If Muslims Called Allah ‘God,’ Would the U.S. Be More Respectful?

In November 2001, two months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a letter to the editor suggesting that the news media might stop using the word “Allah” to refer to the deity worshiped by Muslims.

“I would like to point out that the Arabic word ‘Allah,’ which is often erroneously perceived by many as some kind of a ‘Muslim God,’ is merely a translation of the word ‘God,’ ” wrote Nash Khatri, noting that “even Christian (i.e., non-Muslim) Arabs refer to God as ‘Allah,’ when speaking in Arabic.” The suggestion went nowhere, and in another letter two years later even Khatri acknowledged that “Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc., all define God differently in terms of what God expects from them here and what he will have for them in the afterlife.”

Still, Khatri wasn’t alone in his idea that post-Sept. 11 prejudices against Muslim Americans might be mitigated by recognizing that “Allah” and “God” are one and the same. No less a Christian than George W. Bush said at the time: “I believe we worship the same God.”

Bush deserves credit for trying to tamp down anti-Muslim attitudes after 9/11, though his grasp of Islamic teaching seemed superficial, as if he had been consulting a Good News Koran from which all of the provocative passages had been removed. In any event, his equation of Allah and the God of Jews and Christians never achieved the traction the president intended.

Whether or not a Koran was desecrated at Guantanamo Bay, as Newsweek magazine reported recently before issuing a retraction, no one doubts that it could have happened. (Remember Gen. William Boykin, a deputy undersecretary of Defense who suggested that Allah is not a “real God” and told Christian congregations how he was strengthened in his battle with a Muslim warlord in Somalia by his conviction that “my god was bigger than his”?)

In fact, far from encouraging Muslims, Jews and Christians to view themselves as fellow children of Abraham, Bush’s comments -- and others like them -- have occasioned a debate in academic and religious circles about whether “God” and “Allah” are really one and the same.

In Bush’s corner are scholars who note that more than etymology united the deities of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. (“Allah” and “Elohim,” a Jewish name for God, have common roots.)

“I think you would find both Jewish and Muslim theologians who would acknowledge it’s the same divinity that is worshiped by the two communities,” said Ronald Kiener, an expert in Jewish and Islamic mysticism at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “Standing outside of those traditions as a historian, I would say that the same Semitic God is being worshiped in the two religions.”

The God of both traditions, Kiener said, “created the world for good to be made manifest, a God who has given commands to people to have them behave in a certain ethical way.”

Yet other scholars -- Jewish, Christian and Muslim -- stress the differences. In his contribution to a symposium on the subject in Christian Century magazine, Jon D. Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, acknowledged the commonalities in the three faiths’ view of God but went on to say that they added up to a supreme being “who is closer to the God of the philosophers than to the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob.”

A Muslim contributor to the Christian Century forum, Umar Abd-Allah, agreed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, but he worried about the “political setting for discussing such a topic and its possible bearing on human lives.” A Christian contributor, J. Dudley Woodberry of Fuller Theological Seminary, agreed that “Christians, Muslims and Jews as monotheists refer to the same Being when they refer to God -- the Creator God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob. But in significant ways they do not have the same understanding about him, even though they also agree in significant ways.”

Christian views of Allah are not monolithic, of course. The Vatican, for example, is more willing to emphasize common ground with Muslims than are some evangelical Protestants, though some Muslims were disappointed that Pope Benedict XVI didn’t reach out to them in his inaugural sermon.

Given the tendency of theologians to dwell on the differences among the Islamic, Jewish and Christian concepts of God, it’s not surprising that Bush’s less than nuanced assertion that “we worship the same God” hasn’t inoculated Americans against religious prejudices.

Perhaps the message of the outrage over the alleged flushing of the Koran teaches a harder but more useful lesson about religious tolerance: It is a matter not of shared beliefs but of respect for differences.