Who is the “god” Allah?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hawkeye916
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
If a Moslem walks into a church and finds some people adoring the Blessed Sacrament he will say that

(A) That is an inanimate object, it is a sin to worship it and if you do you are not worshipping Allah

(B) Even if you think that piece of bread is Jesus, Jesus was only a man, it is a sin to worship him and if you do you are not worshiping Allah.
 
Last edited:
Maximian said:
If a Moslem walks into a church and finds some people adoring the Blessed Sacrament he will say that

(A) That is an inanimate object, it is a sin to worship it and if you do you are not worshipping Allah

(B) Even if you think that piece of bread is Jesus, Jesus was only a man, it is a sin to worship him and if you do you are not worshiping Allah.
Click to expand...
Correct. Jews would say the exact same thing.
 
Inquiry said:
It’s not a heresy since Muslims do not claim to be Christian. By the same token, Jews are not heretics when they reject Christ.
Click to expand...
Also, neither Muhammad nor his parents were Christian. They are held to have been Hanif; that is, belonging to a pure monotheism that came down from Abraham through Ishmael. In other words, Islam sees itself as a monotheistic religion that recognizes Jesus as a prophet of God rather than as a group that emerged from Christianity in a way similar to how Christianity emerged from Judaism.

Since Islam is not a version of Christianity that formed by embracing errors about the Christian faith, it is not a Christian heresy.
 
Last edited:
PetraG said:
Also, neither Muhammad nor his parents were Christian. They are held to have been Hanif; that is, belonging to a pure monotheism that came down from Abraham through Ishmael
Click to expand...
Yes, but it’s said that Muhammad interfaced with Catholic (or Oriental Orthodox) monks and had access to the Christian Scriptures.

While enough time has passed & we might consider it a totally separate religion today, it is important to realize that early Christians did view it as a Christological Heresy.

The reason why I think this is important, is because it afrims the position that the Catholic Church has taught for centuries that the Muslims worship the same God as Christians & Jews; and that this is not at newer teaching.
 
Last edited:
Here’s an interesting related point:

Not all rebellions against the Catholic Church started inside the Church, but some happened outside. One in particular, which is still with us to this day, is Mohammedanism, more commonly known as Islam. This “revolt”, of sorts, greatly twisted the truths found in Christian (and even in Jewish) theology. Catholic author and historian Hilaire Belloc called Islam “the great and enduring heresy of Mohammed”. It would be good to shed light on what he means here, and what such an assertion means for us as Catholics in the twenty-first century.
Click to expand...
 
LovelyLadybug said:
Allah is the God worshipped my Muslims. It’s the same God Catholics worship. They just give him a different name. It’s the same thing with Yahweh. All the Abrahamic Religions worship the same God. 🙂
Click to expand...
It’s not even a different name. It’s the same name but in another language. Allah is the Arabic version of the fellow semitic word El in Hebrew and the Aramaic Elaha (which is why Allah and El sound similar, as Arabic and Hebrew have common origins). Arab Christians refer to God as Allah because that is simply the Arabic name for God just as God is the English word for God.
 
Do Muslims view this “Allah” as we do God? No they don’t. They do not see him as their Father in heaven, but as some sort of controlling being that needs to be appeased. Their “Allah” and our God are not the same.
 
phil19034 said:
Yes, but it’s said that Muhammad interfaced with Catholic (or Oriental Orthodox) monks and had access to the Christian Scriptures.
Click to expand...
Unless we think he drew all of his knowledge of Our Lord out of thin air, of course he had to have had encounters with the proclamation of the Gospel, since he hailed Jesus as a prophet. Yes, he failed to accept the Gospel. What he did not do, as nearly as I can tell, is to reject the faith after baptism. The Islamic understanding is that he recognized Jesus as a prophet, rather than as the savior.

Just as the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, of course there have always been people who worshipped the God of Abraham without being Jewish or Christian. Islam did arise in a region of the world that had that kind of monotheistic worship that would recognize the God worshipped by the Jews as the self-same One True God that they themselves worshipped. In other words, the Gentile believers of ancient times didn’t automatically have a faith in the One True God that always died out from having been separated from the descendants of Jacob.
 
Last edited:
First, as people have pointed out, but bears repeating, “Allah” is merely the Arabic name for God in the same way “Dios” is the Spanish name for God. Arabic Christians pray to Allah.

As for the question itself, I believe it is accurate to say that the God of Islam is the same God as that in Christianity in the same sense that the God of the Arians is the same God as that in Trinitarian Christianity.
 
Last edited:
Same God. Vastly different understanding. A bazillion threads here on this.

If you are an Arabic-speaking Catholic, you call God Allah, that being the Arabic word for “God.”
 
Im not sure that you can conclude much from the name used by Moslems. Satanists address the devil by the name adonai, which is used by Jews to address God.

The issue is whether the attributes of the being they worship are the same.

In the case of the Jews the answer is yes. They have the Old Testament whose opening verses set out the Trinitarian nature of God.

But Moslems do not have the Old Testament. Even the selective stories preserved in the Koran which have an OT origin are altered. Things that their god demands of them are impossible for the true God. They themselves deny the existence of two persons of the Trinity, in other words they themselves say we do not worship their god.
 
Last edited:
phil19034 said:
it’s said that Muhammad interfaced with Catholic (or Oriental Orthodox)
Click to expand...
It’s said by whom? As a boy he was influenced by Nestorians. Later he engaged in a political treaty with the Christians of Najran which his successors repudiated, but which is of no doctrinal value to this discussion.

There is also speculation (but no certainty) that he may have been influenced by Ebionites who denied Jesus’ divinity. But there is no evidence that he was influenced by the Catholic Church.
 
Last edited:
Maximian said:
“Oriental Orthodox” is a meaningless anachronism
Click to expand...
Oriental Orthodox refers to those Eastern Churches who discontinued communion with the broader Christian (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) community due to the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
 
I don’t claim otherwise. I just claim that the fact Muslims do not believe in the Real Presence has no bearing on the question posed by this thread.

Jews do not believe Jesus is God not in the Real Presence. Yet we do not question which God they worship.
 
Jews do not, indeed, believe that Jesus is God. But jewish interpretations of the Creation include a Trinitarian explanation of God.
 
Are you claiming Jews believe in a Trinity, three persons in one God? Could you sight evidence if this? I have visited with a very knowledgeable Jew, and he claimed they saw the Trinity as violating monotheism.

Loading…

jewsforjudaism.org
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top