‘Allah’ is NOT the Name of God

I wrote a letter to the editor of 7Days a year or so go. I signed it UmmAli. I was disgusted by the responses directed at me; the evidence of sheer ignorance of basic local or Arabic terms, as most of the responses referred to me as Mr. Ali.

Granted, I’ve been here over a decade and I’ve probably a little more local interaction than the majority of expatriates here, but it didn’t take any of that for me to want to learn the basics.

For all your information, ‘Umm’ translates to Mother of, when prefixed to a name. Thus, making the name ‘UmmAli’ translate to ‘Mother of Ali’.

Considering this neglect most bitching foreigners have or had to learn the basics about local language, culture, traditions and even religion I thought I’d give you all a short-should-be-learnt-language course.

As mentioned above, ‘Umm’ means ‘mother’ or ‘mother of’; likewise fathers are given the term ‘abu’ or locally pronounced ‘bu’. UmmAli means mother of Ali. BuAli means father of Ali. Kindly remember this in the future.

Since I’m on about pretexts to names I might as well move on to what I’d guess is the most commonly misunderstood word, when it comes to Islam or the Arab world: Allah.

Allah is not the name of God. ‘Allah’ is the Muslim term for God, which can be broken down into two parts; ‘Al’ meaning ‘the’, and ‘Illah’ meaning God. The only difference between the English word for God & the Arabic one is the pretext: ‘The’.

This insures that Arabic word for God can not be used as a plural (Gods), or be given gender (Goddess), in the Arabic language, etc.

It simply amplifies that there is only ONE God. In the Quraan, Allah refers to Himself with multiple names which all reveal His qualities; i.e. the Controller (al-Badi), the Creator (al-Muqit), Knower of all hidden things (al-Batin).

I hope you’ve enjoyed your lesson for the day. I also hope that this might inspire you to continue expanding your UAE cultural understanding on your own.

You can find more basic Islamic terms in the English book A Basic Dictionary of Islam, by Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood, ISBN 81-85063-30-3