Interesting information about allahu akbar

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 5, 2008 at 12:59

You wrote

>Have you traced its first appearance? does it appear in the Qur'an or the Sahi Hadith do you know?

As you know the hadith and the Qur'an are really very late and we cannot date either before the late second century of Islam so I checked Hoyland survey where he collected all Arabic language/Muslim literary sources be it coins, papyri or epigraphy and I came across this very interesting Arabic language graffito from an area near Karbala in today's Iraq and it says:

Allah wa kabbir kabirran

Or and Allah (is) great/big greatly

et voila and it is circa 684CE or 64AH and this is as early as we can get

(see Hoyland survey page 693) I realize that it is not Allahu akbar so stay tuned for more but I suspect that this might have been a proto Allahu Akbar

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