The Lord of Sirius, srsly.

You just can't take the pagan out of the prophet; in 53:49 he slips up and calls Allah the Lord of Sirius.
Yet another miracle!! Mohammed knew about the double star!


Oh, Right. That's why astronomers sent out this Newsflash :

Chapter 91 is named after Shams, a popular sun Goddess, 86 is Tariq, another star god, this chapter is named after the Pleides, and here's Sirius, Zoroastrian god of rain and sacred to the Sumerians and Egyptians, plus there's all that moon worship. Look at the sky out in the desert, (if you can get away from all the light pollution), and it's easy to understand why ancient cultures associated their gods with the most prominent stuff up there. In the Mideast, the gods were different in every town, and a surprising lot of them were female like Uzza and the goddesses.

It is interesting to find... how far the esoteric concept of the Feminine pervaded Arab life and belief. As in many other religions of the Ancient Middle East, there was a strong feminine bias in the early religion of Arabia. This seems to have centred principally on the worship of the underlying feminine principle, like the Great Goddess common to several ancient mythologies....Female deities like Allat, Ozza and Manat predominated in importance over male. Even the sun-deity Shams was treated as female by some Arab tribes. The moon… though often ruled by a god, was regarded as the feminine orb par excellence. (Shamoun)

Why was the moon most important? Well shit, think about living in the worst desert on Earth;

... the Moslem Ruwalah Bedouins imagine that their life is regulated by the moon, which condenses the water vapours, distills the beneficent dew on the pasture and makes possible the growth of plants. On the other hand the sun, as they believe, would like to destroy the Bedouins as well as all animal and plant life.

In the Arabian desert? Hey, they might be onto something. Other places might worship it, but in the desert the sun is your enemy. Get caught out there without shade or water a couple of times and you'll be ready to worship the fucking moon yourself. But at night, soft cool life-giving breezes spring up, in the nurturing, feminine moonlight, and there in the vast open spaces, filled with silence and stillness, you feel at peace, and a oneness with your surroundings: Mother Nature, or Gaia, if you're less romantic.

There's a lot of other stuff that indicates women were held in high esteem before Islam. Many tribal names have the form "Banyu X", where 'banyu' means 'children of' and 'X' is a female name; Mohammed's wife Khadijah was a successful businesswoman; temple inscriptions and stories portray women positively; all these goddesses...

I'm romantic; I like to believe that the ancient Arabs weren't all misogynistic bastards before old Abraham came along to fuck everything up.