Allah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the Arabic word "Allah". See God in Islam for the Islamic conception of God.
| Arabic |
| الله |
| Transliteration |
| Allāh |
| Translation |
| God |
Allah (Arabic: الله, Allāh, IPA: [ʔalˤːɑːh]) is the standard Arabic word for "God".[1] The term is most likely derived from a contraction of the Arabic article al- and ʾilāh "deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the [sole] deity, God" (ho theos monos); another theory traces the etymology of the word to the Aramaic Alāhā.[2]
While the term is best known in the West for its use by Muslims as a reference to God, it is used by Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews in reference to "God".[3][1][4] The term was also used by pagan Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity in pre-Islamic Arabia.[2]
The concepts associated with the term Allah (as a deity) though differed from tradition to tradition. In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was not the sole divinity, had associates and companions, sons and daughters. There was also a kind of kinship of between Allah and the jinn. [5] In Islam, Allah is the pivot of the Muslim faith who is only God, all-merciful and omnipotent, transcendent creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind.[3][1] As the Arab Christians today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'[6], they for example use terms Allāh al-ab (الله الآب) meaning God the father, Allāh al-ibn (الله الابن) mean God the son, and Allāh al-ruh al koudous (الله الروح القدس) meaning God the Holy Spirit. There are both similarities and differences between the concept of God as portrayed in the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible. [7] The Qur'an also rejects the Trinitarian conception of God as three persons in one substance (see Trinity).[8]
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[edit] Etymology
The term Allāh is most likely derived from a contraction of the Arabic article al- and ʾilāh "deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the [sole] deity, God" (ho theos monos), L. Gardet states.[2] Another theory traces the etymology of the word to the Aramaic Alāhā.[2]. Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.[4] The corresponding Aramaic form is אֱלָהָא ˀĔlāhā in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܰܠܳܗܳܐ ˀAlâhâ or ˀĀlōho in Syriac.[9].
According to Gerhard Böwering, the contraction of al- and ʾilāh in forming the term Allāh (“the deity” in the masculine form) parallels the contraction of al- and ʾilāha in forming the term al-Lāt (“the deity” in the feminine form). [10]
[edit] Usage
In Islam, Allah is the name of the nameless God. [10] Allah is the pivot of the Muslim faith, Britannica Encyclopedia states. [1] He is the only God, transcendent creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind.[3][1] He is unique (wahid) and inherently one (ahad), all-merciful and omnipotent.[1] The Qur'an insists upon "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures." [1]
According to the tradition of Islam there are 99 Names of God (al-asma al-husna lit. meaning: "The best names") each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah. The most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (al-rahman) and "the Compassionate" (al-rahim).[11][3]
Some Muslims leave the name "Allāh" untranslated in English. [12] Sometimes this comes from a zeal for the Arabic text of the Qur'an and sometimes with a more or less conscious implication that the God that Jews and Christians worship is not really true in it the full sense.[13] On the other hand, The usage of the term Allah by English speaking non-Muslims in reference to the God in Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson says, can imply that Muslims are worshiping a mythical god named 'Allah' rather than God, the creator. This usage is therefore appropriate, Hodgson says, only for those who are prepared to accept its theological implications. [13]
[edit] Other
Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God".[4] The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'.[6] Arab Christians for example use terms Allāh al-ab (الله الآب) meaning God the father, Allāh al-ibn (الله الابن) mean God the son, and Allāh al-ruh al ghodus (الله الروح القدس) meaning God the Holy Spirit (See God in Christianity for the Christian concept of God).
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.[14]
[edit] Cross-religion comparison
Some western scholars have suggested that Muhammad used the term Allah in addressing both pagan Arabs and Jews or Christians in order to establish a common ground for the understanding of the name for God, a claim Gerhard Böwering says must remain doubtful. [10]
[edit] Islamic vs pre-Islamic Arabian conceptions
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. [10] 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.[8]
[edit] Islamic vs Jewish conceptions
According to Francis Edwards Peters, "The Qur'an insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (29:46). The Quran'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.[7] According to Britannica Encyclopedia [1]:
God, says the Qur'an, “loves those who do good,” and two passages in the Qur'an express a mutual love between God and man, but the Judeo-Christian precept to “love God with all thy heart” is nowhere formulated in Islam. The emphasis is rather on God's inscrutable sovereignty, to which one must abandon oneself. In essence, the “surrender to Allah” (Islam) is the religion itself.
[edit] Islamic vs Christian conceptions
Islam vigorously rejects the Christian belief that God is three persons in one substance (see Trinity). According to Britannica Encyclopedia, in Islamic conception of God, no intermediaries between God and the creation exists and God's presence is believed to be everywhere, and yet he is not incarnated in anything.[8]
[edit] Typography
| This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (December 2007) |
From "printing." Encyclopædia Britannica.2007.Encyclopædia Britannica, p.3 "But knowledge of the typographic process does not seem to have succeeded, as papermaking techniques had, in reaching Europe from China. It would seem that typography was assimilated by the Uighurs who lived on the borders of Mongolia and Turkistan, since a set of Uighur typefaces, carved on wooden cubes, has been found that date from the early 14th century. It would be surprising if the Uighurs, a nomadic people usually considered to have been the educators of other Turco-Mongolian peoples, had not spread the knowledge of typography as far as Egypt. There it may have encountered an obstacle to its progress toward Europe, namely, that, even though the Islamic religion had accepted paper in order to record the word of Allah, it may have refused to permit the word of Allah to be reproduced by artificial means.
The word Allāh is always written without an alif to spell the ā vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using alif to spell ā. However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic alif is added on top of the shaddah to indicate the pronunciation.
One exception may be in the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription,[15] where it ends with an ambiguous sign that may be a lone-standing h with a lengthened start, or may be a non-standard conjoined l-h:-
- الاه : This reading would be Allāh spelled phonetically with alif for the ā.
- الاله : This reading would be Al-'ilāh = "the god" (an older form, without contraction), by older spelling practice without alif for ā.
In Abjad numerals, the numeric value of الله is 66.
[edit] Unicode
Unicode has a codepoint reserved for Allāh, ﷲ = U+FDF2. This character according to the official Unicode specification is a ligature of alif-lām-lām-shadda-(superscript alif)-hā (اللّٰه U+0627 U+0644 U+0644 U+0651 U+0670 U+0647). There is, however some confusion arising from the fact that Arabic typography usually features a llāh glyph without the preceding alif, which only occurs phrase-initially (or with hamzatu l-waṣl آ in Qur'anic orthography). Consequently, the majority of Arabic Unicode fonts do not conform with the specification and have a glyph without the alif at this position (e.g. those provided by Linotype, the great majority of those licensed to or developed by Microsoft, those of Arabeyes.org, SIL's Lateef and the fonts of CRULP developed in Pakistan), while others have the prescribed form with alif (e.g. SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic distributed with the Middle-Eastern version of the Adobe Reader 7, Arial Unicode MS, and Arabic Typesetting, distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).
The calligraphic variant of the word used as the Coat of arms of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at codepoint U+262B (☫).
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Catholic Encyclopedia - Allah
- The Concept of Allāh according to the Qur'an
- Strong's Concordance H433 "Eloah" (See Gesenius's Lexicon commentary).
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Allah." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ a b c d "Allah", Encyclopedia of Islam
- ^ a b c d Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Allah
- ^ a b c Columbia Encyclopedia, Allah
- ^ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedGodEoQ - ^ a b Lewis, Bernard; Holt, P. M.; Holt, Peter R.; Lambton, Ann Katherine Swynford (1977). The Cambridge history of Islam. Cambridge, Eng: University Press, 32. ISBN 0-521-29135-6.
- ^ a b F.E. Peters, Islam, p.4, Princeton University Press, 2003
- ^ a b c "Islam." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, p.3
- ^ The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon - Entry for ˀlh
- ^ a b c d Böwering, Gerhard, God and His Attributes, Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, Brill, 2007.
- ^ Bentley, David (Sept. 1999). The 99 Beautiful Names for God for All the People of the Book. William Carey Library. ISBN 0-87808-299-9.
- ^ F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Princeton University Press, p.12
- ^ a b Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, University of Chicago Press, p.63
- ^ Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, University of Chicago Press, p.156
- ^ Zebed Inscription: A Pre-Islamic Trilingual Inscription In Greek, Syriac & Arabic From 512 CE. Islamic Awareness (March 17 2005).
ar:الله (إسلام) az:Allah bn:আল্লাহ bs:Allah br:Allah bg:Аллах ca:Al·là cs:Alláh cy:Al-lâh da:Allah de:Allah dv:ﷲ et:Allah es:Alá eo:Alaho fa:الله fr:Allah gl:Alá ko:알라 hi:अल्लाह hr:Alah id:Allah is:Allah it:Allah he:אללה kn:ಅಲ್ಲಾಹ ka:ალაჰი ku:Allah lv:Dievs islāmā lt:Alachas hu:Allah ml:അല്ലാഹു mt:Alla ms:Allah nl:Allah ja:アッラーフ no:Allah nn:Allah uz:Alloh pl:Allah pt:Alá ro:Allah ru:Аллах sq:Allahu scn:Allah simple:Allah sd:الله sk:Alah sl:Alah so:Allaah sr:Алах fi:Allah sv:Allah ta:அல்லாஹ் tt:Allah th:อัลลอฮ์ tg:Оллоҳ tr:Allah uk:Аллах ur:اللہ zh:安拉
