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'''Allah''' (, '') is the standard Arabic word for "God". The term is best known in the West for its use by Muslims as a reference to God.^[1] Arabic-speakers of all faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God".^[2] The Muslim and Christian Arabs of today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'.^[3] In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was used by pagan Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity.
In Islam, Allah is the only deity, transcendent creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind.^[4] Some Islamic scholars believe that the term "Allāh" should not be translated, arguing that "Allāh" 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. 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.^[5]
According to the tradition of Islam there are more than 99 Names of God (''al-asma al-husna'' lit. meaning: "The best names") each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah. The most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (''al-rahman'') and "the Compassionate" (''al-rahim'').^[6]

Contents

Etymology

History

Allah outside Islam

Translation

Typography

Unicode

See also

External links

Bibliography

References

Etymology

Etymologically, ''Allāh'' is derived from a contraction of the Arabic article ''al-'' and '' "deity, god" to '' meaning "the [sole] deity, God" (''ho theos monos'')^[7]. Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.^[8] The corresponding Aramaic form is ''’Ĕlāh'', in Biblical Aramaic, and ''’Alâhâ'' or ''’Ālōho'', in Syriac.
Synchronically, the term ''Allah'' does not have a plural form or a feminine gender in the Arabic language. The historical (pre-Islamic) corresponding feminine is ''Allāt''.
Regardless of etymology, the synchronic Muslim understanding of the term does not consider it as a proper name like any other, but rather as the "name of the nameless God, next to whom there is no other"^[9].

History

Allah script outside Eski Cami (The Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey.

Medallion showing 'Allah' in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey.

The pre-Islamic Arabs believed in a host of other terms to signify gods, such as Hubal and al-Lāt, al-`Uzzah, and Manah.^[10] Pre-Islamic Jews referred to their supreme creator as Yahweh (Jehovah) or Elohim. This view of Allāh by the pre-Islamic pagans is viewed by Muslims as a later development having arisen as a result of moving away from Abrahamic monotheism over time since the building of the Kaaba. The Qur'an transmits a rebuttal to this common belief at the time in the verse : ''"Has then your Lord (O Pagans!) preferred for you sons, and taken for Himself daughters among the angels? Truly ye utter a most dreadful saying!"''. Secular historians, meanwhile, have postulated that monotheism is the result of an evolution from henotheism, the belief in a supreme deity as well as various lesser divinities. (See Judaism.) The pagan Arabians also used the word "Allāh" in the names of their children; Muhammad's father, who was born into pagan society, was named "Abdullāh", which translates "servant of Allāh". "Abdullāh" is still used for names of Muslim and non-Muslims (e.g. Christians also used the word, as testified by the Zabad inscription).
The Hebrew word for deity, El (אל) or Elōah (אלוה), was used as an Tanakh synonym for the Tetragrammaton (יהוה), which is the proper name of God according to the Hebrew Bible. The Aramaic word for God is ''alôh-ô'' (Syriac dialect) or elâhâ (Biblical dialect), which comes from the same Proto-Semitic word (''
★ ʾilâh-'') as the Arabic and Hebrew terms; Jesus is described in Mark 15:34 as having used the word on the cross, with the ending meaning "my", when saying, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (transliterated in Greek as ''elō-i'').
One of the earliest surviving translations of the word ''Allāh'' into a foreign language is in a Greek translation of the Shahada, from 86-96 AH (705-715 AD), which translates it as ''ho theos monos'',^[11] literally "the one god". Also the cognate Aramaic term appears in the Aramaic version of the ''New Testament'', called the Pshitta (or Peshitta) as one of the words Jesus used to refer to God, e.g., in the sixth Beatitude, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see Alaha."

Allah outside Islam

Most Arabic-speaking Christian and Jewish Communities (including the Yemenite Jews, several communities and some Sephardim), as well as living in Muslim countries (such as Orthodox Christians in Turkey [2]), use "Allāh" as the proper noun for "God".. The name's origin can be traced back to the earliest Semitic writings in which the word for god was Il or El, the latter being an Old Testament synonym for Yahweh Allah is the standard Arabic word for "God" and is used by Arab Christians as well.^[12]
Because of the centuries long Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, the words ojalá and oxalá today exist in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, respectively, borrowed from Arabic by way of Mozarabic. These words literally mean "God willing" (in the sense of "I hope so").
The word 'Allah' in the Indonesian language, means God, it is used alternatively with the word "Tuhan". Indonesia recognises six religions (Islam (majority), Protestantism, Roman Catholicism.^[13] Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism), all of which use these two words to refer to God or gods. However, religions other than Islam, use a different pronunciation for "Allah", although the spelling is the same.

Translation

Some Muslim scholars feel that "Allāh" should not be translated, because they perceive the Arabic word to express the uniqueness of "Allāh" more accurately than the word "god" for two reasons:

★ The word "god" can take a plural form "gods", whereas the word "Allāh" has no individual plural form (it requires grammatical inflection to imply plurality).

★ The word "god" can have gender as male god or female god (called goddess) whereas the word "Allāh" in their view does not have gender.^[14]
This is a significant issue in translation of the Qur'an.
The word "Allāh" had been used in the Arabic tongue in the pre-Islamic period, which Muslims call Jāhilīyah; it occurs in Arabic classical poetry and was also used by Jews in certain regions (for cognate Hebrew Elōah).

Typography

An example of '' written in simple Arabic calligraphy.

The word ''Allāh'' is always written without an alif to spell the ''ā'' vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using alif to spell ''ā''. 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,^[15] where it ends with an ambiguous sign that may be a lone-standing ''h'' with a lengthened start, or may be a non-standard conjoined ''l-h'':-

★ الاه : This reading would be ''Allāh'' spelled phonetically with ''alif'' for the ''ā''.

★ الاله : This reading would be ''Al-'ilāh'' = "the god" (an older form, without contraction), by older spelling practice without ''alif'' for ''ā''.
In ''Abjad numerals'', the numeric value of الله is 66.

Unicode

Unicode has a codepoint reserved for ''Allāh'', ﷲ = U+FDF2.
This character according to the official Unicode specification is a ligature of ''alif-lām-lām-shadda-(superscript alif)-hā'' ( U+0627 U+0644 U+0644 U+0651 U+0670 U+0647).
There is, however some confusion arising from the fact that Arabic typography usually features a ''llāh'' glyph without the preceding alif, which only occurs phrase-initially (or with in Qur'anic orthography). Consequently, the majority of Arabic Unicode fonts do not conform with the specification and have a glyph without the alif at this position (e.g. those provided by Linotype, the great majority of those licensed to or developed by Microsoft, those of Arabeyes.org, SIL's Lateef and the fonts of CRULP developed in Pakistan),
while others have the prescribed form with alif (e.g. SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic distributed with the Middle-Eastern version
of the Adobe Reader 7, Arial Unicode MS, and Arabic Typesetting, distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).
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

★ Tawhid

★ 99 Names of God in the Qur'an

★ Names of God

★ Ilah

★ Qur'an

★ Termagant

External links

★ Catholic Encyclopedia - Allah

★ The Concept of Allāh according to the Qur'an

★ Allah - An Advanced look at God in Islam

★ For Mainstream/Traditional Classical Islamic Teachings

★ An Orthodox Traditional Islamic Information Website

★ - The Origins of "ALLAH" - A Refutation to Quennel Gale's Article "Allah"

Bibliography

★ Samuel M. Zwemep - ''The Moslem Doctrine of God'' (Originally published in 1905) ISBN 1-84664-478-X

★ Ian Richard Netton - ''Allah Transcendent'' (1994) ISBN 0-7007-0287-3

References

1. Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, ''Allah''
2. Columbia Encyclopedia, ''Allah''
3. The Cambridge history of Islam, Lewis, Bernard; Holt, P. M.; Holt, Peter R.; Lambton, Ann Katherine Swynford, , , University Press, 1977,
4. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, ''Allah''
5. F.E. Peters, ''Islam'', p.4, Princeton University Press, 2003
6. The 99 Beautiful Names for God for All the People of the Book, , David, Bentley, William Carey Library, 1999,
7. Encyclopaedia of Islam, ''Allah''
8. 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, the word Allah is used by all Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other monotheists.
9. Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, ''God and his Attributes''
10. Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend, ''"The Facts on File"'', ed. Anthony Mercatante, New York, 1983, I:61
11. A Bilingual Papyrus Of A Protocol - Egyptian National Library Inv. No. 61, 86-96 AH [1]
12. Allah
13. Tritunggal
14. ''Concept of God in Islam''
15. Zebed Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Trilingual Inscription In Greek, Syriac & Arabic From 512 CE



★ The Cambridge History of Islam (Paperback), , P. M., Holt, Cambridge University Press, 1977, ISBN 978-0521291354