In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful…

Welcome to a new blog which has existed in my mind for quite some time. My intention here is to explore and expound the principles of meaningful, effective dialogue on the subject of religion. Please see the About page for more details of the spirit of this diablog.

Since I have started in the name of God, it seems fitting to share a thought-provoking article by Dr Umar Farooq Abd-Allah:

“One God, Many Names” (PDF download)

It is a fairly brief exposition of the use of the name “Allah” to refer to the One God, and corrects a number of misconceptions that exist surrounding this.One of them is the hesitance some Muslims have to use other names in reference to Allah, such as the standard English term God (with a capital ‘g’).

More significantly, I have found many Christians (usually more among those with a keenness for evangelism) who believe that the names “God” and “Allah” have two different referents, so one of them is the true “God of the Bible” (Who of course is referred to by other terms in the Bible’s original language) and the other is a “false god” – or even, according to one particularly wild theory, the “moon god”. We often find the media manipulating this perception in the minds of the public by translating a whole speech by some fanatic or other but not translating the term used for God, Allah. We always read of extremist Muslims who “kill in the name of Allah” – this phraseology obviously being chosen to imply a particular fanaticism among those who use this term to refer to the same God, in Whose name(s) other people do kill.

It is a very crucial point that Jews, Christians and Muslims (and of course we can extend this list) worship the same God, even if their doctrines differ sharply in numerous ways. My Christian friend believes that God is a trinity, made up of Father, Son and Spirit. I point out that the only one of these Who is God is the One he is describing as “Father”, while the others are not equal persons. But more importantly, I emphasise that we may have different beliefs and descriptions of God, but that does not mean we are referring to two different entities. Both of us are saying that we worship the One Who created all things, and neither of us would admit that there is any more than One Who can be truly described as such. So our monotheism (however different its expression) leads us to the conclusion that there is One God upon Whose description we need to work to agree, in the pursuit of true belief and worship.