Allah is the standard
ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...
word for
GodGod is a deity in theistic and deistic religions and other belief systems, representing either the sole deity in monotheism, or a principal deity in polytheism....
. While the term is best known in the
WestThe Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context...
for its use by
Muslim:A Muslim , , is an adherent of the religion of Islam. The feminine form is Muslimah . Literally, the word means "one who submits ". Muslim is the participle of the same verb of which Islam is the infinitive. Muslims believe that there is only one God, translated in Arabic as Allah...
s as a reference to God, it is used by Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including
ChristianA Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic, religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and the Son of God.The term "Christian" is also used adjectivally to...
s and
JewThe Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
s, in reference to "God". The term was also used by
paganPaganism is a word with several different meanings.In its broadest definition, pagan denotes all non-Abrahamic religions, that is to say it denotes all religions other than Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.Other usages are:*Paganism may mean Polytheism: The group so defined includes most of the...
MeccaMecca , sometimes spelled Makkah is the holiest meeting site of the Islamic religion. The city is modern, cosmopolitan and whilst being closed to non-Muslims is nonetheless ethnically diverse.Islamic tradition attributes the beginning of Mecca to Ishmael's descendants...
ns as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity in
pre-Islamic ArabiaThe history of Pre-Islamic Arabia before the rise of Islam in the 630s is not known in great detail. Archaeological exploration in the Arabian Peninsula has been sparse; indigenous written sources are limited to the many inscriptions and coins from southern Arabia...
.
The concepts associated with the term
Allah (as a deity) differ among the traditions. In pre-Islamic Arabia amongst pagan Arabs,
Allah was not considered the sole divinity, having associates and companions, sons and daughters - a concept which
IslamIslam Islam Islam ( al-’islām,
[There are ten pronunciations of Islam in English, differing in whether the first or second syllable has the stress, whether the s is or , and whether the a is pronounced as in father, as in cat, or (when the stress is on the i) as in the a of sofa...]
thoroughly and resolutely abrogated. In Islam, the name Allah is the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name. All other divine names are believed to refer back to Allah.
Allah is unique, the only Deity,
creator of the universeA creator deity is a deity in a creation myth responsible for the creation of the world .In monotheism, the single God is necessarily also the creator deity, while polytheistic traditions may or may not have creator deities...
and omnipotent. Arab Christians today use terms such as
Allāh al-ʼAb (
الله الأب, "God the Father") to distinguish their usage from Muslim usage. There are both similarities and differences between the concept of God as portrayed in the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible.
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
has a codepoint reserved for
Allāh, = U+FDF2. Many Arabic type fonts feature special ligatures for Allah.
Etymology
The term Allāh
is derived from a contractionContraction may refer to:* Lanthanide contraction, the decrease in size of the ionic radius of lanthanide elements with their growing atomic number ....
of the Arabic definite article al- is the definite article in the Arabic language; a particle whose function is to render the noun on which it is prefixed definite. For example, the word “kitāb” can be made definite by prefixing it with Al-, resulting in “Al-kitāb”...
"the" and "deity, god" to meaning "the [sole] deity, God" (ho theos monos
).
Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languagesThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, including HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
and AramaicAramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship...
. The corresponding Aramaic form is אֱלָהָא in Biblical AramaicBiblical Aramaic is the form of the Aramaic language that is used in the books of Daniel, Ezra and a few other places in the Hebrew Bible and should not be confused with the later Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible known as targumim...
and ܐܰܠܳܗܳܐ or in SyriacSyriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th centuries...
.
The contraction of al-
and in forming the term Allāh
("the god", masculine form) parallels the contraction of al-
and in forming the term Allāt ("the goddess", feminine form).
Pre-Islamic Arabia
In pre-Islamic Arabia, Allah was used by Meccans as a reference to the creator-god, possibly the supreme deity.
Allah was not considered the sole divinity; however, Allah was considered the creator of the world and the giver of rain. The notion of the term may have been vague in the Meccan religion. Allah was associated with companions, whom pre-Islamic Arabs considered as subordinate deities. Meccans held that a kind of kinship existed between Allah and the
jinnIn Islam, a Djinn is a supernatural creature which occupies a parallel world to that of mankind, and together with humans and angels makes up the three sentient creations of Allah...
. Allah was thought to have had sons and that the local deities of al-ʻUzzá,
ManātManat is:* The unit of currency of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan; see Azerbaijani manat and Turkmenistani manat.* The designation of the Soviet ruble in both Azerbaijani and Turkmen.* Manat, the goddess of fate and destiny in pre-Islamic Arabia....
and
al-LātAl-Lat may refer to:*Allat ~ A pre-Islamic Arabian goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca*al-Lat ~ The ancient name for the Sun in Frank Herbert's Dune universe...
were His daughters. The Meccans possibly associated angels with Allah. Allah was invoked in times of distress. Muhammad's father's name was meaning the “servant of Allāh.” or "the slave of Allāh"
Muslims
According to Islamic belief, Allah is the proper name of God, and humble submission to His Will, Divine Ordinances and Commandments is the pivot of the Muslim faith. "He is the only God, creator of the universe, and the judge of humankind." "He is unique (wahid
) and inherently one (ahad
), all-merciful and omnipotent." The Qur'an declares "the reality of Allah, His inaccessible mystery, His various names, and His actions on behalf of His creatures."
In Islamic tradition, there are 99 Names of GodThe 99 Names of Allah, also known as The 99 Most Beautiful Names of God , are the names of God by which Muslims regard God and which are traditionally maintained as described in the Qur'ān, and Sunnah, amongst other places. There is, according to hadith, a special group of 99 names but no...
(al-asma al-husna
lit. meaning: "The best names") each of which evoke a distinct characteristic of Allah. All these names refer to Allah, the supreme and all-comprehensive divine name. Among the 99 names of God, the most famous and most frequent of these names are "the Merciful" (al-rahmanRahman is the transliteration of an Arabic given name الرحمن that comes from the triconsonantal root . In Islam, the name الرحمن is considered most special of the 99 Names of God...
) and "the Compassionate" (al-rahim).
Most Muslims use the untranslated Arabic phrase "
insha' Allah is an Arabic term evoked by Indonesian, Arabic, Malay, Spanish, Wolof, Persian, Bosnian, Albanian, Turkish, Cypriot Greek, Urdu, Hausa, Bengali and many Muslim English, German, and French speakers to indicate hope for an aforementioned event to occur in the future...
" (meaning "God willing") after references to future events. Muslim discursive piety encourages beginning things with the invocation of "
bismillahThere are multiple uses of Bismillah :* Bismillah is first word of the Basmala phrase of Islam.* Bismillah , born in Oruzgan, Afghanistan, in 1952...
"(meaning "In the name of God").
There are certain phrases in praise of God that are favored by Muslims, including "
Subhan-AllahSubhan'Allah is an Arabic phrase often translated as "Glorious is Allah."Said Mohammed bin AbeeBakr Abdulqader al-Razee, in his book "Mukhtar al-Sihah" one of the classic Arabic-wordbooks:...
" (Holiness be to God), "
AlhamdulillahAlhamdulillah or Elhamdulillah is an Arabic phrase meaning "Praise to God" or "All praise belongs to God," similar to the Hebrew phrase Halelu Yah...
" (Praise be to God), "La-il-la-ha-illa-Allah" (There is no deity but God) and "
Allāhu AkbarThe takbīr or takbeer is the Arabic name for the phrase ', . Usually translated "God is great" or "God is [the] greatest," it is a common Arabic expression and is used as both an informal expression of faith and as a formal declaration....
" (God is great) as a devotional exercise of remembering God (zikr). In a Sufi practice known as zikr Allah
(lit. remembrance of God), the Sufi repeats and contemplates on the name Allah
or other divine names while controlling his or her breath.
Others
Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews, use the word "Allah" to mean "God". The Christian Arabs of today have no other word for 'God' than 'Allah'. (Even the Arabic-descended Maltese languageMaltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...
of MaltaMalta , officially the Republic of Malta , is a densely populated developed European country in the European Union. The Southern European island nation is an archipelago that includes the inhabited islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino, along with a number of smaller, uninhabited islands...
, whose population is almost entirely Roman Catholic, uses Alla
for 'God'.) Arab Christians for example use terms Allāh al-ʼab
(الله الأب) meaning God the fatherIn many monotheist religions, God is given the title and attributions of Father. In the Israelite religion and its closest modern relative, Talmudic Judaism, God is called Father because he is the creator, law-giver, and protector...
, Allāh al-ibn
(الله الابن) mean God the son"Son of God" is a phrase found in the Hebrew Bible, various other Jewish texts and the Christian Bible. In the holy Hebrew scriptures, according to Jewish religious tradition, "Son of God" has many possible meanings, referring to angels, or humans or even all mankind...
, and (الله الروح القدس) meaning God the Holy SpiritIn Christianity, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God. In mainstream Christian beliefs he is the third person of the Trinity. As part of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit is equal with God the Father and with God the Son....
(See God in ChristianityIn Christianity, God is the eternal being that created and preserves the universe. The Bible never speaks of God in an impersonal sense. Instead, it refers to him in personal terms — as one who is, who speaks, who sees, hears, acts, and loves. God is understood to have a will and personality...
for the Christian concept of God).
Arab Christians have used two forms of invocations that were affixAn affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
ed to the beginning of their written works. They adopted the Muslim basm-Allah
, and also created their own Trinitized basm-Allah
as early as the eight century CE. The Muslim basm-Allah
reads: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." The Trinitized basm-Allah reads: "In the name of Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God." The
SyriaSyria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south and Israel to the southwest....
c,
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
and
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
invocations do not have the words "One God" at the end. This addition was made to emphasize the
monotheisticIn theology, monotheism is the belief that only one god exists. The concept of "monotheism" tends to be dominated by the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Platonic concept of God as put forward by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite...
aspect of Trinitian belief and also to make it more palatable to Muslims.
According to
Marshall HodgsonMarshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson , was an Islamic Studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. He was also a practicing Quaker....
, it seems that in the pre-Islamic times, some Arab Christians made pilgrimage to the Kaaba, a pagan temple at that time, honoring Allah there as God the Creator.
English and other European languages
The history of the word "Allāh" in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
was probably influenced by the study of
comparative religionComparative religion is a field of religious study that analyzes the similarities and differences of themes, myths, rituals and concepts among the world's religions...
in 19th century; for example,
Thomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.
Coming from a strict Calvinist family,...
(1840) sometimes used the term Allah but without any implication that Allah was anything different from God. However, in his biography of Muhammad (1934),
Tor AndræTor Julius Efraim Andræ was a Swedish scholar of comparative religion and bishop of Linköping from 1936.Coming from a clerical family, Tor Andræ studied Theology at Uppsala University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1917. He became professor of the History of Religions at the University College...
always used the term Allah, though he allows that this 'conception of God' seems to imply that it is different from that of the Jewish and Christian theologies. By this time Christians were also becoming accustomed to retaining the Hebrew term "
YahwehYahweh is the English rendering of יַהְוֶה , a Hebrew vocalization of the Tetragrammaton that was proposed by the Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius in the 19th century. Although this vocalized Hebrew spelling יַהְוֶה is found in no extant Hebrew Manuscript, several English Bibles use the spelling...
" untranslated (it was previously translated as 'the Lord').
Languages which may not commonly use the term Allah to denote a deity may still contain popular expressions which use the word. For example, because of the centuries long
Muslim presence in the Iberian PeninsulaAl-Andalus was the Arabic name given to the parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Arab and North African Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492....
, the word ojalá in the
Spanish languageSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
and oxalá in the
Portuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago...
exist today, borrowed from Arabic (Arabic: إن شاء الله). This word literally means "God willing" (in the sense of "I hope so").
Some Muslims leave the name "Allāh" untranslated in English. Sometimes this comes from a zeal for the Arabic text of the Qur'an and sometimes with a more or less conscious implication that the Jewish and Christian concept of God is not completely true in its details. Conversely, the usage of the term Allah by English speaking non-Muslims in reference to the God in Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson says, can imply that Muslims are worshiping a mythical god named 'Allah' rather than God, the creator. This usage is therefore appropriate, Hodgson says, only for those who are prepared to accept its theological implications.
In other scripts and languages
- Allah in other languages with Arabic script is spelled in the same way. This includes Urdu
Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the two official languages of Pakistan. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of five Indian states...
, PersianPersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq and Bahrain, and has a status of official language in the first three countries under different names...
/DariDari may refer to:* Dari , the literary Persian language variant of Afghanistan* Dari or Dari Persian, the literary form of Early New Persian...
, UyghurUyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language spoken in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Central Asian region administered by China, mainly by the Uyghur ethnic group. It is spoken by 10 million in China, mostly in Xinjiang...
among others. Allah
- Chinese
Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
: 阿拉 Ālā, 安拉 Ānlā; 真主 Zhēnzhǔ (semantic translation), Θεός Theós (God)
- Hebrew: אללה Allah
- Hindi: अल्लाह Allāh
- Japanese
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none have gained general acceptance...
: アラー Arā, アッラー Arrā, アッラーフ Arrāfu
- Korean
Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers. It was formerly written using Hanja, borrowed Chinese characters pronounced in the Korean...
: 알라 Alla
- Russian
Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
, UkrainianUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet....
, ́х Allakh
- Serbian
Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora...
, BelarusianThe Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusian people and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland...
, , Алах
- Thai
Thai is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Kradai language family. The Kradai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and are linked to...
: อัลลอฮ์ Anláw
Comparative religion
Some scholars have suggested that Muhammad used the term Allah in addressing both pagan Arabs and Jews or Christians in order to establish a common ground for the understanding of the name for God, a claim Gerhard Böwering says is doubtful. According to Böwering, in contrast with Pre-Islamic Arabian
polytheismPolytheism is the belief in and worship of multiple deities, called gods and goddesses. These are usually assembled into a pantheon, along with their own mythologies and rituals...
, God in Islam does not have associates and companions nor is there any kinship between God and jinn. Pre-Islamic pagan Arabs believed in a blind, powerful, inexorable and insensible fate over which man had no control. This was replaced with the Islamic notion of a powerful but provident and merciful God.
According to
Francis Edwards PetersFrancis Edward Peters is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and History at New York University.-Works :*The Quest of the Historical Muhammad...
, "The
Qur'anThe Qur’an is the central religious text of Islam...
insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that
MuhammadMuhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh , is the founder of the religion of Islam [ إِسْلامْ ] and is regarded by Muslims as a messenger and prophet of , the last and the greatest law-bearer in a series of Islamic prophets as taught by the...
and his followers worship the same God as the Jews . The Quran's Allah is the same Creator God who covenanted with
AbrahamAbraham is the founding patriarch of the Israelites, Ishmaelites, Midianites and Edomite peoples, as described in the book of Genesis. He is widely regarded as the patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims....
". Peters states that the Qur'an portrays Allah as both more powerful and more remote than Yahweh, and as a universal deity, unlike Yahweh who closely follows
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
ites.
Typography
The word Allāh
is always written without an alif* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
to spell the ā
vowel. This is because the spelling was settled before Arabic spelling started habitually using alif to spell ā
. However, in vocalized spelling, a small diacritic alif
is added on top of the shaddaShadda , is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, marking a long consonant...
h
to indicate the pronunciation.
One exception may be in the pre-Islamic Zabad inscription, where it ends with an ambiguous sign that may be a lone-standing h
with a lengthened start, or may be a non-standard conjoined l-h
:-: This reading would be Allāh
spelled phonetically with alif
for the ā
.: This reading would be Al-ʼilāh
= "the god" (an older form, without contraction), by older spelling practice without alif
for ā
.
Unicode
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
has a codepoint reserved for Allāh
, = U+FDF2.
This character according to the official Unicode specification is a ligature of alif-lām-lām-shadda-(superscript alif)-hā
( U+0627 U+0644 U+0644 U+0651 U+0670 U+0647).
There is, however some confusion arising from the fact that Arabic typography usually features a glyph without the preceding alif, which only occurs phrase-initially (or with in Qur'anic orthography). Consequently, the majority of Arabic UnicodeAs of Unicode 5.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:*Arabic *Arabic Supplement *Arabic Presentation Forms-A *Arabic Presentation Forms-B...
fonts do not conform with the specification and have a glyph without the alif at this position (e.g. those provided by Linotype, the great majority of those licensed to or developed by Microsoft, those of Arabeyes.org, SILSIL, Sil and sil may refer to:In organizations:* SIL International, a global Christian non-profit organization that studies lesser-known languages.* SIL, formerly the American Stock Exchange ticker symbol for Apex Silver Mines....
's Lateef and the fonts of CRULP developed in Pakistan),
while others have the prescribed form with alif (e.g. SIL's Scheherazade, Adobe Arabic distributed with the Middle-Eastern version
of the Adobe Reader 7, Arial Unicode MSIn digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much...
, and Arabic Typesetting, distributed with VOLT and with Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003).
The calligraphic variant of the word used as the Coat of arms of IranThe coat of arms of Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution features a stylized Perso-Arabic script of the word Allah .The logo consists of four crescents and a sword. The four crescents are meant to stand for the word Allah. The five parts of the emblem symbolize the Principles of the Religion....
is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous SymbolsThe Miscellaneous Symbols block of Unicode contains various glyphs representing things from a variety of categories: Astrological, Astronomical, Chess, Dice, Ideological symbols, Musical notation, Political symbols, Recycling, Religious symbols, Trigrams, Warning signs and Weather.-Tables:Note:...
range, at codepoint U+262B .
See also
- Ilah
, is the Arabic for "deity" or "god". The feminine is "goddess"; with the article, it appears as . It appears in the name of the monotheistic god of the Abrahamic religions as , literally "the God", which is paralleled in a feminine form by the pagan divinity "the Goddess". is cognate to...
- Names of God
-Hinduism:Within Hinduism, there are number of names of God which are generally in Sanskrit, each supported by a different tradition within the religion...
- Tawhid
Tawhid is the concept of monotheism in Islam. It holds God is one and unique ....
- Termagant
In Medieval Europe, Termagant was the name given to a god that the Europeans believed Muslims worshipped.-Origin of the concept:European literature from the Middle Ages often referred to Muslims as pagans, or by sobriquets such as the paynim foe...
- Five Pillars of Islam
The Five Pillars of Islam is the term given to the five duties incumbent on every Muslim. These duties are Shahada , Salah , Zakah , Saum and Hajj .These five practices are essential to Sunni Islam; Shi'a Muslims subscribe to eight ritual practices which substantially...
- Kaaba
The Kaaba is a cuboidal building in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and is the most sacred site in Islam. The building predates Islam, and, according to Islamic tradition, the first building at the site was built by Abraham. The building has a mosque built around it, the Masjid al-Haram...
- Prophets of Islam
Muslims regard as prophets of Islam those non-divine humans chosen by Allah . Mere humans rely on revelation or tradition to identify prophets....
External links
Typography