My (earnest, irate) thoughts

Language is not enough, but it’s all we have. Because I don’t want my experience of God to be a solely emotional one, I feel the need to talk, to write, to otherwise recount what’s going on inside.

When the prophet Muhammad brought the message of one God to the Arabs, beginning in 610 CE, he called the Divine “Allah” … ilah means little-g god or one that is worshipped, so saying Allah is like saying The God or The One Who is worshipped. Though the Arabic language has a lot of lovely features — a rich vocabulary, genderless pronouns and an unchanged alphabet — it is not the only language that God hears.

See, sometimes Arabic is to Muslims what Latin was to medieval Christians and English is to American evangelicals. Well-meaning folks tend to feel so close to God that they begin to think they know the only way to God. Some Muslims even protest calling Allah “God” because in English, the word can be easily pluralized with an “s” or undercut with a small g. But how these native Muslims expect English-speakers to feel the word “Allah” the way they feel Lord or God is a mystery.

God is infinite. And God painted people in different hues, speaking different tongues and finding peace in different rituals, so that in knowing each other, we could begin to grasp the bigness of ‘infinite’. To imagine that God is more ‘pleased’ by the sound of Arabic is absurd, like saying God is more pleased by the sight of blond hair.

Because language is so important to me, I am skeptical when non-Arabic speaking Muslims recite duas in Arabic, when those personal conversations with God might be more meaningful in the language that speaks to one’s heart. (To be fair, many non-Arabic Muslims do grow up with many Arabic words. Like my husband, Yusuf, a Turk who feels the word Allah the way I feel the word God and who feels elhamdulillah the way I feel praise the Lord.) I suppose it irks me because I was a non-Catholic Christian before, and I vehemently protested the fact that it took the Catholics so long to realize that performing mass in a dead language was elitist and pointless.

But sometimes I think American evangelicals try to do the same thing with English, saying this “Muslim Allah” is not their God. They seem ethnocentric, which seems slightly more outrageous than Muslims with Arabic, since the Qur’an was at least revealed in that tongue. Though the Bible wasn’t even translated into English until 1382, many English-speakers who call the Divine “God” seem to reject any other word for Him/Her/It. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that Jesus spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that he called the Divine “Alaha.”

I find these scandals of particularity very disheartening on both sides. I love English, with its habit of absorbing words from other languages, its ever-evolving vocabulary. And I love Islam, with its breadth and depth and light. It’s sad that the two don’t “meet” more often.