Hubal

"Hubal" was also pseudonym of Henryk Dobrzanski, legendary Polish partisan from World War II

Hubal (هبل) was a god worshipped in the ancient Middle East before the arrival of Islam.

Contents

1 Hubal and the Kaaba
2 Hubal and the Islamic God
3 Hubal in Mesopotamia
4 External links

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. 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, except for a picture of the Madonna which he protected (Hashim at-Tawil, "Early Arab Icons: Literary and Archaeological Evidence for the Cult of Religious Images in Pre-Islamic Arabia" (University of Iowa, 1993)).

Hubal and the Islamic God

Attempts to identify Hubal with the so-called "Muslim god" have been popular among evangelical Christians, but some acknowledge that this hypothesis is speculative[link] and others argue that the Islamic-period texts from which most knowledge of pre-Islamic Arab religion suggest otherwise. There has been responses on the Muslim side to this allegation of moon worship [link] [link]

Some scholars nonetheless maintain that "as the chief deity in Mecca, Hubal was seemingly considered identical with Allah" (AG Lundin, Myths of the Peoples of the World (Moscow), 2:606).

With respect to the etymology of "Hubal", if the reading by Jawad Ali of the first part of the name as the definite article "ha" can be accepted, then the whole name Hubal may be rendered "ha-ba`l" or "the Lord" (Dr Jawad Ali, Al-Mufassal Fi Tarikh al-Arab Qabl al-Islam (Beirut), 6:232). He claims the Jâhilî Arabs called the moon "baal" (Jawad Ali, Al-Mufassal, 6:174). This "etymology" is doubly implausible - in that there are no attested cases of a definite article in Arabic being pronounced "hu", and in that "ba`l" contains a consonant (`ayn) not found in Hubal.

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 in History of the Arabs (1937, pp. 96-101), 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 (Corpus Inscriptiones Semit., vol. II: (189 or 198?); Jaussen and Savignac, Mission Archéologique en Arabie, I (1907) pp.169f); there Hubal is mentioned along with the gods Đu sh-Sharā (ذو الشراة) and Manawatu (the latter of which was also popular in Mecca). On the basis of such slender evidence, it has been suggested that Hubal "may actually have been a Nabataean" (Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, 1961, translated by Anne Carter, 1971, p 38-49), 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 4th 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."

Welllhausen (1926:717, as quoted by [Hans Krause]) indicates that Hubal was regarded as the son of al-Lāt and the brother of Wadd.

As an infant, Muhammad was brought before Hubal by his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib (at-Tabari, The History of the Prophets and Kings, 1:157).

External links

[The Kitab al-Asnam ("Book of Idols")]: translation as posted by an evangelical Christian site.
[Kitab al-Asnam] in the original Arabic (description on p. 5)
[Pre-Islamic Arabia and Its Socio-Religious Conditions]

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