The Word "Allah" Is Older Than the Argument About It
A slab of basalt in northern Syria, and what it quietly settles about a question people still fight over.
In the north of Syria, in a village called Zabad, there is a slab of black basalt that once sat above a doorway. It was carved in the year 512, more than a century before the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was born. The people who cut it were Christians, dedicating their small shrine to Saint Sergius, a soldier-saint much loved in that part of the world.
Along the bottom of the stone runs a line of early Arabic. It opens with an invocation before listing the men who paid for the building: with the help of al-ilah. The God. That phrase, al-ilah, is the one that over time contracts and hardens into a single word: Allah.
I find it hard to stand in front of that stone, even in a photograph, and keep believing the thing a lot of people quietly assume â that "Allah" is the name of some rival deity, a god Muslims coined and Christians would never touch. Here it is, cut by Christian hands, a hundred years early.
The word was never anyone's private property. It belongs to a language, and the language is older than the quarrel.
Arabic is a Semitic tongue, close cousin to Hebrew and Aramaic, and its word for God sits in a family you can line up like relatives at a table. Hebrew has El, Eloah, and the plural-of-majesty Elohim, the word standing in the very first sentence of Genesis. Aramaic has Elah. Syriac, the church-language also carved onto that lintel at Zabad, calls God Alaha. Arabic has Allah. One root, many mouths.
And it isn't only old stone. Open an Arabic Bible today and the word printed where an English one says "God" is Allah. The millions of Christians across the Middle East who worship in Arabic have been saying it in prayer and singing it in hymns for as long as they have prayed in that language. When an Arab Christian and a Muslim both say ya Allah, they are not reaching toward two different beings. They are using the same word a shared inheritance handed to both of them.
Islam has never been shy about this. The Quran speaks to Jews and Christians directly and puts them on the same ground: Our God and your God is one, and to Him we submit (Al-'Ankabut 29:46). It does not lay out two rival gods to be untangled. It names one God â the God of Abraham, of Moses, of Jesus â whom all of them were already addressing. On the level of the name, and on the level of who is being called upon, there is genuinely nothing here to divide. The Christian who carved that lintel and the Muslim at prayer are aimed at the same One.
Where the two faiths actually part is not the name. It is the portrait â what each says that One is like.
Islam draws it in a few unbending lines. There is a short chapter of the Quran that Muslims recite more than almost any other: He is God, One. God, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is begotten, and there is none comparable to Him (Al-Ikhlas 112:1â4). Every line closes a door. Oneness with nothing inside it to divide. No father. No son. No equal. This is tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, and it is the thing the whole faith is built to protect.
Christianity, taken at its most careful and not at its most caricatured, is also monotheism â but a monotheism with a mystery set at the center. It confesses one God who exists eternally as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, sharing a single essence. That formulation was hammered out slowly, across centuries, precisely to hold the oneness of God together while affirming that God was fully present in Jesus. Christians who hold it are not counting to three gods, and they would ask you to understand that before anything else.
A Muslim, standing on tawhid, reads that same doctrine as one step past the line â the indivisible made to admit distinction, the Creator joined to the created. That is the disagreement. It is real, and old, and it does not shrink just because both sides say Allah. If you want to see the linguistic thread and the theological fork set down together, OneGodPath has a careful piece on where the two meet and where they separate (opens outside Tumblr).
I keep coming back to that lintel in Zabad. It has sat in the weather for fifteen centuries, most of them long after the fight over "the same God" got loud, and it knows nothing about that fight. It just says al-ilah, the God, in the hand of a Christian who saw no reason the word should belong to anyone but the One it names.
The name was there before the disagreement, and it will outlast it. What the two faiths are really turning over between them is not which God is real, but what His oneness can hold. That is a question worth sitting with, plainly and without heat. And it might sit a little more honestly once you notice that the word you would reach for to argue over was, from the very start, a word the two of you already shared.
