The Christians who call God 'Allah'

Muslims in Malaysia have burnt churches in protest at Christians calling their God Allah, but there is a precedent, says Christopher Howse
By Christopher Howse (The Telegraph)
11:50AM GMT 30 Jan 2010

Two-thirds of Malaysians are Muslims and about 10 per cent of them Christians. Malaysian political life is a little different from that in Britain. The leader of the opposition, for example, is facing trial on charges of "sodomy", a ploy used by the government before.

Churches have been burnt down in Malaysia in a row over Christians using the word Allah for God. The government had ruled that the word must not be used except to refer to God as worshipped by Muslims. But the high court declared that a Catholic newspaper, the Herald, could continue to use Allah in its Malay edition, since the people in Borneo that buy the paper have from time immemorial referred to God by that name. Many of those protesting at the Christian use of Allah had hardly been aware of the usage before the public row, for they do not buy Christian newspapers and they do not live in Borneo, where the papers mostly circulate. One popular objection among Malaysian Muslims to the use of Allah by Christians is that it might lead to Muslims being lured into conversion to Christianity. The implicit thinking seems to be that Allah is the name of God used in the Koran, and that the God worshipped by Christians is a false god. This thinking seems to me a mirror image of a protest in Stoke on Trent last weekend where people in the crowd chanted: "Allah, Allah, who the ---- is Allah?" That was a disgustingly offensive remark which erroneously took it for granted that Allah and God are not the same being.

The clinching argument against such an assumption is that Christians explicitly worship the God of Abraham. They worship the same God that Jews worship. Of course Jews deny, and indeed are repelled by the idea, that God has a Son who became man, just as Muslims are. But the fact that you think others are mistaken in their description of someone's characteristics does not mean that they are referring to a different person. Someone, for example, might call Spartacus a "freedom fighter" and someone else call him a "murderous rebel", but they are talking about the same man. On a non-religious level, it is undeniable that the word for God is translated into different languages. It is not (like Spartacus) a proper name, but it is the word for the supreme being, of whom there can only be one. Englishspeakers say "God", Frenchmen say "Dieu". Looking at it from the point of view of language, there is a widespread, quite unconscious, sharing of the word Allah between Muslims and non-Muslims. Maltese people, for example, say Alla for "God", because their language has been deeply moulded by Arabic. The Spanish, who live in territory occupied by Arabic-speakers for 700 years, use the word ojalto mean "I hope that". I think that most of them are unaware that the word derives from wa sa llah "and God wills". The problem in Malaysia has erupted among people who do not use Arabic as their first language. No such misunderstanding would be possible between Arabic-speaking Muslims and Arabic-speaking Christians, for whom the only word for God is Allah. The Arabic word Allah comes from al-ilah, "the god". The word Allah was in use among the people of Mecca before Mohammed announced his message to them. It is found in pre-Islamic poetry and in ancient inscriptions in Arabia. It was used by Christians as their term for God long before Mohammed was born.

On the face of it, the Koran declares that the God known to Mohammed is the God of the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians). In Sura 29: 46 God tells his followers: "Say: 'We believe in that which has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to you. Our God and your God are one. We surrender to Him'." Muslims may think that Jews and Christians have betrayed the revelation given to them, but that does not affect the identity of the creator of Adam.

Allah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the Arabic word "Allah". For the Islamic view of God, see God in Islam. For other uses, see Allah (disambiguation). Allah (English pronunciation: /l/ or /l/; Arabic: Allh, IPA: [allh] ( listen) is the Arabic word for God (literally 'the God', as the initial "Al-" is the definite article).[1][2] [3] It is used mainly by Muslims to refer to God in Islam,[4] Arab Christians, and often, albeit not exclusively, by Bah's, Arabic-speakers, Indonesian, Malaysian and Maltese Christians, and Mizrahi Jews.[5][6][7]

Contents

1 Etymology 2 Usage in Arabic o 2.1 Pre-Islamic Arabia o 2.2 Islam o 2.3 Christianity o 2.4 Judaism 3 As a loanword o 3.1 English and other European languages o 3.2 Malaysian and Indonesian language o 3.3 In other scripts and languages 4 Typography o 4.1 Unicode 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links 3

Etymology

The Arabic components that build-up the word "Allah": 1. alif 2. hamzat wal () 3. lm 4. lm 5. shadda () 6. dagger alif () 7. h The term Allh is derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- "the" and ilh "deity, god" to al-lh meaning "the [sole] deity, God" ( , ho theos monos).[8] Cognates of the name "Allh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.[9] Biblical Hebrew mostly uses the plural form (but functional singular) Elohim. The corresponding Aramaic form is lh in Biblical Aramaic and Alh in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply 'God'. [10] In the Sikh scriptures, Guru Granth Sahib, the term Allah (Punjabi: )is used 37 times.[11] The name was previously used by pagan Meccans as a reference to a creator deity, possibly the supreme deity in pre-Islamic Arabia.[12][13] The concepts associated with the term Allah (as a deity) differ among religious traditions. In pre-Islamic Arabia amongst pagan Arabs, Allah was not considered the sole divinity, having associates and companions, sons and daughtersa concept that was deleted under the process of Islamization. In Islam, the name Allah is the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name, and all other divine names are believed to refer back to Allah.[14] Allah is unique, the only Deity, creator of the universe and omnipotent.[5][6] Arab Christians today use terms such as Allh al-Ab (, , 'God the Father') to distinguish their usage from Muslim usage.[15] There are both similarities and differences between the concept of God

as portrayed in the Quran and the Hebrew Bible.[16] It has also been applied to certain living human beings as personifications of the term and concept.[17][18] Unicode has a codepoint reserved for Allh, = U+FDF2.[19] Many Arabic type fonts feature special ligatures for Allah.[20]

Usage in Arabic
Pre-Islamic Arabia
In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was used by Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity.[21] Allah was not considered the sole divinity; however, Allah was considered the creator of the world and the giver of rain. The notion of the term may have been vague in the Meccan religion.[8] Allah was associated with companions, whom pre-Islamic Arabs considered as subordinate deities. Meccans held that a kind of kinship existed between Allah and the jinn.[22] Allah was thought to have had sons[23] and that the local deities of al-Uzz, Mant and al-Lt were His daughters.[24] The Meccans possibly associated angels with Allah.[25][26] Allah was invoked in times of distress.[26][27] Muhammad's father's name was Abd Allh meaning 'the slave of Allh'.[26]

Islam
Main article: God in Islam See also: Names of God in the Qur'an

Medallion showing "Allah" in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey. According to Islamic belief, Allah is the proper name of God,[28] and humble submission to his will, divine ordinances and commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith.[5] "He is the only God, creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind."[5][6] "He is unique (wid) and inherently one (aad), all-merciful and omnipotent."[5] The Qur'an declares "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures."[5] 5

Allah script outside Eski Cami (The Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey. In Islamic tradition, there are 99 Names of God (al-asm al-usn lit. meaning: 'the best names' or 'the most beautiful names'), each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah.[6][29] All these names refer to Allah, the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name.[14] Among the 99 names of God, the most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (al-Ramn) and "the Compassionate" (al-Ram).[6][29] Most Muslims use the untranslated Arabic phrase in sh Allh (meaning 'if God wills') after references to future events.[30] Muslim discursive piety encourages beginning things with the invocation of bismillh (meaning 'in the name of God').[31] There are certain phrases in praise of God that are favored by Muslims, including "Subn Allh" (Holiness be to God), "al-amdu lillh" (Praise be to God), "l ilha ill Allh" (There is no deity but God) and "Allhu akbar" (God is great) as a devotional exercise of remembering God (dhikr).[32] In a Sufi practice known as dhikr Allah (lit. remembrance of God), the Sufi repeats and contemplates on the name Allah or other divine names while controlling his or her breath.[33] Some scholars[who?] have suggested that Muammad used the term Allah in addressing both pagan Arabs and Jews or Christians in order to establish a common ground for the understanding of the name for God, a claim Gerhard Bwering says is doubtful.[28] According to Bwering, in contrast with pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, God in Islam does not have associates and companions, nor is there any kinship between God and jinn. [28] Pre-Islamic pagan Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, inexorable and insensible fate over which man had no control. This was replaced with the Islamic notion of a powerful but provident and merciful God.[34] According to Francis Edwards Peters, "The Qurn insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (29:46). The Quran's Allah is the same Creator God who covenanted with Abraham". Peters states that the Qur'an portrays Allah as both more powerful and more remote than Yahweh, and as a universal deity, unlike Yahweh who closely follows Israelites.[16]

Christianity

The Aramaic word for "God" in the language of Assyrian Christians is lh, or Alaha. Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God".[7] The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for "God" than "Allah".[15] (Even the Arabic-descended Maltese language of Malta, whose population is almost entirely Roman Catholic, uses Alla for "God".) Arab Christians for example use terms Allh al-ab (, ) meaning God the Father, Allh al-ibn () mean God the Son, and Allh al-r al-quds ( ) meaning God the Holy Spirit. (See God in Christianity for the Christian concept of God.) Arab Christians have used two forms of invocations that were affixed to the beginning of their written works. They adopted the Muslim bismillh, and also created their own Trinitized bismillh as early as the 8th century CE.[35] The Muslim bismillh reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized bismillh reads: "In the name of Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God." The Syriac, Latin and Greek invocations do not have the words "One God" at the end. This addition was made to emphasize the monotheistic aspect of Trinitian belief and also to make it more palatable to Muslims.[35] According to Marshall Hodgson, it seems that in the pre-Islamic times, some Arab Christians made pilgrimage to the Kabah, a pagan temple at that time, honoring Allah there as God the Creator.[36]

Judaism
Main articles: Mizrahi Jews and Names of God in Judaism As Hebrew and Arabic are closely related Semitic languages, it is commonly accepted that Allah (root, ilh) and the Biblical Elohim are cognate derivations of same origin, as in Eloah a Hebrew word which is used (e.g. in the Book of Job) to mean '(the) God' and also 'god or gods' as in the case of Elohim, ultimately deriving from the root El, 'strong', possibly genericized from El (deity), as in the Ugaritic lhm "children of El" (the ancient Near Eastern creator god in pre-Abrahamic tradition). In Jewish scripture Elohim is used as a descriptive title for the God of the scriptures whose name is YHWH, as well as for pagan gods.

As a loanword
English and other European languages
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The history of the name Allh in English was probably influenced by the study of comparative religion in the 19th century; for example, Thomas Carlyle (1840) sometimes used the term Allah but without any implication that Allah was anything different from God. However, in his biography of Muammad (1934), Tor Andr always used the term Allah, though he allows that this "conception of God" seems to imply that it is different from that of the Jewish and Christian theologies.[37] Languages which may not commonly use the term Allah to denote God may still contain popular expressions which use the word. For example, because of the centuries long Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, the word ojal in the Spanish language and oxal in the Portuguese language exist today, borrowed from Arabic (Arabic: ) . This phrase literally means 'if God wills' (in the sense of "I hope so").[38] The German poet Mahlmann used the form "Allah" as the title of a poem about the ultimate deity, though it is unclear how much Islamic thought he intended to convey.

Some Muslims leave the name "Allh" untranslated in English.[39]

Malaysian and Indonesian language

The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 recorded "Allah" as the translation of the Dutch word "Godt". Christians in Indonesia and Malaysia also use Allah to refer to God in the Malaysian language and Indonesian language (both languages forms of the Malay language which is referred to as Bahasa Melayu). Mainstream Bible translations in both languages use Allah as the translation of Hebrew Elohim (translated in English Bibles as "God").[40] This goes back to early translation work by Francis Xavier in the 16th century.[41][42] The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 (revised edition from 1623 edition and 1631 Latin-edition) recorded "Allah" as the translation of the Dutch word "Godt".[43] Ruyl also translated Matthew in 1612 to Malay language (first Bible translation to non-European language, only a year after King James Version was published[44][45]), which was printed in the Netherlands in 1629. Then he translated Mark which was published in 1638.[46][47] The government of Malaysia in 2007 outlawed usage of the term Allah in any other but Muslim contexts, but the High Court in 2009 revoked the law, ruling that it was unconstitutional. While Allah had been used for the Christian God in Malay for more than four centuries, the contemporary controversy was triggered by usage of Allah by the Roman Catholic newspaper The Herald. The government has in turn appealed the court ruling, and the High Court has suspended implementation of its verdict until the appeal is heard.

In other scripts and languages

Name of Allh after the 17th-century Ottoman calligrapher Hfz Osman Allh in other languages that use Arabic script is spelled in the same way. This includes Urdu, Persian/Dari, Uyghur among others.

Assamese, Bengali: Allah Bosnian: Allah Chinese: l, nl; Zhnzh (semantic translation), Huda (Khoda, from Persian language) Czech, Slovak: Allch Greek: Allch Hebrew: Allah Hindi: Allh Malayalam: Ah Japanese: Ar, Arr, Arrfu Maltese: Alla Korean: Alla Polish: Allah, also archaic Allach or Aach Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian: Allakh Serbian, Belarusian, Macedonian: Alah Spanish, Portuguese: Al Thai: Anlw Punjabi (Gurmukhi): Allh, archaic Alahu (in Sikh scriptures)

Typography
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The word Allah written in different writing systems. The word Allh is always written without an alif to spell the vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using alif to spell . However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic alif is added on top of the shaddah to indicate the pronunciation. One exception may be in the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription,[48] where it ends with an ambiguous sign that may be a lone-standing h with a lengthened start, or may be a nonstandard conjoined l-h:

: This reading would be Allh spelled phonetically with alif for the . : This reading would be al-Ilh = 'the god' (an older form, without contraction), by older spelling practice without alif for .

Unicode
Unicode has a codepoint reserved for Allh, = U+FDF2, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for compatability with older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly[49], which is dicouraged for new text. Instead, the word Allh should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will render the desired ligature. The calligraphic variant of the word used as the Coat of arms of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at codepoint U+262B ().

See also
Islam portal Religion portal

Islamic eschatology Abdullah (name) Ilh Names of God Tawd Dhikr Termagant Five Pillars of Islam Kabah 11

Prophets of Islam El (deity)

Notes
1. 2. ^ "God". Islam: Empire of Faith. PBS. Retrieved 18 December 2010. ^ "Islam and Christianity", Encyclopedia of Christianity (2001): Arabicspeaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as Allh. 3. ^ L. Gardet. "Allah". Encyclopaedia of Islam Online. 4. ^ Merriam-Webster. "Allah". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 25 February 2012. 5. ^ a b c d e f "Allah." Encyclopdia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopdia Britannica 6. ^ a b c d e Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Allah 7. ^ a b Columbia Encyclopedia, Allah 8. ^ a b L. Gardet, Allah, Encyclopaedia of Islam 9. ^ Columbia Encyclopaedia says: Derived from an old Semitic root referring to the Divine and used in the Canaanite El, the Mesopotamian ilu, and the biblical Elohim and Eloah, the word Allah is used by all Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other monotheists. 10. ^ The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Entry for lh 11. ^ Guru Granth Sahib website (Search: |) 12. ^ L. Gardet, "Allah", Encyclopedia of Islam 13. ^ Smith, Peter (2000). "prayer". A concise encyclopedia of the Bah' Faith. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. pp. 274275. ISBN 978-1-85168-184-6. 14. ^ a b Murata, Sachiko (1992). The Tao of Islam : a sourcebook on gender relationships in Islamic thought. Albany NY USA: SUNY. ISBN 978-0-79140914-5. 15. ^ a b Lewis, Bernard; Holt, P. M.; Holt, Peter R.; Lambton, Ann Katherine Swynford (1977). The Cambridge history of Islam. Cambridge, Eng: University Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-521-29135-4. 16. ^ a b F.E. Peters, Islam, p.4, Princeton University Press, 2003 17. ^ Nation of Islam personification of Allah as Detroit peddler W D Fard 18. ^ "A history of Clarence 13X and the Five Percenters", referring to Clarence Smith as Allah 19. ^ Unicode Standard 5.0, p.479,492 20. ^ Arabic fonts and Mac OS X Programs for Arabic in Mac OS X 21. ^ See Quran 13:16 ; 29:6163; 31:25; 39:38) 22. ^ See Quran 37:158) 23. ^ See Quran (6:100) 24. ^ See Quran (53:1922; 16:57; 37:149)

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25. 26. Quran 27. 28.

^ See Quran (53:2627) ^ a b c Gerhard Bwering, God and his Attributes, Encyclopedia of the

^ See Quran 6:109; 10:22; 16:38; 29:65) ^ a b c Bwering, Gerhard, God and His Attributes, Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, Brill, 2007. 29. ^ a b Bentley, David (September 1999). The 99 Beautiful Names for God for All the People of the Book. William Carey Library. ISBN 978-0-87808-299-5. 30. ^ Gary S. Gregg, The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology, Oxford University Press, p.30 31. ^ Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Islamic Society in Practice, University Press of Florida, p. 24 32. ^ M. Mukarram Ahmed, Muzaffar Husain Syed, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Anmol Publications PVT. LTD, p. 144 33. ^ Carl W. Ernst, Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Macmillan, p. 29 34. ^ Allah, Encyclopdia Britannica 35. ^ a b Thomas E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, Brill, 1994, p. 103 36. ^ Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, University of Chicago Press, p. 156 37. ^ William Montgomery Watt, Islam and Christianity today: A Contribution to Dialogue, Routledge, 1983, p.45 38. ^ Islam in Luce Lpez Baralt, Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Brill, 1992, p.25 39. ^ F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Princeton University Press, p.12 40. ^ Example: Usage of the word "Allah" from Matthew 22:32 in Indonesian bible versions (parallel view) as old as 1733 41. ^ The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society Sneddon, James M.; University of New South Wales Press; 2004 42. ^ The History of Christianity in India from the Commencement of the Christian Era: Hough, James; Adamant Media Corporation; 2001 43. ^ Justus Heurnius, Albert Ruyl, Caspar Wiltens. "Vocabularium ofte Woordenboeck nae ordre van den alphabeth, in 't Duytsch en Maleys". 1650:65 44. ^ Barton, John (200212). The Biblical World, Oxford, UK: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-27574-3. 45. ^ North, Eric McCoy; Eugene Albert Nida ((2nd Edition) 1972). The Book of a Thousand Tongues, London: United Bible Societies. 46. ^ (Indonesian) Biography of Ruyl 47. ^ Encyclopdia Britannica: Albert Cornelius Ruyl 48. ^ "Zebed Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Trilingual Inscription In Greek, Syriac & Arabic From 512 CE". Islamic Awareness. 17 March 2005. 49. ^ The Unicode Consortium. FAQ - Middle East Scripts

References
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The Unicode Consortium, Unicode Standard 5.0, Addison-Wesley, 2006, ISBN 978-0-321-48091-0, About the Unicode Standard Version 5.0 Book

External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article: Allah Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Allah Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Allah (category) Names of Allah with Meaning on Website, Flash, and Mobile Phone Software Concept of God (Allah) in Islam The Concept of Allh According to the Qur'an by Abdul Mannan Omar Allah, the Unique Name of God Typography Arabic Fonts and Mac OS X Programs for Arabic in Mac OS X

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