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thumb|right|The word 'Allah' in thuluth calligraphy

Allah ( ;"Allah". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. , ) is the Arabic word for God, particularly the God of Abraham. Outside of the Middle East, it is principally associated with Islam, although the term was used in pre-Islamic Arabia and continues to be used today by Arabic-speaking adherents of any of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism and Christianity."Islam and Christianity", Encyclopedia of Christianity (2001): Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as Allāh. It is thought to be derived by contraction from al-ilāh (, ) and is linguistically related to God's names in other Semitic languages, such as Aramaic ( ) and Hebrew ( ).

The word "Allah" now implies the superiority or sole existence of one God, but among the pre-Islamic Arabs, Allah was a supreme deity and was worshipped alongside lesser deities in a pantheon. When Muhammad founded Islam, he used "Allah" to refer to the same unitary God who met Abraham, according to the Bible and the Quran. Many Jews, Christians, and early Muslims used "Allah" and "al-ilah" interchangeably in Classical Arabic. The word is also frequently, albeit not exclusively, used by Bábists, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, Indonesian Christians, Maltese Christians, and Sephardic Jews,"Allah." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, AllahWillis Barnstone, Marvin Meyer The Gnostic Bible: Revised and Expanded Edition Shambhala Publications 2009 page 531 as well as by the Gagauz people.

While it is an Arabic word and has historically been used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the Arab world, the usage of "Allah" by non-Muslims has been controversial in non-Arab parts of the Muslim world, especially Malaysia, where it became illegal for non-Muslims to use "Allah" after the country experienced a social and political upheaval in the face of the word being used by Malaysian Christians and Sikhs.Sikhs target of 'Allah' attack, Julia Zappei, 14 January 2010, The New Zealand Herald. Accessed on line 15 January 2014.Malaysia court rules non-Muslims can't use 'Allah', 14 October 2013, The New Zealand Herald. Accessed on line 15 January 2014.Malaysia's Islamic authorities seize Bibles as Allah row deepens, Niluksi Koswanage, 2 January 2014, Reuters. Accessed on line 15 January 2014.

Etymology thumb|240px| The Arabic components that make up the word "Allah":

The etymology of the word Allāh has been discussed extensively by classical Arab philologists.D.B. Macdonald. Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed, Brill. "Ilah", Vol. 3, p. 1093. Most consider it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- and "deity, god" to meaning "the deity, the God". Indeed, there is "the interchangeability of al-ilāh and allāh in early Arabic poetry even when composed by the Christian ʿAdī ibn Zayd. The majority of scholars accept this hypothesis. A minority hypothesis, seen with more skepticism, is that the term is a loanword from Syriac Alāhā.Gerhard Böwering. Encyclopedia of the Quran, Brill, 2002. Vol. 2, p. 318

Grammarians of the Basra school regarded it as either formed "spontaneously" (murtajal) or as the definite form of lāh (from the verbal root lyh with the meaning of "lofty" or "hidden"). Other Muslims scholars suggested that the term derives from wilah (the object of mystery) since the nature of God is a mystery and perplexing for humans.Ibrahim, Zakyi. "To Use “God” or “Allah”?." American Journal of Islam and Society 26.4 (2009): v.

The use of Allah as the name of a deity appears as early as the first century. An inscription using the Ancient South Arabian script in Old Arabic from Qaryat al-Fāw reads, "to Kahl and and ʿAththar ()".

Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.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 and Eloah, the word Allah is used by all Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other monotheists. The corresponding Aramaic form is ʼElāh (), but its emphatic state is (). It is written as () in Biblical Aramaic and () in Syriac, both meaning simply "God".The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon – Entry for ʼlh The unusual Syriac form is likely an imitation of the Arabic.Kiltz, David. "The Relationship between Arabic Allāh and Syriac Allāha." Der Islam 88.1 (2012): 47.

History of usage Pre-Islamic Arabia

Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic inscriptions. According to Marshall Hodgson, it seems that in the pre-Islamic times, some Arab Christians made pilgrimage to the Kaaba, a pagan temple at that time, honoring Allah there as God the Creator.Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, University of Chicago Press, p. 156

The Syriac word () can be found in the reports and the lists of names of Christian martyrs in South Arabia, as reported by antique Syriac documents of the names of those martyrs from the era of the Himyarite and Aksumite kingdomsIgnatius Ya`qub III, The Arab Himyarite Martyrs in the Syriac Documents (1966), Pages: 9-65-66-89

In an inscription of Christian martyrion dated back to 512, references to al-ilah () can be found in both Arabic and Aramaic. The inscription starts with the statement "By the Help of al-ilah".Adolf Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie II: Das Schriftwesen und die Lapidarschrift (1971), Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nochfolger, Page: 6-8Beatrice Gruendler, The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century according to Dated Texts (1993), Atlanta: Scholars Press, Page:

Archaeological excavation quests have led to the discovery of ancient pre-Islamic inscriptions and tombs made by Arab Christians in the ruins of a church at Umm el-Jimal in Northern Jordan, which initially, according to Enno Littmann (1949), contained references to Allah as the proper name of God. However, on a second revision by Bellamy et al. (1985 & 1988) the five-verse inscription was retranslated: "(1)This inscription was set up by colleagues of ʿUlayh, (2) son of ʿUbaydah, secretary (3) of the cohort Augusta Secunda (4) Philadelphiana; may he go mad who (5) effaces it."James Bellamy, "Two Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscriptions Revised: Jabal Ramm and Umm al-Jimal", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 108/3 (1988) pp. 372–378 (translation of the inscription) "This was set up by colleagues/friends of ʿUlayh, the son of ʿUbaydah, secretary/adviser of the cohort Augusta Secunda Philadelphiana; may he go mad/crazy who effaces it."Enno Littmann, Arabic Inscriptions (Leiden, 1949)

Irfan Shahîd quoting the 10th-century encyclopedic collection Kitab al-Aghani notes that pre-Islamic Arab Christians have been reported to have raised the battle cry "Ya La Ibad Allah" (O slaves of Allah) to invoke each other into battle.Irfan Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University-Washington DC, page 418. According to Shahid, on the authority of 10th-century Muslim scholar Al-Marzubani, "Allah" was also mentioned in pre-Islamic Christian poems by some Ghassanid and Tanukhid poets in Syria and Northern Arabia.Irfan Shahîd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University-Washington DC, Page: 452A. Amin and A. Harun, Sharh Diwan Al-Hamasa (Cairo, 1951), Vol. 1, Pages: 478-480Al-Marzubani, Mu'jam Ash-Shu'araa, Page: 302

Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in pre-Islamic polytheistic cults. According to the Quran exegete Ibn Kathir, Arab pagans considered Allah as an unseen God who created and controlled the Universe. Pagans believed worship of humans or animals who had lucky events in their life brought them closer to God. Pre-Islamic Meccans worshiped Allah alongside a host of lesser gods and those whom they called the "daughters of Allah." Islam forbade worship of anyone or anything other than God. Some authors have suggested that polytheistic Arabs used the name as a reference to a creator god or a supreme deity of their pantheon.Zeki Saritopak, Allah, The Qu'ran: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Oliver Leaman, p. 34 The term may have been vague in the Meccan religion.L. Gardet, Allah, Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. by Sir H.A.R. GibbGerhard Böwering, God and his Attributes, Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, ed. by Jane Dammen McAuliffe

According to one hypothesis, which goes back to Julius Wellhausen, Allah (the supreme deity of the tribal federation around Quraysh) was a designation that consecrated the superiority of Hubal (the supreme deity of Quraysh) over the other gods. However, there is also evidence that Allah and Hubal were two distinct deities. According to that hypothesis, the Kaaba was first consecrated to a supreme deity named Allah and then hosted the pantheon of Quraysh after their conquest of Mecca, about a century before the time of Muhammad. Some inscriptions seem to indicate the use of Allah as a name of a polytheist deity centuries earlier, but nothing precise is known about this use. Some scholars have suggested that Allah may have represented a remote creator god who was gradually eclipsed by more particularized local deities. There is disagreement on whether Allah played a major role in the Meccan religious cult. No iconic representation of Allah is known to have existed. Muhammad's father's name was meaning "the slave of Allāh". The interpretation that Pre-Islamic Arabs once practiced Abrahamic religions is supported by some literary evidence, being the prevalence of Ishmael, whose God was that of Abraham, in pre-Islamic Arab culture.The Treasury of literature, Sect. 437The Beginning of History, Volume 3, Sect.10The Collection of the Speeches of Arabs, volume 1, section 75

Islamic period

In contrast with pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, as stated by Gerhard Böwering, God in Islam does not have associates and companions, nor is there any kinship between God and jinn. Pre-Islamic pagan Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, inexorable and insensible fate over which man had no control. This was replaced with the Islamic notion of a powerful but provident and merciful God. According to Francis Edward Peters, "The Qur'ān insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (). The Qur'an'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.F.E. Peters, Islam, p.4, Princeton University Press, 2003

Since the first centuries of Islam, Arabic-speaking commentators of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith used the term Allah as a generic term for the supreme being.Thomas, Kenneth J. "Allah in Translations of the Bible." The Bible Translator 52.3 (2001): 301-306. Saadia Gaon used the term Allah interchangeably with the term ʾĔlōhīm. Theodore Abu Qurrah translates theos as Allah in his Bible, as in John 1:1 "the Word was with Allah". Muslim commentators likewise used the term Allah for the Biblical concept of God. Ibn Qutayba writes "You cannot serve both Allah and Mammon.". However, Muslim translators of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia rarely translated the Tetragrammaton, referring to the supreme being in Israelite tradition, as Allah. Instead, most commentators either translated Yahweh as either yahwah or rabb, the latter corresponding to the Jewish custom to refer to Yahweh as Adonai.

Most Qur'an commentators, including al-Tabari (d. 923), al-Zamakhshari (d. 1143/44), and al-Razi (d. 1209), regard Allah to be a proper name.Ibrahim, Zakyi. "To Use "God" or "Allah"?." American Journal of Islam and Society 26.4 (2009): i-vii. While other names of God in Islam denote attributes or adjectives, the term Allah specifically refers to his essence as his real name (). The other names are known as the 99 Names of Allah ( lit. meaning: 'the best names' or 'the most beautiful names') and considered attributes, each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah. All these names refer to Allah, the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name. Among the 99 names of God, the most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (ar-Raḥmān) and "the Compassionate" (), including the forementioned above al-Aḥad ("the One, the Indivisible") and al-Wāḥid ("the Unique, the Single").

According to Islamic belief, Allah is the most common word to represent God,Böwering, Gerhard, God and His Attributes, Encyclopaedia of the Qurʼān, Brill, 2007. and humble submission to his will, divine ordinances and commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith. "He is the only God, creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind." "He is unique () and inherently one (), all-merciful and omnipotent." No human eyes can see Allah till the Day Of Judgement. The Qur'an declares "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures." Allah does not depend on anything. Allah is not considered a part of the Christian Trinity. God has no parents and no children.

The concept correlates to the Tawhid, where chapter 112 of the Qur'an (Al-'Ikhlās, The Sincerity) reads:Arabic script in Unicode symbol for a Quran verse, U+06DD, page 3, Proposal for additional Unicode charactersقُلْ هُوَ ٱللَّهُ أَحَدٌ ۝ ٱللَّهُ ٱلصَّمَدُ۝ لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ ۝ وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ ۝١ ۝ Say, God is one God; ۝ the eternal God: ۝ He begetteth not, neither is He begotten: ۝ and there is not any one like unto Him.Sale, G AlKoran

In a Sufi practice known as (Arabic: ذِكر الله, lit. "Remembrance of God"), the Sufi repeats and contemplates the name Allah or other associated divine names to Him while controlling his or her breath.Carl W. Ernst, Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Macmillan, p. 29

Present day Islam thumb|Medallion showing "Allah Jalla Jalaluhu" in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey thumb|Allah script outside the Old Mosque in Edirne, Turkey The Islamic tradition to use Allah as the personal name of God became disputed in contemporary scholarship, including the question, whether or not the word Allah should be translated as God.Andreas Görke and Johanna Pink Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies London p. 478 Umar Faruq Abd-Allah urged English-speaking Muslims to use God instead of Allah for the sake of finding "extensive middle ground we share with other Abrahamic and universal traditions".

Most Muslims use the Arabic phrase (meaning 'if God wills') untranslated after references to future events.Gary S. Gregg, The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology, Oxford University Press, p.30 Muslim discursive piety encourages beginning things with the invocation of (meaning 'In the name of God').Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Islamic Society in Practice, University Press of Florida, p. 24 There are certain other phrases in praise of God that are favored by Muslims and left untranslated, including "" (Glory be to God), "" (Praise be to God), "" (There is no deity but God) or sometimes "" (There is no deity but You/ Him) and "" (God is the Most Great) as a devotional exercise of remembering God (dhikr).M. Mukarram Ahmed, Muzaffar Husain Syed, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Anmol Publications PVT. LTD, p. 144

Christianity The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for "God" than "Allah". Similarly, the Aramaic word for "God" in the language of Assyrian Christians is , or . (Even the Arabic-descended Maltese language of Malta, whose population is almost entirely Catholic, uses Alla for "God".)

Arab Christians have used two forms of invocations that were affixed to the beginning of their written works. They adopted the Muslim , and also created their own Trinitized as early as the 8th century. The Muslim reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized reads: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God." The Syriac, Latin and Greek invocations do not have the words "One God" at the end. This addition was made to emphasize the monotheistic aspect of Trinitarian belief and also to make it more palatable to Muslims.Thomas E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, Brill, 1994, p. 103

Pronunciation

The word Allāh is generally pronounced , exhibiting a heavy , , a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, a marginal phoneme in Modern Standard Arabic. Since the initial alef has no hamza, the initial is elided when a preceding word ends in a vowel. If the preceding vowel is , the is light, , as in, for instance, the Basmala.

As a loanword English and other European languages The history of the name Allāh in English was probably influenced by the study of comparative religion in the 19th century; for example, Thomas Carlyle (1840) sometimes used the term Allah but without any implication that Allah was anything different from God. However, in his biography of Muḥammad (1934), Tor Andræ always used the term Allah, though he allows that this "conception of God" seems to imply that it is different from that of the Jewish and Christian theologies.William Montgomery Watt, Islam and Christianity today: A Contribution to Dialogue, Routledge, 1983, p.45

Languages which may not commonly use the term Allah to denote God may still contain popular expressions which use the word. For example, because of the centuries long Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, the word in the Spanish language and in the Portuguese language exist today, borrowed from Andalusi Arabic similar to (). This phrase literally means 'if God wills' (in the sense of "I hope so").Islam in Luce López Baralt, Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Brill, 1992, p.25 The German poet Mahlmann used the form "Allah" as the title of a poem about the ultimate deity, though it is unclear how much Islamic thought he intended to convey.

Some Muslims leave the name "Allāh" untranslated in English, rather than using the English translation "God".F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Princeton University Press, p.12 The word has also been applied to certain living human beings as personifications of the term and concept.

Malaysian and Indonesian language

page=77|thumb|The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 recorded as the translation of the Dutch word .|link=File:Vocabularium,ofte_Woordenboek,in't_Duytsch_en_Maleys(IA_vocabulariumoft00dancgoog).djvu%3Fpage=77 thumb| (Word of God Revival Church) in Indonesia. is the word for "God" in the Indonesian language - even in (Christian Bible, from = the book) translations, while is the word for "Lord". thumb|Christians in Malaysia also use the word for "God".

Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia use to refer to God in the Malaysian and Indonesian languages (both of them standardized forms of the Malay language). Mainstream Bible translations in the language use as the translation of Hebrew (translated in English Bibles as "God").Example: Usage of the word "Allah" from Matthew 22:32 in Indonesian bible versions (parallel view) as old as 1733 This goes back to early translation work by Francis Xavier in the 16th century.The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society Sneddon, James M.; University of New South Wales Press; 2004The History of Christianity in India from the Commencement of the Christian Era: Hough, James; Adamant Media Corporation; 2001 The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by Albert Cornelius Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 (revised edition from 1623 edition and 1631 Latin edition) recorded " as the translation of the Dutch word . Ruyl also translated the Gospel of Matthew in 1612 into the Malay language (an early Bible translation into a non-European language,But compare: made a year after the publication of the King James VersionBarton, John (2002–12). The Biblical World, Oxford, UK: Routledge. .North, Eric McCoy; Eugene Albert Nida ((2nd Edition) 1972). The Book of a Thousand Tongues, London: United Bible Societies.), which was printed in the Netherlands in 1629. Then he translated the Gospel of Mark, published in 1638.

The government of Malaysia in 2007 outlawed usage of the term in any other but Muslim contexts, but the Malayan High Court in 2009 revoked the law, ruling it unconstitutional. While had been used for the Christian God in Malay for more than four centuries, the contemporary controversy was triggered by usage of by the Roman Catholic newspaper The Herald. The government appealed the court ruling, and the High Court suspended implementation of its verdict until the hearing of the appeal. In October 2013 the court ruled in favor of the government's ban. In early 2014 the Malaysian government confiscated more than 300 bibles for using the word to refer to the Christian God in Peninsular Malaysia. However, the use of is not prohibited in the two Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. The main reason it is not prohibited in these two states is that usage has been long-established and local Alkitab (Bibles) have been widely distributed freely in East Malaysia without restrictions for years. Both states also do not have similar Islamic state laws as those in West Malaysia.

In reaction to some media criticism, the Malaysian government has introduced a "10-point solution" to avoid confusion and misleading information. The 10-point solution is in line with the spirit of the 18- and 20-point agreements of Sarawak and Sabah.

National flags with "Allah" written on them

Typography 280px|thumbnail|The word Allah written in different writing systems

The word is always written without an to spell the vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using to spell . However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic is added on top of the to indicate the pronunciation.

In the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription, God is referred to by the term , that is, alif-lam-alif-lam-ha. This presumably indicates means "the god", without for ā.

Many Arabic type fonts feature special ligatures for Allah. Arabic fonts and Mac OS X Programs for Arabic in Mac OS X

Since Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Koran only, rendering + + as the previous ligature is considered faulty which is the case with most common Arabic typefaces.

Unicode Unicode has a code point reserved for , , in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for "compatibility with some older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly";The Unicode Consortium. FAQ - Middle East Scripts this is discouraged for new text. Instead, the word should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will render the desired ligature.

The calligraphic variant of the word used as the emblem of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at code point U+262B (☫). The flags that include the word are also present in the regional indicator symbols of Unicode: 🇮🇶, 🇸🇦, 🇦🇫, 🇮🇷, 🇺🇿.

See also Abdullah (name) Allah as a lunar deity Emblem of Iran Ismul Azam Names of God

Notes

References

General and cited references

The Unicode Consortium, Unicode Standard 5.0, Addison-Wesley, 2006, , About the Unicode Standard Version 5.0 Book

Further reading Online Allah Qur'ān, in Encyclopædia Britannica Online, by Asma Afsaruddin, Brian Duignan, Thinley

External links

Names of Allah with Meaning on Website, Flash, and Mobile Phone Software Concept of God (Allah) in Islam The Concept of Allāh According to the Qur'an by Abdul Mannan Omar Allah, the Unique Name of God

Typography Arabic Fonts and Mac OS X Programs for Arabic in Mac OS X

Category:Arabian deities Category:Arabian gods Category:Islamic terminology Category:Middle Eastern gods Category:Names of God