A friend I met in Minneapolis this past summer, Mr. Tamim Saidi, recently sent me a link to his article, My God or Your Lord: Whom Should We Worship? where he offers his experience and perspective as a Muslim speaking on this important question that many ask regarding Islam and Christianity, “Is Allah the same as God?” If you’ve read A Deadly Misunderstanding, you are familiar with how I answer this question. Though I once believed wholeheartedly that Allah was a false god, through my experience and research I have found “Allah” simply the name for God in Arabic, used by both Christians and Muslims through the Arab world and moreover, Jesus our Lord used the nearly identical “Alaha” in his Aramaic language.  I thought you would be interested in hearing a similar perspective from a Muslim point of view. He begins:

“I still vividly remember one of my very first Islam 101 presentations shortly after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. It was in a school auditorium in one of the northern Twin Cities suburbs.

Immediately after the teacher introduced me and before I had finished my first sentence, I noticed a hand raised high from a young man who asked, “Why is your God better than my God?”

I was rather surprised by this question so early in the presentation, as I had planned to talk about the Islamic understanding of God around the middle of my presentation.  I tried to explain that Muslims believe in the One and the only God, the Creator of the universe–the same God that Jews and Christians believe in.  I further explained that Muslims believe in the same God that the Prophet Abraham, peace be upon him (p) believed in.  We worship the same God that spoke to Moses (p) and we pray and prostrate to the very same God that Jesus (p) prayed to and prostrated to; the same God that created Adam and Eve and the same God that saved Noah (p) from the flood.

So my God is your God and your Creator is my Creator, even though we might explain God in different terms.  Understanding this could have saved thousands of lives, and could have helped people of different faiths grow closer together.”

Tamim goes on to offer several examples from language, culture and religion that help to demystify the questions that cause many to ask if Allah and God are one and the same.  If you have lingering questions on this topic, you will find his perspective helpful.

Because of so much misunderstanding, I often find myself pointing out through various means that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Can there be more than one Creator of the Universe? The misunderstanding of who we believe the other to worship often sets us up from the beginning with feelings of discomfort and mistrust which derail friendships before they begin! In all our striving to understand, we may miss the first thing God teaches us: to love our neighbor, to treat others as ourselves. Tamim finishes with a story reminding of the value of embracing humility when attempting to understand the infinite King of Kings:

“There is an ancient and very interesting Muslim understanding, perhaps another analogy or another parallel about understanding God. It is said that, when visiting a King, a peasant will have to ride his ass or horse (or, in our times, his Avalanche or his Honda) to the door of the castle, then leave his ass behind (or park his Avalanche), and meet the King on his own.  Even though our super-smart brains are designed to get us pretty far in understanding our Lord; at a certain point, it cannot get us any closer to understanding the King of kings. So we have to check our brains at the door of the castle. At that point, our heart and our intuition might get us a bit closer, if allowed by the King.

Thus God is beyond our imagination, and better than the best of the best that our super-smart brains can envision.”