Who is Allah? 5 misunderstandings about the name itself

Allāh is the Arabic word for God. Arabic-speaking Christians use it. Arabic Bibles use it. The Maltese, whose language descends from Arabic, call God Alla in church.

It is the definite noun: al-ilāh, the god, contracted, and it works the way the English word God works. When a Muslim says Allah, the claim is that this is the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus, the one the Quran says sent them all. The Quran tells believers to say to Jews and Christians that “our God and your God is one”.^[1]

You can argue that Muslims and Christians describe God differently, and they do. The Quran itself rejects the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, so the disagreement is acknowledged on both sides. That is a different argument from saying they mean different beings. A Jew and a Christian describe God differently too, and nobody concludes that they worship two gods.

This one circulates on the internet with a diagram of a crescent. It rests on two facts and a leap. Pre-Islamic Arabia had various deities, and some of them, in the south of the peninsula, were lunar. Some crescent imagery appears on later Islamic buildings. Therefore, Allah was originally a lunar deity.

The leap is the problem. The Quran names the sun and moon as created things, and forbids worshipping either.^[2] The crescent as a symbol of Islam is Ottoman, 700 years after Muhammad. And Muhammad’s own father was named ʿAbd Allāh, meaning servant of God, which tells you the word was in use for the high God of Arabia before Islam existed, not for a moon.^[3]

The Quran also reports that the pagans of Mecca, asked who created the heavens and the earth, would say Allah.^[4] They worshipped other beings beside him, which is the charge the Quran brings against them. Historians of Arabia do not accept the moon-god thesis, and the evidence for moon cults concerns the south, where the lunar god had other names.

The impression comes from the emphasis on transcendence: God is unlike anything, beyond imagining, not to be depicted. The Quran puts it plainly: there is nothing like him.^[5]

Read the Quran’s own vocabulary. Of the 99 names by which God is described in the tradition, the two that open nearly every chapter are al-Raḥmān and al-Raḥīm, both from the root for mercy, which is also the root of the word for the womb. God is described as nearer to a person than his jugular vein.^[6] The hadith literature (the reports of what the Prophet said and did) has God saying that he comes to the one who walks towards him at a run.^[7]

The Quran also speaks of wrath and punishment, and the critic is right to say so. The tradition answers with God’s own words in a hadith: “My mercy overcomes My wrath.”^[8] Another report has the Prophet say that before God created the creation He wrote a book, “My mercy has preceded My wrath”, and that it is written with Him above the Throne. Islam asserts that God is both transcendent and near, and the tension between the two is where the theology lives.

The names are often presented as a list to memorise, and there is a tradition that memorising them has merit. The Prophet is reported to have said that God has ninety-nine names, and that whoever enumerates them will enter Paradise.^[9] The Quran says that the most beautiful names belong to God.^[10]

The point of them is different. Each is a lens. The Provider, the Just, the Forgiving, the Subtle, the Withholder, the Reckoner. Read together, they describe a God who is not one thing, and who is not reducible to the single attribute a critic wants to argue against. Someone who says Islam’s God is only a judge has read 1 name out of 99.

One detail deserves honesty. The count of ninety-nine is in the well-attested hadith, but the familiar list of names is transmitted in a separate report, and many hadith scholars hold that the list was added by a narrator. The Quran itself names God in more ways than any one list holds. Scholars read “enumerates” as including understanding and living by the names, which makes the practice an education in character.^[11]

Nobody who has heard the declaration of faith would think this, since it puts Muhammad second and calls him a messenger. But the impression persists, partly from the honour Muslims show him.

The line is sharp in practice. Muhammad is not prayed to. He is not depicted. He is described in the Quran as a man who will die, who cannot see the unseen, who has no power to help or harm anyone.^[12] The reverence is for the messenger. The worship is for the one who sent him, and confusing the two is the single thing Islam is most concerned to prevent.

When the Prophet died, Abu Bakr told the grieving crowd that whoever worshipped Muhammad should know that Muhammad had died, and whoever worshipped God should know that God is living and never dies.^[13] The Prophet had himself warned against the exaggerated praise Christians gave to Jesus, saying: call me the servant of God and his messenger.^[14] The honour Muslims show him, in sending blessings upon him, is real, and the teaching sets a limit on it.