Are God And Allah The Same?
What’s the relationship or difference between God and Allah? Are they the same?
Yes and no. Yes they’re the same and no the relationship isn’t the same. The reason is because a person could be a human being, they are human beings right? But they could be from different countries but they’re still human beings. Right? ‘Ilah’ and ‘God’ are the same word. But the word Allah is not in the English language ‘because English is not strong enough to handle it. Now that sounded facetious didn’t it? I’ll ask you a question. When you are talking about anything worshipped, according to Funk & Wagnall and according to Merriam Webster’s dictionary when you’re talking about an object that’s worshipped is it called the god, yes or no? Yeah. When you’re talking about the one true God who has no partners it's not like those little fake idols, is it also called the god? What’s the difference? Big G. How do I know if you are talking to me, I can’t see the big G. You’d have to say “god big G” said to Jesus or Mohammad or.. right? Those gods little g, that’s the only way I would know. Then what if you are writing and you are starting a sentence, you have to use a big G, but you meant the little g. Now what are you going to do? So ‘ilah’ is anything worshipped but Allah is God’s name and it means the only one to be worshipped because Allah has no plural to it, it can’t be made plural. Allah also can’t have gender can’t be male or female. The reference to ‘he’ in Arabic to Allah is out of respect or dignity instead of saying ‘it’, and also the plural which you find through the Quran, ‘We created mankind’, it says real clear. ‘Khalaqna’, which means, ‘We created’, does not mean ‘we’ in the sense of more than one.
Let me give you an example from English. The king or the queen give a decree, they say ‘We decreed the following’, its not ‘we’ its one king. It’s a royal ‘we’, if you still didn’t catch that it’s also in regular language when we speak to each other. If I’m speaking to a group of people I say you are my friends, and I hope you are. You are my friends, but if I’m just speaking to you directly I say you still are my friend right? I don’t say, ‘You is my friend’, do I? No. Why did I have a plural, because anything else singular would be ‘is’. Is that true? This is, that is, he is, she is, but you are. Why? Its respect, that’s all. Why don’t I say, ‘I is’?
Because ‘am’ is also the correct plural form, not meaning plural in number, but it’s the royal form. The way you address yourself and the one you are speaking to is putting them on a high level, that’s all. Got it?
So Allah means the only one to be worshipped and its God’s name at the same time. So the word God in English needs help, big g little g. There are no capital letters in Hebrew, there are no capital letters in Aramaic, that Jesus spoke (Peace be upon him) and there’s no capital letters in Arabic either. It means that when you read the scripture you have to know the form of the word so you know what it says. The word in the Hebrew and the Old Testament says “Elohim”, is exactly like ‘Allahumma’ and it is plural in the sense of respect and its calling on God, ‘O God’, but doesn’t mean plural.
Sheikh Yusuf Estes