In Defense of the Faith

Who is “Allah”?

Question: “Allah,” contrary to what you have written in A Cup of Trembling, Judgment Day!, and elsewhere, is the one true God of the Bible. This is proved by the fact that the Hausa translation of the Bible in northern Nigeria, where there are many Muslims, uses Allah as a designation for the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Jehovah of the Old Testament, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. What better way could we encourage Muslims to believe the Bible?

Response: Unfortunately, this is a common error that is found in Arabic translations of the Bible as well, which are used in some Muslim countries. It is a serious mistake. Far from helping Muslims, it leaves them trusting their false god, Allah. Identifying Allah as Jehovah has caused a great deal of confusion and harm.

One of the major promoters of this delusion is the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican imagines that the difference between the God of Christianity and the Muslim’s Allah can be swept under an ecumenical rug. For example, The Canons and Decrees of Vatican II declare that Allah is the “Creator…the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge”—in other words, the one true God of the Bible. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

The Moon God of Muhammad’s Tribe

Allah is not the generic Arabic word for God but the name of a particular god among many deities traditionally honored in ancient times by the nomadic tribes in Arabia. Allah was the chief god among the approximately 360 idols in the Ka’aba in Mecca. In that pagan idol temple, still standing in Mecca today but now the focus of Muslim worship, there was a deity to suit each of the thousands of travelers passing through in the trade caravans.

Allah is a contraction of al-Ilah, the name of the moon god of the local Quraish, Muhammad’s tribe, which they had worshiped with animal and human sacrifices for centuries before Islam was invented. Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s earliest biographer, tells how Muhammad’s grandfather was about to sacrifice one of his sons, Abdullah (who would later become the prophet Muhammad’s father), when a sorceress persuaded him to sacrifice a camel instead.

The name of Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, is a contraction of Abd ul Allah, which means “servant of Allah.” It is a historic fact that Allah was worshiped long before Muhammad was born. When Muhammad rejected polytheism, he took the name of his own tribe’s traditional deity, the moon god, as the designation for the one God of Islam, his allegedly new religion.

Pagan Practices Continue in Islam Today

In fact, much of Islam is a carryover of primitive tribal laws and customs already in existence in Muhammad’s day. Even the holy month of Ramadan had long been established. Nor can Muslims deny that for centuries before Muhammad, Allah had been one of the many pagan deities such as Baal or Molech) whom the God of the Bible, Jehovah, had forbidden His people, the Israelites, to worship. Surely Allah and Jehovah are not the same!

Allah’s symbol was the crescent moon, which Muhammad also carried over into Islam. This symbol is still seen on mosques, minarets, shrines, and Arab flags. When he conquered Mecca, after breaking on a pretext the peace treaty he had made with the leaders of that city, Muhammad smashed the idols in the Ka’aba, including Allah, and began preaching against idolatry. Nevertheless, the new self-proclaimed prophet kept the idol temple and retained the pagan ritual (long an integral part of the worship of the idols) of kissing the black stone, which had for centuries been embedded in the southeast corner of the

Ka’aba, “five feet from the ground, just right for kissing,” as historian Will Durant points out.

That stone, actually of “dark red material, oval in shape, some seven inches in diameter,”7 remains in its centuries-old position to this day and must still be kissed by Muslims on

their required pilgrimage to Mecca as part of the allegedly new religion of Islam. It would seem that Muhammad kept the black stone as well as the god Allah (without its image) as a

partial concession in order to preserve something of familiarity to the Arabs.

Deceptive and Grievous Confusion

Bible translators, by using “Allah” for God, far from being helpful, have succeeded instead in creating confusion. Allah is no mere linguistic designation for God, as Dios in Spanish or Dieu in French. Allah is the name of an ancient pagan idol adopted as the god of Islam. If Allah were merely the generic Arabic word for God, then Muslims would not hesitate to use

the word for God in each language into which the Qur’an has been translated. Instead, they insist that Allah must be used in every language. It would be blasphemy to call the Muslim’s god anything else. And blasphemy against Allah carries the death penalty in Pakistan and elsewhere.

The God of Israel, too, has a name, YHWH, now pronounced Jehovah but anciently as Yahweh or Yahweh. Most Christians are unaware of God’s name because the Old Testament substitutes Lord for YHWH. God told Moses, “By my name YHWH was I not known to them” (Exodus:6:3And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.
See All...); and at the burning bush God explained the meaning of His name: “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus:3:13And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?
See All...–14). YHWH means not just one who is, but the self-existent One who is in and of Himself.

Contrasting “Allah” and “Yahweh”

That Allah is not the God of the Bible is very clear for a number of other reasons. His very character and characteristics are the opposite of the biblical God’s. The Qur’an says that Allah is not a father, has no son (though he had three daughters, Al-Uzza, al-Lat, and Manah, represented among the idols in the Ka’aba), and is not a triune being but a single and unknowable entity. Allah destroys rather than saves sinners, has compassion on only the righteous, does not deal in grace but only rewards good deeds, and has no just and righteous way to redeem the lost, as does the God of the Bible. That Allah should become

a man to die for the sins of the world would be heresy to a Muslim. It is very clear from what the Qur’an and the Hadith (Islamic tradition) teach about him that Allah is not the God of the Bible.

In contrast, the God of the Bible is love, an impossibility for Allah. As a single entity, Allah is incomplete: He was lonely and could not love or fellowship until other entities came into existence. Not so with YHWH or Jehovah. YHWH is three Persons in One: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, complete in perfection and in need of no others to love and fellowship with (“the Father loves the Son,” there is communion within the Godhead, etc.). Only of this God could it be said that He is love in Himself.

Allah could never say, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis:1:26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
See All...). The Muslim scholar has no explanation for this expression, which is even found in the Qur’an’s paraphrase of this Bible verse. We could point out other reasons, but this should be enough to show that to use the name Allah for the God of the Bible in the Hausa translation or in any other translation is a grave error!