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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

The Shahadah


The Shahadah is usually rendered one of two ways:

There is no God but God

That's virtually a tautology. Perhaps the only thing that spares it from pure tautology is the implicit monotheism in the singular formulation. That might be designed to rule out polytheism.

By by itself, it fails to say who God is. It doesn't distinguish the true God from rival claimants. What God does it refer to?

Perhaps, though, that lacuna is supplied by the next phrase: "and Muhammad is his prophet/messenger."

The other rendering is:

There is no God but Allah

That has greater specification. It pinpoints the God in question as Allah–to the exclusion of other named Gods. 

That might be what the sentence intends to convey, where the first occurrence of the divine name is generic while the second occurrence is specific. The first occurrence is denotative while the second occurrence is connotative.

But it's striking that we have this semantic ambiguity in the fundamental creed of Islam. What does the Shahadah even mean? 

2 comments:

  1. The first part rules out polytheism, and the second part that rules out Judaism and Christianity. No one at the time, and probably few Muslims now, would think your second reading is semantically compatible with how Arabic uses the word 'Allah'. Certainly the many Christian Arabs who use the word 'Allah' for God would not think so. Neither would the Christian missionaries who make it part of their apologetic to agree with the first part of this statement.

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    1. The question is not how the Arabic language uses the word "Allah," but how Arabic speakers (and writers) use it, which clearly varies with the speaker.

      When you say "Neither would the Christian missionaries who make it part of their apologetic to agree with the first part of this statement," which part of which statement are you alluding to?

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