Pagan Pre-Islamic Arabian Origins Of The ‘Bismillah’ In Islamic Prayer To Allah | Pagan Idolatry In Islam

The Islamic phrase bismillah, “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful” (Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem), is recited before the start of each Quranic surah and begins the Islamic al-Fatiha prayer. This phrase occurs in Quran 27:30.

In 2018 the first known pre-Islamic Arabian Basmala inscription was found on the side of a cliff in Yemen, reading in South Arabian Script, “In the name of Allah, Rahman; Rahman lord of the heavens” (bsmlh rḥmn rḥmn rb smwt). The rest of the inscription reads, “satisfy us by means of your favor, and grant us the essense of it (i.e. wisdom) to number our days”. Writing about the discovery, Ahmad al-Jallad dates the inscription to the late 6th or early 7th century CE and observes that overall the inscription has a psalm like quality, likely impacted by Jewish or Christian liturgy. He interprets the second rḥmn as rḥm-n (“have mercy on us”) (Ahmad al-Jallad, The pre-Islamic basmala: Reflections on its first epigraphic attestation and its original significance, pp. 6-7)

Ar-Raheem (the merciful) would then be an Islamic innovation appended to al-Rahman of the pagan pre-Islamic Arabian Basmala which by then had come to represent an adjective describing the Islamic deity Allah. (Ahmad al-Jallad, The pre-Islamic basmala: Reflections on its first epigraphic attestation and its original significance, page 13 ff)

This pagan pre-Islamic basmala and many other pagan pre-Islamic inscriptions bear stark similarities with the terminology and phrases found in various passages in the Muslim Quran. (Ahmad al-Jallad, 2020, Chapter 7: The Linguistic Landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia – Context for the Qur’an in Mustafa Shah ed., Muhammad Abdel Haleem ed., “The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 121 ff)

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