Wednesday, November 11 2026
More Bible Studies Available @ http://www.marktabata.com. To Receive Free Bible Studies and updates via email, contact Mark Tabata @ 606-216-1757 (SMS Only) or mailto:markatabata@gmail.com (Email). Follow me on Substack: http://substack.com/@marktabata. Also, please visit my author page: http://amazon.com/author/marktabata
Deuteronomy 32:16-17-They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger. 17 They sacrificed to demons, not to God, To gods they did not know, To new gods, new arrivals That your fathers did not fear.
As we begin our study of Islam, it will help us to have a basic timeline in place.
The religion of Islam began with a man named Muhammad, who was born on August 2, 570 and died in 632 A.D.
Muhammad was born in the city of Mecca, in Arabia (which today includes the countries of Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan). Sadly, his father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was at the tender age of six. When this happened, Muhammad was adopted by his grandfather (his father’s father)., who was part of the Quraysh tribe. This grandfather, a man by the name of Abd al-Muttalib, was the caretaker of a very holy site in the land of Mecca Kaaba, or Al-kaaba.
What exactly is this?
One former Muslim college professor explains it in detail.
This tribe controlled the main place of worship for all of Arabia, a temple filled with idols known as Al-Ka’ha. Muhammad’s grandfather father had the honor of serving as the caretaker for Al-Ka’ba. He was in charge of repairs and cleaning. The temple was made of a walled courtyard with a large, block structure in the center. (The phrase AI-Ka’ba literally means “the cube.”) The block monument was shaped like a rectangle and draped with the richest fabrics of the day. Even before the advent of Islam the people believed Abraham built it. This monument was also called the Black Stone, in reference to a small stone, believed to have fallen from heaven, concealed inside the structure. “Once a year Muhammad’s grandfather would have removed the coverings, washed the structure, and placed new coverings back on it. All tribes believed in a supreme god, but they were not sure who this supreme god was. They looked for a mediator to help connect them to this supreme god. So they made different types of idols…Even though each tribe had their own idol to worship, everyone also walked in circles around the Black Stone as part of their worship rituals. However, they did not believe the Black Stone represented the supreme god. Each tribe had its own traditions for annual pilgrimages as well. So there were always different tribes visiting Al-Ka’ba. When tribes came they gave voluntary offerings of money, food, or animals, which the caretakers and the tribe of Quraysh kept. (Mark Gabriel, Jesus And Muhammad: Profound Differences And Surprising Similarities, 313-319 (Kindle Edition); Lake Mary, Florida; Charisma House)
Muhammad lived with his grandfather for two years, and he saw the religious devotion of the pagans to this site.
It will help to remember that in Muhammad’s time, there were three prominent religions in the region from which he hailed. There were some followers of the Jewish religion, some of the Christian religion (which was more appropriately described as Catholicism by that point), and paganism as well.
It is when we study the origins of Arabian paganism that we get our first glimpse into the god of Islam, known as Allah. One historian on the subject provides the following fascinating breakdown.
With Arabia’s submission to the authority of Zoroastrian Persians, state-sponsored monotheism in Arabia came to an end. The Jewish and Christian communities that survived were left without international patrons, but they clearly continued to practice their faith in cities, such as San‘ā’ or Ẓafār for the Christians, and Ẓafār and Yathrib for the Jews. 1 The long years of Jewish and Christian monotheism as the religion of government naturally contributed to the decline of pagan cults, for which temples became markedly fewer as the sixth century progressed. But the cults that survived remained much as they were before the monotheist centuries. Paganism had traditionally been polytheist, and no less traditionally it was associated with desert tribes. The Ka‘ba in Mecca, to which the tribes still came on pilgrimages, constituted a sacred space (ḥaram) that was not only urban but boasted more than a local constituency. Other cities, such as Dūmat al-jandal and Ṭā’if, also had polytheist shrines. But if the Arabic tradition that pre-Islamic idolatry numbered 360 gods is a fantasy, to reduce the number to one, as has been claimed in recent years, with Allāh as the sole god, would be a fantasy of comparable proportion. 2 Polytheism in the late sixth century left enough traces on stone found today to leave no doubt that, however much the monotheist rulers may have weakened idol worship, idols were still both numerous and numinous. Allusions to the worship of these idols was catalogued in detail by Ibn al-Kalbī in a text that only became accessible late in the last century. 3 Although he was writing after the revelations to the Prophet Muḥammad, and his evidence is circumstantial, he seems, in his comparisons with cults outside Arabia (such as those at Palmyra), reasonably well informed. It is not easy nowadays to use the word “paganism” in discussing religious beliefs, simply because it has no clear meaning. It is usually defined by what it is not, and in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean context that meant neither Jewish nor Christian. The word “pagan” (paganus) evokes a Latin word for a rustic or country person, and it is certainly true that many local cults, such as those that worship trees, springs, and other natural features, would explain such a designation. But in Greek the early Christian word for pagan (ethnikos) pointed simply to ethnic or national differences. It was formed from ethnos (nation), a word much like goy in Hebrew, which meant “nation” in the Bible but later changed to designate any non-Jew, and the Septuagint translation of the Bible into Greek naturally facilitated this change. Greek ethnikos was then literally matched by the Latin equivalent gentilis, and both eventually came, like goy, as well as the English Gentile, to designate non-Jews. 4 Meanwhile, ethnikos in the sense of pagan gave way in later Christian texts to hellēn (Greek) because after Constantine the cultivation of classical Greek culture was generally linked to pagan Greek religion—neither Christian nor Jewish. But hellēn, although an increasingly common word for paganism in later Greek, never wholly lost its connection with Hellenism, and this could be profoundly embarrassing for a Christian like Gregory of Nazianzus, who had been educated in classical Greek learning. 5 In general, the word “polytheism” is infinitely preferable to paganism because, unlike paganism, it has a precise meaning, which is the worship of many gods. Surprisingly it took scholars of the modern era a long time to come to the banal realization that pagan cults that were indisputably polytheist often showed a hierarchy of gods, with a supreme god such as Jupiter or Zeus over all. Consequently this realization has inspired a flood of attempts to legitimate something called “pagan monotheism” or even “soft monotheism.” 6 But no one familiar with Greek cults could possibly imagine that the pre-Christian Greeks were monotheists, even if in later antiquity various unnamed gods were occasionally perceived as parts (merē) of a single god. (G. W. Bowersock, The Crucible of Islam, 33-37 (Kindle Edition): Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)
Paganism thus had reference to the worship of various gods and goddesses. It is fascinating that here, in this historical study of paganism in ancient Arabia, we get our first glimpse into what became the god of Islam, known as Allah.
The pre-Islamic gods, however many there may have been, had distinctive names, as we know both from inscriptions and from the Qur’ān, quite apart from the later register of Ibn al-Kalbī. The most resonant of those names was Allāh, which, as the whole world knows, ultimately became the name for the single God of Muslim monotheism. But this name and this god had a long pedigree, which goes back at least to the fifth century BC, when Herodotus mentioned a feminine form of the name, Alilat. 8 She emerges in later centuries with her name contracted to Allāt, and she was probably a consort of Allāh. At Palmyra she was worshipped as a part of the pantheon of which Ibn al-Kalbī was well aware, and a marble statue of her, discovered on the site, represented her as an Arab Athena. Greek polytheism regularly nourished Arab polytheism through fruitful similarities of function and appearance. The large-eyed face on a wall painting at Qaryat al-Fāw and a statue of a hermaphrodite at the same site illustrate this cross-fertilization memorably. 9. (G. W. Bowersock, The Crucible of Islam, 37-38 (Kindle Edition): Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)
This religious climate of Muhammad’s day formed the foundations for what became the religion of Islam.
Lord, give us wisdom to discern the reality of the gods of this world. Help us to look to You, the one true eternal God, as the Source of our hope. Amen.