From The Portable World Bible
edited by Robert O. Ballou printed by the Viking Press. Pages 437 - 439
During the first half of the millennium of our era, when Christianity was establishing itself firmly in Europe and Zoroastrianism, having been stopped in its march by the Greek victory at Salamis, in Persia, when in China Confucius and Lao Tze had become venerated saints of the distant past and Buddhism had spread far eastward from the land of its origin, the vast majority of the Semitic Arabian people still expressed their dim religious consciousness in primitive, unorganized polytheism. In the Theology of the Arabs, there was a God for every sept - a deity who symbolized the state of union which existed between every living man and his ancestors. Above all these minor Gods there was one higher god, Allah, whose sons and daughters the tribal deities were. Feasts and ceremonies paid tribute to tribal gods, but Allah was ignored in these propitiations. Holy oaths were sworn and documents sealed in his name, but beyond this recognition of his existence he seems to have had little pertinence to the life of the average Arab.
In the conception and name of Allah, the Arabians were but carrying on a primitive vision of God and a word which existed before the beginning of their recorded history -- one which fathered the conception of Jehovah as well as that of Allah. Just as a common ancestry of the Indians, Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and others, may be traced, through language and common theologies, to the Indo-European race, so has language research established knowledge of a common Semitic race, through which, before recorded history, scattered into southern or Arabic, and northern, or Aramaic, and middle or Hebrew, branches.
Among the deities common to all of these peoples was El, which
meant "strong." In early Hebrew it occurs to mean "strong," "hero,"and
"God." In Babylonian inscriptions, the same designation occurs as Ilu,
meaning God. In Arabic Ilah, standing alone, means any god; combined with
an article, Al-Ilah, it becomes, through shortening, Allah, the far and
distant God, whose sons and daughters were worshiped by the Arabian tribes. (1)
This Book addresses the eight (8) major religions of the world, was copyrighted
in 1939, first published in 1944 and had its 24th printing in 1970.
1. F. Max Muller, The Science of Religion (New York 1872).
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