THE MYSTERIES OF THE CRESCENT AND STAR
- NOTES ON THE HILAL AS A SYMBOL OF ISLAM

The hornéd Moon with one bright star
Within the nether tip...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

 

INTRODUCTION

No religion is born with all its symbols ready-made and fully developed. Rather, an order of symbolism is implicit from the beginning and, typically, is revealed or unfolded gradually over the course of time. It was some five hundred or so years after Christ before the crucifix became the acknowledged symbol of the Christian faith, and the Mogen David (Shield of David, Star of David or Seal of Solomon) has, surprisingly, only been a symbol of Judaism for the last two hundred years or so. In the case of Islam the crescent, or the crescent and a star, (hereafter called the "hilal", the Arabic word for the lunar crescent of the New Moon) is the generally acknowledged symbol of the Islamic faith, yet it was not formally adopted into this role until quite late in the Ottoman Caliphate, which is to say in early modern times; it was not a part of Islam from the outset. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam had no defining symbol in the beginning. No emblem accompanied the Islamic revelation. The Prophet Muhammad endorsed no symbol. Instead, the Muslim religion, like others, acquired its symbol in the course of history, and even then quite recently.

It is for this reason that many contemporary Muslim purists reject the use of the hilal and dismiss it as an "innovation", a deviation from the pristine symbolessness of early Islam. They argue that since neither the Prophet, nor his family, nor his companions nor the early generations of Muslims knew of any such symbol, it can have no proper place in the pure and true form of the religion. So-called "fundamentalists" have made it a matter of controversy. It is one of the issues around which the tensions between tradition and modernity among contemporary Muslims will sometimes coalesce. Most Muslims, and most non-Muslims, readily employ the hilal as the sign for Islam, and regard it as an established tradition, but there are so-called "hardline" elements who shun it as part of their return to "fundamentals" and to the "true sunnah" (example) of the Prophet. At the same time, the fundamentalists - strange to relate - have taken heed of their counterparts in the Christian faith, who, in their mobilisation against Islam, have attacked the symbol as a remnant of paganism and sure evidence that Islam is a sinister pagan moon cult disguised as a semitic monotheism. Not only is the hilal not sunnah but it is a symbol of the paganism that the Prophet and his Companions strove to eliminate and replace with pure worship.

This article will offer some brief notes on this matter, including some discussion on the significance of the symbol itself, and its origins, and of its relation, historic and intrinsic, to Islamic spirituality. While it appears to be a somewhat peripheral issue, it nevertheless raises some important matters and presents an opportunity to explore some things which, while they are little understood, are central to Islam.

 

1. SYMBOLS AND TRADEMARKS

Firstly, let us admit that on this particular matter the hardline taken by the fundamentalists has some merit and is a case where they are in part right but largely for wrong reasons. Their opposition to the hilal is based on literalist, ossified readings of the sources of Islam and shows no appreciation of the quite orthodox ways in which living religions permutate beyond their initial forms; thus they are just as opposed to Sufism because the official formation of the Sufi brotherhoods occured after the time of the Prophet and the Companions. But their stance does at least bring into question the whole proceedure of allotting symbols to religions and draws attention to the fact that it is quite a modern thing to do. The idea that a religion requires a symbol as an identification marker is an outcome of the modern mentality where all things have such markers or "trademarks" or "brand logos". It is modern bourgeois man that wants his ideologies packaged and brand marked. The hilal is not a traditional symbol of Islam, not a part its integral heraldry, rather it is the Muslim brand logo, its label in the modern ideological and spiritual "market". It became attached to Islam only when Islam needed a trademark, which is to say when it entered modernity and came under the sway of conditions of commodification. There is undoubtedly something irksome about the mentality that wants religions tagged like designer jeans. It is a manifestation of the same mentality that would tag Jewish citizens of modern states with the Star of David so as to dehumanize them, which is in fact how the Star of David became the "brand logo" of Judaism. The opponents of the hilal are therefore right to regard the symbol as suspect, especially in so far as they draw attention to the degrading effects of such labels in general. Their anti-modern instincts are quite astute here. It is indeed confounding to every modern mind to hear that Islam is a religion that denies having a symbol. A religion, an ideology, without a logo? And no doubt they are right to say that when early Muslims still basked in the radiance of the Islamic theophany Islam was symboless except for the plain black banner of the Prophet, itself symbolic of the black of the desert night.

 

2. THE POLITICS OF THE HILAL

But, as in most cases, the fundamentalist position on this has little to do with a legitimate critique of modernity and much more to do with profane aspirations dressed up as religious piety. The modern rejection of the hilal by Muslims has more to do with politics and ethnic nationalism than it does with religion. We see this quite simply by looking at the flags of modern Muslim nations. The hilal features on many of them, but not all. In fact, it features on the flags of virtually all Muslim nation states, with the conspicuous exception of the Arab states. The Turkish flag features a white hilal design with crescent and five pointed star on a red background. The Pakistani flag has a similar design but with the moon reclining on a green background. Malaysia has a yellow crescent and fourteen pointed star on a blue background. The flag of Turkmenistan has a waxing hilal with five five-pointed stars. The post-Soviet Muslim republics of Central Asian all have their own variations. But not the Arab states. The modern Arab states have not adopted the hilal as an indication of their heritage.

This is an anti-Turkish Arab-nationalist gesture. The Arabs associate the crescent with the Turks and with Turkish domination prior to the 20th century. It therefore does not feature as a symbol of Islam among the modern Arabs. Anti-crescent sentiment, manifest as religious puritanism, is an extension of this. If many Muslims throughout the world question the validity of the hilal it is because of the outreach of modern Arab Islam and especially the sanctioned Islam of the Arabian Holy Land, Wahabism. The Wahabi ideology is, in many ways, inseperable from Arab nationalism. On the authority of various ahadith (prophetic narratives) the Wahabis draw a line after the first three generations of Muslims and declare that everything beyond that date is "innovation". This has the effect of anathemizing all of the distinct contributions of the Turkish, Persian and Indian peoples to the Islamic spiritual heritage and is a way of ethnically cleansing Islam. The Wahabis accompanied the House of Saud to power in Arabia in the 1920s and, by means of oil wealth, have propagated Wahabi ideology throughout the Muslim world and especially to newly formed and struggling Muslim nations. The assault on the hilal is as much motivated by this neo-Arabism and hostility to all things Turkish as it is by genuinely religious concerns. According to the opponents of the hilal the crescent and star was an ancient Byzantine symbol indicating the patronage of the goddess Artemis, and it was appropriated by the Turks when they took Constantinople. It is a pagan symbol, they say, recklessly acquired by the innovationist and heresy-loving Turks and it is precisely this of which the whole of modern post-Ottoman Islam must be purged.

Debate over the hilal therefore takes us to the heart of the plight and predicament of Islam in our times. The fundamentalism of which we have been speaking is a manifestation of the post-Ottoman era. When the decrepid Ottoman Empire, and the Caliphate, was dismantled the classical phase of Islamic civilization ended; the door was open for the assertion of Arab nationalism, and with this came the Wahabism of the Saudis. These were catastrophic events, a terrible rupture of the traditional forms of Islam. In the recriminations after Ataturk and his followers took control of the Turkish state the Sufi brotherhoods were outlawed and the traditional Islam of the Turks was suppressed and brought under state supervision. The continuity of Turkoman Islam, unbroken since the Middle Ages, was sundered. At the same time the Wahabis who were empowered by the demise of the Ottomans were viciously anti-Sufi and clung to the most horizontal of literalist understandings of Islam which they have subsequently propagated throughout the Ummah. By these events Islam entered a new depth of "forgetfulness", something of its mystical perfume faded, it fell yet further into metaphysical decline and many of its secrets were lost.

 

3. THE MEANING OF THE HILAL

This is the context in which we must consider the question of the validity of the hilal. Is it just a brand logo? Is it an ancient symbol of the moon goddess that the Turks unwittingly imported into Islam? Or of the pre-Islamic moon goddess of southern Arabia? Or does it have a symbolic value - a secret - that has now become obscure and unfamiliar to modern Muslims? Modern Turks will themselves tell you that the crescent and star is an ancient Turkoman symbol that their nomad ancestors carried across Central Asia and established as the banner of Islam upon adopting the faith. Is it then merely an ethnic symbol after all? Perhaps its association with Islam is accidental and it has no profound meaning? We must remember that modernity is a forgetting. The hilal emerged as the emblem of Islam from the tumult of the collapse of the Caliphate and thus from the religion's passage into modernity. Is it a symbol that survived from the closing phases of classical Islamic civilization but of which the significance has been forgotten?

There is certainly no consensus of opinion as to what the symbol actually means. This is why there are so many different variations used on flags and other Muslim insignia. The common elements are a crescent and a star, but there is no standard way to arrange them, except to say that the star is very often intruding into or is placed within the dark of the moon's face. How does this represent Islam? What does it mean? The crescent alone is easy to explain: it represents the crescent moons by which the Muslim calendar is calculated, the hilal moon. Sighting and calculating the hilal is a Muslim past time today and in previous centuries was a serious scientific endeavour. It is understandable and appropriate as an emblem of Islam, and indeed the crescent is often seen portrayed alone, as in the Red Crescent of the emergency humanitarian organisation, the Muslim equivalent to the International Red Cross. But the crescent is usually accompanied by a star, and this creates difficulties. Which star? Which astronomical (or astrological) configuration is being depicted? And how does this appropriately represent Islam? It seems there are no clear answers to any of these questions.

There is, of course, a plethora of modern theories, but none are very convincing. Most are concerned to explain how a star can appear inside the dark of the moon. Some argue that the star is actually the flash caused by a meteorite striking the moon's surface in some prehistoric catastrophe, and that the hilal is a remnant memory of this event. Some will tell you that the design depicts a visitation by alien spacecraft that had flown across the face of the moon in past centuries, which the poor simpletons of those days mistook for a divine sign. Others will explain it by atmospheric optical tricks and statistics about freak astronomical conditions. Others have calculated that there was a very bright conjunction of moon and Jupiter near to the time that the Prophet Muhammad had his first vision of the Angel Gabriel and propose that the hilal depicts this event. Islam-haters will say that the hilal symbolizes the horns of the devil and Satan's star, Lucifer. Neo-pagans will say that it represents the Goddess and her Consort. It is very hard to find any sort of cogent and credible explanation among the current speculation from the current modes of inquiry. Historical research reports that in Ottoman usage the star was officially fixed as five-pointed in the late 1700s and was explained post hoc as representing the so-called "five pillars of Islam". But this only explains why the star is five-pointed, not why it is placed inside the dark of the moon's face, and nor does it reveal what star it might be. What is this star of Islam?

The star is the riddle. The problem is to identify the star and then explain why it is placed inside the dark of the moon. And then the problem becomes explaining what that has to do with Islamic spirituality? It would be easy to mount a full study of these questions. The symbolism of crescent and star is ancient - indeed crescent and star are both primordial symbols - and there is a profusion of theories that could be discussed along with ample archeological and historical examples on stone and metal, ancient coins and other media in times and places far afield. Given the limited scope of this present exposition, however, the most we can do here is make some general observations and attempt to point the reader towards the correct - which is to say traditional, substantial, integral - order of symbols and steer them away from empty modern speculation.

 

4. SEVERAL HILALS

Much of the uncertainty and confusion regarding the symbol arises from it being the combination or convergence of several very ancient but related symbols. Modern accounts often fail to distinguish between different symbols and collapse similar symbols into one. If we conduct a careful survey of hilal symbols through history we will notice that several distinct but similar symbols have converged in modern times, and this in large measure is what confuses things for us. We have only one symbol and are looking for a single answer to our questions when in fact the single symbol we know is an amalgamation of several historical precedents. The modern hilal, that is to say, is a synthetic symbol in which several earlier traditions of symbolism have been reduced into one design, largely as a consequence of the modern need for standardized logos as discussed above.

To be specific, the evidence requires that we distinguish between the crescent/star symbol and those symbols depicting a crescent and stylized sun. The crescent and star is one symbol and the crescent and sun is another, although they can look similar or even indistinguishable outside of their context since the sun can be and very often is, in some cultures, shown as a star. Sometimes the only difference between a star and the sun is the number of arms on the figure. Among the modern representations of the hilal only the flag of Malaysia still has a crescent and sunburst, but the earlier Ottoman designs were all moon with sun, not moon with star. This has been forgotten and with it an essential dimension of the hilal symbol. The modern designs have been standardized and the ambiguity between star and sun in earlier designs has been eliminated in favour of the star and at the sun's expense.

As well as this, there are several - or at least two - stars, or rather we should say planets, that regularly appear in ancient hilal designs and have behind them distinct traditions of symbolism, both of them distinct from the crescent/sun traditions. There are at least two quite distinct crescent/star traditions that have converged, and modern minds have forgotten both of them as well as the distinction between them. These two stars are Venus and Saturn. Sometimes the star that intrudes upon the crescent is Venus, the evening/morning star, but there is another quite distinct tradition in which it is Saturn, last of the seven ancient planets. Again, visual codes such as the number of arms on the star that would have made the distinction clear to people in past ages have been entirely forgotten and along with them a whole order of subtle understandings.

Despite this diversity of precedents, however, there is a single motif that unites these different symbols into a single order of symbolism and so there is some basis for the collapsing of them into one symbol. The common factor is that in all cases the moon is in the act of devouring. The hilal depicts the moon eating either star or sun. This is the whole key to the symbol. The hilal is sometimes called "crescent facing a star" but in fact the crescent is devouring a star (if that star is not in fact the sun.) We see this as an obvious fact the moment we put aside our modern sophistications and see primordially, with the eyes of Adam, so to speak. The modern mind can be ridiculously literal. People will ask, "How can a star appear across the face of the moon? It is impossible because no star could pass between the earth and its satellite. The earth would burn up!" The star, of course, is within the moon, in its belly, having been consumed by the moon. The horns of the moon are the jaws of its mouth. The crescent is a mouth and the hilal - regardless of whether the star/sun is entering or is within the shaded part of the moon's face - shows the moon in the act of eating. It is sometimes shown eating the Sun, sometimes Venus and sometimes Saturn.

We are therefore considering the symbolism of the lunar dragon. To the primordial imagination the crescent moon is like the wide opened mouth of a dragon, and from time to time it swallows either stars or planets by occultation, or the sun itself by eclipse. This is what the hilal is about at its most primal level. It is a depiction of the lunar dragon and it is associated with everything suggested by the lunar dragon and its symbolism.

 

5. THE ECLIPSE HILAL

In regards to the moon eating the sun we are, of course, talking about the mystery of eclipses. In an eclipse the dragon swallows the sun. This is why dragons are depicted as having fire in their belly and why they guard over a treasury of solar gold stashed in the darkness of the earth. In mythology the chivalric and spiritual hero must conquer this dragon and recover the gold from the darkness.

All of this, and much else in many related myths and legends, refers - by cosmic metaphor - to the spiritual process of reconciling opposites that also has as its symbol "the sun at midnight" (and conversely the stars at midday). This describes the state of spiritual realisation where day or solar consciousness enters the darkest realms of sleep. This is the secret to the prophetic and the oracular. The recorded descriptions of the prophetic experiences of Muhammad are highly suggestive in this regard. In the state of revelation Muhammad bridged waking and sleeping; it is a state beyond both, a marriage and reconciliation of the most basic polarities in the human soul. The trance-state of the oracle at Delphi as well as the mode of the Abrahamic theophany in the biblical tradition are the same: "And Abram fell into a deep sleep..." In historical terms, it is the solar hilal that the Turks carry with them from Central Asia. It is essentially shamanic.

As a coming together of opposites the eclipse, in Islam, also prefigures the Hour of Doom, the Day of Resurrection. In the hadith literature we find accounts in which the Prophet describes eclipses as forewarnings of the approaching Day. And in his Sunnah he offers special prayers at the eclipse. In an eclipse the night/day polarity is reversed. It forewarns of the Hour of Doom when the sun will rise in the west and set in the east and the whole of time will be reversed. In some Sufi groups, especially those with Turkish roots, we find a practice in which the murid (pupil) must replay their waking life backwards in their minds - like a film played in reverse - every night as they fall into sleep. This practice is directly related to the eclipse symbolism we are considering here. It is an extremely important symbolism in many traditions, Islam included.

One hadith of the Prophet is particularly illuminating regarding the metaphysical significance of eclipses:

It is reported - (and Allah knows best) - that a solar eclipse occured during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad - peace be upon him. He offered the eclipse prayer and afterwards his companions said to him, "O Allah's Apostle! We saw you trying to grasp at something while standing at your place and then we saw you retreating." The Prophet said, "I was shown Paradise and wanted to have a bunch of fruit from it. Had I taken it, you would have eaten from it as long as the world remains."

The Prophet could see into Paradise and indeed so real, so corporeal, was it to him he could have reached out and tasted its fruit. Paradise is no mere vision. It is supernal and super-real. The opposites that are reconciled here are spirit and body, pneuma and soma, world and God. In this hadith the Prophet has a glimpse of the resurrected state. The eclipse is like a doorway into that state, a realm beyond opposites.

 

6. THE VENUS HILAL

In regards to the moon eating Venus it is emblematic of the Koranic theophany and of the conjunction Prophet/Angel or Muhammad/Jibreel, Muhammad being the moon and the angel the evening star. At first consideration Venus seems the most likely of all candidates as the star of the hilal because she is often seen in the western sky accompanying a crescent moon, and she is sometimes "occluded" behind the moon, in which case the hilal illustrates an occultation of Venus. The five-pointed star very often indicates the Venus hilal because the five points of the star illustrate the pentagram that Venus inscribes on her circuits of the sun as seen by the geocentric observer.

It is probably Venus to which the mysterious early Meccan surah called "The Night Visitor" in the Koran refers:

Consider the heavens and the night visitor.
What could make you understand what comes in the night?
It is the star that pierces through darkness
For no human being has ever been left unguarded.

The key Arabic term here, used metaphorically, is at-tariq with the root meaning "to knock" and the idea is that a certain star "knocks" at a door like a visitor in the night. It is sometimes argued in modern commentaries that this must refer to Venus as the morning star since it appears, or visits, (very late) in the night, and is thus a "night visitor". Maybe so, but the next few lines of the surah make it clear that it is more the evening star knocking on the gates of night to which the Koran is alluding in the first instance. It is the evening Venus that loisters above the dusk horizon like someone standing at the doors of night waiting to be let in. The surah continues:

Let man then observe out of what he has been created: he has been created from the seminal fluid issuing from between the loins (of man) and the pelvis (of women)...

Venus is also, of course, the planet of love and rules over the union of man and woman, the sexual and procreative. It is Venus, the evening star, that guards over the conjunction of the opposites man and woman, night and day and the entry of the phallic sun into the womb of darkness. The core significance of the Venus hilal, therefore, is that where Venus is shown inside the moon then the moon has been impregnated. The short, ecstatic Meccan surat that announced the Islamic theophany often refer to the mysteries of embryonic fertilization. This reflects the spiritual fertilization of the Prophet's heart whereby the seed of the Koran - the whole Koran in principle - was implanted in his bosom by the Angel Jibreel on the Night of Power. We must remember that the Prophet in Islam has the parallel function to the Virgin Mary in Christianity, his unletteredness being exactly parallel to her virginity. Thus, too, the Koran - placed in the Prophet's heart - is parallel to Christ, placed in the Virgin's womb. At the Christian annunciation the Virgin is impregnated with the Logos, the Word. So too Prophet Muhammad on the Night of Power. This is what the Venus hilal represents, the germ of revelation, the pregnant theophany.

 

7. THE SATURN HILAL

Finally, in regards the Moon devouring Saturn, modern readers need to be completely reacquainted with the symbolism of this planet before they are likely to understand the Saturn hilal. The discovery of the modern extra-Saturnian planets and hence the modern notion of the expanded "solar system" has obscured the entire symbolism of Saturn as the last of the visible planets and the ring-pass-not of the traditional seven planet cosmos. Saturn is, in traditional understandings, the cosmic chronometer, the time-keeper, Father Time. But also, as Chronos, he is lord of the Golden Age. The importance of this symbolism in the Semitic traditions is signalled by Saturn being the lord of the sabbath, which in Judaism is on Saturn's day - day of rest. In Islam, a related symbolism concerns the famous "Black Stone of Mecca" which is Saturnian in its symbolism - pilgrims touch or kiss it at the end of the seven (planetary) rounds of the Kaaba - and signifies both centre-point and end-point. The moon is the fastest moving of the traditional planets and Saturn is the slowest with a symmetry between the moon's period of twenty-eight days and the twenty-eight year period of Saturn. The Saturn hilal, therefore, signifies "First and Last", the first planet and the last. In an Islamic context it is equivalent to the Alpha and Omega used in Christianity. In terms of the symbolism of the lunar dragon it shows the dragon eating its own tail, the ouroboros, in turn symbolic of the cosmic cycle between Creation and the Day of Resurrection. Saturn is the planet of doom and death but also of the Golden Age and Paradise. The Saturn hilal carries the meaning: the end is a return to the beginning.

The communist development of the hilal, the 'Hammer and Sickle' - industry and agriculture - is directly related to this particular order of symbolism. Crescent = Sickle = Agriculture. The star of the hilal is the spark from the blow of the hammer on an anvil - industry. In terms of the symbolism with which we are concerned here it indicates the Ferric or Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, end of a cosmic cycle.

CONCLUSION

Although Islam is the most recent of the great world religions it claims to be both new and primordial, first and last. Its stark monotheism is both a culmination and a return. It is not surprising that, however it may have happened, Islam arrived in modern times bearing a primordial symbol. The symbolism of the cross is well documented, not least in Rene Guénon's work of that name. The symbolism of the Star of David or Seal of Solomon is equally well-known and understood. The symbolism of the hilal is a mystery by comparison. The whole modern tendency to label religions with convenient brand-marks is suspect, and there is some validity in resisting it, but at the same time anti-hilal sentiment in contemporary Islam is largely politically motivated and is certainly based on ignorance of what the crescent and star might mean in a broader frame of reference. We must remember that the historical religions, Islam included, are themselves a forgetting. The historical religions are built over wellsprings of a vastly more ancient symbolism that most religionists barely suspect, a fundamental order of symbols of which the ill-named "fundamentalist" has no knowledge at all. It is hoped that this present article might stimulate further consideration of these matters.

©Copyright Dr Abdu' Razzaq Blackhirst, 2006.

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