selumbaq

Who is Allah?

Written by EDITOR
Thursday, 18 February 2010 05:21
“He is Allah, the Creator, the Originator, the Fashioner. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names, whatever is in the heavens and on Earth, does declare His Praises and Glory, and He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise.” (Holy Qur’an 59:24)
Allah is the name of the only Sole Creator; the only One Who deserves to be worshipped; the Omnipotent Lord of the entire universe; the Cherisher of Mankind; the Eternal, the Absolute; the Merciful, the Beneficent; the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing Provider; The Judge, the Master of the Day of Judgement.
Allah is the personal name of the One True God. It denotes the Oneness of God, His Majesty which He shares with none as opposed to the plurality that religions based on false ideas of triune divinity tend to preach. The name does not suggest any particular gender. It is the name that the Prophets (peace be upon them all) used in reference to Him, including Jesus! We can prove this.
Firstly, Allah is the name by which God is known to all Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike. The Arab Christians are known to call Jesus ‘ibn Allah’ meaning the son of God. Ask the Orthodox Christians of Iraq the birthplace of Abraham, the Coptic Christians of the Egypt of Moses, the Palestinian Christians of the Holy Land trod by Jesus Christ or the peoples of the entire Middle Eastern complex, the epicenter from which the shockwaves of revelation emanated, and they will attest to that ‘Allah’ is recognized as the proper name for what Western religions call ‘God’.
Secondly, the Arabic translation of the Bible refers to God as ‘Allah’, but the Western Christian with his deep rooted prejudice against the Muslim will do everything to deceive the poor African Christian by feeding him false information to turn him away from his true religion towards the worship of a man-God. Does it mean that Arab Christians also worship a pagan god or that their Bible encourages them to do so?
Thirdly, The 72 Jewish scholars entrusted to translate the Septuagint chose to translate ‘Elohim’, the most encountered name for God in the New Testament, to ‘Theos’. ‘Elohim’, ‘Eloah’, ‘Eloi’, ‘Eli’ sound like and linguistically match ‘Allah’ in form and meaning. These Biblical names are in Hebrew, a sister language to Arabic and Aramaic. So it would be expected for words which have the similar meanings in these languages to have a similar phonetic sound. For instance, ‘shalom’ in Hebrew and ‘salaam’ in Arabic both mean peace.
What is not recognized by Christian and Muslim purists in the land of revelation is the generic Westernized name, ‘God’. This term is completely and absolutely foreign to the untranslated, foundational scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an. It simply does not exist in the foundational manuscripts of any of the three Abrahamic religions. Not even a single word can be found which can be transliterated to ‘God’.
The word ‘God’ is of uncertain origin. It may have arisen from the Indo-European ‘ghut’ with underlying meaning of that which is invoked or the prehistoric German ‘guth’ as a distant ancestor (from which modern Germanic ‘gott’, the Dutch ‘god’ and the Swedish and Danish ‘gud’ are derived). Lots of maybes. No matter how the origin of the word is traced, the name ‘God’ is of Western and extra-Biblical construction, and the historical origin and meaning are uncertain.
Consider names such as Shim’own Kipa, Yehowchanan, Iakobos, Matthaios. Who is to say that these transliterations of the Hebrew and Greek are not the correct names for the Biblical Simon Peter, John, James and Matthew? Are they correct only in their English form?
The above evidences are well recognized but obstinately concealed by those who approach scriptural analysis more as a religious turf war than as an objective search for truth.
Which is stranger, to invent and popularize new names or to remain faithful to what are held to be holy texts. To identify the Creator by the ‘God’ label hatched from human creativity and incubated in Western culture or by the name specified by The All-Mighty in his own scripture?
The one who speaks ‘Iakobos’ and ‘Allah’ will be greeted with a certain reserve in the West. We are not concerned with popularity but rather truth of testimony before the Creator.
This article intends to educate the local Christian clergy and the media who have connived to cast Islam as a religion of idol worship and have spread falsehood and lies to turn people away from this great religion. It is unbelievable that in this day and age of information technology there should still be such ignorance. Those misguided Christians who claim that the word refers to a pagan god should then not trust their very own Bible for including it in its text! Jesus supposedly called out to this ‘God’ from the cross. He did not say ‘God’ for he was not European. He spoke Aramaic and the word in his language was ‘Alah’.
Perhaps they should talk to their Christian brothers in Malaysia who’ve taken the government to court and got a ruling that allowed them to use the name ‘Allah’ for their religious purposes. Their insistence is based on the fact that the Arabic word ‘Allah’ is commonly used by Christians to describe God in such countries as Egypt, Syria and Indonesia. These are the sincere Christians who have seen through the warped religious dogma of the Western world.

Those who reject Allah and resort instead to spewing blasphemous invectives ‘will not injure Allah in the least, but He will make their deeds of no effect’ (47:32)

al-Hasan Lentswe

moemedi2001@yahoo.com