It not even necessary to mention that Allah plays a central point in Islam and the life of Muslims in all Muslim nations. Muslims without a shred of evidence consider Allah to be the creator of all things in the universe. The Muslims’ God, Allah, occupies the most sanctified place in Islam. Knowing or understanding who or what Allah is, therefore, is critical to the understanding of Islam.
There are great many discussions and views on the origin of this term and its eventual adoption by Muhammad as referring to the creator of the universe.
Long before Islam, Arabs of the greater Arabian Peninsula worshiped, in the broadest sense of the term, the sun, the moon, and the stars. The root word for Allah is Ela, a term used by Yemeni Arabs for god and in reference to the moon. In addition, there were numerous other Ela. Allah is thought to be a compound word composed of al (the) and Ela.
It was Yemeni Arabs who migrated to the present Saudi Arabia who took the concept and the term Ela with them and propagated it. This is the root of the first part of the Muslim profession of faith, La ilah illaAllah, “there is no God but Allah.”
To re-emphasize, before the advent of Islam, the Arabs were idol worshipers. One their own historians, by the name of Vaqqidi, said that the Arabs had 360 gods for each day of the year, and the largest and the main God was called “Allah.” They were pagan, a polytheistic culture. Interestingly enough, not many Muslims want to accept that Allah was already being worshiped at the Ka’ba in Mecca by Arab pagans before Muhammad even appeared.
Many idols existed in Mecca. Each tribe had its own idol they worshiped; they did not reject or denounce other idols. They simply left them alone. Even when at war with one another, they did not desecrate or destroy the opponent’s idols. They just ignored them.
There were four major idols in the Kabeh (known as the house of Allah) of Mecca, three of which had physical representations. The fourth was Allah, who had no physical form. This fourth idol was greatly feared, and reportedly was experienced at night, in the wilderness, and in desolate valleys.
This Allah was believed to have two daughters. Muhammad made Allah a kind of super-god by elevating him above the other three major idols, and said that Allah did not have the two daughters that Arabs believed he had.
These assertions by Muhammad greatly irked the Arabs, and formed one of the reasons for their hostility toward him.
In effect, what Muhammad did was to make the formless Allah into a super-god, proclaimed that there is no other Ela or god than Allah, and took him out of the idolatry of Mecca, shipping the formless Allah to the invisible heavens.
Why did Muhammad elect Allah and make him the super-god? There are all kinds of speculations about that. One plausible theory is that his tribe worshiped the idol Allah. His father was named Abdullah, contraction of Abd-ul-elah (slave of Allah). It also served Muhammad well by making himself the one and only interlocutor between the super-god and the people.
Endless questions arise. For one, is Allah the super-god who created the entire universe, as the Quran claims, by one command word of his mouth “kon va yakoon” (become and became)? The hodgepodge book called the Quran is full of nonsensical, contradictory verbiage that Muhammad claimed to be Allah’s word, perfectly transmitted. This is the very same verbiage that took the same super-god twenty-three years to write in a smallish book, and earned Muhammad the reputation “enaho la shaeron majnoon” (he is crazed poet) from the Meccans of his time.
Why did this supreme being, the personification of all knowledge and wisdom, chose an illiterate hired-hand Arab to serve as his mouthpiece? Why is the “perfect” book he gave him so scrambled and confused?