Allah as a lunar deity

Allah as a Lunar deity refers to the postulation that "Allah" (the name of God in Islam) originated as a moon god. The claim first arose in 1901 in the scholarship of archeologist Hugo Winckler, who identified the name Allah with a pre-Islamic Arabian deity known as Lah or Hubal, which he called a lunar deity. The idea has been dismissed by scholars such as Patricia Crone and Joseph Lumbard, and is vehemently rejected by Muslims.

The general idea was widely propagated in the United States in the 1990s by Christian apologists, first via the publication of Robert Morey's pamphlet The Moon-god Allah: In Archeology of the Middle East (1994), eventually followed by his book The Islamic Invasion: Confronting the World's Fastest-Growing Religion (2001). Morey argued, slightly differently, that "Allah" was the name of a moon goddess in pre-Islamic Arabic mythology. Islam's use of a lunar calendar and the prevalence of crescent moon imagery in Islam have also been used to support the notion. Both iterations of the theory have been dismissed by modern scholars as entirely unevidenced. The propagation of the theory is regarded as an insult both to Muslims and to Arab Christians, who likewise refer to God as "Allah".