The word, "Allah". A PSA.

[Kelp]

I've noticed in the past that several prominent Evangelicals, (Tim LaHaye for one, Jerry Falwell well, I think) making statements such as "Allah is a demon" and "the God of Christianity and the God of Islam are not the same". While I agree with these statements as they are intended; they are inaccurate as stated.

Allah, is also the standard word for "God" (in this case referring to the Christian God) used by Arabic speaking Christians. Indeed, "God be with you" is "Allah Ma'ak" (Allah Ma'ik if you are saying it to a woman).

This is something that kind of weighs on me. I think Arabic Christians are in a very precarious place in the world today, and semantic fudges like the above can only risk hurting their image even more by encouraging ignorance. Just my opinion. Thanks

[Narnian]

• Edited by a Moderator •

Moderator Notice

one must adhere to the doctrines laid out in the forum rules to post here

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publically complain or whine, please take it to the Psychotherapy Room unless told otherwise.

[Little Shepherd]

If I'm not mistaken, Allah was not originally a generic name for "god," but was a reference to a specific deity(the one symbolized by the moon in that part of the world, if memory serves), and after Muhammed converted the former polytheists to his monotheistic religion, Allah was used specifically as the name for his deity.

If that's accurate, then using the name as a generic term for god, including the Christian God, is a more recent development(more recent than the 7th century, that is; I don't know exactly how long ago it came to be used this way).

That said, I don't like it. It was(and is more often than not still used as) a proper name referring to a specific non-YHWH deity. People in the OT were struck dead for doing things that could cause YHWH to be confused with other deities. It's very serious.

And that said, I can't imagine someone truly being confused by the statements in the OP unless they don't know that LaHaye and Falwell are Christians. If they are aware of this fact, then there's simply no way they couldn't know that LaHaye and Falwell are speaking specifically of the Islamic deity named Allah. If they don't know this fact, well, then they don't have the full context of the message and it's their fault if they jump to hasty conclusions.

[JB]

If I'm not mistaken, Allah was not originally a generic name for "god," but was a reference to a specific deity(the one symbolized by the moon in that part of the world, if memory serves), and after Muhammed converted the former polytheists to his monotheistic religion, Allah was used specifically as the name for his deity.

If that's accurate, then using the name as a generic term for god, including the Christian God, is a more recent development(more recent than the 7th century, that is; I don't know exactly how long ago it came to be used this way).

That said, I don't like it. It was(and is more often than not still used as) a proper name referring to a specific non-YHWH deity. People in the OT were struck dead for doing things that could cause YHWH to be confused with other deities. It's very serious.

And that said, I can't imagine someone truly being confused by the statements in the OP unless they don't know that LaHaye and Falwell are Christians. If they are aware of this fact, then there's simply no way they couldn't know that LaHaye and Falwell are speaking specifically of the Islamic deity named Allah. If they don't know this fact, well, then they don't have the full context of the message and it's their fault if they jump to hasty conclusions.

I generally view the word "Allah" like I do the Canaanite term "El". Both are technically generic names meaning "God" that have a historic association with a particular deity--"Allah" with the Islamic conception of the biblical God, "El" with the head of the Canaanite pantheon. And yet the latter, which at one point had a referent even further removed from the reality, was used on occasion by the biblical authors with reference to YHWH. So since the Arabic term "Allah" is basically in the same situation, I don't think it's inherently problematic to use the term "Allah" with respect to the true God, so long as Arabic-speaking Christians and others make clear that they don't mean to import the erroneous Islamic conceptual baggage along with the term. And in my view, to say that Allah is another god or the same god wrongly conceived is largely a matter of how one looks at reference. It seems to me that "Allah" is, even in Islam, intended to pick out the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and so I shy away from statements like those of LaHaye and Falwell. Rather, from a Christian perspective, I would say that the Islamic conception of God is an often-erroneous conceptual model for the true God who is accurately represented within the Christan faith.

But, I wonder if there have been any studies in how Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians referred to God prior to the time of Muhammad?

[Sparko]

actually the arabic word for god is "ila"

La Ilaha Ila Allah
No other-God than God Allah.

Allah is a proper name referring literally to "The God" which would be the muslim God.

[OneSizeFit]

Al = El

[37818]

Before Muhammad's Islam, what became the name of the top god of the Arabic pantheon of gods was originally the Arab Moon deity who was said to have had three daughters of the Sun goddess. (Allah has no son.)

There is a different Arabic word for God which is different than Allah. Allah is a contraction of the Arabic for "the God" to become "Th'God," that is "Allah" in Arabic.

It is because in orthodox Islam that what was a contraction for "the God" became the Name of God in Islam. And it is do to the Islamic insistence that Allah is God's Name that it is used in the Arabic Bible for "God" instead of the Arabic word for "God."

As I understand it.

[RonC]

I refer all to Matthew 27:46 as well as the Pe[color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color]ta Aramaic NT. The OP is accurate. Also study the term elohiym it is considered a plural derivative of the term El (Al in Arabic).