Of all the reasons to believe that the Arabian god Allah had always been the Judeo-Christian God, imported from Syria, the most powerful is phonetic. The word Syrian Christians used for God is, depending on context, either allaha or allah. How likely is it that Syrians and Arabs had come to believe in two different gods who happened to have essentially the same name and to both be creator gods? That would be hard to believe even if Arabia and Syria were separated by an ocean; that they were nearby trading partners makes it only harder.

To be sure, scholars who embrace the independent-evolution scenario have an explanation for the phonetic likeness of the Arabian god Allah and the Christian God of Syria. In Arabic, the generic word for god—for any deity—was ilah, and the phrase for “the god” was al-ilah. Through contraction, they say, this phrase could have been compressed to allah. If this is indeed what happened, then the resemblance between the Arabic allah and the Syriac allaha has an explanation that doesn’t involve direct transmission from Syriac to Arabic. After all, Syriac and Arabic are, like ancient Hebrew, Semitic tongues. So if you could precisely trace the history of the Syriac word allaha back a millennium or so, and you could do the same with the Arabic word ilah, the two lineages might well converge somewhere in the trunk of the Semitic-language family tree. Specifically, they might converge in the vicinity of a word that is enough like ilah and allaha in sound and meaning to suggest close kinship with them: Elohim, Hebrew for God (and for god—lowercase—as well). Thus the phonetic resemblance between the Syriac word for God and the Arabic word for god could be the legacy of a common, distant ancestor, rather than signifying that the former gave birth to the latter.

The problem with this scenario lies in the next step: the idea that the name Allah arose as a contraction of “the god” (al-ilah) to refer to a god who was pre-Islamic and non-Judeo-Christian—in other words, a god that dwelt among polytheists. How likely is it that Arabs would have been referring to a particular god simply as “the god” before they had come to believe that he was in fact “the god”—before they had accepted that there was such a thing as the one and only god? A more plausible sequence of linguistic evolution is the more straightforward one: the Arabic Allah is descended from the Syriac allaha, and allaha’s lineage, in turn, leads back to close kinship with Elohim. The names change—a little—but the God remains the same.

God’s Phonetic Footprints

Another Semitic language was Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and a language ancestral to the Syriac language of Muhammad’s time. Together these four languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic—trace some crucial stages in the evolution of God. The Hebrew Elohim had, by the middle of the first millennium BCE, come to signify the one and only God, a god who, to the Israelites, was the arbiter of national salvation. This God as rendered in Aramaic—elaha—was a god who, Jesus (or at least his followers) would emphasize, could bring individual salvation, judging souls at the end of time. By Muhammad’s day, some Christians had made individual salvation more ornate and more compelling, elaborating vividly on what paradise and hell would be like; the Syriac name for God, allaha, or allah, probably embodied this vividness for Syrian believers.

If so, these connotations would have carried over into the Arabic name for God, Allah. In any event, the word carried these connotations after Muhammad got through with it, and put flesh on the Judeo-Christian God that Meccan pagans had previously accepted only in skeletal form. Allah, Muhammad informed the Arabs, was not a god to be casually accepted in the service of commercial diplomacy. If you believed in him at all, you believed in a god that was omnipotent and omniscient, a god that was fair but stern, a god that would eventually judge everyone on their merits. At the end of time, said Muhammad, “every soul shall know what it hath produced.”