Allah and Syriac in the late antique period and prior to the Arab invasion

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), May 4, 2008 at 07:47

Mark wrote

It seems many people have the Syriac usage in mind when the say that Allah was used by Christians before Muhammad, but that is very sloppy linguistics.

Thanks for your response, but I just wanted to expand a bit here. If you mean by Christians here (in the late antique period) Arabic speakers (and there were indeed many Arab tribes living in the Syria and in Mesopotamia prior to the Arab invasion in 633CE) then it would not surprise me if they used the word Allah (from Arabized Alaha/Allaha). Almost all Christians in the late antique period in Syria and Mesopotamia were Syriac speakers and would have used the word alaha/allaha for God and there is no doubt in my mind that there are indeed many Syriac words (as would be excepted) in the Qur'an

And do not forget that the genius of the Arabic grammar is that you can incorporate just about any word into Arabic and it would sound as a perfect Arabic word ,and that is indeed what Huenin ibn Ishaq did when he translated the Greek learning from Greek to Syriac and then to Arabic and Arabized Greek words and terms that did not exist in Arabic at that time (3rd century of islam), and made them perfect Arabic words based of Sibawayhe's (the fahter of Arabic grammar) F3L so sputum becomes balgham in Arabic and a perfect Arabic word (and you will find it in ibn Manzur's Lisan al-Arab dictionary), albeit an Arabized word and a word that the generation of Muhammad would have had no clue about what it really means.

As for zzazz's claim that Christian Arabs must have used the word Allah based on an inscription where you will not even find the word Allah (the second word in the inscription is al-ilah or the God) is sloppy reading of historical literature

But again like anything in the history of Islam we will never know what really happened

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