Byzantine polemicists reworked Muslim monotheism as disguised polytheism

Evidence

Two eighth-century Byzantine writers followed Anastasius’s lead in presenting Muhammad’s monotheism as a veneer covering his true idolatry. For Nicetas of Byzantium, Muhammad was in fact a devotee of the goddess Khabar: it is her idol the Muslims actually worship in Mecca. Georges the Monk gives a fraudulent translation of the Arabic Allahu akbar! (God is great!) that dhimmi would constantly hear intoned from minarets. He transcribes it as Allah wa Koubar, and he says that it means “God and Koubar”; the latter, he explains, is the Saracens’s name for the moon and Aphrodite. … The hostile Christian can twist even a simple affirmation of God’s greatness into a call for Saracen idolatry. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the modern Islamophobic trope that Islam is paganism/idolatry masked as monotheism — the same genealogical line Anidjar and Aziz trace from medieval polemic, echoed in current ‘Islam is moon-god worship’ claims.
• SEED: The Allahu akbar = ‘God and Koubar the moon-goddess’ mistranslation is a concrete medieval ancestor of modern anti-Muslim tropes; a piece tracing how a deliberate 8th-century mistranslation survives in 21st-century polemic would show genealogy.
• QUESTION: Worth checking whether the ‘Khabar/Koubar’ moon-goddess claim survives in modern anti-Islam writing — the lineage may run unbroken.
• ADDENDUM: Parallel to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: both collect concrete medieval-era tropes that persist as identity signaling — here the Christian legibility of Islam as idolatry.