In answer to the video "What Does "Allahu Akbar" Really Mean?"
Allah is the only true deity 2:255,23:116-117,37:95-96,59:22-24,112:1-4. As already shown, He can be named by absolutely any name, so long as it is the "best of names", which includes among others, Allah. He isnt restricted to any name or any number of names and all the scholars agree that Allah's names are unlimited so long as they are the best.
There is a prayer by the prophet in which he calls upon Allah by the name He has chosen to reveal to mankind, and those He kept in the unseen
"I ask You by every name belonging to You which You named Yourself with, or revealed in Your Book, or You taught to any of Your creation, or You have preserved in the knowledge of the unseen with You..".
When the prophet urged the people to pay heed to those names, he said those who ahsaa ha/assimilates and applies them -not merely memorize them, see Quran 18:12- in the worship and in everyday life is deserving of a great reward. These Divine Names, which punctuate so many Quran verses inform us about the moral quality that human beings must strive to embody. The believer becomes a vessel of mercy, justice, etc. Naming Allah doesnt imply knowing Allah, or encompassing Him, or giving Him a similitude. Humans exist, but nothing like Allah, who ever-exists. Anyone has experienced mercy or existence, but not to perfection and infinity. The names of Allah dont describe the reality of His attributes, but tell us that He possesses a particular attribute to perfection. To clarify further, the name "all merciful" doesnt describe the reality, the essence of Allah's infinite mercy. It tells us that He possesses the concept of mercy, which we have experience of, to perfection, which we cannot fathom.
To limit God's names would be in effect a restriction on His majesty and God can never be contained, neither physically nor linguistically
17:110"Call upon Allah or call upon, Al-Rahman; whichever you call upon, He has the best names".The most obvious of these attributes is His attribute of Rahma, or mercy. Al rahman is the most intensive form of rahma. This is because Allah is the most merciful and this is why the attribute of mercy is the only one said to be "written" upon God
6:12,54"your Lord has written mercy on Himself".Rahman stems from R-H-M meaning WOMB. In order to imagine the implication of the meaning, one has to picture the womb and what it does to the fetus. It nurtures, protects, provides warmth, love etc. The Hebrew equivalent of "rhm", is also found in the Hebrew Bible Deut4:31,Ps86:15 again to stress an important attribute of God from a human perspective. Many Christian and Jewish South-Arabian pre-Islamic inscriptions refer to God with Rahmanan. It is also important to mention that the pagans never refered to any of their deities with Rahmanan and in fact when they were told to
25:60"Prostrate to al-Rahman! they say: And what is al-Rahman? Are we to prostrate to whatever thou biddest us? And it increaseth aversion in them".It is interesting noting how God, in answer to the derogatory demand to know "what" al rahman is, after giving a glimpse of His identity through the observable mercy pervasive in His creation, cites His servants as being the wordly ambassadors reflecting that attribute of mercy, physically and spiritually sincere and humble, benevolent towards their fellow men, patiently forbearing especially when confronted by the ignorant 25:60-77.
This tone was obviously derogatory, the pagans knew that this term was specifically used by the monotheistic religions so they did not want to give the impression of having forsaken their polytheism and alligned themselves with them.
The word ALLAH was used since pre-islamic times, by the Hanif, the Arab polytheists, and both Arab Jews and Christians. The verse 22:40 states that all people in whose temples Allah's name is mentioned, were encouraged to stand up and defend their sites and rights to worship in them, including churches and synagogues. Elsewhere we read how the pagans recognized Allah as the supreme Creator despite having associated interceding deities to Him 29:60-65,46:28,39:3.
The difference between each group however lies in the attributes they give Him and the manner they describe His interaction with the universe. That is why the Quran in sura kafirun does not negate who/man the disbelievers worship, rather what/ma
109:2"You do not serve what I serve".
The characteristics of the "Allah" of each group are different. What Muslims worship is not the deity of a chosen race, does not rest or slumber after creation, nor enters it. He does not have sons and daughters, nor a consort, and He did not detach Himself from creation after giving it the initial push. More descriptive points can be enumerated showing the monotheistic deficiency of every thought system claiming to worship One Creator with a common name, in contrast to Islam's supreme tawhid. The word "Allah" in itself however, "Who" is meant by it, is not exclusive to Islam.
Up to this day, Arab Jews refer to God as "Allah". The Torah prohibits Jews from pronouncing another god's name
Ex23:13"and the name of the gods of others you shall not mention; it shall not be heard through your mouth".
If Allah was a name unknown to them and the name of another God that the unpronouncable Tetragammaton, they would have never repeated it, much less in prayer. A Jew can even go as far as praying inside a mosque but is forbidden of entering a church under any circumstances. The Arabic "Allah" could thus simply be the contraction of al ilah/the God. The word was so persistently and exclusively used to describe the supreme God that stood above the hundreds of interceding deities that it gradually became equivalent to His proper name among the Arabs, whether the pagans, the hanif, the Jews or Christians.
YHWH could just have been one of Allah's best names, describing one of His perfect attributes, like al Rahman and endless others, and its correct pronunciation now forgotten. That is why it is never used in the entire NT and yet nobody will claim that the God John and Jesus spoke of in the NT is other than the God of Moses in the Torah. Writing the tetragammaton is allowed in Jewish tradition, as is done throughout the HB. It is the vowelization and attempted pronunciation that are forbidden. Further, no passage within the NT hints at an awareness of the prohibition to utter the tetragammaton. The NT goes as far as saying that Jesus' name is greater than all names Phil2:9.
Even in the HB we read in Ex6:2-3 that the patriarch did not known God by the name of YHWH. Yet we do read throughout Genesis that from the first humans, down to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all knew the name YHWH.
The way this contradiction is harmonized is by saying that, although previous people knew the name, they did not know its meaning. In Western languages, a name is a label of identification. In Semitic languages, shem (Hebrew) or ism (Arabic) is meant to reveal something of the essence of the entity. Hence the non-exhaustive "names" of Allah given in the Quran and traditions, each evoking an aspect by which His essence manifests. To further corroborate that what is traditionally construed as a mere label of identification of God in Hebrew, is in fact a description of one of God's attributes is seen in
Ex3:13-14"And Moses said to God, "Behold I come to the children of Israel, and I say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they say to me, 'What is His name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I will be what I will be)," and He said, "So shall you say to the children of Israel, 'Ehyeh (I will be) has sent me to you.'"
God here doesnt answer Moses' question with a word, but with a definition, an expression entailing eternity past and future. That notion is found in many Quranic passages 2:255,3:2,28:88,40:65,57:3,55:27. Once God clearly defined the meaning of the label by which Moses was to identify Him, He finally spelled out His "shem"
v15"And God said further to Moses, "So shall you say to the children of Israel, 'YHWH elohe/the God of your forefathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is My name forever, and this is how I should be mentioned in every generation".
Moses is thus told to make God known to the Israelites by a label which in the Hebrew language denotes eternity YHWH ELOHE. The Quran conveys in Arabic the same meaning with ALLAHU SAMAD, which Muslims recite in their daily prayers. The traditions also list ALBAQI among the names of Allah, denoting everlastingness. Similarly in the Greek of the New Testament, we find the phrase aioniou theou/the eternal God Rom16:26. Just like the Arabic Quran, the Greek of the New Testament doesnt use the Hebrew tetragammaton YHWH. Nobody will claim that the God John and Jesus spoke of in the NT is other than the God of Moses in the Torah. Writing the tetragammaton is allowed in Jewish tradition, as is done throughout the HB. It is the vowelization and attempted pronunciation that are forbidden. Further, no passage within the NT hints at an awareness of the prohibition to utter the tetragammaton. The NT goes as far as saying that Jesus' name is greater than all names Phil2:9.
We even read that just as Allah was known prior to Islam, the semitic tribes inhabiting the land of Canaan much earlier than the Israelites also knew YHWH. The very reason, per the Torah, For God deciding to uproot and exterminate those nations, then settling the Israelites instead, was not because of the Abrahamic covenant, but because these nations had become sinners, unworthy to reside in a land previously declared sacred Gen15:16,Deut9,1Sam4:7. The Canaanite were relatives of the Israelites. They were Abrahamic descendants, such as the Moabites descendants of Lot and Edomites whose father is Esau. There is no reason to assume that these Abrahamic tribes did not emulate their common forefather by worshiping YHWH. But as the generations passed they corrupted that worship until God sent another Abrahamic branch, the Israelites, to uproot and replace them. Similarly Jethro was a Midianite-Kenite. Midian was the son of Abraham, and Kenite in reference to Adam's son, Cain whose descendants lived among all the people of the Levant. Jethro was thus a non Israelite Semite, descendant of Abraham, who had kept the Abrahamic legacy. He proclaims to Moses that YHWH is greater than all false deities Ex18:7-12.
It is known that Hebrew, like Arabic, as Semitic languages have triliteral roots for every word.
With their successive displacement, assimilation, loss of culture and language, the Israelites lost one of the 3 stem letters, forcing their linguists to reach the correct view regarding a Hebrew word in light of its usage in the Arabic. Among all Semitic languages, Arabic is known to be the best preserved. Obeid (2009), in his study of the pronunciation of Arabic and Hebrew, inferred that “Arabic is closer to Proto-Semitic language with average 83.67%, and for Hebrew it is 43.36%. And both (Arabic and Hebrew) are incompatible with Proto-Semitic language with average 10.71%”.
The original phonological inventory of Semitic languages (consonants and vowels) has been preserved most fully in Classical Arabic and Old South Arabian languages. This is attested through inscriptions discovered mostly in present-day Yemen and dated to the 1st millennium BCE and the early 1st millennium CE. The loss of the triliteral roots of many words led the Hebrew linguists that could not find one of the lost stem letter to a word, to argue that certain Hebrew words are in fact biliteral, or even monoliteral. This created complications as regards the principles of conjugation of verbs. It wasnt until the 10th century that a Jewish Arabic grammarian, David Hayyuj, transposed his knowledge of Arabic grammar, to the convoluted Hebrew grammar, in order to clarify many aspects of the language. The influence of Arabic grammar, which primarily finds its source in the study of the Quran, on Hebrew grammar is such that Hayyuj is said to have become the founder of the scientific study of the discipline of Hebrew grammar. In fact his first works were written in Arabic and the technical terms still employed in current Hebrew grammars are most of them simply translations of the Arabic terms employed by Hayyuj. The Masoretic text didnt even start adding vocalization prior to his works, a crucial step in narrowing down the pronounciation and meaning of the consonantal text. Vocalization maybe transmitted by the oral tradition. But in the case of Hebrew, that oral tradition deteriorated and the language lost its archaic form, mainly due to their hellenization as they lived under Greco-Roman culture. They in addition didnt have a vocalized religious scripture to help in ascertaining the original pronouciation of certain words. Arabic grammar was thus crucial for the Jewish interpretation of their own scriptures.
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