Byzantine polemicists twisted Muslim monotheism into idolatry claims

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. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 305

Categorization

• CANDY: The claim that Allahu akbar secretly means ‘God and Koubar’ with Koubar being the moon and Aphrodite is a delightfully absurd bit of polemic worth sharing.
• SHARE: For a friend interested in Byzantine anti-Islamic polemic or etymology of religious slurs.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Muslim polytheism charges were deliberate Crusade propaganda