Allah

Allah, name in Islam for God. Concepts of the deity in Islam have much in common with those in Judaism and Christianity. God is seen as one, perfect, uncreated, eternal, omnipotent, and as the creator (or for some medieval philosophers the source) of the cosmos. Muslims have customarily emphasized the unity and uniqueness of God above all. In polemics between groups within Islam, and in those directed by Muslims against other monotheistic religions, the charge has often been made that the opponents hold doctrines which are incompatible with the oneness of God.

Conflicting explanations of the origins of the Arabic word Allah, which is related to the name for God in other Semitic languages, have been put forward. The most widely accepted is that it is a contraction of al-ilah, “the god”. It is suggested that the pagan Arabs of pre-Islamic Arabia, although they worshipped many gods, had come to accept that one of them was superior to the others. This god was especially associated with the Kaaba in Mecca, was often referred to simply as “the god”, and the name al-ilah was thus used so often that it developed into the name Allah. Muhammad then used this already existing name to refer to the one and only God whose prophet he was. Attempts by some scholars to explain the name as a borrowing from the Aramaic language or some other language have not been widely accepted.

Other names for God are frequently used in Islam. These are usually expressive of particular qualities or attributes which are predicated of God. Among the best known are al-Rahman (“the Merciful”) and al-Rahim (“the Compassionate”). Traditionally it has been held that there are 99 such names, which together are referred to as “the most beautiful names” Commonly, Muslims are given a personal name which is formed by prefacing one of the names of God with the word abd (“servant of”): Abd Allah, Abd al-Rahman, Abd al-Rahim, etc.

The elaboration of a developed and sophisticated theology, that is, a body of literature which explores problems concerning the nature of God and His relationship with the world, was one of the major achievements of the formative period of Islam. Our earliest securely datable works of Muslim theology come from the 9th century ad (3rd century ah). The discipline of theology in Islam is usually known as kalam (literally “debate” or “argument”) and the concepts, terminology and topics of kalam came to influence Jewish and Christian theology as they developed in Arabic in the Islamic world.

One of the main problems discussed in kalam is whether human acts are freely willed by men or predetermined by God. On the one hand God is seen as the cause and creator of everything, knowing everything and foreseeing everything. On the other hand, it is taught that God will hold men responsible for their acts and reward or punish them accordingly. These two propositions are to some extent contradictory. If one stresses absolutely the power of God, there is the risk of portraying Him as an arbitrary tyrant who torments men merely for His own pleasure. If one stresses human responsibility for actions, there is the risk of denying God's omnipotence.

Some Muslim theologians, notably those belonging to the school known as the Mutazila which flourished in the 9th century, stressed human free will. They argued that justice is a necessary feature of any definition of God and that, since God must be just, human beings must be free in their choice between good and evil. The opponents of the Mutazila argued that that view placed unacceptable limits on the power of God, and they held that justice is not an abstraction independent of God's will. If God wished, He could have established a moral order which is the opposite of the one which actually exists. The duty of human beings is to obey God's law as He has revealed it through the Prophet, without seeking to understand the reasons for God's decisions.

Various compromise positions seeking to maintain both the omnipotence of God and the responsibility of humans for their own acts developed. The best known, and one which was adopted by many Sunni Muslims, is associated with the school of al-Ashari. According to this, God is the creator of everything and therefore the ultimate source of human acts, but the individual human being has responsibility for its acts because he or she “acquires” them. It is the concept of “acquisition” which is the main characteristic of the Ashari approach to the problem of how divine omnipotence is to be reconciled with human free will.

Another problem which occupied Muslim theologians was whether God may be said to have “attributes” and, if so, how they are related to the divine nature or essence. Kalam emerged in an intellectual atmosphere heavily influenced by the philosophical ideas of ancient Greece and the development of them in later antiquity. The distinction between essence and attributes in entities was a characteristic of these ideas. With regard to God, the problem was whether one can talk, for example, of His sight, hearing or speech without implying that He is more than one. If we consider God to have sight as an uncreated attribute distinct from His essence, some claimed, we are in effect saying that there is more than one uncreated entity existing. Since being uncreated is a characteristic only of God, we would be saying that there is more than one god.

The Muslim theologians knew of the doctrine of Christian theology according to which Jesus is the uncreated Word of God, and those who rejected the possibility of uncreated attributes distinct from the divine essence may have been influenced by the wish to avoid what they saw as the polytheism involved in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Once again the theological school of the Mutazila, which emphasized divine unity as well as divine justice, was foremost in rejecting the possibility of God's having uncreated attributes separable from His essence.

The dispute about attributes had a number of aspects. It was associated with an argument about whether the Koran is created or uncreated. The Koran is regarded in Islam as the speech of God (kalam Allah). Since speech is an attribute, the Mutazila and others insisted that the Koran cannot be uncreated but must have been created in time. The traditionalists refused to accept that, and were led to counter the Mutazila by insisting that the Koran is uncreated. The traditionalists were eventually victorious, and their view was accepted into the theology of Sunni Islam. Some other groups of Muslims accept the view that the Koran was created in time.

Another aspect of the dispute concerned the sort of language in which one may talk of God. Traditionally monotheists have been happy to talk of God anthropomorphically. In the Bible and the Koran God is described as sitting on a throne, stretching forth His hand, having a face, etc. The Mutazila and those who shared their views regarded this sort of language as inappropriate and unacceptable. It both implies that God has attributes and, since it compares Him to His creation, leads to a conception of the divinity which is too limited. Some argued, like the Christian adherents of the via negativa, that one cannot say anything positive about God but only what He is not. Connected with this argument about anthropomorphic language was a dispute about whether the believer will see God after death. The traditional view, which refers to a Koranic verse as a proof, is that he will; the Mutazila again thought that this doctrine involved a misconception of the nature of God and sought to explain the Koranic verse as a sort of metaphor.

As in the case of the dispute about divine predetermination and human free will, the initial stark contrast between the Mutazila and their traditionalist opponents eventually led to various compromise traditions. The traditionalists had insisted on the reality of the attributes, but without asking how and without implying any comparison between God and His creatures. The followers of al-Ashari later formulated a doctrine which accepted their reality within the divine essence and insisted that they are not identical with God but also not distinct from Him.

These disputes were not carried on at a purely intellectual and theoretical level. They were connected with political struggles which concerned the fundamental problem of the nature and source of religious authority in Islam. In the first half of the 9th century the Mutazila were supported by the caliphate, and their theological views were upheld as orthodoxy. Eventually, however, their traditionalist opponents, who also opposed the claims of the caliphs to have religious authority in Islam, triumphed. The views of the traditionalists then became dominant in Sunni Islam, where they continued to be developed and systematized in an increasingly sophisticated manner. Many of the views of the Mutazila passed into Shiism and other groups opposed to the Sunnis.

In the early centuries of Islam the existence of God was simply assumed as a self evident fact. By about the 11th century (5th century of the Hegira), however, the development of philosophy by some Muslim thinkers seemed to make a defence of the existence of God necessary. Philosophical thinking had by this time been significantly influenced by Aristotelianism, and Aristotle was understood to have taught that the world was uncreated and eternal. It was probably to combat this doctrine that various arguments for the existence of God came to be formulated. These are very similar to some of those found in Christian theology: arguments stressing the need for a first cause, arguments from the design of the universe, arguments based on the entirely contingent (that is not logically necessary) character of the universe, etc.

There is some truth in the view that theology does not have the same prominence in Islam that it does in Christianity but it would be wrong to underestimate the extent to which Muslims have explored various questions arising from the fundamental tenet that “there is no god but God”.