On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 09:42:29 -0700, Matthew Weber
wrote:

Cecil Moore wrote:
Randy wrote:

The Christian God is not Allah, and Jesus never prayerd to Allah.

In Arabic, (and I was a professional government Arabic linguist and
Middle East specialist) "Allah" means "THE God". The "AL" in Allah is
the definite article in Arabic and in the Arabic script, the definite
article gets physically linked to the word it defines. The word "god"
(lower case) ( in Arabic is Lam, Lam, Tah Marbutah or LLH.
Unfortunately I can't do Arabic script on my home computer. Also
Arabic script does not have capital letters.) That word is
transliterated LLH. (That "H" is really a glottal stop like the second
"h" in "huh." There are several Arabic letters which can be
transliterated "H" in Roman script. The Tah Marbutah, it looks like an
"o" with two dots above it, has no real equivalent in Roman script,
but is pronounced as a glottal stop. Like Hebrew, most vowels are not
written out in Arabic except in linguistic texts and the Koran...they
are simply diacrital marks. "LLH", without the definite article, was
used to described dieties in Arabic long before Muhammad and the Koran
came around in ca. 632 AD when the pre-Islamic Arabs were mainly
animists.

From an Islamic perspective, "Allah" is the same God as the God of
Jews and the Christians. The Koran makes that quite clear. (The Koran
also argues that the Jews didn't go far enough in their beliefs and
the Christians got it wrong, but further argues that an Islamic
believer is unlikely to convert them and they should be left alone and
respected as "People of the Book.", the book in this case being the
Pentateuch.) Whether you wish to accept that concept, of course, is a
theological question. Most academic comparative theologists, even
those at Christian and Jewish seminaries who are among the believing,
do accept that premise (that the God is the same entity) even if they
don't believe in the premise that God made the Koran his last word on
the subject. The Islamic formula, as written in Arabic, states that
there is no god (indefinite article) (llh) but THE God (Allah) with
the definite article. The word has its roots in the proto-Semitic
common to Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Again, from an Islamic
perspective, Abraham, Jesus and Mohammad prayed to the same God, but
certainly the vocabulary was different.

Your theologic milage may vary, but here is at least is a linguistic
and historical basis generally accepted in academic circles.



Jon W3JT (Retired Gov't Linguist with Masters in Middle East Area
Studies.)