Moslems usually know little about the origins of the cult of Submission. Islam is not a religion of course, but a communal cult. The individual is effectively neutered – chained in the most feudalistic manner - and must support the dictums of the Allah-Muhammad complex of commands, injunctions and obligations. You have no free-will. That was taken care of by the immanent power of the Allah-thing, or 'Lord' witnessed through mankind's 'perfect' man, Muhammad.

This Allah which referenced the first Lord of the Kabaa shrine in Mecca, was the only force of free-will in the universe. He [or it], controlled everything. This ilah was of course Baal or Hu'Bal in northern Arabian scripts. Baal was a celestial deity and in northern Arabia it was the male moon idol. Baal was represented by a black asteroid rock, which Meccans and pilgrims had to kiss and venerate. When you roll back the fog of history, Allah is a moon idol.

Sheldon Smith, in 'Islam, A raging storm', gets it right when he states on page 24:

“The truth is, the Islamic god, is a god borrowed from the mythology of the paganism which was prevalent in the Middle East at the time of Muhammad. In effect Muhammad created Allah:

...the hard evidence suggests that the god Allah was a pagan deity. In fact, he was the moon god who was married to the sun goddess, and the stars were his daughters....In ancient Syria and Cana, the moon god Sin was usually represented by the moon in its crescent phase...The archeological evidence demonstrates that the dominant religion of Arabia was the cult of the moon god....While they worshipped 360 idols at the Kabah in Mecca, the moon god was the chief deity.”

I am sure if Mr. Smith wanted a Phd from a prestigious Western university he would be denied. He is obviously correct. Archaeology, extant records, Moslem sources, civilizational artifacts, Arab cult practices and even the names of Muhammad's family [slaves of Allah]; make it quite clear that both moon worship, and Allah-veneration preceded Muhammad in some form by millennia, not just centuries.

“According to numerous inscriptions, while the name of the moon god was Sin, his title was al-ilah, 'the deity', meaning that he was the chief or high god amongst the gods....”

Muhammad took his family, tribal and cultural idea of 'god' and turned the ilah or Lord into the Judaic-Christian equivalent of a monotheistic power. Not just Allahu Akhbar – Allah is the greatest – but now Allah as the sole god, the only god to be worshipped.

“Muhammad was raised up in the religion of the moon god of Allah. But he went one step further than his fellow pagan Arabs....Muhammad decided that Allah was not only the greatest god but the only god.....”

Mr. Smith's assertion is entirely the right one. Allah is the moon idol rendered omnipotent by the political-adventurer Muhammad, who quite conveniently for himself, becomes the only spokesperson for this Allah. A sort of Christ-like messenger delivered to save the Arabs from Semitic, Christian, Jewish, and foreign influence, and to raise the Bedouin out of their miserable anti-civilizational culture, into something more approaching that of Semitic development and prosperity.

Muhammad is more of a Luther than a Christ of course. Or if one wants to be more precise, he was a nationalist agent of change; a pagan reformer; and a bloody tyrant, married to young girls, sex, sex slavery, plunder, gold, wealth accretion, murder and war. One cannot say the same about Luther, no matter how negative the view might be. One thing they did share in common however, was that they denied free-will, freedom of the individual, and demanded that the group or the communal take precedent over the singular person. Such a creed is by definition fascistic. Fascism is simply the destruction of the singular person and the creation of a communal cult uber alles. In this regard Muhammad shares much in common with the evil demon who was an outgrowth of 19^th century dialectical irrationality including Marxism, Evolution and Scientism – Adolf Hitler.