Allah


Allah is the Arabic language term for God, specifically the monotheistic God of Abraham. Outside of Arabic languages, it is principally associated with Islam, although the term was used in pre-Islamic Arabia and continues to be used today by Arabic-speaking adherents of any of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism and Christianity. It is thought to be derived by contraction from al-ilāh and is linguistically related to other Semitic God names, such as Aramaic and Hebrew.
The word "Allah" now conveys the superiority or sole existence of one God, but among the pre-Islamic Arabs, Allah was a supreme deity and was worshipped alongside lesser deities in a pantheon. Many Jews, Christians, and early Muslims used "Allah" and "al-ilah" synonymously in Classical Arabic. The word is also frequently, albeit not exclusively, used by Bábists, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, Indonesian Christians, Maltese Christians, and Sephardic Jews, as well as by the Gagauz people.

Etymology

The etymology of the word Allāh has been discussed extensively by classical Arab philologists. The majority of scholars consider it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- and "deity, god" to meaning "the deity, the God" as in the contraction of to Allāt. In some sources, the contracted and un-contracted forms are used interchangeably. Originally, ʾilāh was used as an epithet for the West Semitic creator god, before being adopted as the proper name itself for this god.
Semitic cognates of "Allāh" appear in Semitic languages, such as the Aramaic in the absolute form, and in its definite/emphatic form,, as in reflected in Biblical Aramaic. Also Syriac ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ, both meaning simply "god", or "deity", used by both monotheists and pagans. Others are Akkadian, Ugartic, and Phoenician. A minority hypothesis posits that Allah is a loanword from the Syriac Alāhā. A more likely theory is that, it is an adaptation of the word to the phonetic structure of Arabic.
Whether or not Allah can be considered as the personal name of God became disputed in contemporary scholarship. Islamic scholars have generally tried to explain the issue by rejecting approaches that associate this word with the names of other gods or that state it is derived from these names; grammarians of the Basra school regarded it as either formed "spontaneously" or as the determined form of llāh. Other Muslims scholars proposed that the term derives from since the nature of God is a mystery and incomprehensible for humans. In Islamic usage and indoctrination, Allah is God's most unique, proper name, and referred to as . Jahm bin Safwan claimed that Allah is a name God created for himself and that names belong to the things God created.

History of usage

Pre-Islamic Arabia

Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions.
According to Marshall Hodgson, it seems that in the pre-Islamic Arabia, some Arab Christians undertook pilgrimages to the Kaaba, a pagan temple at that time, honoring Allah there as the God the Creator. Archaeological excavations have led to the discovery of pre-Islamic inscriptions and tombs made by Arab Christians in the ruins of a church at Umm el-Jimal in Northern Jordan, which initially thought to be containing references to Allah by Enno Littmann, as the proper name of God; however, this view was rejected by a second translation of the five-verse inscription made by Bellamy et al.. In an inscription of Christian martyrion dated to 512, references to al-ilah appear in both Arabic and Aramaic. The inscription opens with the phrase "By the Help of al-ilah". Irfan Shahîd quoting the 10th-century encyclopedic collection Kitab al-Aghani notes that pre-Islamic Arab Christians have been reported to have raised the battle cry "Ya La Ibad Allah" to invoke each other into battle. According to Shahid, on the authority of 10th-century Muslim scholar Al-Marzubani, "Allah" was also mentioned in pre-Islamic Christian poems by some Ghassanid and Tanukhid poets in Syria and Northern Arabia.
Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in pre-Islamic polytheistic Meccan cults. According to Ibn Kathir, Arab idolaters considered Allah as an unseen God who created and controlled the Universe. Pagans believed worship of humans or animals who had fortunate occurrences in their life brought them closer to God. Pre-Islamic Meccans worshiped Allah alongside a host of lesser gods and those whom they called the "daughters of Allah". According to Islamic sources, the Meccans and their neighbors believed that the goddesses Al-lāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt, and in some cases the Angels, were the daughters of Allah. Some authors have suggested that polytheistic Arabs used the name as a reference to a creator god or a supreme deity of their pantheon. According to one Islamic hypothesis, the Kaaba was originally built by Abraham and his son Ishmael for the worship of a single supreme god, Allah, to whom people were called on pilgrimages. However, this place of worship was filled by the Quraysh with as many as 360 idols about a century before Muhammad's time. Some scholars have suggested that Allah may have represented a remote creator god who was gradually eclipsed by more particularized local deities. There is disagreement on whether Allah played a major role in the Meccan religious cult. No iconic representation of Allah is known to have existed. Muhammad's father's name was [Abd Allah ibn Abd al Muttalib|] meaning "the slave of Allāh". The interpretation that Pre-Islamic Arabs once practiced Abrahamic religions is supported by some literary evidence, being the prevalence of Ishmael, whose God was that of Abraham, in pre-Islamic Arab culture.

Islamic period

Early Islam

"The Qur'ān insists that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews. The Qur'an's Allah is the same Creator God who covenanted with Abraham". Francis Edward 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. Since the first centuries of Islam, Arabic-speaking commentators of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith used the term Allah as a generic term for the supreme being. Saadia Gaon used the term Allah interchangeably with the term ʾĔlōhīm. Theodore Abu Qurrah translates theos as Allah in his Bible, as in John 1:1 "the Word was with Allah". Muslim commentators likewise used the term Allah for the Biblical concept of God. Ibn Qutayba writes "You cannot serve both Allah and Mammon." However, Muslim translators of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia rarely translated the Tetragrammaton, referring to the supreme being in Israelite tradition, as Allah. Instead, most commentators either translated Yahweh as either yahwah or rabb, the latter corresponding to the Jewish custom to refer to Yahweh as Adonai.
In contrast with pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, as stated by Gerhard Böwering, God in Islam does not have associates and companions, nor is there any kinship between God and jinn. Pre Islamic Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, unstoppable and insensible fate over which man had no control. This was replaced with the Islamic belief of a powerful yet benevolent and merciful God's control over man's life. In the early periods of Islam, the concept of God was established as a personal deity living in the heavens. This understanding developed over time under the influence of Islamic theology, acquiring a transcendent character. However, in contrast to this transcendent and absolute conception of God established among the elite, the public and Sufis maintained the traditional understanding on God. Also actions and attributes such as coming, going, sitting, satisfaction, anger and sadness etc. similar to humans used for this God in the Quran were considered —"no one knows its interpretation except God" —by later scholars stating that God was free from resemblance to humans in any way.

Islamic theology

Islamic theology emphasises the absolute uniqueness and singularity of God in his essence, attributes, qualities, and acts. This emphasis was made despite a number of verses and hadiths that offer analogies for God, and it was gradually established over time. Instead, the term "mutashabih" was used for these verses, and the approach of "believing in the essence, not searching for its meaning" was adopted. Understandings and expressions contrary to these definitions were described as shirk, which is considered one of the greatest sins in Islam, and it was said that those who did so would leave the religion.
God's Arsh and Kursi -may appear as chair or footstool in direct translations, often confused and used interchangeably in Islamic terminology- are also evaluated within this scope in Islamic theology;
"Indeed your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then established Himself on the Throne"
"You will see the angels all around the Throne, glorifying the praises of their Lord,....".
Named as the Ayat al-Kursi of Surah al-Baqarah literally is this; "Allah! There is no god except Him, the Living, Sustaining. Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. Who could possibly intercede with Him without His permission? He knows what is ahead of them and what is behind them, but no one can grasp any of His knowledge—except what He wills. His "Kursi" encompasses the heavens and the earth, and the preservation of both does not tire Him. He is High, Great."
Islamic teachings, in accordance with the principle of tawhid, also condemn statements that imply God is something comparable to known and created things. This understanding is based on the expressions in the chapter 112 of the Qur'an : These expressions were also used in polemics as a response to understandings that described God through the metaphor as father;
قُلْ هُوَ ٱللَّهُ أَحَدٌ ۝ ٱللَّهُ ٱلصَّمَدُ۝ لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ ۝ وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ ۝١
Most Qur'anic commentators, including al-Tabari, al-Zamakhshari, and al-Razi, regard word Allah to be a proper noun ie, while other names denote attributes or adjectives known as the 99 Names of Allah. The most famous and frequently repeated names are "the Merciful" and "the Compassionate", al-Aḥad and Al Hayy. In a Sufi practice known as, the Sufi chants and contemplates the name Allah or other associated divine names to Him while regulating his or her breath. Islamic theology rejects definitions and expressions that imply a comparison between God and His creations, because He cannot be likened to His creations in any of His attributes. However, it is observed that many of these names are translated as "the most..." in a comparative mode, as in the expression , which is also used as an Islamic slogan.

Present day

Islam

The Islamic tradition to use Allah as the personal name of God became contested in contemporary scholarship, including the question, whether or not the word Allah should be translated as God. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah encouraged English-speaking Muslims to use God instead of Allah for the sake of finding "extensive middle ground we share with other Abrahamic and universal traditions".
Most Muslims use the Arabic phrase [Insha'Allah|] untranslated after references to future events. Muslim devotional practices encourage beginning things with the invocation of [Basmala|]. There are certain other phrases in praise of God that are commonly used by Muslims and left untranslated, including "[subhan'allah|]", "[Alhamdulillah|]", "[Shahada|]" or sometimes "" and "[Takbir|]" as a devotional exercise of remembering God.

Christianity

The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for "God" than "Allah". Similarly, the Aramaic word for "God" in the language of Assyrian Christians is, or '.
Arab Christians have used two forms of invocations that were affixed to the beginning of their written works. They adopted the Muslim ', and also created their own Trinitarian ' as early as the 8th century. The Muslim ' reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized reads: "In the name of the 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 Trinitarian belief and also to make it more palatable to Muslims.

Pronunciation

The word Allāh is generally pronounced, exhibiting a heavy,, a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, a marginal phoneme in Modern Standard Arabic. Since the initial alef has no hamza, the initial is elided when a preceding word ends in a vowel. If the preceding vowel is, the is light,, as in, for instance, the Basmala.

As a loanword

English and other European languages

The history of the name Allāh in English was probably influenced by the study of comparative religion in the 19th century; for example, Thomas Carlyle sometimes used the term Allah but without any implication that Allah was anything different from God. However, in his biography of Muḥammad, Tor Andræ 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.
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 ojalá in the Spanish language and oxalá in the Portuguese language exist today, borrowed from Andalusi Arabic similar to . This phrase literally means 'if God wills'. 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 retain the name "Allāh" untranslated in English, rather than using the English translation "God".

Typography

The word ' is always written without an [aleph|] to spell the ' vowel. This is because the spelling was established before Arabic spelling started regularly using ' to spell '. However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic ' is added on top of the [shadda|] to indicate the pronunciation.
In the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription, God is referred to by the term الاله, that is, alif-lam-alif-lam-ha. This presumably indicates ' means "the god", without ' for ā.
Many Arabic type fonts feature special ligatures for Allah.
Since Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Koran only, rendering ' + ' + ' as the previous ligature is considered faulty which is the case with most common Arabic typefaces.

Unicode

Unicode has a code point reserved for ',,
in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for "compatibility with some older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly"; this is not recommended for new text. Instead, the word ' should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will generate the desired ligature.
The calligraphic variant of the word used as the emblem of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at code point U+262B. The [|flags that include the word] are also present in the regional indicator symbols of Unicode: ??, ??, ??, ??, ??.

General and cited references

*

Online

  • , in Encyclopædia Britannica Online, by Asma Afsaruddin, Brian Duignan, Thinley