It Burns Us!

Question: I love your Alihah write-up, but I'm not entirely sold on Unity as a Titan concept, so I was considering a Light Titanrealm, with Djinn (smokeless fire could be interpreted as Light) as Titanspawn, since as desert-dwelling nomads who love the night sky, they seem to have issues with the Sun. Does Allah have any solar connotations? Or do you think the whole idea is too mythically inaccurate?

Glad you enjoyed it! I can definitely see the appeal of setting the Alihah up as opposed to a Titanrealm of Light; they're the gods of one of a very few cultures that could be said to be opposed to the idea of the sun, since they live in a desert climate and do most of their traveling out from under the harsh eye of the unforgiving daystar. There aren't a lot of world religions that really demonize or even mildly dislike light, which is a concept almost universally associated with sunshine, truth and life.

Unfortunately, though, I don't know that I've got much to help you. The pre-Islamic Allah has no solar connotations that I know of; he's a god more associated with spirit and communication than anything else, with possibly minor sky associations thanks to an ancient reconstructed image of him as one of those great big sky-fathers everybody in the Mediterranean area seems to love so much. He's more similar to Ahura Mazda over in Persia than to any of the sky Titans, though, and has nothing in common with Aten other than the connection to monotheism (which happened in distinctly different ways and eras for the two figures). The Islamic Allah doesn't have any real connection to the sun, or to light in general for that matter, that I know of, either; by the time he's morphed into one of the big bad monotheistic powers of the modern world, he's almost exclusively about omnipotence rather than having any specific associations.

The Alihah and the ancient Arabs that worshiped them also weren't really all that opposed to the sun, which makes the connection difficult as well. It was inconvenient and overheating, but not something they considered malevolent, more a fact of life that they dealt with by minimizing their exposure to it, and since it's a constant and predictable danger it lacks the immediacy and enmity of other natural disasters like storms or earthquakes. Their solar deity, the goddess Shams, is not particularly important because of this image of the sun as dehydrator and heat-source rather than all-important giver of life, but she's still a positive figure with no particularly nasty associations that I'm aware of. The religion's closer to being annoyed with the fundamental concept of light than most others, but that's not saying much.

I wish I had something awesome to offer, but alas, the Arabian peninsula is just not cooperating today.