In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions.
In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. Christians in Borneo have used Allah for ‘God’ for hundreds of years, but the idea has got around among Malaysian Muslims that no non-Muslim should use the word to refer to God.
Linguistically it is hard to think the High Court was wrong. I don’t know Arabic but it is easy enough to discover that Allah derives from al-ilah, ‘the god’. Historically there is no doubt that the Meccans before Mohammed’s time used Allah to mean ‘God’. The Koran says so.
The presence of the definite article in the word Allah suggests that it functions like a common noun, not like a proper name. That is not to say that it does not refer to a unique being. After all, we are accustomed to the definite article being attached to the word for ‘God’ in various languages. When St John wrote that the Word was ‘with God’, he uses the phrase ‘pros ton theon’.
Another sign that God functions like a common noun is that it is translated between languages. We do not use the Hebrew name for God. Indeed we hardly know what the Hebrew is. Granted, Yahweh is found in the Bible, or it almost is. For that word for God was held to be so holy that it was pronounced as a different word, adonai, rendered in the Authorised Version as ‘the Lord’. In any case Yahweh was held to have a meaning connected to the verb hawah, ‘to be’, as in Exodus 3:14, where Moses is told to tell the people: ‘I AM hath sent me unto you.’
I think an analogy is the word king. If there could only be one king, then to say ‘the King’ would be a sort of name attached to one individual. Just so, ‘the Lord’ or ‘the God’ can only refer to God.
The trouble, no doubt, is that some Muslims feel that Christians have got much information wrong about God. For a start, they would point out, God has no son, nor could have. This seems to me a mirror-image of the denial by some Christians that Muslims worship the same God as they. It is true that Muslims deny that Jesus is God, but so do Jews. And yet Christians certainly worship the God of Abraham. So God is the English for ‘Allah’, and Allah the Arabic for ‘God’.
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