Allah in the Quran
Mark Anderson

Is the Allah of the Quran the same as the God of the Bible? Yes, in the sense that Allah is the word Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians use for God in their Bible translations. And the Quran’s choice of Allah specifically identified him with the God of the Bible. Much of the Quran’s theological content, however, calls that answer into question. For while the God of the Quran is like the God of the Bible in many respects, he is also profoundly different, and the resulting tension has produced significant controversy among evangelical Christians.

Since Allah is the Quran’s implied speaker throughout, its most obvious theological point is that God communicates in human words. It also calls such divine actions as providing sunshine and rain his “signs” (āyāt) because they reveal truths about him. Allah is said to be the “most just of judges” and “most compassionate of the compassionate” (e.g., 95.8; 7.151), requiring us to give quranic descriptions of God their typical meanings. Though language is here stretched to its limits, analogy is qualified only in that God’s is the “loftiest of likenesses” (or “the Mighty, the Wise”; 16.60; 30.27).

Like the Bible, the Quran shows the Creator to be exalted and distinct from his creation. But it further stresses that he is unlike anything created (e.g., 112.4) and makes associating with him anything created (shirk) as the unforgiveable sin (4.48). Besides precluding his incarnation, this discourages us from taking the Quran’s anthropomorphic descriptions of him too literally (e.g., his speaking, knowing; 15.32; 49.16). Yet these passages do imply divine-human analogy.

The Quran uses six nonintimate biblical images of God: creator, king, master, judge, guide, and deliverer, although the Quran dramatically marginalizes the role of deliverer compared to its biblical significance. It also alludes to God’s being a friend in its single unexplained reference to Abraham as his friend (khalīl; 4.125). However, it entirely omits the central New Testament images of God as father and lover/husband. As supreme master, the quranic God seeks no intimacy with humankind. Though he makes covenants, he answers to no one and has no interest in friendship with his servants, disclosing only what they need in order to obey him. That is, he freely reveals his will but not himself.

This is radically different from biblical theology, with its full embrace of divine-human analogy. In the Bible, God makes himself answerable to keep his word. Taking on our humanity, he comes to live among us in Christ, who sacrifices his life as the perfect servant and later indwells us by his Holy Spirit. And this fuller revelation of God points to his triunity, which the Quran explicitly denies. Neither does the Muslim scripture identify love as a primary divine attribute, nor our primary act of worship, as is the case biblically. Rather, as Iain Provan says, aside from his singularity, the quranic presentation of God is more reminiscent of the haughty and threateningly inaccessible gods of ancient Middle Eastern religions than of the Bible’s self-revealing, loving, and voluntarily condescending God. All this renders humankind’s relationship to God in the Quran markedly nonintimate, in sharp contrast to biblical teaching.

The Quran broadly agrees with the Bible’s ethical descriptions of God as both just and merciful. Yet God’s justice in the Quran relates to a paradigm of reciprocity by which human actions (e.g., loving, forgetting) evoke corresponding actions from him. The fact that our actions seldom receive God’s immediate response implies his superimposition of another paradigm – one of reversal – on that of reciprocity. Flowing from his mercy, this reversal enables him to delay the fulfillment of his promises, both to punish and to bless, till the final judgment. These paradigms operate in much the same tension that holds them together in the Bible, except that God’s mercy is always conditional in the Quran. While disobedience incurs his anger, his ethical attributes are not clearly rooted in essential holiness. This explains the absence of a call to moral likeness and any concept of God taking on our fallen state to heal it. Rather, God in the Quran lacks a clear ethical core, appearing dualistic – first just, then merciful – leaving Muslims to plead his unknowability, as they have historically done.

Toshihiko Izutsu contends that the quranic concept of nobility reflects that found in early Arabic poetry. Its primary attributes are haughtiness and the refusal to submit. This notion lies at the heart of quranic theology, with its absolute Master-servant distinction. And this is what most basically excludes the New Testament’s core theological concepts: what binds God’s mercy and justice together biblically is His profound humility and love, so spectacularly demonstrated in Christ’s incarnation and life-giving crucifixion.