First, the context. There are many Christians who will say that Muslims pray to a “different” God than Christians do. However, the same Christians will admit that Jews pray to the “same” God as Christians, even though the beliefs of Islam explicitly identify Allah with the God of the Hebrews.
I think one of the reasons for the popularity of this view is that many Muslims continue to use the name “Allah” for God when speaking English, while Jews use the English “God.” When discussing this issue with said Christians I would point out that Arabic Christians, when praying in Arabic, also pray to Allah since that is the Arabic word for God. So for Arabic Christians, the question of whether Allah is God becomes meaningless – Allah is Allah (God is God).
But I have never really verified this. Is this statement about Arabic Christians praying to Allah true?
I could tell you how I see it, or the way it was taught to me, but none of us really knows whether God, Allah, Vishnu, and Yahweh are all the same entity. I believe so. I hope so.
There can be no factual answer for a question based in faith, so this thread may be in the wrong forum.
I know I have read that they do, but can’t give you a cite off the top of my head.
Interesting question, in that it reminds me of an issue that the Mongolian Bible Society is currently struggling with. Some people attempting to translate the Bible are using a Mongolian name associated with Buddha, and others are arguing that this leads to confusion and syncretism, and are trying to find a Mongolian word to use for God that cannot be confused with any other deities.
It seems to parallel the common conception of Arab Christians praying to “Allah” - I know it’s their word for “god”, but I don’t know to what extent it influences their understanding of God to conform to the Islamic deity (whose attributes differ from YHWH, as can be ascertained by comparing the Bible/OT to the Qur’an).
There are a number of Christian (evangelical) groups that have put out various versions of the relationship of Islam to different pagan beliefs of the region (generally in an attempt to claim that Islam is, somehow, “merely” a take-off on pagnism).
This Muslim site discusses some of the connections that the Christian sites claim (with links to some of the Christian sites).
Sorry. I had both of the current questions on Islam open in different windows and posted this to the wrong thread (although it does have links to answer the question.
While I’m here: I had a classmate of middle east ancestry who was either Chaldean Catholic or Maronite who noted that his grandfather referred to God as Allah.
Actually Islamic and Jewish conceptions of God are rather closer to each other than either is to the mainstream Christian conception ( rejection of the trinity, for example ).
In point of fact, from the Muslim perspective it’s simple - The Islamic God is absolutely the same as the Jewish and Christian God. They believe that Christians and Jews follow flawed interpretations of his Word, but that their God is no different from the Muslim God.
Working on It, an American of Middle Eastern (IIRC Syrian) extraction who is an active member of the Antiochene Orthodox Church and a retired moderator at the Pizza Parlor, confirms that the use of Allah as the term for God used by Christians speaking Arabic is in fact valid.
JFTR, Allah incorporates the article, and is more equivalent to the Hebrew Elohim which it translates than to our term, which can mean “a (presumably false) deity of a faith not my own” as well as being the titular name of the Jewish/Christian deity in English. “Allah” means roughly “The (only) God” and would be used only by a monotheist speaking of his own god, or, of course, with reference to the deity of Islam, whether or not equated to the J/C God. While I’m not an Arabic speaker, I seem to recall “ilah” as being the proper usage for “god” with a small “G” which would be used in a sentence like “That idol is a false god.”
MC, it’s not a corruption of Elohim but a parallel formation, a cognate – both carrying the meaning of “the one and only god.” (The Hebrew, BTW, is plural in form; I’ll let someone more scholarly than I discuss the explanations of this.)
I’m not sure that is accurate ( the ‘corruption from Elohim’ part ). I think it’s just a dialectical variant of the same Semitic concept of the supreme deity. Il to the Babylonians, El to the Canaanites and Israelites, Ilah to the south Arabians. In other words, I suspect the root are not directly derivative from Hebrew, but rather parallel to it, though I welcome correction on that.
Makes sense ( though I don’t speak Arabic either ). Allah apparently comes from the contemporary ( to Muhammed ) Bedouin al-Ilah, “The Deity” as you said.
OK (well, for now I’m not ready to address that point), but:
We’re talking about Christian Arabs vs. Muslim Arabs, right? And I think we can agree that the Christian concept of God doesn’t line up well with the Islamic concept of Allah.
I don’t see how the comparison between Islamic & Jewish conceptions ties in, but I’m willing to be enlightened…
Why don’t you tell us why you think the Muslim God (Allah) is so different from the Judeo-Christian God. Tamerlane pointed out a pretty big difference between the Jewish and Christian version of God. The Muslim Allah doesn’t have the trinity conotation as in the Christian religion, and so is more similar to the Old Testament God of the bible. Do you think the Muslims added some new “features” onto the Jewish God, YHVH? Remember, Mohammed is just a prophet, not a Jesus parallel.
Polycarp: It never occured to me before that Elohim is plural, but is sure makes sense. I’d like to hear the story behind that as well!
As I pointed out in the “Before Islam” thread, the early christian establishment considered Islam to be a Christian sect…
In fact in that book it mentions that it was common for Christians and Muslims to pray at the same shrines, and they still do in places. Intresting point to any English football holigans out there, the example mentioned in the book where Christians and Muslims still pray together was a shrine to St George in western Turkey…
Another big (to Christians) difference is the personal nature of God vs. the impersonal, detached nature of Allah. Christianity teaches that God loves us; I’ve read over and over that that is a strange concept to Islam. Likewise, the Muslims are apparently appalled at the Christian idea of God having a son; they consider it blasphemous, as I understand it. These are just the ones that come off the top of my head; I might be able to name more if I spent more time on it, but I think those should suffice, as they’re “big” enough.
Well, I know Mohammed is not a Jesus parallel - of that I never need to be reminded. As to the first part, I’ve read opinions that Mohammed did in fact co-opt the Jewish concept of God but added “features” that fit his concept of what God “should” be. I’m not married to the idea, but it seems feasible, from what I’ve read (I don’t have any exact cites, but I think one source came out of an Encyclopedia Brittanica).
Well, I for one have read the Bible in Arabic… and I can tell you that, in Arabic, Christians sho’ nuff pray to “Allah.” And no one else but Allah. The same goes for ;j Arabic-speaking Jews.
I gave my Catholic mom a recording of the Lebanese chanteuse Fayruz singing an Arabic song to Mary that began Yâ Umm Allâh… (O Mother of God…). Which is an expression a Muslim could not use, but is quite common in Christianity.
As for God in Mongolian, a non-Buddha word for God in Mongolian is lkha, a loanword from Tibetan lha which means ‘deity’. The origin of the name Lhasa for example. I’m surprised the translators weren’t aware of that.
However, if it were me translating God (meaning the One God, the Supreme Being) into Mongolian, I would use Tenger which means ‘the sky, Heaven’ and is the original pre-Buddhist Mongolian shamanist name for the Supreme Being. In fact, this is etymologically related to the Turkish word for God, Tanrï.
Another pre-Buddhist Turko-Mongolian shamanist name for God is Ülgen, though I think Tenger would meet the needs of Christian theology better.
Padma: My construction would begin with Abraham’s conception of God, and build from that to Moses’s and what Judaism has evolved to become since then. Then look at the reinterpretation that Christianity, forced to deal with the deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, placed on the Jewish understanding of God. (While we Christians say that we worship the God of the Jews, the Jews are quite explicit that the Holy Trinity is not anything that they’d see as resembling the Name.) And recall that the Christian conception itself evolved from “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” into the abstraction of the Quicunque Vult.
Then I’d work back from the Jewish conception and look at how Mohammed modified it to come up with the Islamic idea of Allah, and how that’s evolved since Mohammed.
And my conclusion is that there are three distinct conceptions of one basic God, differing in very important ways, but all based on the same basic idea of a single all-powerful Creator who calls individual people to follow Him.
Padmaraga, namaste. You have repeated the demonstrably false assertion of certain missionaries that there is no love of Allah in Islam. There are verses in the Qur’an that say “Those who believe are strongly in love with Allah” and “Allah loves them and they love Him.” Also, a hadith in which Allah says, “My servant keeps coming nearer to me with extra worship until I love him. And when I love him, I become the eye with which he sees, the ear with which he hears, the hand with which he grasps, and the foot with which he walks.”
So in the Straight Dope tradition of fighting ignorance, I respectfully call bullshit on what those missionaries are claiming. They can only keep getting away with this as long as their followers do not check up on the objective facts.
Surely there is a window from heart to heart:
they are not separate and far from each other.
Two earthenware lamps are not joined,
but their light is mingled as it moves.
No lover seeks union without the beloved seeking;
but the love of lovers makes the body thin as a bowstring,
while the love of loved ones makes them comely and plump.
When the lightning of love for the beloved
has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart. When love for God has been doubled in your heart,
there is no doubt that God has love for you.
Bolding mine.
From good ole’ Rumi. Of course that’s a Sufi take on things. Some sour, cheerless fundamentalist might well disagree. Still, the notion that God loves us ( well, maybe not me ) is not an alien concept to Islam.
Ah, well my comment may have derived from a false assumption on my part. It’s a common refrain from certain types of Christian that Judaism and Christianity share the same God, while Islam doesn’t. For some reason ( less identifiable now that I peer at it again ), your wording led me to assume you were in that camp, hence my rebuttal.
No, the concept ( or perhaps more accurately, the interpretation ) doesn’t necessarily line up perfectly. But that doesn’t presuppose Christian and Muslim Arabs regard themselves as praying to different deities. As I’ve said, from a Muslim perspective it would seem that that’s generally not the case ( though I’d certainly leave the door open for some outliers in this respect, Islam rather pointedly draws comparisons between itself and other ‘Peoples of the Book’ ). From the Christian Arab perspective I’m sure it varies.
) is not an alien concept to Islam.