Originally Posted by
Black Man
Allah
The term Allah has an expansive history in terms of the meaning of the word. It should be mentioned at this point that Arabic is related to the whole family of Semitic languages. Therefore words that appear in Arabic often times appear in Hebrew or Aramaic. Allah is one of those words.
In fact, the name given to the God of the Torah is a manifestation of the word Allah. Every time that you see God in the English bible it is a place marker for the word El/Eloah or Elohiem. In actuality the E should be an A (Aleph in Hebrew) making Al or Alohiem. The reason that it was changed was due to the Masoretic Jewish scholars transforming the essential text. Al is a contraction of the word Allah. Where Alohiem is a plural manifestation of said word.
Many, mistakenly, have translated Allah to be a contraction of al (proper noun marker in Arabic) and ilah (one of the forms of the phoneme of Allah) so that it means “the god”. The problem inherent from casual observation is that the word God is of Gothic origin. Gothic is a much younger language complex then Arabic. Therefore it is impossible for the son to give birth to the father. Allah actually is a word in and of its self and is not a contraction.
In digging deeper into the history of said phoneme you will find it appearing in Mdw Ntr (Ancient Egyptian) as Rh/Ra (La), ar (al), and Heru/Hr (Ala). Amongst the Akkad you will find it written as iluh. Amongst the Canaanites it is written as il. There is no mystery as to the proliferation of this term in that area as Egypt gave Phoenicia their alphabet system. From that point you have a proto-Semitic script dividing into it's various offshoots. In viewing the whole scope of the word Allah what you begin to have is an etymology that goes beyond Arabic into proto-Arabic. All of these manifestations of the word Allah mean roughly the same thing, which is powerful, strong, light, or mighty. The only difference in this phoneme is it’s spelling from language to language. In actuality when one lines up ilu, ilah, ala, allah, al, etc…one can realize that it is no more then a regional pronunciation. This is similar to the regional intonations of someone from Boston vs. someone from the Deep South.
The term at no time was historically exclusive only to the concept of a formless astral deity. In fact in many cases it was used as a title for a person who performed great things. In this case etymology does not denote usage because the phoneme is not that inclusive. It is a little "vague". This is because, despite what the Western religious, anthropologic, or historic scholars tell you, just because a word is used by some now to mean an anthropomorphic abstract deity does not mean that is the way a specific cultures in the past originally utilized the word. The current Western thought is that all societies start out personifying natural forces and then evolve to develop an abstract deity that is inclusive of all of these forces (monotheism). They actually present this as gospel. There is another direction by which a deity may just be a deified ancestor. In this case it is only later that the people dealt with abstractions. In fact there is many examples of God as man and man as God. Interpretation of a word according to a worldview plays a huge part in attributing a particular connotation to words and names. We do know that early amongst many of the societies that have this phoneme that it became a proper name (Canaan, Middle East, etc.).
So in summation of the word Allah the etymology is modified by the usage during various times and in specific societies. The meaning is totally dependent on the one who is utilizing the word. Therefore, once again, it does not necessarily have a religious meaning as given by the followers of Al-Islam. Nor does it have an origin that begins with the religion of orthodox Al-Islam as brought by Muhammad Ibn Abdullah.
