Who is Allah?

PopeOfEruke

I found it very interesting to learn on this forum about the origins of Yahweh as an ancient tribal deity worshipped by the early settlers in the Middle East. But I know very little about Allah, the God of Islam.

Does anyone know the relationship between Allah and Yahweh? Is there one at all? Do both these deities have an origin in the ancient tribes from the Middle East area?

Interesting too is how little information about Islam is to be found in the JW publications. Seems the JW leadership are simply not interested in this subject....

Pope

bigdreaux

i may be wrong, but, i think allah is closer to jesus than jehovah. at least, in their stories. and again, if you go by the wts version of the bible.

mrsjones5

I know that Allah is simply the Arabic word for God. Is it the same God as for Jews and Christians? Some say yes.

Allah (Arabic: ?? , Allah) is the standard Arabic word for "God", derived from al-ilah, the God. [1] [2] The term is best known in the West for its use by Muslims as a reference to God. [3] Arabic-speakers of all faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God". [4] The Muslim and Christian Arabs of today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'. [5] In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was used by pagan Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity. [6]
In Islam, Allah is the only deity, transcendent creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind . [3] [1] Some Islamic scholars believe that the term "Allah" should not be translated, arguing that "Allah" as used in Islam is a special and glorified term whose use should be preserved, while God can also be used in reference to deities worshiped by polytheists.
According to F. E. Peters, "The Qur'an insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews. [Qur'an 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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah

Mary

Ah, Mrs. Jones is correct: The term "Allah" simply means "God" in the Islamic religion.

Narkissos

From a philological standpoint 'Allah is one of the many Semitic forms of 'l, which include names of particular gods (notably 'El, the Father of gods, head of the Canaanite-Phoenician pantheon) and generic designation of "gods" (cf. 'eloah / 'elohim in Biblical Hebrew). But of course there is more to the Islamic 'Allah than mere philology, since Islam presupposes monotheistic Judaism and Christianity (especially in some of its "Jewish-Christian" forms): Mohammad's 'Allah is meant to be none other than the God of Abraham and Jesus.

PopeOfEruke

So did Arabic people worship Allah from the time of Abraham? What religion were they between then and when Mohammed came thousands of years later?

DeusMauzzim

Side note: Narkissos is absolutely right about the etymology: al-Ilah just means 'God' in Arabic (like ha-'Elohim in Hebrew, 'al-' and 'ha-' being the respective articles), and is related to semitic 'el: 'God', probably coming from the verbal root for 'power, strength' (Brown-Driver-Briggs)

Muslim teaching:

Muslims teach that Abraham was the first muslim (meaning one who practices Islam or 'submission' to God)

Until the time of Muhammad, the Arabs lived in a time of Jahiliya or 'ignorance' of God - they were pagans. Then Muhammad, 'seal of the prophets', is given the final revelation by God (the Qur'an) and leads his people on the right track of Islam by his example (the Sunna or path of the Prophet).

Academic teaching:

Before the rise of Muhammad, Allah was one of the pagan gods of the Arabs, who had three daughters (al-Lat, al-Uzza and al-Manat - see wikipedia on the Satanic Verses). Just like Yhwh some 1500 years before, Allah is upgraded from a polytheistic god (one of many gods) to a henotheistic god (multiple gods, only one, Allah, must be worshipped), and ultimately to a monotheistic god (the only existing god).

History sometimes repeats itself...

I hope this answers some of your questions,

Regards,

Deus Mauzzim

P.S so where Yhwh was probably borrowed from the canaanite pantheon (search wikipedia on Ugarit) and upgraded to the only existing god by the Jews, Allah was an indiginous pre-Islamic God who was upgraded by the Arabs themselves.

Of course, Muslims maintain Yhwh/Allah has always been one and the same god all along - because the Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures and failed to totally surrender themselves to God, He found it necessary to try everything again with a different people (the Arabs). This argument is somewhat like the Christians used against the Jews.

diamondblue1974

I havent met him so I dont know!

Gary

Narkissos

In the believer's mind mytho-theology is retroactive by nature: once Yhwh became "God," Yhwh-God had always been there. Once Jesus became "God" he had to be so "from the beginning," one way or another. The Islamic Allah is no exception.

"History (of ideas) repeats itself" must be corrected in at least one way, I think: there is something unique in the Jewish step to monotheism (Deutero-Isaiah making the old god Yhwh the only existing god, hence "God") which cannot be exactly repeated (except in a hermetically closed cultural setting of which I know no example). Islamic monotheism appropriates and modifies the extant Jewish-Christian mytho-theology, much as Christianity had appropriated and modified the Jewish mytho-theology. Neither the Christian God nor the Islamic Allah pop up from nowhere or can be described as completely "original" to a religious or ethnic community inasmuch as they depend on direct or indirect Jewish influence. In that sense, the pre-Islamic Arabic definitions of 'Allah can provide only a small part of the genealogy for the Islamic Allah.

DeusMauzzim

@Narkissos:

1. Good point about retroactive mytho-theology. I think we can use this concept not only for the development of monotheistic gods, but also for fictional "historical continuity" of the believing community itself:

- Once Islam was created, Abraham had always been a Muslim. There's even the term hanif for a "pre-islamic muslim" in islamic theology.

- Once dubdom was created, the first witness was Abel, and Jesus was a sort of über-witness (borth martyroi: witnesses/martyrs)

2. "history repeats itself (or not)" - I agree with you in that Islam appropriated the Judeo-Christian heritage, as Christianity appropriated the Jewish heritage. So it's better to speak of appropriation of history than repetition in these cases. However, I would not call the Jewish step to monotheism 'unique'. Atenism was definately earlier under Amenhotep IV, and has the same development of polytheism-henotheism-monotheism (eg hymn of Aten: O sole god, like whom there is no other! - unfortunately I can't read ancient egyptian to check this translation, but this seems reasonable from what I've read about Atenism). IF the Jews were influenced by this (like Freud speculates in Der mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion), We should also say Judaism appropriated an already established pattern. IF this was not the case, however, we have your example of an exact repetition of development of poly-,heno-,monotheism in Egypt and Israel.

I'll leave Zoroastrianism out for the moment because its dualism tends to give me headaches :)

Regards,

Deus Mauzzim

Who is Allah?

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