ALLAH
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Written by
Asma Afsaruddin
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Last Updated: Apr 3, 2025 • Article HistoryArabic: Allāh (“God”)
Allah, the one and only God in Islam.
Etymologically, the name Allah is probably a contraction of the Arabic al-Ilāh, “the God.” The name’s origin can be traced to the earliest Semitic writings in which the word for god was il, el, or eloah, the latter two used in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Allah is the standard Arabic word for God and is used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews as well as by Muslims. The association of the word specifically with Islam comes from the special status of Arabic as the language of Islam’s holy scripture, the Qurʾān: since the Qurʾān in its original language is considered to be the literal word of God, it is believed that God described himself in the Arabic language as Allāh (which is written as الله). The Arabic word thus holds special significance for Muslims, regardless of their native tongue, because the Arabic word was spoken by God himself.
Allah is the pivot of the Muslim faith. The Qurʾān stresses above all Allah’s singularity and sole sovereignty, a doctrinal tenet indicated by the Arabic term tawḥīd (“oneness”). He never sleeps or tires, and, while transcendent, he perceives and reacts to everything in every place through the omnipresence of his divine knowledge. He creates ex nihilo and is in no need of a consort, nor does he have offspring. Three themes preponderate in the Qurʾān: (1) Allah is the Creator, Judge, and Rewarder; (2) he is unique (wāḥid) and inherently one (aḥad); and (3) he is omnipotent and all-merciful. Allah is the “Lord of the Worlds,” the Most High; “nothing is like unto him,” and this in itself is to the believer a request to adore Allah as the Protector and to glorify his powers of compassion and forgiveness.Britannica QuizWorld Religions & Traditions
Allah, says the Qurʾān, “loves those who do good,” and two passages in the Qurʾān express a mutual love between him and humanity. Although he is infinitely forgiving, according to the Qurʾān, there is one infraction that God will not forgive in the hereafter: the sin of associationism, or polytheism (shirk). The God of the Qurʾān proclaims himself to be the one and the same as the God who has communicated with humanity through his various emissaries (rusul) who came to different communities, including the Jewish and Christian prophets.
Muslim scholars have collected, in the Qurʾān and in the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), the 99 “most beautiful names” (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā) of Allah, which describe his attributes. These names have become objects of devoted recitation and meditation. Among the names of Allah are the One and Only, the Living One, the Subsisting (al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm), the Real Truth (al-Ḥaqq), the Sublime (al-ʿAẓīm), the Wise (al-Ḥakīm), the Omnipotent (al-ʿAzīz), the Hearer (al-Samīʿ), the Seer (al-Baṣīr), the Omniscient (al-ʿAlīm), the Witness (al-Shahīd), the Trustee (al-Wakīl), the Benefactor (al-Raḥmān), the Merciful (al-Raḥīm), the Utterly Compassionate (al-Raʾūf), and the Constant Forgiver (al-Ghafūr, al-Ghaffār).
The profession of faith (shahādah) by which a person is introduced into the Muslim community consists of the affirmation that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. For pious Muslims, every action is opened by an invocation of the divine name (basmalah). The formula in shāʾa Allāh, “if Allah wills,” appears frequently in daily speech. This formula is the reminder of an ever-present divine intervention in the order of the world and the actions of human beings. Muslims believe that nothing happens and nothing is performed unless it is by the will or commandment of Allah, although humans are individually responsible for the moral choices they make at any given moment. As signified by the term Islam, the personal attitude of a Muslim believer, therefore, is a conscious submission to God. Such submission is not blind and passive but should be purposeful and based on the knowledge of God and his commandments through his revelations.
Asma AfsaruddinThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Also known as: Al-Islām
Written by
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Fazlur Rahman•All
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Article HistoryKey People: MuhammadMuḥammad I AskiaIbn TaymiyyahRuhollah KhomeiniAurangzebRelated Topics: Islamic artsIslamic worldIslamic literatureʿushrmissions
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Islam, major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century ce. The Arabic term islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental religious idea of Islam—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of islām) accepts surrender to the will of Allah (in Arabic, Allāh: God). Allah is viewed as the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allah, to which human beings must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures, the Qurʾān (often spelled Koran in English), which Allah revealed to his messenger, Muhammad. In Islam Muhammad is considered the last of a series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus), and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the “revelations” attributed to earlier prophets.
Retaining its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism and a strict adherence to certain essential religious practices, the religion taught by Muhammad to a small group of followers spread rapidly through the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay Peninsula, and China. By the early 21st century there were more than 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. Although many sectarian movements have arisen within Islam, all Muslims are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community.
This article deals with the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam and with the connection of religion and society in the Islamic world. The history of the various peoples who embraced Islam is covered in the article Islamic world.
The foundations of Islam
The legacy of Muhammad
From the very beginning of Islam, Muhammad had inculcated a sense of brotherhood and a bond of faith among his followers, both of which helped to develop among them a feeling of close relationship that was accentuated by their experiences of persecution as a nascent community in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the Qurʾānic revelation and the conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islamic religious practices cemented this bond of faith. In 622 ce, when the Prophet migrated to Medina, his preaching was soon accepted, and the community-state of Islam emerged. During this early period, Islam acquired its characteristic ethos as a religion uniting in itself both the spiritual and temporal aspects of life and seeking to regulate not only the individual’s relationship to God (through conscience) but human relationships in a social setting as well. Thus, there is not only an Islamic religious institution but also an Islamic law, state, and other institutions governing society. Not until the 20th century were the religious (private) and the secular (public) distinguished by some Muslim thinkers and separated formally in certain places such as Turkey.
This dual religious and social character of Islam, expressing itself in one way as a religious community commissioned by God to bring its own value system to the world through the jihād (“exertion,” commonly translated as “holy war” or “holy struggle”), explains the astonishing success of the early generations of Muslims. Within a century after the Prophet’s death in 632 ce, they had brought a large part of the globe—from Spain across Central Asia to India—under a new Arab Muslim empire.Britannica QuizIslam
The period of Islamic conquests and empire building marks the first phase of the expansion of Islam as a religion. Islam’s essential egalitarianism within the community of the faithful and its official discrimination against the followers of other religions won rapid converts. Jews and Christians were assigned a special status as communities possessing scriptures and were called the “people of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious autonomy. They were, however, required to pay a per capita tax called jizyah, as opposed to pagans, who were required to either accept Islam or die. The same status of the “people of the Book” was later extended in particular times and places to Zoroastrians and Hindus, but many “people of the Book” joined Islam in order to escape the disability of the jizyah. A much more massive expansion of Islam after the 12th century was inaugurated by the Sufis (Muslim mystics), who were mainly responsible for the spread of Islam in India, Central Asia, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa (see below).
Beside the jihad and Sufi missionary activity, another factor in the spread of Islam was the far-ranging influence of Muslim traders, who not only introduced Islam quite early to the Indian east coast and South India but also proved to be the main catalytic agents (beside the Sufis) in converting people to Islam in Indonesia, Malaya, and China. Islam was introduced to Indonesia in the 14th century, hardly having time to consolidate itself there politically before the region came under Dutch hegemony.
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The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islam (an estimated total of more than 1.5 billion persons worldwide in the early 21st century) has produced important internal differences. All segments of Muslim society, however, are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community. With the loss of political power during the period of Western colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of the Islamic community (ummah), instead of weakening, became stronger. The faith of Islam helped various Muslim peoples in their struggle to gain political freedom in the mid-20th century, and the unity of Islam contributed to later political solidarity.
Sources of Islamic doctrinal and social views
Islamic doctrine, law, and thinking in general are based upon four sources, or fundamental principles (uṣūl): (1) the Qurʾān, (2) the Sunnah (“Traditions”), (3) ijmāʿ (“consensus”), and (4) ijtihād (“individual thought”).
The Qurʾān (literally, “reading” or “recitation”) is regarded as the verbatim word, or speech, of God delivered to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. Divided into 114 suras (chapters) of unequal length, it is the fundamental source of Islamic teaching. The suras revealed at Mecca during the earliest part of Muhammad’s career are concerned mostly with ethical and spiritual teachings and the Day of Judgment. The suras revealed at Medina at a later period in the career of the Prophet are concerned for the most part with social legislation and the politico-moral principles for constituting and ordering the community.
Sunnah (“a well-trodden path”) was used by pre-Islamic Arabs to denote their tribal or common law. In Islam it came to mean the example of the Prophet—i.e., his words and deeds as recorded in compilations known as Hadith (in Arabic, Ḥadīth: literally, “report”; a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet). Hadith provide the written documentation of the Prophet’s words and deeds. Six of these collections, compiled in the 3rd century ah (9th century ce), came to be regarded as especially authoritative by the largest group in Islam, the Sunnis. Another large group, the Shiʿah, has its own Hadith contained in four canonical collections.
The doctrine of ijmāʿ, or consensus, was introduced in the 2nd century ah (8th century ce) in order to standardize legal theory and practice and to overcome individual and regional differences of opinion. Though conceived as a “consensus of scholars,” ijmāʿ was in actual practice a more fundamental operative factor. From the 3rd century ah ijmāʿ has amounted to a principle of stability in thinking; points on which consensus was reached in practice were considered closed and further substantial questioning of them prohibited. Accepted interpretations of the Qurʾān and the actual content of the Sunnah (i.e., Hadith and theology) all rest finally on the ijmāʿ in the sense of the acceptance of the authority of their community.
Ijtihād, meaning “to endeavour” or “to exert effort,” was required to find the legal or doctrinal solution to a new problem. In the early period of Islam, because ijtihād took the form of individual opinion (raʾy), there was a wealth of conflicting and chaotic opinions. In the 2nd century ah ijtihād was replaced by qiyās (reasoning by strict analogy), a formal procedure of deduction based on the texts of the Qurʾān and the Hadith. The transformation of ijmāʿ into a conservative mechanism and the acceptance of a definitive body of Hadith virtually closed the “gate of ijtihād” in Sunni Islam while ijtihād continued in Shiʿism. Nevertheless, certain outstanding Muslim thinkers (e.g., al-Ghazālī in the 11th–12th century) continued to claim the right of new ijtihād for themselves, and reformers in the 18th–20th centuries, because of modern influences, caused this principle once more to receive wider acceptance.
The Qurʾān and Hadith are discussed below. The significance of ijmāʿ and ijtihād are discussed below in the contexts of Islamic theology, philosophy, and law.
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