Some inscriptions seem to indicate the use of Allah as a name of a polytheist deity centuries earlier, but nothing precise is known about this use. According to that hypothesis, the Kaaba was first consecrated to a supreme deity named Allah and then hosted the pantheon of Quraysh after their conquest of Mecca, about a century before the time of Muhammad. However, there is also evidence that Allah and Hubal were two distinct deities. According to one hypothesis, which goes back to Julius Wellhausen, Allah (the supreme deity of the tribal federation around Quraysh) was a designation that consecrated the superiority of Hubal (the supreme deity of Quraysh) over the other gods. The term may have been vague in the Meccan religion. Some authors have suggested that polytheistic Arabs used the name as a reference to a creator god or a supreme deity of their pantheon. In Islam worshipping anyone other than God is considered as the greatest sin. Pagans believed worship of humans or animals who had lucky events in their life brought them closer to God. According to the Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir, Arab pagans considered Allah as an unseen God who created and controlled the Universe. Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in pre-Islamic polytheistic cults. Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic inscriptions. Biblical Hebrew mostly uses the plural (but functional singular) form Elohim ( אלהים), but more rarely it also uses the singular form Eloah ( אלוהּ). It is written as ܐܠܗܐ ( ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ ( ʼAlâhâ) in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply "God". The corresponding Aramaic form is Elah ( אלה), but its emphatic state is Elaha ( אלהא). Ĭognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. The majority of modern scholars subscribe to the latter theory, and view the loanword hypothesis with skepticism. Others held that it was borrowed from Syriac or Hebrew, but most considered it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- "the" and ilāh " deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the deity", or "the God". Grammarians of the Basra school regarded it as either formed "spontaneously" ( murtajal) or as the definite form of lāh (from the verbal root lyh with the meaning of "lofty" or "hidden"). The etymology of the word Allāh has been discussed extensively by classical Arab philologists. Similar usage by Christians and Sikhs in West Malaysia has recently led to political and legal controversies.
It is also often, albeit not exclusively, used in this way by Bábists, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, Indonesian and Maltese Christians, and Sephardi Jews. Along with Allah, however, they also worshipped a host of lesser gods and “daughters of Allah.” Later it has been used as a term for God by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) and even Arab Christians after the term " al- ilāh" and "Allah" were used interchangeably in Classical Arabic by the majority of Arabs who had become Muslims. The origin of the title Allah goes back before Muhammad, who found that the Meccans worshipped a supreme deity whom they called Allah. The word Allah has been used by Arabic people of different religions since pre-Islamic times. The word is thought to be derived by contraction from al- ilāh, which means "the god", and is linguistically related to the Hebrew words El ( Elohim), Elah and Aramaic word ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlâhâ) for God. In the English language, the word generally refers to God in Islam. Allah ( / ˈ æ l ə, ˈ ɑː l ə, ə ˈ l ɑː/ Arabic: الله, romanized: Allāh, IPA: ( listen)) is the common Arabic word for God.