God by Any Other Name

By Shakir Ebrahim

Muslims and non-Muslims alike mistake the name of God to be “Allah.” Allah though, is a concept, not a name. If God has no form, no shape, no beginning and no end, could He possibly have a name? A name is a human invention to distinguish one person from another. When God is one, He needs no distinct identification.

God can thus be referred to by any word that implies Him to be a supreme, non-human existence, without partner. So I can easily substitute the word “Allah” with the word “Bhagwan” or “Khuda” or “Rab” and continue to believe in “Allah” and practice the faith of Islam correctly.

Pushing this logic to its ultimate conclusion, I can say, “There is no bhagwan but Bhagwan and Muhammad is His messenger.” Thus the word “Allah” can be substituted in the Islamic profession of faith by the word referred to as God in any language so long as conceptually that is the Supreme Divine.

Allah is the Arabic name for God that existed before the advent of Muhammad. Allah was the supreme god of the Kaaba, the holy temple of pre-Islamic Arabs. He was considered the giver of rain, the arbitrator of disputes and the witness of all oaths. The problem with this picture was that he had two female companions: Al-Uzza and Manat (Qur’an 53:19). Additionally he had a host of other small gods and goddesses, numbering about 300, to whom “godly” work was delegated. Blood sacrifices were performed for him along with a host of other pagan rituals. As Albert Hourani points out in A History of the Arab People, “Allah” was also used by Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians as the name for God (p. 16).

Muhammad brought a new religion to the Arabs, but not a new God. How could he, after all there is only one God. He told them that the God they were worshipping was fine--continue calling him Allah and believing Him to be supreme, but all the things they associated with Him were not. This way, they did not need to discard a familiar concept, but instead looked at God from an entirely new perspective. Islam never came to change every aspect of people’s behavior. It only modified what was wrong and gave general concepts so that future behavior would remain within certain universal guidelines.

See, for example, the beautiful use of psychology by Muhammad (as instructed by God of course). If people were allowed to continue calling the “god” they knew by the same name, barriers to accepting Him could be overcome. That Muhammad faced resistance was due more to economic and tribal reasons than to ideology. If he had asked the Meccans to stop believing in Allah and coined an entirely new name for God, the resistance could possibly have been insurmountable.

Future generations of Muslims lost this important psychological lesson and implicit Quranic message by confusing the name of God to be the Arabicized Allah. Arabs, in their quest for conquest, did not realize the damage being done by arabizing everything related to Islam. This Arabization went unnoticed when Islam bulldozed through cultures already weakened by wars over several generations. A notable exception to resist the rising tide of Arabization was the Shu’ubiyya movement in 9th and 10th century Iran. Persian intellectuals sought to reclaim their culture, language and self-esteem by writing against the superiority claims of the Arabs. Their efforts contributed to the survival of Farsi against the Arabic onslaught.

Sufi brotherhoods, however, understood this subtlety better. They integrated Islam with regional beliefs to make it more acceptable to the local populace. Sufis, many of whom were not of Arab ancestry, were responsible for expanding Islam in Africa (The Shadhiliyyah Brotherhood), Turkey and the Indian sub-continent (The Chistiyyah Brotherhood). In fact, the Arabs have a disastrous record of spreading Islam outside the Middle-Eastern, non-Arab ethnic heartland. For example, while the Mughals ruled India under Sufi influence, they fought only military battles. Several generals in Emperor Akbar’s army were Hindu Rajputs, who fought against local Hindu kings with Hindu armies. Many of Akbar’s children were sired of Hindu wives. At no point was the battle one between Islam and Hinduism; they were purely wars of conquest.

When the orthodox Aurengzeb became emperor, he rejected the Sufi ethos of conciliation in favor of the confrontational approach of Arabized Islam and imposed unpopular decisions such as the Jizya tax on non-Muslim citizens. The dynasty’s downfall was quick thereafter. Possibly, people belonging to monolithic faiths were more ready to accept Islamic laws as they often mirrored their own. With polytheists, the entire concept of one God was new and required a different, more moderate approach.

The Muslim rule of Spain by the Umayyad Arabs, though often considered the highlight of worldwide Muslim dominance, was doomed to failure precisely due to the arabization policy that was followed elsewhere. Imposing a new culture (and language) on the populace rather than adapting that culture to Muslim principles led to the eventual decline and rout of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.

Muslims dominated Spain with military might, not theological acceptance. A parallel can be drawn with the various tribes of the Hijaz who affiliated with Muhammad due to his military prowess rather than belief in Islam and rebelled the moment he died (i.e. when they thought his military prowess was weakened). The Arab rebels were subdued because once they were militarily defeated, there was no second front to fight an alien culture. Spain was always going to rebel. Islam was always going to be booted from there; it was a matter of time.

By adopting a method of least resistance, conversion to Islam can be made really easy. Today, conversion rates are low because people, in order to convert, have to admit that they were wrong in the first place. Then, after calling God by another name for years, now they suddenly have to get used to calling Him with a new name, Allah, and adopt a new language to communicate with him. Why are we creating barriers where none exist?

The biggest barrier today to the spread of Islam continues to be its Arabized character. Only until Muslims understand that Arabic is in no way related to Islam and that existing customs of other cultures, however alien, are not contradictory to Islamic principles, will we see more people looking to Islam more sympathetically.

Muhammad taught the pagan Meccans to continue calling their once-pagan god “Allah” and condoned several pre-Islamic practices simply because they did not clash with basic Islamic principles. Contemporary Muslims must use this technique so successfully used by the Prophet to spread the message of Islam. When other things can be labeled as the Prophet’s Sunna, why has the Muslim world not followed this tradition of the Prophet, one that arguably is more important than the other alleged traditions we blindly ape.

It is high time that Muslims acknowledge that Arabic culture is distinct from the universal guidance of Islam. May God guide us all.