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Z IS ALLAH OF
THE MUSLIM/ISLAM RELIGION
This
critical question was twice asked of and well answered by our friends in
ministry at The Berean
Call in their newsletter. We thought you would appreciate
it.
Question: The word "Allah"
as used in your September 1993 issue is not correct. The Hausa
translation of the Bible in northern Nigeria uses Allah as a designation for
the true God. Allah is therefore the
same divine being in both the Islamic and Jewish faiths and the one who
became man for the salvation of mankind. Answer: The
translators, by using a term familiar to the Muslims in northern Nigeria, no
doubt thought they were being helpful. But by using Allah in the Hausa
language, they 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 the god of Islam. In fact,
Allah was the name of the chief god among the numerous idols in the Kaaba in Mecca, which represented the deities of
travelers passing through in the caravans. Allah was the god of the
local Quraish, Muhammad's tribe, before Islam was
invented. Muhammad smashed the idols but kept the black stone which is
still kissed today by Muslims. He kept, too, the name Allah for
the god of Islam (its sign was the crescent moon) in order to appeal to his
own tribe.
Allah has definite characteristics: he is not a father, has no son, is not a
triune being but a single (and thus incomplete) entity who destroys rather
than saves sinners, has compassion on only the righteous, does not deal in
grace but only rewards good deeds, has no way to redeem the lost sinners,
etc. Allah is not the God of the Bible.
The God of Israel, too, has a name, YHWH, now
pronounced Jehovah but more anciently as Jahweh.
Most Christians are unaware of God's name because the Old Testament
substitutes Lord for YHWH. In Exodus 6:3 God says,''By my name YHWH was I
not known to them"; and at the burning bush when Moses asked His name,
God explained the meaning of it by saying I AM THAT I AM; thus YHWH means not just one who is, but the self-existent One
who is in and of Himself (Ex. 3:13-14).
The God of the Bible is love, an impossibility
for Allah. As a single entity, Allah was lonely and could not love or
fellowship until other entities came into existence. Not so with YHWH (Jehovah). He is three persons in One: Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, complete in Himself and in need of no others to love and
fellowship with ("The Father loveth the
Son" [John 3:35], 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 1:26) and the Muslim scholar has no explanation for
this expression, which is even found in the Koran's paraphrase of this Bible
verse. We could point out other reasons, but this should be enough to
show that to use in the Hausa translation the name Allah for the God
of the Bible is a great error! In fact Allah is a false god on a par
with any other pagan deity. Question: (condensed
to save space--full question will be posted on our website): In response to
(your) article I read on the internet (on someone else's website), entitled
"Is Allah, of the Muslim/Islam religion, the same God of the
Bible?" I would like to make a few comments and ask some
questions. Please give me chapter and verse from the Qur'an....lf l do
not hear from you I will assume you have no proof and are spreading lies
about Islam. Answer: This has been discussed in
these pages in the past. That Allah is not the God of the Bible is very
clear. The biblical God is called Yahweh (or Jehovah) nearly
9,000 times. Yet Allah is not called by that name even once in the Koran.
Why not, if Allah is the same God? God is also referred to as Elohim more than 2,500 times in the Bible, but again that
word never appears for Allah in the Koran. Why? The God of the
Bible is called "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob “Israel" (Jacob's name was changed by God to Israel later in life,
so he is referred to by either name). He is the father of the Jews. The
God of the Bible revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush by this name
("God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob “Israel") and told Moses,
"this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all
generations" (Ex 3:1-16). If Allah is the God of the Bible, why is
he never called by these names? The God of the Bible tells us again and
again that He is the God of the Jews. Many times He is called "the
God of Israel." Yet there is such hatred for Israel among
Muslims! The Koran talks about Abraham and Ishmael, even claims they
built the Kaaba, but gives Isaac no prominence. The
Bible mentions Isaac favorably and prominently more than 150 times. God very
clearly says that His covenant is with Isaac, not with Ishmael (Genesis
17:19-21), from whom the Arabs claim they are descended. The God of the
Bible calls the Jews His chosen people. He loves them and gave the land
of Israel to them as an heritage forever, as
hundreds of verses in the Bible declare. Islam denies this basic
biblical truth. The Jews are certainly not Allah's chosen people! How
can Allah be the God of the Bible, yet not choose the Jews? In
your Koran, as you must know, Allah commands Muslims, "Take not the Jews
and Christians as friends 1 Surah 5:51, A1 Hi1-a1i, v. 54, Jusuf a1i), so Allah is not the
God of the Christians either. In the hadith,
Muhammad himself said, "The last hour will not come before the Muslims
fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them" (Mishkat
al Masabih Sh. M. Ashraf,
1990, pp. 147, 721, 810-11, 1130, etc.). Islam's god hates the Jews;
the God of the Bible loves them as His chosen people! Allah is very clearly
not Jehovah, Elohim, the God of Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, the God of the Bible! The
God of the Bible chose Jerusalem as His holy city. Forty times He calls
Jerusalem "the city of David" and repeatedly He promises that the
Messiah will be descended from David and will rule on David's throne in
Jerusalem over the whole world (2 Chronicles 6:6; 33:7; 2 Samuel 7: 16; Psalm
89:3-29, etc.). Never does the Bible (or the God of the Bible) mention
Mecca or Medina, but Jerusalem is mentioned more than 800 times. Yet
Allah never mentions Jerusalem. How can this be if Allah is the God of
the Bible? And how can the Muslims today claim Jerusalem as a holy city
of Islam, when it isn't even mentioned in the Koran? That recent claim
comes from those who want to take that city from the Jews. That
Allah has no son is further proof that He is not the God of the Bible, who
definitely has a Son, as both the Old and New Testaments declare.
Psalms 2 says, "Kiss the Son." Referring to the God of the Bible,
Solomon says, "What is his son's name...?" (Proverbs 30:4). The
angel Gabriel, whom Islam claims to honor, told the virgin Mary (Islam
accepts the virgin birth of Jesus), " And,
behold, thou shalt...bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be...called the
Son of the Highest ...the Son of God...and the Lord God shall give unto him
the throne of his father David..." (Luke 1:31-35). That throne is in
Jerusalem, not in Mecca. Muslims
insist that the name " Allah" must be used
in every language; it cannot be translated Dios in Spanish, Dieu in French, or God in English. Muslims thus
treat " Allah" not as a generic word for
God, but as the name of a particular god. In fact, Allah was the god of
the Kuraish tribe centuries before Muhammad was
born. You deny that he was the chief god in the Kaaba,
but you admit there were for centuries 360 idols in the Kaaba
and one of these was called Allah. What is Allah doing in a temple among 360
idols if he is the God of the Bible, who forbids idolatry? Why does
Islam keep this idol temple, and why must Muslims to this day make a
pilgrimage there? That Allah was the chief idol in the Kaaba is documented history. Let me quote one of
the greatest historians: The
desert Arab...feared and worshiped incalculable deities in stars and
moons....Now and then he offered human sacrifice; and here and there he
worshiped sacred stones. The center of this stone worship was Mecca
(with) the Kaaba and its sacred Black Stone...in
its southeast corner, five feet from the ground, just right for kissing.… Within
the Kaaba, in pre-Moslem days, were several idols
representing gods. One was called Allah...three others were Allah's
daughters, al-Uzza, al-Lat, and Manah.
We may judge the antiquity of this Arab pantheon from the mention of A1-il Lat (AI-Lat) by Herodotus [fifth century B.C. Greek
historian] as a major Arabian deity . The Quraish [Muhammad's tribe controlling Mecca] paved the
way for monotheism by worshiping Allah as chief god; He was presented to the Meccans as the Lord of their soil, to Whom they must pay
a tithe of their crops and the first-born of their herds. The Quraish, as alleged descendants of Abraham and Ishmael,
appointed the priests and guardians of the shrine and managed its revenues
(Will Durant, "The Story of Civilization," IV: 160-61). The Kaaba still
stands, without its idols, but with the Black Stone. The pilgrimage
to the Kaaba, to...kiss the sacred stone, to run
between Safa and Marwa,
and to climb Mount Arafa, was practiced by pious
pagan Arabs for centuries before Muhammad. Why did your prophet keep,
as part of Islam, these pagan rituals? You
say "Islam is the religion of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses,
Jesus..." Do you think Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus,
et al. journeyed to the idol temple, the Kaaba, and
kissed its Black Stone? Impossible! Not one follower of the God
of the Bible would ever have gone near the Kaaba,
because the God of the Bible forbids any association with idols; and you
admit (as history tells us) that the Kaaba was
filled with idols before Muhammad destroyed them all. In history and
the Bible, you will find no mention of Islam or any religion like it.
How could you have Islam without the Koran and Muhammad? The
only people who journeyed to the Kaaba and kissed the Black Stone were pagan Arabs who
worshiped one or more of the idols within and around it. Muhammad
started a new religion called Islam to which Arabs, Persians, Egyptians,
Turks and everyone else in the region had to convert at the point of the
sword. They became Muslims, and there is no way you can say that Islam
was the original religion of that or any other region.
You ask me to explain, "The God of the Bible is love, an impossibility for Allah."
If Allah is a single being, as Muslims insist, then he cannot be love in and
of himself, because he had no one to love until he created others; but the
God of the Bible is love in and of Himself because He is three Persons but
One God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit loved and communed with one
another before men or angels were created. While the Jews know that Allah is not
Jehovah, they try to say (as Muslims do for Allah) that Jehovah is a single
being. If so, then why does the Bible refer to Him more than 2,500
times with the plural Elohim (gods)?
Interestingly, however, always with the plural noun there is a singular
verb. One cannot escape the plurality combined with singularity
repeatedly used. The
famous shema (Dt 6:4),
the most fundamental saying about God for a Jew, declares, "Hear, O
Israel: Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah."
Far from declaring that the God of the Bible is a singular being, the Hebrew
word translated "one" is echad, which
means a unity of several becoming one, as when God said the man and woman
became "one (echad) flesh" (Genesis
2:24); when many soldiers became "one (echad)
troop" (2 Samuel 2:25) or when two sticks became "one (echad) stick" (Ezekiel 37:17) etc.
The Bible teaches that God's very
essence is love and says, "God is love" (1 John 4:8).
This is not true of Allah. The Bible repeatedly speaks of God's love
for man and the love we must have for Him. But love is scarcely
mentioned in the Koran. Not once is "love" listed in the
index of the popular Marmaduke Pickthall
translation of the Koran. Of Allah's 99 attributes, love is not
one. The Koran does say that Allah loves "the beneficent" (Surah 2:195), "the stedfast
( and) those whose deeds are good" (Surah 3:146-48), and "those who battle for his
cause" (Surah 61:4). But never does it say he
loves all mankind, much less sinners; but the God of the Bible loves sinners,
even those who hate Him. Allah is said to be merciful, but he does not
show mercy to those who need it. The God of the Bible, however, is
merciful to all, ready to forgive confessed sin. The
first of the Ten Commandments is that we are to love the God of the Bible
with our whole heart; but never does the Koran say a Muslim is to love
Allah. You cannot love Allah, because he is unknowable. The God
of the Bible can be known and repeatedly calls upon men to know Him; but the
Koran says no one can know Allah because he is too great. In spite of
being infinite, without beginning and end, and the Creator of the universe,
the biblical God reveals himself so that men can know Him. Jesus
himself said, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3).
Those who don't know the God of the Bible are lost eternally. No one knows
Allah.
The Bible is filled with prophecies of
the coming of Messiah Jesus, but there is not one such prophecy in the Koran
for Jesus or Muhammad. In fact, the Koran was written after
Muhammad came, so it could not prophesy his coming, but the Old Testament
prophesied the coming of Jesus centuries and even thousands of years
beforehand. The Jewish prophets in the Old Testament said the Messiah
would be crucified and rise from the dead the third day. Jesus came at
exactly the time prophesied and died for the sins of the world, as the Bible
says over and over. But the Koran contradicts this and says He didn't
die on the cross at all, much less for our sins. The Bible says that
the penalty for sin must be paid and that God himself had to come as a man to
die for our sins. Allah did not do that.
How does Allah save sinners?
It would be unjust to forgive the guilty without the penalty being
paid. Where does Allah explain the penalty? When and by whom was
that penalty paid? If Allah forgives, how does he forgive? Allah
simply refuses to forgive or forgives whom he will, but there is no
consistent or just basis for either. No Muslim can be sure Allah will
forgive him. As a Christian I know for certain that I have been
forgiven all my sins and that I have eternal life as a free gift from God
through the death and resurrection of Christ and that I will be in heaven—not
by my good works, but by Christ paying the penalty for my sins. Allah
is merciful to those who do good. The Bible
says that none do good, all have sinned, and that
God saves sinners if they believe in the Christ who died for them. You ask where Allah says in the Koran, "Let us make man in our image." I don't read Arabic so can't find that exact place but I was told by an Arabic scholar that in the Arabic that is what it says. However, the God of the Bible said, "Let us make man in our image." If Allah is the same God, why didn't he say that? There are many contradictions within the Koran, and between the Bible and the Koran. Please refer to my book, A Cup of Trembling, which lists some of them.
Reprinted with permission of the Berean Call Ministry P.O. Box 7019 Bend, OR 97708 www.thebereancall.org
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