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| Crescent (Hilâl) as an
Emblem
The crescent is not a sacred symbol in Islam. It has become a national, cultural, political, and military or community symbol. Allama Iqbal said in one of his poems... The Qur’an or Sunnah has not mentioned
Hilal as our sacred symbol. In the Qur’an there is only one reference to
Ahillah (plural of Hilal). According to historians, the first instance
of its use was found in Jerusalem during the Umawi period. It is mentioned
that in the building of the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhrah, built
around 675 CE) crescents were used as decorative symbols. Later
throughout the Muslim world it was used on coins, in decorative art,
architecture, and sometimes on the top of the mosque domes and minarets. During the Ottoman period the Crescent was used by royalty. In the 19th century when the Western Christians colonized a large area of the Muslim world, Muslims and Christians became much more conscious of the struggle between the Cross and Crescent. Turkey was the first country that used it on its postage stamp in January 1863. A Red Crescent with a white ground was
adopted as an equivalent of the Red Cross symbol. Later when the Muslim
states became independent, many of them adopted the symbol of crescent in
their national flags. Today the crescent has become a very common symbol of Muslim identity. It has become a Muslim emblem in the minds of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Yahya Monastra explains it thus: "I called the crescent an
"emblem" in Islam, because the function of an emblem is just to
identify. It was used to
identify Ottoman forces, but this came relatively late in the history of
Islam. Since the Ottomans held the Caliphate, the Western world
looked on them as representative of Islam as a whole, such that in the
17th and 18th centuries, the word "Turk" was used as synonymous
with "Muslim" (as when Blake sang of "heathen, Turk, or
Jew"). The Jews used the
Star of David as a symbol of Judaism, and the Christians used the cross as
a symbol of Christianity . . . so the crescent being associated with the
Ottoman forces, they assumed that it must be the "symbol" of
Islam. Not so.
However, the Star of David and the cross really are genuine
symbols. The difference between an emblem and a symbol is that a symbol is a doorway opening onto a higher reality, in a metaphysically vertical dimension. Accessible through contemplation. The meaning of a symbol cannot be encapsulated in a single definition, whereas an emblem just has an ordinary referent. For example, the octagon: as a traffic sign, it just means "Stop" and there's nothing to contemplate; its whole meaning is exhausted by "Stop"." excerpt from a discussion on 'Crescent as Symbol of Islam' |
