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This pre-Islamic bismillah, inscribed by someone visiting a cave in South Arabia to meditate, like prophet Muhammad much later in Makkah, upends a lot of traditionally held Islamic beliefs. Raḥmān was the proper name of a pre-Islamic South Arabian Ḥimyaric deity, & was not > https://twitter.com/safaitic/status/1274335467656351745
> used in North Arabia. The deity’s expansion to Hijaz probably happened under the rule of Abraha, who unlike the depiction in Quran, conquered Hijaz. By the 6th century, almost entire Arabia was already monotheistic, & we don’t find a single polytheistic deity in inscriptions. >
> The tripartite division of bismillah-Rahman-rahim is an echoe of the Christian trinity, & in time we lost this & started to view the Rhman & Rahim as adjectives of one god. We are now seeing the same historical phenomenon of contextualizing religious tenets with Islam that >
> has been happening with Judaism & Christianity for the last hundred years, and that has informed us how Torah & Bible were a product of their greater Mesopotamian, Canaanite, Persian & Greek world. Interesting times ahead!
