By Dr. David Wilmsen, Director of Arabic & Translation Studies, American University, Cairo
The assertion by some members of the clergy that the god of Islam is not the same god as that worshipped by Christians is disturbing. Not only for the bigotry that it reflects and reinforces, but also for the plain ignorance it betrays. Ignorance of Islam is not in itself a bad thing, and a certain amount of it must be expected in non-Muslim societies. What is unexpected is that such a basic misunderstanding might arise amongst people who may be presumed to have made some formal study of the concept of deity. In order to be ordained into the ministry of most mainstream Christian denominations a candidate must have studied the original languages of the Christian scriptures, those being Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Candidates to the clergy are not necessarily required also to know Arabic, although some do. But it should not be too much to expect of them a certain linguistic sensitivity to evident similarities between the Semitic languages. After all, the study of Arabic in the west has its origins in part in the discipline of comparative Semitics, whose founding purpose was to enable scholars and translators to clarify obscurities in the original Christian and Jewish scriptures by means of reference to related languages.
The Semitic languages, of which Arabic has always been the largest in its number of speakers and geographical distribution, are members of a family once named Hamito-Semitic, for two of the three sons of Noah, Ham and Shem. Now known more properly as Afro-Asiatic, the family includes along with the more familiar Hebrew and Arabic some of the languages of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, and Somalia; the languages of Ancient Egypt including Coptic; and the various Berber languages of North Africa. Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ, is still represented as a minority language in various pockets in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Iraq. Aramaic speakers of Iraqi descent, Christians known as Chaldeans, are present in significant numbers in the Arab community of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab community in the world outside of the Middle East.
All of the Semitic languages descended from a hypothesized original language, called for the sake of convention “proto-Semitic”. This either originated in the Horn of Africa, spread across the Red Sea into South Arabia, whence it radiated into the entire Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, or the opposite, originating in Mesopotamia and moving southward. It is proposed that classical Arabic, of which the Qur’an exhibits the most exquisite ideal, and which is still in use today in a somewhat simplified register in most formal Arabic writing, is the closest approximation as can be gained to proto-Semitic. All the languages that descend from proto languages are considered to be sister languages, with varying degrees of similarity between them. Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic are sister languages in the same way that most of the languages of Europe are (as are their more distant cousins Persian and Pashto); their degree of relatedness is roughly analogous to the Romance languages, sharing as they do much similar morphology and syntax as well as conspicuous cognates in their lexicons.
The Hebrew scriptures refer to God as such by two words. The first to appear, in the book of Genesis, in the well-known rhythmic phrase, whose translation in the English Bible preserves a great deal of the majesty of the source language, is the very generalized Semitic word for the divinity in its local form: “Elohim”. This word is constructed of two parts: the root for divinity /eloh/ and the plural suffix /-im/. The plural ending here does not mean that the ancient Hebrews conceived of God as multiple. Instead it serves as a purely grammatical device, an augmentative, for emphasizing that God is great. The similarity between the generic Semitic term for god /el/, the Hebrew variant /eloh-/, and the Arabic /allaah/ betrays their common origin.
The name of Allah existed in the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam and was used in reference to God by Arab Christians and Jews. It remains in use today in Arabic translations of the Bible along with the word for “Lord”, in Arabic /rabb/ (cognate with rabbi). Arab Muslims, Christians, and Jews continue to use both in reference to God.
An operating principle in translation is to transfer concepts from one culture to another by means of the closest equivalent in the target language to its original meaning in the source text when such an equivalent exists. It might well be argued that the Arabic translations of the Bible are “truer” than those into English or other languages since two of the source languages are sisters to the target language. Many of the source concepts find direct resonance in the target culture. In the Bible and the Qur’an God is one, as is indicated by the unity of His name.
He is the same God.
(David Wilmsen, with a Ph.D. in Arabic language and linguistics, is Director of Arabic and Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo. He learned all the Hebrew he ever knew from his grandfather, William A. Irwin, professor of Biblical languages at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and one of the team of translators of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible).