7 reasons why Allah of the Quran is the same God as the God of the Bible

The Quran tells believers how to speak to the Jews and Christians, whom it calls the People of the Book: argue with them only in the best way, and say, “We believe in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to you, and our God and your God is one, and to Him we submit.”^[1]

That is an instruction on what to say, and the thing to say is that the God is the same. Another verse invites the People of the Book to a common word, that none is worshipped but God.^[2] Both verses treat the other side as addressing the same Lord.

The strongest objection points to the Quran’s own rebukes, such as its statement that those who say God is the third of three have disbelieved.^[3] The answer is that the rebuke concerns a claim about God, which the Quran judges false, and it is addressed to people who are assumed to be speaking about God. A person can be corrected about a being only if the same being is meant. The verse about the common God also carries an exception for those among them who do wrong, which shows the Quran did not suppose every argument would be friendly.

Arabic Bibles use Allāh for God throughout. Arab Christians pray to Allah in church, and did so before Islam existed. The word is the ordinary Arabic for the one God, and the argument that it names a different being would have to explain why Christians used it first. It is related to the Hebrew Elohim and the Aramaic Alaha, the language Jesus and his first followers spoke.

The objection runs that a shared word proves little, since the pagan Arabs of Mecca also said Allah. The Quran agrees that they did: asked who created the heavens and the earth, they answered, “God.”^[4] Their fault, in the Quran’s account, was to join other beings to him. It does not say they worshipped another creator.

That settles the point from the Muslim side. If the Quran counts the word as naming the Creator even in the mouths of idolaters, it counts it as naming the Creator in the mouths of Christians, who do not join him with any rival.

Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus. The Quran does not introduce a new cast. It claims the same one, and says the same God sent them all. The believers are taught to say that they believe in God and in what was given to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the tribes, to Moses and Jesus and all the prophets, and that they make no distinction among them.^[5] Elsewhere the Quran says that the religion enjoined on Noah was enjoined on Abraham, Moses and Jesus as well.

At the burning bush the Quran has the voice say to Moses, “I am God. There is no god but Me.”^[6] That is the scene of Exodus, told again. You can dispute what the Quran says about these men. You cannot say it is talking about somebody else’s God when it is talking about Abraham’s.

Ismail al Faruqi draws the wider claim from the verse that “there is no people but that God has sent them a prophet or warner” (35:24). On his reading every messenger conveyed “identically one and the same message from God”, and Islam therefore treated the prophets of Judaism and Christianity as “genuine prophets of God”, accepting them “as Islam’s own”.^[16] He adds that Muslims later extended the same standing to Zoroastrians, Hindus and Buddhists, which is his interpretation and a matter on which the jurists were not united.

The fair objection is that the Quran’s portraits differ, and a different portrait might mean a different subject. The Quran answers that it came to confirm the earlier scriptures and to act as a guardian over them.^[7] It presents itself as correcting a record of the same events, and it takes the God of that record to be its own.

Christians say God is three persons in one essence, a formula the church settled over the fourth and fifth centuries. Muslims say God is one without division. The Quran puts it in a short chapter: “Say, He is God, the One, God the Eternal. He neither begets nor is begotten, and there is none like Him.”^[8] That is a real disagreement and it matters.

It is a disagreement about what God is like. Jews and Christians have the same disagreement, since Jews reject both the Trinity and the incarnation while Christians keep the Hebrew Bible as scripture, and nobody says Jews worship a different god from Christians. Describing one being differently is what theological argument is. It does not multiply the beings.

The strongest form of the objection says that for Christians the Trinity is the way God is known, so a God without a Son is a different God to them. The reply is that this describes how each side thinks God should be described. The question of identity asks whom a worshipper is addressing, and both address the maker of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham.

Creator of everything. One, eternal, uncreated. Merciful and just. Sends messengers. Judges the dead. Rewards and punishes. Hears prayer.

Write down what the Hebrew Bible says about God and what the Quran says about God and put the lists side by side. The Torah has God proclaim himself “merciful and gracious, slow to anger”, and every chapter of the Quran but one opens with “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”^[9] The Shema declares the Lord one; the Quran opens its chapter on purity of belief with a cognate word, aḥad. Isaiah has God say he is the first and the last, and the Quran says the same of him.^[10]

The overlap is most of both lists. The residue is the dispute in the entry above, and it is a dispute about a shared subject. Muslims also reject some Biblical descriptions, such as God resting from fatigue after creation, and the Quran says that no weariness touched him. Rejecting a description is a way of arguing about the one described.

If a different description means a different god, then Calvinists and Catholics worship different gods, and so do Orthodox and Baptists, and so did Augustine and Aquinas. In the fourth century Arius and Athanasius disagreed over whether the Son was created, and both claimed to worship the God of Israel. Christianity has never accepted that logic for itself. Applying it only to Muslims marks a boundary and settles nothing in theology.

Major Christian bodies have said as much. The Second Vatican Council taught that Muslims profess the faith of Abraham and together with Christians adore the one, merciful God who will judge humankind on the last day.^[11] The Protestant theologian Miroslav Volf argued the same case at book length, concluding that Muslims and Christians have a common God, though they differ in what they believe about him.^[12]

Some Christians and some Muslims reject these judgements, and they are entitled to their view of the doctrines. What they cannot do is rest the case on the Quran, which instructs the opposite.

Some polemicists go further and say that the God of the Quran is Satan in disguise. The Quran itself makes the claim impossible to sustain from its own pages. It tells the reader, before reciting it, to seek refuge with God from Satan the accursed.^[13] It calls Satan an enemy to humankind and commands believers to treat him as one.^[14]

In its account of Iblis, God orders him to bow to Adam, Iblis refuses out of pride in his own creation from fire, and God expels him and calls him one of the humbled.^[15] A text that has God condemn Satan, and has its readers pray to God for protection from him, gives no ground for identifying the two. The charge rests on hostility to Islam, and it finds no support in the book it attacks.