortal beings dwelling
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: between heaven and earth, mediators between human weakness and divine omnipotence. Then,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: writing in the four hundreds, the neoplatonist Macrobius argues that
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: the gods of the Greek and Egyptian pantheon were partial
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: representations of one great solar God. So again we're seeing
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: a monotheizing trend. And Arabian society was not isolated from
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: this world. By the late five hundred CE, when Muhammad
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: was born, Arab tribes were increasingly connected to the Roman Empire,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: the Persian Empire, and especially to Christianity. Christian and Manichean
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: missionaries have been active among Arabic speaking populations for hundreds
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: of years, and what you get is a cultural exchange.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Doctor Nikolai Sinai argues that in this environment a law
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: could have become something like a shared concept. Christians could
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: hear a Lahan think Ah, the god of the Bible,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Pagans could hear Alan think Ah, the high creator God
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: we've been worshiping for centuries. Doctor Sini writes, it may
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: well be this bi directional intelligibility of pre Islamic notions
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: of a law across the pagan Christian divide that played
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: a significant role in propelling him to prominence in the
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: pre Koronic centuries. The scholar Patricia Krona goes so far
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: as to argue that the Koronic musha Kin were functionally
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: pagan monotheists. They didn't deny a law they believed to him,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: and they even acknowledged him as the creator. The problem
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: wasn't disbelief, it was association. The Qoran constantly criticizes them
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: for recognizing or vene lesser divine beings, sometimes described as
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: pre Islamic gods, sometimes as angels, and sometimes as sons
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: and daughters of Allah. The Qoran says, they say God
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: has begotten offspring. They falsely credit him with sons and daughters.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: How can he have offspring when he has no consort.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: The Koran even explains their reasoning, we only worship them,
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: these lesser intermediary beings, so that they may bring us
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: closer to God. So what we're seeing here is a
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: system where a Law sits at the top of a hierarchy.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: He is the supreme creator, with other lower divine beings
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: beneath him functioning as intermediaries through whom people approach God.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Doctor Krona writes the pagan deities mentioned in the Koran
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: had all been autonomous gods, yet all appear to have
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: been downgraded to intermediary status. She argues the mushri Kin
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: may have viewed these beings as conceptually different as the
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: High God, viewing them as manifestations, emanations, or aspects of
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: the One True God. So the Qoran's charge of a
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: duociation or shirk means that they were recognizing other superhumans
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: alongside a Law, failing to worship him exclusively. And there
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: were also some crucial differences between the a law of
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Islam and the Allah of the musha Kin in both
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: pre Islamic poetry and the Koran's description of pagan belief,
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: a law is not an end times judge. There's no resurrection,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: no final judgment, and no eternal reward or punishment. That's
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: the part that Koran really emphasizes, and it's also the
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: part that seems to have been most controversial to the
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: mushi Kin of Mecca, so we can see both continuity
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: and change. Muhammad did not introduce a law to the
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: musha Kin, as the Koran itself says, pre Islamic Arabs
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: already believed in a god named a law for centuries,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: and as we've seen the Safiata conscriptions, they invoked him
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: for protection, swore by his name, and in at least
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: one case, linked him with light and creation. But the
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Koran redefines him, calling people to recognize a law alone
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: as the only one worthy of worship and as the
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: one who will ultimately judge humanity. If you're interested in
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: how Islam evolved over time, I'm very excited to invite
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: you to our upcoming reading group reading through the Conference
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: of the Birds, a classic work of Sufi Islamic literature.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Sign up at Religiondepartment dot com slash Conference of the Birds.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: Conference of the Birds tells the story of a group
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: of birds who set out on a journey to find
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: their king. They pass through a series of symbolic valleys,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: each representing stages of spiritual transformation, doubt, love, loss of ego,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: and ultimately a kind of radical rethinking of the self.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: It's an absolutely stunning display of Sufi thought. So think
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: of this like a weekly book club with an expert host.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: You'll meet every week with the scholar, doctor Patrick da Silva,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: a specialist in Sufism. You'll read selections together, you'll unpack
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: what's going on in real time and get the kind
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: of context that'll help you make sense of the text itself.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: We're hosting this through our learning community, the Religion Department.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: We've brought together some of the most compelling scholars of
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: religion and we're here to help you move past surface
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: level takes on religion. A lot of people talk about
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: religion and fewer people know how to study. But at
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the Religion Department, through live classes, guided readings, and a
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: growing library of lectures, we'll give you the tools to
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: think more clearly about religion and start to understand how
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: religion shapes culture, identity, and the whole world around you.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: So if you're looking for a smarter way to think
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: about religion, this is a great entry point. Join our
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: Sufismreading group at Religiondepartment dot com slash Conference of the Birds.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Thanks everyone,