The Name and the Named: Allah or God
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66207/jis.v18i1.233Keywords:
Allah, al-Bayḍāwī, dhikr, Divine Name, Gibril Fouad Haddad, God, Islamic English, Khodā, lafẓ, maʿnā, and musammā, language and revelation, Muslim cultural formation, Qurʾān translation, Qurʾānic semantics, semantic transformation, tawḥīd, Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, William C. ChittickAbstract
This essay examines the use of Allah and “God” in English through the relation between lafẓ (word), maʿnā (meaning), and musammā (the Named). Beginning from a personal editorial encounter surrounding the publication of the first volume of the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān (IEQ) in 2013, and from an influential essay by Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, it argues that identity of intended Referent does not establish identity of meaning and that Allah and “God” cannot therefore be treated as fully interchangeable names.
The essay traces the pre-Qurʾānic use of Allah, the Qurʾān’s transformation of the semantic world surrounding the Name, and the classical understanding of Allah as the all-comprehensive Name that gathers the Divine Names and Attributes. It brings this tradition into conversation with William Chittick’s formulation that “only Allah is truly a universal name” and Toshihiko Izutsu’s description of Allah as the Qurʾān’s “one supreme focus-word.” The historical Islamization of the Persian Khodā, together with the later displacement of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu by English, then provides the basis for asking what it would mean for English itself to become an Islamic language: not simply a vehicle into which Islamic meanings are translated, but a receiving language whose semantic structures are transformed by revelation.
This question is tested through Gibril Fouad Haddad’s recent The Meanings of the Inimitable Quran, which ordinarily renders Allah as “the One God” while explicitly permitting Islamic Arabic vocabulary to enter English untranslated. Particular attention is given to Q 2:163 and Q 112:1–2, where the Qurʾān distinguishes the Divine Name from propositions concerning Divine Oneness. Read alongside al-Bayḍāwī, Haddad’s principal exegetical guide, these passages show that a true theological description of the Named is not thereby equivalent to the revealed Name. The problem, therefore, is not finally how to make Allah fit English, but how to make English capable of receiving Allah.
The essay concludes by moving from translation, semantic transformation, and public representation to dhikr: Allah is not merely a word to be rendered or defended, but the Name by whose remembrance the heart is formed.
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