In a church retreat in Malaysia, as they sang and prayed to Allah with Pentecostal fervor I stood there thinking how some people would easily see it as Islamic. As for me, I have heard of a time there when there was a clamor to forbid Christians and Sikhs from using term ‘Allah’ because Muslims considered it to be the exclusive deity name of their religion. Recently, there emerged a controversy, alleging Brain Houston, the founder of Hillsong Church, who was quoted to have said that in the Old Testament times Muslims worshipped the same God as we Christians do today; it was branded Chrislam.
The objection to the use of Allah is understandable as it is mostly seen as a Muslim thing. But it is also true that the same term does not solely denote the Muslim god. Even in Islamic belief Allah simply means God and is not a nomenclature for a deity specific to a religion. Of course, Muslims say that the God of Abraham is Allah. So in generic terms both Muslims and Jews worship God, just as in any other religious beliefs. Simply put, we cannot deny that religion is about God.
In every society and culture the concept of God exists; even atheists and agnostics will not have any substance in their arguments in the absence of the idea of a god. In Arabic language the word ‘Allah’ is the equivalent of the English term ‘God.’ The Hebrew ‘El’ and the Aramaic ‘Elah’ are equivalents of the Arabic “Allah’. No wonder Arab Christians worship Allah as well. It is a generic word for God which can be used for any god. This is something tribal people like us can easily understand as we have dialects that differ from village to village. So ‘Allah’ is simply ‘God’ as in any other language or dialect.
We can understand this better from the case of the Angami Bible which was originally first brought out by American missionaries. Though the Nagas believe in the existence of many spirits they only worship a supreme spirit which they call God Almighty. In Angami the root term for god is ‘terhruo’. But the missionaries took the term to mean the name of a specific god and rejected its use in their translation.
In its place Jihova which is the transliteration of Yaweh was used. Later, the Angami Baptists coined their own term for God in feminine gender as Ukepenuopfü, which literally translated is ‘our birth mother’. One Naga from an Eastern Naga village told me they too translated their Bible in the same vein under the influence of Angami missionaries, but later found it to be wrong and went back to the original term for God in their dialect.
Some religions have specific names for their deities, but they all come under the generic category of the term ‘God.’ When it comes to language, we have to let God be God and no religion can claim exclusive ownership of the term in any language. This is why I had no problem with the Malaysian Christians worshiping Allah just as I would if they were to sing in English and use God instead. But as for the Angamis, in their next translation of the Bible, they should seriously consider going the way of their Eastern counterpart.