cording to Islamic belief, Allah is the proper name of God,[27] and humble submission to His Will, Divine Ordinances

and Commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith.[5] "He is the only God, creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind."[5][6] "He is unique (wid) and inherently one (aad), all-merciful and omnipotent."[5] The Qur'an declares "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures."[5] Allah script outside Eski Cami (The Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey.

In Islamic tradition, there are 99 Names of God (al-asm al-usn lit. meaning: "The best names") each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah.[6][28] All these names refer to Allah, the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name. [13] Among the 99 names of God, the most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (ar-ramn) and "the Compassionate" (al-ram).[6][28]

Most Muslims use the untranslated Arabic phrase in Allh (meaning "God willing") after references to future events.[29] Muslim discursive piety encourages beginning things with the invocation of bismi-llh (meaning "In the name of God").[30]

There are certain phrases in praise of God that are favored by Muslims, including "Subhan-Allah" (Holiness be to God), "Alhamdulillah" (Praise be to God), l ilha illa-llh (There is no deity but God) and "Allhu Akbar" (God is great) as a devotional exercise of remembering God (zikr).[31] In a Sufi practice known as zikr Allah (lit. remembrance of God), the Sufi repeats and contemplates on the name Allah or other divine names while controlling his or her breath.[32]

Some scholars[who?] have suggested that Muhammad used the term Allah in addressing both pagan Arabs and Jews or Christians in order to establish a common ground for the understanding of the name for God, a claim Gerhard Bwering says is doubtful.[27] According to Bwering, in contrast with PreIslamic Arabian polytheism, God in Islam does not have associates and companions nor is there any kinship between God and jinn.[27] Pre-Islamic pagan Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, inexorable and insensible fate over which man had no control. This was replaced with the Islamic notion of a powerful but provident and merciful God.[33]

According to Francis Edwards Peters, "The Qur'an insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (29:46). The Koran's Allah is the same Creator God who covenanted with Abraham". Peters states that the Qur'an portrays Allah as both more powerful

and more remote than Yahweh, and as a universal deity, unlike Yahweh who closely follows Israelites.[15] Christianity

The Aramaic word for "God" in the language of Assyrian Christians is lh, or Alaha. Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God".[7] The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'.[14] (Even the Arabic-descended Maltese language of Malta, whose population is almost entirely Roman Catholic, uses Alla for 'God'.) Arab Christians for example use terms Allh al-ab ( ) meaning God the Father, Allh al-ibn ( ) mean God the Son, and Allh ar-r al-quds ( )meaning God the Holy Spirit (See God in Christianity for the Christian concept of God).

Arab Christians have used two forms of invocations that were affixed to the beginning of their written works. They adopted the Muslim bismi-llah, and also created their own Trinitized bismi-llah as early as the eight century CE.[34] The Muslim bismi-llah reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized bismi-llah reads: "In the name of Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God." The Syriac, Latin and Greek invocations do not have the words "One God" at the end. This addition was made to emphasize the monotheistic aspect of Trinitian belief and also to make it more palatable to Muslims.[34]

According to Marshall Hodgson, it seems that in the pre-Islamic times, some Arab Christians made pilgrimage to the Kaaba, a pagan temple at that time, honoring Allah there as God the Creator.[35] Judaism Main articles: Mizrahi Jews and Names of God in Judaism

As Hebrew and Arabic are closely related Semitic languages, it is commonly accepted that Allah (root, ilh) and the Biblical Elohim are cognate derivations of same origin, as in Eloah a Hebrew word which is used (e.g. in the Book of Job) to mean "(the) God" and also "god or gods" as in the case of Elohim, ultimately deriving from the root El, "strong", possibly genericized from El (deity), as in the Ugaritic 'lhm "children of El" (the ancient Near Eastern creator god in preAbrahamic tradition).

In Jewish scripture Elohim is used as a descriptive title for the God of the scriptures whose name is YHWH, as well as for pagan gods. As a loanword English and other European languages This article is part of the series: Islam Allah-eser-green.png Beliefs[show] Practices[show] Texts & laws[show] History & leaders[show] Denominations[show] Culture & society[show] See also[show]

The history of the word "Allh" in English was probably influenced by the study of comparative religion in 19th century; for example, Thomas Carlyle (1840) sometimes used the term Allah but without any implication that Allah was anything different from God. However, in his biography of Muhammad (1934), Tor Andr always used the term Allah, though he allows that this 'conception of God' seems to imply that it is different from that of the Jewish and Christian theologies. By this time Christians were also becoming accustomed to retaining the Hebrew term "YHWH" untranslated[dubious discuss] (it was previously translated as 'the Lord').[36]

Languages which may not commonly use the term Allah to denote God may still contain popular expressions which use the word. For example, because of the centuries long Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, the word ojal in the Spanish language and oxal in the Portuguese language exist today, borrowed from Arabic (Arabic: .) This word literally means "God willing" (in the sense of "I hope so").[37]

Some Muslims leave the name "Allh" untranslated in English.[38] Malaysian and Indonesian language

Christians in Indonesia and Malaysia also use Allah to refer to God in the Malaysian language and Indonesian language (both languages forms of the Malay language which is referred to as Bahasa Melayu).

Mainstream Bible translations in both languages use Allah as the translation of Hebrew Elohim (translated in English Bibles as "God").[39] This goes back to early translation work by Francis Xavier in the 16th century.[40][41] The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 recorded "Allah" as the translation of the Dutch word "Godt".[42] Ruyl also translated Matthew in 1612 to Malay language (first Bible translation to nonEuropean language, only a year after King James Version was published[43][44]), which was printed in the Netherlands in 1629. Then he translated Mark which was published in 1638.[45][46]

The government of Malaysia in 2007 outlawed usage of the term Allah in any other but Muslim contexts, but the High Court in 2009 revoked the law, ruling that it was unconstitutional. While Allah had been used for the Christian God in Malay for more than four centuries, the contemporary controversy was triggered by usage of Allah by the Roman Catholic newspaper The Herald. The government has in turn appealed the court ruling, and the High Court has suspended implementation of its verdict until the appeal is heard. In other scripts and languages

Allh in other languages with Arabic script is spelled in the same way. This includes Urdu, Persian/Dari, Uyghur among others.

Bengali: Allah Bosnian: Allah Chinese: l, nl; Zhnzh (semantic translation) Greek: Allch, Thes (God) Hebrew: Allah Hindi: Allh Malayalam: Aaah Japanese: Al, Allh, Allf

Maltese: Alla Korean: Alla Polish: Allah, also archaic Allach or Aach Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian: Allakh Serbian, Belarusian, Macedonian: Alah Spanish, Portuguese: Al Thai: Anlw Punjabi (Gurmukhi): Allh (archaic in Sikh scripture)

Typography

The word Allh is always written without an alif to spell the vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using alif to spell . However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic alif is added on top of the addah to indicate the pronunciation.

One exception may be in the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription,[47] where it ends with an ambiguous sign that may be a lone-standing h with a lengthened start, or may be a non-standard conjoined l-h:-

: This reading would be Allh spelled phonetically with alif for the . : This reading would be Al-ilh = "the god" (an older form, without contraction), by older spelling practice without alif for .

Unicode

Unicode has a codepoint reserved for Allh, = U+FDF2. This character according to the official Unicode specification is a ligature of alif-lm-lm-shadda(superscript alif)-h ( U+0627 U+0644 U+0644 U+0651 U+0670 U+0647). An example of Allh written in simple Arabic calligraphy.

There is, however some confusion arising from the fact that Arabic typography usually features a llh glyph without the preceding alif, which only occurs phrase-initially (or with hamzatu l-wal in Qur'anic orthography). Consequently, the majority of Arabic Unicode fonts do not conform with the specification and have a glyph without the alif at this position (e.g. those provided by Linotype, the great majority of those licensed to or developed by Microsoft, those of Arabeyes.org, SIL's Lateef and the fonts of CRULP developed in Pakistan), while others have the prescribed form with alif (e.g. SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic distributed with the Middle-Eastern version of the Adobe Reader 7, Arial Unicode MS, and Arabic Typesetting, distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).

The calligraphic variant of the word used as the Coat of arms of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at codepoint U+262B (). See also Wikisource has original text related to this article: Allah

Abdullah (name) Ilh Names of God Tawd ikr