Who Are "Allah" And Who are Muslim God - Shah Raaz Khan

 According to the Islamic statement of witness, or shahada, “There is no god but Allah”. Muslims believe he created the world in six days and sent prophets such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and lastly Muhammad, who called people to worship only him, rejecting idolatry and polytheism.

The word islam, which means submission, was not at first the name of a religion founded by Muhammad. It referred, rather, to the original religion of all mankind – and even of the universe itself which, like us, was created to serve Allah.

Earlier prophets and their followers were all Muslims (submitters to Allah), though Muslims do tend to conflate the general and specific meanings of the words Islam and Muslim.

Some prophets received scriptures from Allah, notably the Torah of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the Gospel of Jesus. Their messages and books, however, became corrupted or were lost.

Miraculously, the Qur’an (“recitation”) revealed to Muhammad – the very word of Allah – will not suffer this fate, so there is no need for further prophets or revelations.

The names and character of Allah

The Qur’an refers to Allah as the Lord of the Worlds. Unlike the biblical Yahweh (sometimes misread as Jehovah), he has no personal name, and his traditional 99 names are really epithets.

These include the Creator, the King, the Almighty, and the All-Seer. Two important titles of Allah occur in a phrase that typically prefaces texts: Bismillah, al-Rahman, al-Rahim (In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful).

Allah is also the Master of the Day of Judgment, when the good, especially believers, will be sent to their heavenly reward, and the wicked, especially unbelievers, will be dispatched to hellfire. Muslims claim to reject anthropomorphic descriptions of Allah, yet the Qur’an describes him as speaking, sitting on a throne, and having a face, eyes and hands.

Nothing can ever happen unless it is caused or at least permitted by Allah, so when making plans of any kind, Muslims typically say in sha‘ allah (God willing).

If matters go well, one says ma sha‘ allah (Whatever Allah wills), but in any event one can say al-hamdu li-llah (Thanks be to Allah). In their prayers and on other occasions (including battles and street protests), Muslims declare that Allah is the greater than anything else (Allahu akbar).

Allah and the god of the Bible

Allah is usually thought to mean “the god” (al-ilah) in Arabic and is probably cognate with rather than derived from the Aramaic Alaha. All Muslims and most Christians acknowledge that they believe in the same god even though their understandings differ.

Arabic-speaking Christians call God Allah, and Gideon bibles, quoting John 3:16 in different languages, assert that Allah sent his son into the world.

Addressing Christians and Jews, the Qur’an declares, “Our god and your god are one” (29:46). The names Allah and al-Rahman were evidently used by pre-Islamic Jews and Christians for God, and the Qur’an (5:17-18) even criticises Christians for identifying Allah with Christ and both Jews and Christians for calling themselves children of Allah.

Allah is not a trinity of three persons and has no son who was incarnate (made flesh) as a man. Some Christians therefore deny that Allah is the god they acknowledge. Yet, they seem sure that Jews worship the same god despite similarly rejecting the trinity and the incarnation.

Claiming that the Qur’an’s god and the Bible’s god are different beings is rather like arguing that the New Testament’s Jesus and the Qur’an’s Jesus (who is not divine and was not crucified) are different historic individuals. Some will reply that while there are competing interpretations of the one Jesus, God and Allah have different origins.

Polytheistic origins

Indeed, Allah was recognised mostly by polytheists before the revelation of the Qur’an. Muhammad’s own father, who died before the Prophet was born, was called Abdullah (Servant of God).

But the argument that Allah cannot be God because he was originally part of a polytheistic religious system ignores the origins of Jewish monotheism (and its Christian and Islamic derivatives).

Biblical writers identified the Canaanite high god El with their own god even though he originally presided over a large pantheon. The closely related plural form elohim is used more often in the Bible, but both derive from the same Semitic root as Allah.

El and elohim, the New Testament theos (hence theology), the Latin deus (hence deism), and the pre-Christian, Germanic god can all refer both to the Judeo-Christian god and other supernatural beings.

So Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings of the divinity originated in polytheistic contexts. Just like traditional Jews and Christians, however, Muslims believe that the religion of the first humans, Adam and Eve, was monotheistic. Because it was corrupted into polytheism, Allah sent prophets who all taught that there is only one god.

Islam took over from Judaism the notion that Abraham in particular was the one who (re)discovered monotheism and rejected idolatry. Thus Muhammad sought to restore the authentic monotheism of Abraham, from which even Jews and Christians had allegedly deviated.

Gods as human constructions

If he lived at all, which is doubtful, Abraham presumably flourished early in the second millennium BCE. Critical historians and archaeologists, however, argue that Israelite monotheism only developed about the time of the Babylonian Exile – well over a thousand years later.

The reason why there are different conceptions of God and of gods is surely not that humans have culpably strayed from an original revelation. Rather, these beliefs are human constructions and reconstructions that reflect our own rationalisations, hopes, fears and aspirations.

The latter include attempts by particular groups of people to defend their identity or even assert their hegemony over others on the grounds that they have been uniquely favoured by God with authentic revelation.

That seems to be why some Christians deny that Allah is just another name for God. It also explains Malaysian Muslim efforts to prevent Christians from referring to God as Allah for fear that legitimising the Christian understanding of Allah will threaten Islamic dominance in their country.

Islam is on the rise in the United States. According to a 2017 Pew Study, the Muslim American population is “growing rapidly” through a combination of immigration, conversion, and a high fertility rate. The growth of Islam in America means that Christians are interacting with Muslims more than ever before. How are Christians responding? The media often suggests that American Christians (especially Evangelicals) have turned Islamophobic, but at the talks I give around the country I encounter more curiosity about Islam than hatred or fear. Most questions I address are not about jihad or sharia, but about Allah. Christians regularly ask whether the God of Islam is the God of Christianity. Should Muslims, like Jews, be counted as fellow believers? Or is Allah a different God, the creation of Muhammad and fundamentally unlike the God of the Bible?

In his 1984 book Mohammad And  Christian the Anglican bishop Kenneth Cragg writes, “The answer to the vexed question, ‘Is the God of Islam and the God of the Gospel the same?’ can only rightly be ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’.” The concern that led Cragg to this answer, or rather this failure to answer, is one shared by many orthodox Christians interested in friendship with Muslims. Muslims disagree with Christians on a number of things, including the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and the authority of the Bible. Yet many Christians are eager to emphasize what we hold in common with Muslims. Many hold up the piety of Muslims, particularly in their fidelity to prayer, as an example to be emulated.

The urge to recognize commonality with Muslims is felt more strongly by many Christians these days in the West, as the number of “nones” continues to grow and religion is pushed out of the public sphere. During a recent seminar on Islamic Origins at Notre Dame a Christian student raised some concern with “ideas that will inevitably antagonize Muslims,” adding, “Muslims are our allies against secularism.”

Yet other Christians feel the challenge from Muslims more acutely than they do the challenge of the nones. The God of Islam cannot be the true God, they hold, and the spread of Islam is necessarily a threat to the Church. Nabeel Qureshi, a Muslim-background Christian believer and author of Seeking and Allah Jasus argues that the problem begins with the Qur’an’s position on Jesus:

Qureshi (who died at the age of 34) was responding to a controversy that started with a Facebook post by Larycia Hawkins, the first female African-American tenured professor at evangelical Wheaton College. On December 10, 2015, Hawkins posted a picture of herself wearing an Islamic headscarf and wrote: “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

Now, Muslims generally do not consider themselves “People of the Book,” but instead reserve this title for Jews and Christians. And Christians usually do not adopt this title. For Christians, in fact, the center of the religion is Christ, not any book. It is also not clear what statement of Pope Francis Hawkins was referring to, although she was right about his belief that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

In a March 20, 2013 address to representatives of churches and world religions (after addressing some comments to Jewish representatives), he declared, “I greet and thank cordially all of you, dear friends belonging to other religious traditions; firstly the Muslims, who worship the one living and merciful God, and call upon Him in prayer.”

Hawkins’s post led to trouble with Wheaton. In part because of angry response by benefactors and alumni, she was put on leave for her statement, which the College held violated the statement of faith that she, like every other faculty member at Wheaton, had signed. Eventually Hawkins left Wheaton and was hired by the University of Virginia (her story is now featured in a documentary film entitled Same God).

Miroslav Volf, a prominent evangelical professor at Yale Divinity school (and author of a book entitled Allah : A Christian Response) entered the fray with a Washington Post editorial entitled: “Wheaton professor’s suspension Is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology.” Volf argues that only bigotry against Muslims could have motivated Wheaton’s move. After all, Jews hold a teaching on God that is not far from that of Muslims. Jews, too, deny the Trinity and the Incarnation, and yet Christians have no problem affirming that the Jewish God is their God. It was Volf’s editorial that provoked Nabeel Qureshi to intervene on the other side of the question.

Volf’s argument faltered on the fact that Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike know God not only through reflection on the created order and the human person, but also through his self-disclosure as transmitted in scripture. There’s the rub: Christians and Jews share a Scripture. Christians and Muslims do not. Muslims do not recognize the Old or the New Testament. They judge the Bible muharraf, or “falsified.” This does not mean that they do not know God, but it does mean that getting to a “yes” answer on the same God question is not as easy as pointing to the case of the Jews. One cannot simply say, “Jews also reject the Trinity, but Christians have no problem there!”

The Catholic Church since Vatican II has taught in different ways that Muslims and Christians do worship the same God. Lumen Gentium §16 includes the line: “Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind [nobiscum Deum adorant unicum, misericordem].” Pope Saint John Paul II, speaking in front of a soccer stadium filled with young Muslims in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1985, famously declared:

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