"ALLAH" is NOT a separate God!

[liberalpragmatist]

I was just reading Wes Clark's excellent speech today on national security.

One minor thing annoyed me, however, something that is symptomatic of ALL discourse in America.

Clark says we have to rob young Arabs of the ideology of terror, of tha ability of them to hate and justify that hate in "Allah."

I see this used time-and-time-again. And frankly, it annoys me because it's such a minor point but one that has major implications for how Americans see Islam.

"Allah" is simply the Arabic word for God. Nothing more. Their God is the exact same God as the God of the Bible and the Torah. Most Americans, certainly most educated Americans, would find it absurd to refer to "Yahweh" whenever referring to Jews. We don't speak of French Catholics praying to "Dieu," or Martin Luther dedicating his life to "Gott."

By constantly referring to Muslims worshipping "Allah," we perpetuate an image of Muslims as "the other" - something wholly different from Jews and Christians, when in truth, one could quite easily classify Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as all being sects of the same faith ("Abrahamism") - after all, we classify Hinduism and Buddhism as "religions" when each is in fact a bewildering number of sects more differentiated than Islam and Christianity.

[KG]

1. at the heart of the problems is that people believe in gods.

[Must_B_Free]

2. Al-ilah is the Aramaic word for God, as spoken by Jesus!

(an even more damning detail)

so Allah was essentially the name for God that Jesus used in his time.

[CJCRANE]

7. Yes, people tend to forget

that Jesus was a semitic guy who lived in the Middle East and had a Middle eastern lifestyle, language etc.

[Frederik]

12. The Nazis had their theory of the "Aryan Christ"

who was killed by the Jews. I think many on the religious right-wing in America secretly subscribe to the same idea. Certainly judging from the popular depictions of Christ as a tall, blond hippie.

[FreedomAngel82]

13. Exactly

Jesus was an Israeli.

[FreedomAngel82]

11. Yes

I first realized that when I was watching F911 and there was a woman on there who was an Iraqi and she was crying out to God and she said "Allah" which translated into God on the screen. I was curious as to what dictionary.com said about Allah and this is what it said: <God, especially in Islam.>

[bertha katzenengel]

3. To fundamentalist Christians, Allah is NOT God at all. He is a

false god, Islam is a false religion, as are ALL other gods and ALL other religions.

[RevCheesehead]

4. That's a good point.

BTW - I love your cartoon. :)

[LittleClarkie]

5. Is it wrong to think of them in the same terms as the Jews?

In that they both believe in God, the same God as the Christians, and that neither of them believe that Jesus was a messiah, only the Muslims have added Mohammed the Prophet and have put Jesus on about the same level as him?

How grossly oversimplified is that?

[mmonk]

6. sure it's a different god

Billy Bob Nutjob, our local preacher at Hoboken Antioch Free Will Excercised Tabernacle Independent First Word Church said so.

[KansDem]

8. "Allah Bless America"

I thought of putting this bumper sticker on my car after we invaded Iraq but decided against it due to "health concerns" (I live in a red state). But you're right...Americans have an "us or them" attitude toward everything including religion. They see the worship of "God" and "Allah" as some kind of football game between cross-town rivals.

So now I'm thinking of a new bumper sticker: "My God can beat up your God!"

[Johonny]

9. I don't get the point

In general I've never heard even western Muslims use God for Allah. So clearly to many Muslims even those that speak English Allah is the preferred reference to God. Just because other religions have been more thoroughly westernized or just don't give a crap doesn't mean Muslims don't. In general if you can't translate Allah to God when someone is talking about the the Muslim faith than it's your problem not the speakers...

[mondo joe]

10. Every person's god is a different god. And the adherent of these religions

are pretty clear these are different.

Christians worship a god in a trinity who has a son. Jews and Muslims don't - their god has no son.

All the gods are stories, and there are different versions.

[sweetheart]

14. "God" implies anthromorphic qualities of personality

Whereas, hinduism and buddhism both support a divine infinite intelligence
of the universe beyond human knowledge... "Nirguna Brahman" in
sanskrit... "no aspects unknowable universal-awareness/god" Nirvana,
as a sea of intelligent life that is all of life, that is at once
sentient and inorganic, a universal field theory in a word.

In a comparative religion sense, i can't see a religion in all the
world of existance that does not have a divine unity of all creation,
but in defining the individual words, humans strive to make differences
where there is none... oneness is oneness after all.

A buddhist will describe the world religions's as the fingers on the
hand of nirvana, each finger with divine compassion manifesting in the
cultural frame of all the world's cultures, that no person is
denied access to wisdom and knowledge.

An atheist might rather describe all the world's religions as good
marketing programs for social control and temperance, where the more
someone is educated in empirical truth, the less any conceptions of god
make sense.

And yet, if God is in the heart, (satguru) in sanskrit. Then there
is no human being without God in their heart, and since all human
beings are widely different, the only thing that is common is
sentience, love and human suffering, the realpolitik of god on the
ground... not ideas and theology, but today's dirty laundry.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. "Allah" is simply the Arabic word for "God."

Arab Christians (and there are millions of them, mostly in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq) refer to God as "Allah."

[CJCRANE]

18. Good point but put another way -

"God" is simply the English translation of "Allaha" (which is the original word in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke).

[Igel]

16. One of the guys on my dissertation committee was named Dean.

The head of the DNC is named Dean.

Hey, must be the same guy.

The snarkiness is because it's really easy to confuse words for the things they stand for and there's little excuse for it. One of the classic rhetorical fallacies to is change definitions mid argument. Ecumenists love it--it simplifies their goal immensely, and nobody feels like telling them they're wallowing in a fallacy.

Arab. Allah = God; Gk theos = God; Heb. Elah = God; the Old Slavic word was bogu, which predates Christianity, and referred to any of their gods ... and now = God; we even see the same word as in Slavic in Bagh-dad, something like 'God-given', even though the Iranian gods were different from the Slavic ones. Most languages have a generic word for 'god', or a word that can be construed to be generic; but they all referred to different beings, all called 'god'.

Most strains of Christian thought have either villified or altered the Judaic God, but want to believe they're the same one so as to claim legitimacy or for PR purposes; similarly with Islam, they just justify it a bit differently.

[lumpy]

17. Excellent point

So many people consider that 'other ' religions worship a 'different god. Brings to mind some fundamentalists/protestants who believe that Catholics worship a 'different' god. Years ago I was stunned to hear a Baptists preacher claim that the Catholic Church was a non-Christian religion. Ignorance and intolerence lives on and on and on.

[CJCRANE]

19. And Jesus never heard or used the word "God"

Plus for that matter he never heard the word "Jesus", that's an anglicization, the real pronunciation is actually something like "Yeshua".

[Clark2008]

20. While you are technically correct, there is a reason English-speaking

Muslims don't refer to Allah as God.

See, in their culture, Allah backwards, Halla, means something nice (I forget - something like "beloved" or "reverent" or something), but God backwards is "Dog," and they consider that a cut-down to call the most high being a dog.

I very much agree that we need to point out to people that Allah = God, and is not some friggin' Moon God that the fundies keep saying Allah is, but their culture prefers "Allah."