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Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Name of God is Not "Allah"

There are some Christian churches in the Middle east that use the word Allah instead of God.  This is an egregious error.  Allah is the name of the pagan moon god of the Kaaba that was worshiped by the Meccans before Muhammad.  Muhammad's own family name was Abdallah, meaning "slave of Allah".  He was the chief deity of the Meccan pantheon.  When Muhammad first started hearing the voices and attributed it to divine message, he referred to his new God as Al-Rahman.  Nowhere in the Surahs revealed in Mecca do we see his god referred to as Allah, because he knew the Meccans would not accept their Kaaba God as the sole God.  Al-Rahaman was the term used by a different temple further south towards Yemen (The Kaaba was not unique; every town had their own kaaba that they circumambulated as a form of worship.  This practice came from India).  Only after Muhammad fled to Medina did he start calling his God Allah, since no one in Medina knew much about the Allah of the Kaaba.

The use of Allah by Christian communities is a bow towards the Muslim majority in the countries where this is practiced, and attempt to placate the Muslims and keep them from burning their churches and killing their people, because of the Muslim intolerance for all things non-Muslim.  Muslims find this acceptable, because it allows them to promote the fiction that Allah is the same as the Judeo-Christian God. God has a name, though, and it most certainly isn't Allah: 

    Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?”
    And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” And God, furthermore, said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is My memorial-name to all generations.

-Exodus 3:13-15

"I Am"  That's deep, no matter how long you think about the implications of that, it's deep.  The Hebrew word was  הָיָה, directly translated to YHWH (written Hebrew had no vowels), pronounced Yah-weh, which later got mangled into Yehova, and in Latin the Y sound was written as a J, which we barbarian English actually pronounce as a J, thus Jehovah.  The literal definition is "To exist" or "to Be or Become".  This is God's name for all generations.  Not "Allah".