Indeed. So let’s bring a little bit of language learning into it. If I recall correctly my Arabic teacher, a Presbyterian Arab immigrant from Lebanon, said that “lah” means “god”, so “allah” means “the god”. Arab uses the definite article a bit differently than English, but basically “Allah” linguistically is not a name or title used solely by Islam, but is just Arabic for “God” and is used by Arab Christians likewise.
The last words of Christ on the cross found in the Gospel are “‘Eloi eloi lama sabachthani’ – My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”. I don’t know, but always assumed that was either Hebrew or Aramaic. Both of those are Semitic and related to Arabic, of course. Anyway, this year during the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday it struck me that “elo” sounds quite similar to “allah”, and in Arabic “my” is indicated with the suffix “i”. If that is common to other Semitic languages, then “elo-i” would make sense as “my God”.
Thus my amateur linguist bone was tickled. I’m far from an expert on any of this, though, so I’ll stop now to let others correct or mock me.
Of course the stem lh, etc. means “God” in the Semitic language. It was the name of the chief God of the Canaanite pantheon and it’s used in as one of the words for God in the Jewish Torah (Elohim, in plural for respect) and to mean both “a god” and “the God” in Arabic. Al-lah means “the God”, al is the article. The Islamic Shaqada:
lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāh can be literally translated as “No god but _the God”.
Christian Arabic speakers call the “Christian” God Allah
You couldn’t be more right. This is a forum which by definition is for debate and discussion. It is no pulpit for any religion. I have a direct line with god and it tells me that it doesn’t write, nor talk, nor dictate, nor order, it does what it wants to when it wants to, what any religion says notwithstanding. It is clearly not open to discussion that is why you won’t see it here.
