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").[20]
Others held that it was borrowed from Syriac or Hebrew.
Most considered it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite articleal- and ilāh "deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the deity, the God".[20] Indeed, there is "the interchangeability of al-ilāh and allāh in early Arabic poetry even when composed by the Christian ʿAdī ibn Zayd.[21]
The majority of modern scholars subscribe to the latter theory and view the loanword hypothesis with skepticism.[22]
The use of Allah as the name of a deity appears as early as the
Qaryat al-Fāw reads, "to Kahl and lh and ʿAththar (b-khl w-lh w-ʿṯr)".[23]
Aramaic.[24] The corresponding Aramaic form is ʼElāh (אלה), but its emphatic state is ʼElāhā (אלהא). It is written as ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlāhā) in Syriac, both meaning simply "God".[25] The unusual Syriac form is likely an imitation of the Arabic.[26]
Regional variants of the word Allah occur in both pagan and Christian pre-Islamic inscriptions.
ʿAbd-Allāh meaning "the slave of Allāh".[31] 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.[37][38][39]
Khosrau II) by adding the phrase Besmela on their coins, instead of designing a new one.[40]
In Islam, it is believed that all prophets were adherents of Islam, which is considered the primordial faith since the creation of the world and heavens by Allah. According to this perspective, every human is born a Muslim, into a state of "Fitra" (natural disposition), often interpreted as an innate inclination towards Islam.[41]
Present day
In Islam, Allah is the unique, omnipotent and only deity and creator of the universe and is equivalent to God in other Abrahamic religions.[12][13]Allah is usually seen as the personal name of God, a notion which became disputed in contemporary scholarship, including the question, whether or not the word Allah should be translated as God.[42]
According to Islamic belief, Allah is the most common word to represent God,[43] and humble submission to his will, divine ordinances and commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith.[12] "He is the only God, creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind."[12][13] "He is unique (wāḥid) and inherently one (aḥad), all-merciful and omnipotent."[12] No human eyes can see Allah till the Day Of Judgement.[44] The Qur'an declares "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures."[12] Allah does not depend on anything.[45] God is not a part of the Christian Trinity.[46] God has no parents and no children.[47]
The concept correlates to the Tawhid, where chapter 112 of the Qur'an (Al-'Ikhlās, The Sincerity) reads:
("The Cow") states:
Allah script outside the Old Mosque in Edirne, Turkey
Allah! There is no deity but Him, the Alive, the Eternal.
Neither slumber nor sleep overtaketh Him.
Unto Him belongeth whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth.
Who could intercede in His presence without His permission?
He knoweth that which is in front of them and that which is behind them,
while they encompass nothing of His knowledge except what He wills.
His throne includeth the heavens and the earth,
and He is never weary of preserving them.
He is the Sublime, the Tremendous.
In Islamic tradition, there are
99 Names of God (al-asmā' al-ḥusná lit. meaning: 'the best names' or 'the most beautiful names'), each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah.[13][50] All these names refer to Allah, the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name.[51] Among the 99 names of God, the most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (ar-Raḥmān) and "the Compassionate" (ar-Raḥīm),[13][50]
including the forementioned above al-Aḥad ("the One, the Indivisible") and al-Wāḥid ("the Unique, the Single").
Most Muslims use the untranslated Arabic phrase
Subḥāna llāh" (Glory be to God), "al-ḥamdu li-llāh" (Praise be to God), "lā ilāha illā llāh" (There is no deity but God) or sometimes "lā ilāha illā inta/ huwa" (There is no deity but You/ Him) and "Allāhu Akbar" (God is the Most Great) as a devotional exercise of remembering God (dhikr).[54]
Silk textile panel repeating the name Allah, North Africa, 18th century
In a
Sufi practice known as dhikr Allah (Arabic: ذكر 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.[55]
For example, in countless references in the context from the Qur'an forementioned above:
Allah is referred to in the second
al-Mumiyt
);
Allah is neither male or female (who has no gender), but who is the essence of the "Omnipotent, Selfless, Absolute Soul (an-
al-Quddus
);
Allah is the originator of both before and beyond the cycle of creation, destruction and time, - notably among the 99 names of God, "the First, Beginning-less" (
aṣ-Ṣabūr
).
According to Gerhard Böwering, in contrast with pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, God in Islam does not have associates and companions, nor is there any kinship between God and jinn.[43] 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.[12]
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 (29:46). 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.[56]
Christianity
The
Assyrian Christians is ʼĔlāhā, or Alaha. (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 bismillāh, and also created their own Trinitizedbismillāh as early as the 8th century.[58] The Muslim bismillāh reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized bismillāh reads: "In the name of 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.[58]
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.[59]
Some 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 Littman (1949), contained references to Allah as the proper name of God. However, on a second revision by Bellamy et al. (1985 & 1988) the 5-versed-inscription was re-translated as "(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."[60][61][62]
The syriac word ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) can be found in the reports and the lists of names of Christian martyrs in South Arabia,
In Ibn Ishaq's biography there is a Christian leader named Abd Allah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad, who was martyred in Najran in 523, as he had worn a ring that said "Allah is my lord".[66]
In an inscription of Christian martyrion dated back to 512, references to 'l-ilah (الاله)[67] can be found in both Arabic and Aramaic. The inscription starts with the statement "By the Help of 'l-ilah".[68][69]
In pre-Islamic Gospels, the name used for God was "Allah", as evidenced by some discovered Arabic versions of the
Arabia.[70] However most recent research in the field of Islamic studies by Sydney Griffith et al. (2013), David D. Grafton (2014), Clair Wilde (2014) & ML Hjälm et al. (2016 & 2017) assert that "all one can say about the possibility of a pre-Islamic, Christian version of the Gospel in Arabic is that no sure sign of its actual existence has yet emerged."[71][72][73][74][75] Additionally ML Hjälm in her most recent research (2017) inserts that "manuscripts containing translations of the gospels are encountered no earlier than the year 873"[76]
The word Allāh is generally pronounced [ɑɫˈɫɑː(h)], exhibiting a heavy lām, [ɫ], a
velarized alveolar lateral approximant, a marginal phoneme in Modern Standard Arabic. Since the initial alef has no hamza, the initial [a] is elided when a preceding word ends in a vowel. If the preceding vowel is /i/, the lām is light, [l], as in, for instance, the Basmala.[81]
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.[82]
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
Arabic: إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ). This phrase literally means 'if God wills' (in the sense of "I hope so").[84] 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".[85] The word has also been applied to certain living human beings as personifications of the term and concept.[86][87]
The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 recorded Allah as the translation of the Dutch word Godt.Gereja Kalam Kebangunan Allah (Word of God Revival Church) in Indonesia. Allah is the word for "God" in the Indonesian language - even in Alkitab (Christian Bible, from الكتابal-kitāb = the book) translations, while Tuhan is the word for "Lord".Christians in Malaysia also use the word Allah for "God".
Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia use Allah 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 Allah as the translation of Hebrew Elohim (translated in English Bibles as "God").[88] This goes back to early translation work by Francis Xavier in the 16th century.[89][90] 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 Allah" as the translation of the Dutch word Godt.[91] Ruyl also translated the Gospel of Matthew in 1612 into the Malay language (an early Bible translation into a non-European language,[92]
Bibles) have been widely distributed freely in East Malaysia without restrictions for years.[99] Both states also do not have similar Islamic state laws as those in West Malaysia.[19]
In reaction to some media criticism, the Malaysian government has introduced a "10-point solution" to avoid confusion and misleading information.[101][102] The 10-point solution is in line with the spirit of the 18- and 20-point agreements of Sarawak and Sabah.[19]
In the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription,[104] God is referred to by the term الاله, that is, alif-lam-alif-lam-ha.[67] This presumably indicates Al-'ilāh = "the god", without alif for ā.
Since Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Koran only, rendering lām + lām + hā’ as the previous ligature is considered faulty which is the case with most common Arabic typefaces.
This simplified style is often preferred for clarity, especially in non-Arabic languages, but may not be considered appropriate in situations where a more elaborate style of calligraphy is preferred.
Unicode has a code point reserved for Allāh, ﷲ = U+FDF2, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for "compatibility with some older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly";[107][108] this is discouraged for new text. Instead, the word Allāh should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will render the desired ligature.
^"God". Islam: Empire of Faith. PBS. Archived from the original on 27 March 2014. Retrieved 18 December 2010.
^"Islam and Christianity", Encyclopedia of Christianity (2001): Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as Allāh.
^Gardet, L. "Allah". In Bearman, P.; Bianquis, Th.; Bosworth, C.E.; van Donzel, E.; Heinrichs, W.P. (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam Online. Brill Online. Retrieved 2 May 2007.
^The Collection of the Speeches of Arabs, volume 1, section 75
^As the Arabs of the Ḥejāz had used the drahms of the Sasanian-style, the only silver coinage in the world at that time, it was natural for them to leave many of the Sasanian mints in operation, striking coins like those of the emperors in every detail except for the addition of brief Arabic inscriptions like besmellāh in the margins.https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/coins-and-coinage-
^ abThomas E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, Brill, 1994, p. 103
^Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, University of Chicago Press, p. 156
^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."
^James of Edessa the hymns of Severus of Antioch and others." Ernest Walter Brooks (ed.), Patrologia Orientalis VII.5 (1911)., vol: 2, p. 613. pp. ܐܠܗܐ (Elaha).
^Ignatius Ya`qub III, The Arab Himyarite Martyrs in the Syriac Documents (1966), Pages: 9-65-66-89
^Alfred Guillaume& Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, (2002 [1955]). The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Isḥāq's Sīrat Rasūl Allāh with Introduction and Notes. Karachi and New York: Oxford University Press, page 18.
^ abM. A. Kugener, "Nouvelle Note Sur L'Inscription Trilingue De Zébed", Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, pp. 577-586.
^Adolf Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie II: Das Schriftwesen und die Lapidarschrift (1971), Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nochfolger, Page: 6-8
^Beatrice 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:
^Frederick Winnett V, Allah before Islam-The Moslem World (1938), Pages: 239–248
^Sidney H Griffith, "The Gospel in Arabic: An Enquiry into Its Appearance in the First Abbasid Century", Oriens Christianus, Volume 69, p. 166. "All one can say about the possibility of a pre-Islamic, Christian version of the Gospel in Arabic is that no sure sign of its actual existence has yet emerged.
Protestant
assumptions outlined in the introduction of this article. It is clear that the earliest Arabic biblical texts can only be dated to the 9th century at the earliest, that is after the coming of Islam.
^Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the 'People of the Book' in the Language of Islam. Jews, Christians and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World, Princeton University Press, 2013, pp242- 247 ff.
^The Arabic Bible before Islam – Clare Wilde on Sidney H. Griffith's The Bible in Arabic. June 2014.
. Retrieved 15 February 2018. Monasticism played a key role in the Ethiopian literary movement. The Bible was translated during the time of the Nine Saints in the early sixth century [...].
