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IS
ALLAH OF THE MUSLIM/ISLAM RELIGION OF THE BIBLE ? 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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