Hubal

In pagan Arabia, before the teachings of Muhammad (محمد), the moon god Hubal (هبل) was worshipped, especially at the shrine where he was the chief among the deities represented by idols, the Kaaba (الكعبة) at Mecca (مكة المنورة)). Muhammad freed his tribe the Quraish (القريش) from their pagan worship by smashing all the idols at the Kaaba, including Hubal. Though there were 360 idols there, Hubal was the main pagan manifestation of the One God (Allah (الله) means "the God") in South Arabia.

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, pages 96-101), and even to "baal" ("lord") then Hubal may have come from the north of Arabia. In Sumer, in southernmost Mesopotamia, just to the north of Arabia, the moon-god figures in the Creation epic, the Enuma Elish; in a variant of it, the Moon-God is chief among the elder gods. According to Hitti, a tradition recorded by Muhammad's early biographer ibn-Hisham, which makes Amr ibn-Luhayy the importer of this idol 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, vol. I (1907) pp.169f); there Hubal is mentioned along with deities Dusares (ذو الشراة) and Manutu. 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.

At the conquest of Makkah by Muhammad Hubal shared the lot of the other idols and was destroyed.

Hubal the moon god had three daughters, or rather he had a daughter-goddess in three manifestations: al-Lat (the feminine form of "God", i.e. "the Goddess"), Uzza,who was the youngest of the three, and Manat the crone goddess, who carried the shears of fate like Atropos among the Greeks. The three daughters of the moon are mentioned in the Qur'an, but Hubal's name does not appear, not even to be denied.

According to Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar, Muhammad The Holy Prophet (1969), "About four hundred years before the birth of Muhammad one Amr bin Lahyo bin Harath bin Amr ul-Qais bin Thalaba bin Azd bin Khalan bin Babalyun bin Saba, a descendant of Qahtan and king of Hijaz, [more usually called