Why Allah is not God

Howard Sutherland writes:

Fr. Andrew Greeley really hit home with his December 2001 column about Islam. I would not have expected it of him. Does writing it make him a clear-eyed liberal? I’m inclined to think of that as a contradiction in terms! I wish GWB, et al., had read the column back when Greeley wrote it.

Still, I wonder about one thing. Greeley said that Allah “by the way is for Muslims the God of Abraham.” Was Greeley saying that is what Moslems believe about Allah? If that is all he was saying, I agree. But if he meant that Allah is the God of Abraham, I don’t think I could agree. This may be ground you have covered at VFR, but it is very controversial. Try laying out what follows to conventional Westerners, and reactions vary from horror to a blank stare. One can’t really think the following without shedding liberal assumptions. Of course it also puts me on the wrong side of Nostra Aetate (a document with no presumption of infallibility), but not—I believe—on the wrong side of the traditional Christian and Catholic and, as far as I know, Jewish belief about the nature of Allah.

Allah as the Koran presents him (never read the Hadith, so can’t comment) does not remind me of the God of the New Testament, nor even of God as the Old Testament presents Him. God may be severe at times, but He is never unfeeling, never indifferent to His human creations. Also, as Pope Benedict said, God is reasonable—indeed, He is Reason itself. His severity is never purposeless. God doesn’t need man’s love, but I believe He desires it to a degree beyond our imagining. God loves us as His creatures, and wants us to love Him. In addition, Christians believe that God’s love is so great that he sacrificed Himself to redeem sinners. God has arranged His creation so that unrepentant sinners are subject to punishment, but that punishment is not His wish for us. It is, however, justice.

Allah, on the other hand (I rely on impressions from reading about him in the Koran), seems entirely unfeeling about his purported human creations and anything they do. He has laid down a book of strict, often capricious-seeming, rules. Unless one follows them exactly and unquestioningly, one is damned to eternal torment and subject to slaughter at the hands of his fearful votaries—and that is how Allah wants it. He rewards those who toe his line exactly, but doesn’t seem to care whether or not one actually does. The seeming indifference makes the punishments for perceived infidelity all the more malicious. If one doesn’t really care whether one’s subjects behave, what reason is there in tormenting them if they don’t? For whatever reason, Allah is not all that interested in redeeming sinners, but in punishing them. Also, would the God who blessed Abraham and his posterity, inspired Moses and (for us Christians) lived among us as Jesus Christ have sent a man like Mohammed as his final messenger and model to man?

So I feel (verb chosen on purpose) that Allah is not an image of the God of Abraham. Maybe a reflection of some bloodthirsty moon-god of an Arabian death cult, or a re-presentation of Moloch? Perhaps Allah and Huitzilopochtli are cousins.

LA replies:

A couple of years ago at VFR I was referring to “God” in the context of the Koran, and a reader corrected me. Since then I consistently speak of the god of Islam as “Allah,” not as God. As Serge Trifkovic points out in a recent article, Allah is so transcendent that he has no relationship with anyone and anything, and therefore is not really a person at all, but rather pure will. Yet the most salient and amazing feature of God as revealed in the Bible is that, in addition to being the creator of the universe, he is a person.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 07, 2006 02:27 PM | Send