Tags: Allah, God in Islam, Islam and Reason, Islam vs Christianity, Misconceptions of Islam, Truth
Allah!
To Him belong all the beautiful names that can possibly be uttered. These names and attributes are encompassed in “Allah” within the Arabic language as Muhammad (pbuh) spoke, also in “Elah” of the Aramaic language as Jesus (pbuh) spoke as well as in “Eloah” of the Hebrew language as Moses and most of the descendants of Abraham spoke.
Let it also be said that Yahweh does not mean “God the Creator”. It strictly means “I am”, “The Lord”, “The one in charge”.
Eloah, Elah and Allah in are special words to describe the monotheistic - one God – in the Semitic languages of classical Hebrew (Moses), Aramaic (Jesus) and Arabic (Muhammad). They consist of the defining letters of L.A.H. and are unique in describing God, since they can neither take the form of male, female nor can they be expressed in plurality. This is not the case with most definitions of God, which can also form words such as “gods”, “goddess”, “goddesses” or other distorted ways of addressing the Creator of the heavens used in many other irrelevant contexts such as “The Father”
The conformity between how Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (pbut) referred to the one unseen “God” – the creator of heavens and earth and all that is between them– shows that these great prophets were refereeing to the same God – The one supreme creator of the universe – and carried the same prophetic task.
Although Arabic is the only true living language of the three, it is an accepted fact that “My God” is pronounced exactly the same in all these three languages as “Elahi”.
Elahi is pronounced “eelaahee”. It consists of “Elah” meaning God and “i” – pronounced “ee” – meaning “My” or “Mine”.
To justify the above argument, it is interesting that the Arabic bible also uses the word Allah to refer to God. One can find the word Allah repeated eleven times on the first page of many Arabic Bibles alone.
Convincingly, that is why He – God the Creator – refers to Himself in the Quran as “I am your creator. I am Allah, other than me there’s no other god” and Gabriel passes the Message to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that “to Him (Allah) belongs all the beautiful names”.
Say: “Call upon Allah (God), or call upon Most Gracious: by whatever name ye call upon Him, (it is well): for to Him belong the Most Beautiful Names. Neither speak thy Prayer aloud, nor speak it in a low tone, but seek a middle course between.” (Quran 17:110)
Allah (God). there is no god but He! To Him belong the most Beautiful Names. (Quran 20:8)
Allah is He, than Whom there is no other god;- the Sovereign, the Holy One, the Source of Peace (and Perfection), the Guardian of Faith, the Preserver of Safety, the Exalted in Might, the Irresistible, the Supreme: Glory to Allah. (High is He) above the partners they attribute to Him.
He is Allah, the Creator, the Evolver, the Bestower of Forms (and Colours). To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names: whatever is in the heavens and on earth, doth declare His Praises and Glory: and He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise. (Quran 59:23-24)
The only absolute being is God and He is absolutely different from anything our human perception allows us to form or imagine of Him. The Quran implies that the only avenue to understanding Him is to understand his beautiful attributes and names.
Jeffery Land, an American mathematics professor at the University of Southern California, a former atheist and a convert to Islam, in his book “Losing My Religion”, writes:
“It is not true that the Quran tells us very little about God; it tells us a great deal, but for some reason I had paid no attention to it. If I had just glanced at the beginning of a surah (i.e. chapter of Quran) or turned to almost any page, I would have found what I was looking for, if only I had read carefully, for there are thousands of descriptions of God in the Quran that link good works to growing closer to Him. Although I had read the Quran from cover to cover, deliberating on and analyzing almost every verse along the way, I mentally disregarded the Scripture’s abundant references to God’s attributes.
The Quran teaches us God’s most beautiful names:
It teaches mankind that God is most compassionate, most merciful, most powerful beyond bounds, He is all-knowing, all-wise, ever-lasting, exalted in might, the knower of all things both secret and open, the sovereign, the Holy One, the guardian of faith, He is the preserver of safety, the Irresistible, the sources of peace and perfection; He is Allah (God), than whom there is no other god, He is the beneficent, the supreme, He begets non nor is He begotten, He is above all the things some associate with Him.
French Doctor, Maurice Bucaille in his book, The Bible, The Quran and Science writes:
“One extremely important view of this kind is the attitude which leads people to repeatedly use the term Allah’ to mean the God of the Muslims, as if the Muslims believed in a God who was different from the God of the Christians. Al lâh means ‘the Divinity’ in Arabic: it is a single God, implying that a correct transcription can only render the exact meaning of the word with the help of the expression ‘God’. For the Muslim, al lâh is none other than the God of Moses and Jesus.
The document produced by the Office for Non-Christian Affairs at the Vatican stresses this fundamental point in the following terms:“It would seem pointless to maintain that Allâh is not really God, as do certain people in the West! The conciliar documents have put the above assertion in its proper place. There is no better way of illustrating Islamic faith in God than by quoting the following extracts from Lumen Gentium [ Lumen Gentium is the title of a document produced by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1966)].
‘The Muslims profess the faith of Abraham and worship with us the sole merciful God, who is the future judge of men on the Day of Reckoning . . .’””
May Allah – God with most beautiful names and attributes – bring us all out of darkness into light and forgive us all our sins.
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Elah, Eloah and Allah, 3 beautiful names that refer to our god. I think a ahristian, jew and muslim are closer to each other than we think.
Naser thanks for your comment,
In the original teachings we are not only close but almost identical… remember that there is only one God but thousands of prophets – sent by Him – who proclaimed one message “Worship God alone, submit to him alone, do good to to your fellow human being and treat them as you want to be treated”
But, in my opinion Christianity meaning “way of those who follow Jesus” and Judaism “descendants of the tribes of Judah”, originally and fundamentally used to be pure; they have over the years been changed in their teachings and added/subtracted to and from it.
But Allah, Eloah and Elah are meant to be refereed to the same deity without a doubt.