There Is No God but God

The first object of belief that will secure an individual, according to the Islamic tradition, is īmān billāh, which means belief in Allah. Now, it is well known that the first statement of the Muslims is lā ilāha illallāh. And this is usually translated as "there is no god but Allah" — which, in many ways, is problematic. Because it leads a person who is not an Arab, or not a Muslim, to think that Allah is some kind of… there is no god but Allah. In other words: there is no god for the Christians, there is no god for the Jews, there is no god but this god that the Arabs are calling Allah. Which is problematic, because Jewish Arabs call God Allah, and Christian Arabs call God Allah. A Christian Arab calls God Allah, and they call Jesus ibnullāh, the son of Allah. That is what a Christian Arab calls him; a Palestinian Christian says: the son of Allah.

So this is a linguistic determination from the Arab people for what we know in English as God — which is originally probably an Indo-European word, gut. It goes into Persian as Khudā. The Persian word Khudā — and this is not to be told to any white supremacists — is related to the English word for God, because then it goes into German as Gut, or Gott. And the original word here is related to the one who is called on when there is no one else to call on. That is God. God is the one we call on when there is no one else to call on.

Now, the word Allah in the Arabic language does not designate a meaning. We do not know what it means. Some of the Muslims think that it is originally from ilāh — the word ilāh — and obviously the linguistic similarity can be seen there. The Orientalists would definitely say yes, it has got to be: it is just a lām; it becomes Allah because it is al-ilāh, and they take the two lāms together and make it Allah, instead of saying al-ilāh. The word ilāh has a plural; it has a masculine and a feminine. It has a masculine and a feminine. It also has negative connotations in the Qurʾān as well, whereas Allah does not have negative connotations. Ilāh can have negative connotations in the Qurʾān; Allah does not. Allah always has a positive connotation in the Qurʾān.

The root word of ilāh is aliha, which means to bewilder, to create bewilderment. And this would be consistent, for instance, with Saint Anselm's idea of God being that than which nothing greater can be conceived: that it is the thing on which the intellect literally short-circuits when it tries to conceptualise it. It creates a type of bewilderment in the psyche for us to try to imagine infinity. Infinity — we cannot imagine it. We can imagine it as an abstract concept, but we cannot really conceptualise the idea of infinity. It is something we can only abstract; we cannot grasp the true idea of infinity.