High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Allah as Moon-God is a claim put forth by some Evangelical Christian groups that the Islamic name for God, Allah, derives from a pagan Moon god in local Arabic mythology. The implication is that "Allah" is a different God from the Judeo-Christian deity and that Muslims are worshipping a "false god". The claim is most associated with the Christian apologist author Robert Morey, whose book The moon-god Allah in the archeology of the Middle East is the most cited source of the meme that Allah is a moon-god. It has also been promoted in the cartoon tracts of Jack Chick. The use of a lunar calendar and the prevalence of crescent moon imagery in Islam is said to be the result of this origination. In 2009 anthropologist Gregory Starrett wrote, "a recent survey by the Council for American Islamic Relations reports that as many as 10% of Americans believe Muslims are pagans who worship a moon god or goddess, a belief energetically disseminated by some Christian activists." Islamic and Western scholars have rejected these claims, one even calling them "insulting". It is argued that "Allah" is simply the word for "God" in Arabic, which ultimately derives from the same root as the Hebrew words "El" and "Elohim", both used in the Book of Genesis. Sociologist Lori Peek, "Allah is simply the Arabic word meaning God. In fact people who speak Arabic, be they Christians, Jews or Muslims, often say "Allah" to describe God, just as God is called "Gott" in German and "Dieu" in French." While other gods were certainly referred to using this epithet, this is equally true of the Hebrew words. The Biblical commandment You shall have no other gods before me uses the same word, "Elohim", to refer to the "other" gods that is used for the creator god. It is also true of the English, French and other European-language words for God. Indeed the English word "God" evolved from pagan Germanic terms for invocation; the Latin word Deus, from which "Dieu" derives, can be traced to the same root as Dyeus, which gives the names of the ancient Indo-European divinities Zeus, Jove and Dyaus Pitar.
