Hubal

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"Hubal" was also pseudonym of Henryk Dobrzanski, a Polish partisan from World War II
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Hubal (هبل) was a god worshipped in pagan Arabia, notably at Mecca before the arrival of Islam.

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[edit] Hubal and the Kaaba

One notable center of Hubal-worship is said to have been at the Kaaba at Mecca, where his was said to be the grandest of the idols. As an infant, Muhammad was brought before Hubal by his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, at-Tabari records in The History of the Prophets and Kings 1:157. When Muhammad conquered Mecca, he ended the Quraysh's tradition of idol-worship by smashing the statue of Hubal along with the 360 idols at the Kaaba

[edit] Hubal and Allah

Attempts to identify "the Muslim god" (i.e. Allah) with Hubal have been popular among evangelical Christians. Some acknowledge that this hypothesis is speculative[1] and others argue that the Islamic-period texts from which most knowledge of pre-Islamic Arab religion suggest otherwise. This allegation of "moon-worship" is of course staunchly rejected from the Muslim side [2][3][4].

At face value, the hypothesis that Hubal was originally the proper name of Allah suffers from serious difficulties. In the Battle of Uhud the distinction between the followers of Allah and the followers of Hubal is made clear by the statements of Muhammad and Abu Sufyan. Ibn Hisham narrates in the biography of Muhammad:

When Abu Sufyan wanted to leave he went to the top of the mountain and shouted loudly saying, "You have done a fine work; victory in war goes by turns. Today in exchange for the day (of Badr). Show your superiority, Hubal," i.e. vindicate your religion. The apostle told ‘Umar to get up and answer him and say, God [Allah] is most high and most glorious. We are not equal. Our dead are in paradise; your dead are in hell.[5]

In fact, Arab Jews and Arab Christians referred to God as Allah before the arrival of Islam [6] [7] and still continue to do so today.

[edit] Hubal in Mesopotamia

Tracing the origins of ancient gods is often tenuous. If the name Hubal is related to an Aramaic word for spirit, as suggested by Philip K. Hitti[1], then Hubal may have come from the north of Arabia.

In Sumer, in southernmost Mesopotamia north of Arabia, the moon-god figures in the Creation epic, the Enuma Elish; in a variant of it, Hubal is chief among the elder gods. According to Hitti, a tradition recorded by Muhammad's early biographer ibn Ishaq, which makes ˤAmr ibn-Luhayy the importer of an image of Hubal from Moab or Mesopotamia, may have a kernel of truth insofar as it retains a memory of such an Aramaic origin of the deity.

Outside South Arabia, Hubal's name appears just once in a Nabataean inscription; [2] there Hubal is mentioned along with the gods Đu sh-Sharā (ذو الشراة) and Manawatu—the latter, as Manat, was also popular in Mecca. On the basis of such slender evidence, it has been suggested that Hubal "may actually have been a Nabataean" [3], but the Nabataeans were cosmospolitan traders who drew on many traditions in every aspect of life.

According to Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar,Muhammad The Holy Prophet (1969),

About four hundred years before the birth of Muhammad one ˤAmr ibn Lahya ibn Harath ibn ˤAmru l-Qays ibn Thalaba ibn Azd ibn Khalan ibn Babalyun ibn Saba, a descendant of Qahtan and King of the Hijaz, more usually called Amr ibn Luhayy, had put an idol called Hubal on the roof of the Kaˤabat. This was one of the chief deities of the Quraysh before Islam."

The actual date for this quasi-legendary leader of the Quraysh are disputed, with dates as late as the end of the fourth century CE suggested, but what is quite sure is that the Qurayshiyya became the protectors of the ancient holy place, supplanting the Khuza'a. There may be some foundation of truth in the story that Luhayy had travelled in Syria and had brought back from there the cults of the goddesses ˤUzzā' and Manat, and had combined it with that of Hubal, the idol of the Khuza'a. (Maxime Rodinson, 1961).

An earlier reference to this legend records that he

"brought with him [to Mecca] an idol called Hubal from the land of Hit in Mesopotamia... So he set it up at the well inside the Kaaba and ordered the people to worship it. Thus a man coming back from a journey would visit it and circumambulate the House before going to his family, and he would shave his hair before it. Muhammad ibn Ishaq said that Hubal was cornelian pearl in the shape of a human. His right hand was broken off and the Quraysh made a gold hand for it. It had a vault for the sacrifice, and there were seven arrows cast [on issues relating to] a dead person, virginity and marriage. Its offering was a hundred camels. It had a custodian (hajib)" (Al-Azraqi, died 834 CE, an early commentator).

According to Ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols,

"The Quraysh had several idols in and around the Kaaba. The greatest of these was Hubal. It was made, as I was told, of red agate, in the form of a man with the right hand broken off. It came into the possession of the Quraysh in this condition, and they therefore made for it a hand of gold. The first to set it up was Khuzaymah ibn-Mudrikah ibn-al-Ya's' ibn-Mudar. Consequently it used to be called 'Khuzaymah's Hubal'.
"It stood inside the Kaaba. In front of it were seven divination arrows. On one of these arrows was written "pure" (sarih), and on another "consociated alien" (mulsag). Whenever the lineage of a new-born was doubted, they would offer a sacrifice to it [Hubal] and then shuffle the arrows and throw them ... It was before [Hubal] that 'Abd-al-Muttalib shuffled the divination arrows [in order to find out which of his ten children he should sacrifice in fulfilment of a vow he had sworn], and the arrows pointed to his son ˤAbdu l-Lāh, father of the Prophet.
"In 624 at the battle called 'Uhud', the war cry of the Qurayshites was, 'O people of ˤUzzā', people of Hubal!' By the end of that war, the victorious Abū Sufyān ibn-Harb cried, 'O Hubal be exalted, O Hubal be exalted!'"
"The Prophet answered him: 'God is the highest and the most exalted.'"

Julius Welllhausen[4] indicates that Hubal was regarded as the son of al-Lāt and the brother of Wadd.

[edit] Hubal and al-Qaeda

Many non-Muslims have as of recently encountered references to Hubal without knowing it: the term is used by some adherents of the Wahhabi movement as a metaphor for secularized ("Western") mores, most prominently by Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Translations of al-Qaida press releases will often contain the phrase "the idol of this/our/the age". In the original Arabic version, the word used for "idol" is Hubal, and al-Qaeda statements released in English (e.g. as-Sahab Productions, 2006), apparently to distinguish the term "idol" as in "idolatry" from the more common meaning, give the phrase as "the Hubal (idol) of this age".

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Hitti, History of the Arabs 1937, pp. 96-101.
  2. ^ Corpus Inscriptiones Semit., vol. II: (189 or 198?); Jaussen and Savignac, Mission Archéologique en Arabie, I (1907) pp.169f
  3. ^ Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, 1961, translated by Anne Carter, 1971, p 38-49
  4. ^ Wellhausen, 1926, p 717, an unidentified English translation? as quoted by Hans Krause

[edit] External links

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