Posted by Toby A Inkster on 11/13/07 16:25

abdo911 wrote:

> Allah is the personal name of the One true God. Nothing else can be
> called Allah.

Really? I was under the impression that "Allah" is simply the Arabic word
for "God", and that Arabic-speakers of other religions also referred to
their god(s) as Allah. (Of course many of these will be Jews and
Christians, who theoretically worship the same god as Muslims do anyway.)
That is, it's just considered a general term rather than a personal name.

> It is interesting to notice that Allah is the personal name of God in
> Aramaic

Interesting, but false. The Aramaic equivalent of Allah is אלהא, which is
roughly pronounced "alaha". It's not the same word, but is a cognate, much
like the German "die Katze und der Hund" is cognate to the English "the
cat and the hound".

The Hebrew is similar again אלוה ("Eloah").

The Qur'an lists 99 names for god <http://www.luvu4luv.com/99names.html>
but Allah is not one of them -- it's not his name, it's his job title.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 6 days, 23:01.]

TrivialEncoder/0.2
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/08/19/trivial-encoder/

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