Allah
Allah (/ˈælə, ˈɑːlə, əˈlɑː/;[1][2][3] Arabic: ٱللَّٰه, romanized: Allāh, IPA: [ʔaɫ.ɫaːh] ) is the common Arabic word for God. In the English language, the word generally refers to God in Islam.[4][5][6] The word is thought to be derived by contraction from al-ilāh, which means "the god", and is linguistically related to the Aramaic words Elah and Syriac ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlāhā) and the Hebrew word El (Elohim) for God.[7][8]
This article is about the Arabic word "Allah". For the Islamic view of God, see God in Islam. For other uses, see Allah (disambiguation).The word Allah has been used by Arabic people of different religions since pre-Islamic times.[9] The pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped a supreme deity whom they called Allah, alongside other lesser deities.[10] Muhammad used the word Allah to indicate the Islamic conception of God. Allah has been used as a term for God by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab), Judaeo-Arabic-speaking Jews, and Arab Christians[11] after the terms "al-ilāh" and "Allah" were used interchangeably in Classical Arabic by the majority of Arabs who had become Muslims. It is also often, albeit not exclusively, used in this way by Bábists, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, Indonesian and Maltese Christians, and Sephardi Jews,[12][13][14] as well as by the Gagauz people.[15] Similar usage by Christians and Sikhs in Peninsular Malaysia has recently led to political and legal controversies.[16][17][18][19]
Pronunciation
The word Allāh is generally pronounced [ɑɫˈɫɑː(h)], exhibiting a heavy lām, [ɫ], a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, a marginal phoneme in Modern Standard Arabic. Since the initial alef has no hamza, the initial [a] is elided when a preceding word ends in a vowel. If the preceding vowel is /i/, the lām is light, [l], as in, for instance, the Basmala.[80]
As a loanword
English and other European languages
The history of the name Allāh in English was probably influenced by the study of comparative religion in the 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 Muḥammad (1934), Tor Andræ 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.[81]
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 ojalá in the Spanish language and oxalá in the Portuguese language exist today, borrowed from Andalusi Arabic law šá lláh[82] similar to inshalla (Arabic: إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ). This phrase literally means 'if God wills' (in the sense of "I hope so").[83] The German poet Mahlmann used the form "Allah" as the title of a poem about the ultimate deity, though it is unclear how much Islamic thought he intended to convey.
Some Muslims leave the name "Allāh" untranslated in English, rather than using the English translation "God".[84] The word has also been applied to certain living human beings as personifications of the term and concept.[85][86]
