Allah

Outside of the Middle East, it is principally associated with Islam (in which it is also considered the proper name), although the term was used in pre-Islamic Arabia and continues to be used today by Arabic-speaking adherents of any of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism and Christianity.

An inscription using the Ancient South Arabian script in Old Arabic from Qaryat al-Fāw reads, "to Kahl and lh and ʿAththar (b-khl w-lh w-ʿṯr)".

[32] The Syriac word ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) can be found in the reports and the lists of names of Christian martyrs in South Arabia,[33][34] as reported by antique Syriac documents of the names of those martyrs from the era of the Himyarite and Aksumite kingdoms[35] In an inscription of Christian martyrion dated back to 512, references to al-ilah (الاله)[36] can be found in both Arabic and Aramaic.

[37][38] Archaeological excavation quests have led to the discovery of ancient pre-Islamic inscriptions and tombs made by Arab Christians in the ruins of a church at Umm el-Jimal in Northern Jordan, which initially, according to Enno Littmann (1949), contained references to Allah as the proper name of God.

[42] According to Shahid, on the authority of 10th-century Muslim scholar Al-Marzubani, "Allah" was also mentioned in pre-Islamic Christian poems by some Ghassanid and Tanukhid poets in Syria and Northern Arabia.

According to the Quran exegete Ibn Kathir, Arab pagans considered Allah as an unseen God who created and controlled the Universe.

Pagans believed worship of humans or animals who had lucky events in their life brought them closer to God.

[10] According to that hypothesis, the Kaaba was first consecrated to a supreme deity named Allah and then hosted the pantheon of Quraysh after their conquest of Mecca, about a century before the time of Muhammad.

[10] Some scholars have suggested that Allah may have represented a remote creator god who was gradually eclipsed by more particularized local deities.

[57] Pre-Islamic pagan Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, inexorable and insensible fate over which man had no control.

[12] According to Francis Edward Peters, "The Qur'ān insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (29:46).

According to Islamic belief, Allah is the most common word to represent God,[57] and humble submission to his will, divine ordinances and commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith.

The concept correlates to the Tawhid, where chapter 112 of the Qur'an (Al-'Ikhlās, The Sincerity) reads:[67]قُلْ هُوَ ٱللَّهُ أَحَدٌ ۝ ٱللَّهُ ٱلصَّمَدُ۝ لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ ۝ وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ ۝١ In a Sufi practice known as dhikr Allāh (Arabic: ذِكر الله, lit.

[70] Umar Faruq Abd-Allah urged English-speaking Muslims to use God instead of Allah for the sake of finding "extensive middle ground we share with other Abrahamic and universal traditions".

[60] Most Muslims use the Arabic phrase in shā'a llāh (meaning 'if God wills') untranslated after references to future events.

[71] Muslim discursive piety encourages beginning things with the invocation of bi-smi llāh (meaning 'In the name of God').

[75] 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.

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.

[79] 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.

[90][91] The government of Malaysia in 2007 outlawed usage of the term Allah in any other but Muslim contexts, but the Malayan High Court in 2009 revoked the law, ruling it unconstitutional.

[92] In early 2014 the Malaysian government confiscated more than 300 bibles for using the word to refer to the Christian God in Peninsular Malaysia.

[94][95] The main reason it is not prohibited in these two states is that usage has been long-established and local Alkitab (Bibles) have been widely distributed freely in East Malaysia without restrictions for years.

Unicode has a code point reserved for Allāh, U+FDF2 ﷲ ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM, in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block, which exists solely for "compatibility with some older, legacy character sets that encoded presentation forms directly";[101][102] this is discouraged for new text.

Instead, the word Allāh should be represented by its individual Arabic letters, while modern font technologies will render the desired ligature.

The calligraphic variant of the word used as the emblem of Iran is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at code point U+262B (☫).