1. Introduction

The religion of Islam, in accord with the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah [Tradition] of Muhammad (d. 632), the Messenger of Allah, permits and even encourages mentioning the name of “God” to such an extent that the Arabic language has become saturated with a multitude of rich and varied idiomatic expressions invoking the name of Allah. These idioms are collectively known as “the Allah Lexicon,” a feature unique to Arabic and a reflection of the Allah-centricity of the Arabic language, culture and civilization.1

In the following chapter, we will examine the importance of key words in the study of culture, the theological foundation of the Allah Lexicon and its main expressions, their frequency, the frequency of the word “God” in various languages, and some linguistic and socio-cultural limitations affecting the spread of the Allah Lexicon. On the basis of this study, it will be seen that key words are the key to comprehending culture, that both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad are the inspiration for the Allah Lexicon, that Allah expressions number in the thousands and are suited for any conceivable context, that the name Allah or God, as a content word, has the highest functional yield in the Arabic language, that it is unique in this respect among all languages and cultures, even Muslim ones, and that Arabic is so replete with Allah expressions that we can speak seriously of the omnipresence of Allah in the Arabic language. On the basis of this study, it will be understood why Arabic is considered the language of Islam, the language of the Qur’an, and the language of Allah.2

2: Key Words: The Key to Culture

The value and importance of linking vocabulary and culture by means of key words has been widely recognized by scholars including, among others, Thorndike, Evans-Pritchard, Williams, Parkin, Moeran, Sapir and Wierzbicka. According to E.L Thorndike, “[t]he vocabulary, active and passive, of any group is truly an index of its nature and culture as are its tools, monuments, customs and myths” (qtd. in Eaton vi). According to Edward Sapir: “language [is] a symbolic guide to culture” (1949: 162) and “vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people” (27). As Anna Wierzbicka explains, “some words can be studied as focal points around which entire cultural domains are organized” (16). Clearly, key words reflect core cultural values and are crucial in the interpretation of culture.3

Despite monolingual popular opinion and the academic arguments made by Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, different words do indeed reflect different ways of thinking, something which is usually self-evident to people with an intimate knowledge of two [or more] different languages and cultures (Hunt and Benaji 1988). Whether language determines thought or thought determines language is matter of philosophical debate.4 What is clear is that people express themselves differently because they see the world differently.5 The existence of culture-specific conceptual categories makes any absolutist theory on the universality of human thought untenable. Since language is the reflection of thought, and thought is the source of science, culture and creation, “linguistics is of strategic importance for the methodology of social sciences” (Sapir 166).6 Since language is the key to understanding culture, “word frequency lists from different languages provide useful baselines for comparisons of many sorts” (Thorndike qtd. in Eaton vi). Having established the theoretical foundations of this study, let us now explore on-target support for the religious triggers which lead to the myriad variations of the Allah Lexicon.

3. Theological Considerations

3.1 The Holy Qur’an

The Allah Lexicon originated during the emergence of Islam and first appears in the Holy Qur’an. In Surat al-Kahf [The Cave], Allah instructs Muslims to: “Nor say of anything, ‘I shall be sure to do so and so tomorrow’ - Without adding, ‘So please Allah!’ And call thy Lord to mind when thou forgettest, and say, ‘I hope that my Lord will guide me ever closer [even] than this to the right road’” (18: 23-24).

In Surat al-Baqarah [The Heifer], Almighty Allah says: “remember Me; I will remember you” (2:152). In Surat Bani Isra’il [The Children of Israel] and Surat Ta-Ha [Mystic Letters. T.H.], He says: “To Him belong the most beautiful names” (17:110; 20:8). In Surat al-A‘raf [The Heights], He says “The most beautiful names belong to Allah (7:180) and in Surat al-‘Imran [The Family of ‘Imran], He calls upon the believers to: “Celebrate the praises of thy Lord again and again, and glorify Him in the evening and in the morning” (3:41). In Surat al-Ahzab [The Confederates], He commands the believers to “Celebrate the praises of Allah, and do this often; and glorify Him morning and evening (33:41-42).” And yet again in Surat al-Ra‘d [The Thunder]: “Those who believe, and whose hearts find satisfaction in the remembrance of Allah: for without doubt in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find satisfaction” (13:28).

3.2 The Ahadith/Prophetic Traditions

3.2 The Ahadith7 / Prophetic Traditions

In a hadith qudsi [sacred tradition] we read: “Oh you who believe! Remember Allah abundantly” (Shirazi).8 In another, Almighty Allah repeats throughout “Remember Me…I will remember you.” In Tirmidhi (d. 892), the Messenger of Allah says: “The best remembrance [of Allah] is [saying] la ilaha illa Allah [There is no god but Allah].” In Muslim (d. 875), it is related that the Prophet said: “Whenever people sit and remember Allah, the angels surround them, mercy covers them and tranquility descends upon them and Allah makes mention of them to His Company [of angels].” In Muslim (d. 875) and Bukhari (d. 870), the Prophet states that: “He who remembers Allah, and he who does not, are like the living and the dead.” In Ahmad (d. 855), he says that the best deed is “[t]o leave the world while your tongue is busy with the remembrance of Allah.” In the same book, he says that the best people on the Day of Judgment will be “those who remember Allah greatly.” In Bayhaqi (d. 1066), Allah’s Messenger says: “For everything there is a polish, and the polish for hearts is the remembrance of Allah.” In Ahmad (d. 855), Abu Dawud (d. 817) and Tirmidhi (d. 892), the Prophet says: “Gabriel came to me and told me to order my Companions to raise their voices in takbir.”9 Not only did the Messenger of Allah encourage the remembrance of Allah, he prescribed many formulas, expressions and invocations for purposes of personal piety and for particular occasions, of which many examples are to be found in the collections of prophetic traditions.10

3.3 The ‘Ulama’ / Scholars of Islam

In light of the teachings of the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah, it comes as no surprise that the scholars of traditional Islam11 universally agree that dhikr, the remembrance of Allah, is permissible at all times and places, quietly or out loud, individually or in group, with or without ritual ablutions, in various forms, including tasbih, tahmid, takbir, and praising and praying for the Prophet.12

4. The Allah Lexicon

The Allah Lexicon is a language feature specific to the Arabic language.13 It is utilized extensively in the operation of everyday discourse in Arabic and to a much lesser degree among non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. It includes the following common expressions used by Muslims worldwide in a variety of different contexts:

Bismillah: In the name of Allah; insha’ Allah: If Allah wills; subhana Allah: Glory be to Allah; ya Allah: O Allah; masha’ Allah: It is the will of Allah; jazaka Allahu khayran: Allah will reward you well; la ilaha illa Allah: There is no god but Allah; bismillah wa billah: I swear by Allah; alhamdulillah: Praise be to Allah; yarhamuka Allah: May Allah have mercy on you; astaghfirullah: I ask forgiveness from Allah; fi sabilillah: In the path of Allah; tabarak Allah: Praise and might belongs to Allah; a‘udhu billah: I seek refuge in Allah; inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un: From Allah we come and to Him we return; fi amanillah: Go with the protection of Allah; lihubbillah: For the love of Allah; tawakkaltu ‘ala Allah: I put my trust in Allah; la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah: There is no might nor power but by [the help] of Allah; baraka Allahu fik: May Allah bless you; radiyya Allahu ‘anhum: May Allah be pleased with them.

The Allah Lexicon goes well beyond these examples and encompasses thousands of invocations, each of which is contextually bound: historically, geographically, ethnically, socio-emotionally, spiritually, and situationally. The most complete collection of Allah expressions in the English language is to be found in The Muslim Conception of God and Human Welfare by Moshe Piamenta, consisting of over 200 pages of duly contextualized Allah expressions drawn from both classical Arabic and everyday colloquial speech from throughout the Arabic world. Piamenta has divided the Allah Lexicon into two main sections, “The Veneration of God” and “God and Human Welfare.” The first section covers expressions venerating God by affirming His existence, omnipotence, and unity; as well as thanking, glorifying, and blessing God. It also includes the invocations of God, religious symbols, Islam, the Prophet, the Qur’an, the hajj and the Ka‘bah, and God’s most beautiful names, namely the ninety-nine most common names Almighty Allah uses to describe Himself in the Holy Qur’an. The second section covers invocations relating to humankind’s survival and God’s blessings and support.

On the basis of his painstaking and elaborate research, and drawing from a voluminous corpus of formulae consisting of evocations expressed in a variety of Arabic dialects from a representative and diverse group of informants, Piamenta concludes:

Man’s veneration of God emerges from the belief in God’s existence, in God’s omnipresence and omnipotence; that the believer’s veneration of God in non-ritual prayers and invocations consists in bearing witness that there is no deity but God and that Muhammad is the Prophet of God, in declaring His unity, in worshipping Him, in praising and thanking Him, in glorifying and blessing Him; that the believer is keen on his religion, on his Prophet, and on the Qur’an; that he recites the Fatihah on various occasions; that the pilgrimage to Makkah and to the Ka‘bah in particular are regarded by him with reverence; that formulae expressing man’s veneration of God may include names attributed to God known as God’s most beautiful names…not exhausting the full list of the Qur’anic names, while comprising some that do not occur in the Qur’an ad litteram. (2)

As Barbara Castleton points out in her dissertation, the Allah Lexicon is present not only in speech throughout the Arabic-speaking world but in the tangible features of life as well: on flags, government stationary, songs, literature, emails (2000a). It abounds in Arabic and Islamic music worldwide14 and forms an integral part of traditional Muslim medicine.15 It is also present in politics from the huge inscriptions on the outside of Moroccan towns proclaiming “Allah, King and Country” to Saddam Husayn’s insertion of Allahu Akbar on the Iraqi flag in an attempt to attract some Islamic sentiment, to military and political parties such as the Hizbullah, “The Party of Allah,” and to the election of George W. Bush.16

5. The Frequency of the Allah Lexicon

Any observer who has lived in the Arab world even for short periods of time inevitably notices the preponderance of expressions invoking the name of Allah explicitly or implicitly in everyday Arabic speech.17 The Allah Lexicon occurs most frequently among Arabic-speaking Muslims, be they Mauritanian, Moroccan, Algerian, Libyan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Chadian, Syrian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Emirati, Qatari, Bahraini, Eritrean, Comoran, Djiboutian, Ethiopian, Omani, Somalian, Saudi Arabian or Yemeni. Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and the Eastern, Western and Gulf Arabic dialects are saturated with multifarious manifestations and variations of the Allah Lexicon.18 As Castleton remarks, “[s]ome Arabic-speaking cultures may favor the use of one [expression] over another in a particular venue, but all cultures employ the Lexicon throughout normal discourse” (2000a). Without a doubt, the noun Allah has the highest functional yield in the Arabic language.

While the Allah Lexicon is found throughout the Muslim ummah [world community, lit. “motherland”], its frequency varies from country to country, from culture to culture and from language to language. The Allah Lexicon appears among Persians, Turks, Indians, and other peoples who have been Muslim for over a millennium. Although Allah expressions occur in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, they are far less prevalent than they are among the Arabs and are often supplanted by expressions falling partially outside the realm of the Arabic Allah Lexicon, such as Khuda Hafiz [God is the Preserver], and the secular Urdu greeting adab, meaning roughly “regards to you.” Arabic speakers use thousands upon thousands of Allah expressions. Non-Arabic speakers rarely use more than one or two dozens.19

Allah expressions occur with least frequency among Muslim converts/reverts from the West. The Allah Lexicon among Western Muslims rarely goes beyond the most common expressions such as bismillah [In the name of Allah], alhamdulillah [Praise be to Allah], Allahu Akbar [Allah is the Greatest], subhana Allah [Glory be to Allah], a‘udhu billah [I take refuge in Allah], masha’ Allah [It is the will of Allah], fi amanillah [Go with Allah], astaghfirullah [I ask forgiveness from Allah], jazaka Allahu khayran [Allah will reward you well], and the occasional inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un [From Allah we come and to Him we return]. These Arabic idioms, of course, undergo varying degrees of phonetic and contextual corruption when entering other languages.20

6. The Frequency of Allah in the Arabic Language

The third most commonly occurring word in the Holy Qur’an is Allah, occurring 2,702 times, not including the basmalah (Abu al-Futuh 133).21 If we include the 113 cases of “In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful,” then we have a total of 2,815 occurrences of the name Allah in the holy book. If we discount particles, it is the most common word repeated in the sacred scripture. As Martin Lings observes in “The Reality of Sufism:” “[t]he name Allah occurs so often that it may be considered as the warp on which the Qur’anic text is woven” (517). After Allah, the word rabb [Lord] is the 12th most common, occurring 970 times, while the word ilah [god] is the 91st most common word, occurring 113 times.

According to David Quitregard’s sample of two million words drawn from all types of publications, such as fiction, drama, essays, historical, geographical and scientific works, magazines from nine countries, newspapers from fourteen countries, films from seven countries, radio programs from twelve countries, television programs from eight countries, children’s books, and literary histories, the word Allah is the 18th most commonly occurring word in the Arabic language, preceded only by the fourth person singular of the verb “to be,” kana [was], as well as series of articles, prepositions, conjunctions and subject pronouns such as al- [the], min [from], wa [and], ‘an [to], fa [so], fi [in], la [no], huwwa / hiyya [he / she], aw [or], ila [to], li alla [lest], bi [with / in], ana [I], hadha / hadhihi [this], dhalika and tilka [that]. (Quitegard Unit 1). If we drop the articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and subject pronouns, Allah is the most commonly occurring kalimah [word] and ism [name/noun].22 In Islam, God is one and appropriately appears as the first in the list of most common Arabic words. The 19th most common word, or the second after Allah, is wahid [one] (Unit 1). The 88th most common word is muslim; the 97th is Islam (Unit 5); the 120th is salam [peace] (Unit 6); the 143rd is Qur’an and the 310th is rasul [messenger]. When we examine the most common words in Arabic we observe a prevalence of religious, spiritually centered, vocabulary.

In Ernest N. McCarus and Raji M. Rammuny’s “Word Count of Elementary Modern Literary Arabic Textbooks,” the name Allah is found in every one of the 11 textbooks which were scanned (146). The fact that the word appears in every textbook demonstrates that this lexical item is one of the most necessary for beginning students. The shortfall of this study, however, is that it only lists the number of texts the word appears in and not how many times it occurs, limiting itself to listing the frequency results found in Jacob Landau’s A Word Count of Modern Arabic Prose.

In Landau’s study of 273,178 words from the language of the Arabic daily press, conducted in 1959, the word Allah appeared 296 times, making it the 76th most common word (335). Although a degree of divergence is to be expected between spoken and written language, such a significant reduction of occurrences may demonstrate, if anything, a tendency among the educated secular elite of the Arab world to suppress the natural occurrence of the name Allah in the official Arabic media.23 The situation seems to have improved, though, as can be seen from a study conducted in February 1999 by Tim Buckwalter in which the word Allah is ranked as the 30th most common word in online Arabic newspaper archives including al-Ahram [Cairo], al-Bayan [UAE], al-Dustur [Amman], al-Hayat [London], al-Nahar [Beirut], al-Rayah [Qatar], al-Riyyad [Riyadh], al-Safir [Beirut], al-Sharq al-Awsat [London] and al-Watan [Qatar].

7. The Frequency of the Word God in Various Languages

7.1 Hebrew

In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the situation is similar to that of the Holy Qur’an and the Arabic language, with the name Elohim [god, plural] being the second most common word (Mitchel 1). According to Larry Mitchel’s list, Elohim is only preceded by the preposition el or towards (Mitchel 1). This is incorrect as min [from] and et [with or marker for the direct object] are more numerous than Elohim, as well as a number of prepositions that are inseparable from the word to which they are attached. Based on Mitchel’s data, and if we discard grammatical items, Elohim would be the most common lexical item out of the 10,000 different words appearing in the Old Testament. The problem, however, is that Mitchel does not seem to have considered the name Yahweh in his Student’s Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Indeed, a search of the Hebrew Old Testament, courtesy of the Blue Letter Bible, using the numbers from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, indicate that the Tetragrammaton Yahweh occurs 6,519 times; Elohim 2,606 times; Adon [Lord], 335 times; and El [God], 245 times. Michael Carasik’s computer concordance, however, found 6,828 cases of the Tetragrammaton, 2,602 cases of Elohim, 335 instances of Adon, and 237 occurrences of El. According to the editors of the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, the Tetragrammaton occurs 6,518 times in the Masoteric text. While these words counts all differ slightly, they clearly indicate that Yahweh is the most common noun in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. If we base ourselves on the frequency list on the back of Biblical Hebrew by Kittel, Hoffer, and Wright, discarding the words min and et and some of the other eight particles, the Tetragrammaton is the most common word in the Bible and Elohim is the twelfth. This comes as no surprise since we are dealing with a religious text in the language of the Prophets of Israel.

In a small journalistic corpus of 2,251,976 words prepared by Shmuel Bolosky - including texts from Haaretz, Maariv and Yedioth Aharonot, as well as some literary texts - the frequency for the word “God” in the Hebrew of the Israeli media is as follows:

Table 1: Frequency of “God” in the Modern Hebrew Media

אלוהים Elohim156

השםhashshem51

יהוהYahweh 30

אֵלEl4

אלוהEloah3

אדונַיAdonay 2

אלוהַיElohay1

אלוקים Eloqim1

אלוקינוEloqeynu1

The frequency of the word Elohim is almost 71 times per million and Yahweh is 14 times per million. For the name Yahweh, 24 of the 30 occurrences formed part of the collocation “Yahweh Witness” or “Jehovah Witness.” According to Alexandra McCauley’s Hebrew Word Frequency Database, a 30 million word corpus of Modern Hebrew drawn from the Israeli newspaper Ha‘aretz, the word אלוהים / Elohim, has a frequency of 1.2 occurrences per million. The personal name of God in Hebrew continues to be exceedingly rare due to the traditional taboo on mentioning the name of the Almighty.24 As a result, the name / Yahweh has a mere frequency of 0.5 occurrences per million.

7.2 English

One of the largest systematic word counts ever conducted in the English language studied 17 million words from 6,333 fiction and non-fiction texts used in schools and colleges in the United States in order to provide a meaningful description of the characteristics of the vocabulary students are apt to encounter throughout their schooling. The study found that the word God was the 97th most common word, occurring 97 times per million words (Zeno 129). In a study of spoken American English, the word God appeared 141 times out of 1,058,888 words drawn from 30 different speakers (Hartvig). In a study of 1 million words, W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera found that the word God was the 292nd most common word in English (468). In a study based on a million word corpus of present day English prose, it was found that the word God appeared 192 times (Johanson 170).

7.3 Spanish

In Spanish, Dios [God] is the 107th most common word, appearing 11,940 times out of a corpus of 7 million words (Rodríguez 17). Clearly one of the most impressive corpora available is Mark Davies’ 100-million-word corpus of Spanish from the 1200s to the 1900s. This massive corpus includes 20 million words from the 1200s to the 1400s, 40 million words from the 1500s to the 1700s, and 40 million words from the 1800s to the 1900s. The 20 million words from the 1900s are divided equally among literary texts, oral texts, as well as newspapers and encyclopedias. The 80 million words covering the 1200s to the 1800s are drawn mostly from historical and literary sources. A search of the word Dios in the corpus revealed the following:

Table 2: Frequency of Dios in Spanish

1200130014001500160017001800TotalLiterature OralText

18,9937,65614,67144,83727,1207,46820,4085,5252,6051,6571,263

A search for the expression ojalá [God willing / hopefully: a phonetic adaptation of the Arabic insha’ Allah] revealed the following:

Table 3: Frequency of ojalá in Spanish

1200130014001500160017001800TotalLiterature OralText

00015424122642160117934379

While a search for the name Alá [Allah] revealed:

Table 4: Frequency of Alá in Spanish

1200130014001500160017001800TotalLiterature OralText

60364184153395185324

7.4 Portuguese

The Portuguese word for God, Deus, appears 24 times in the COMPARA corpus of 685,952 words drawn from 23 source texts from 1980s and 1990s (Frankenberg-García). This may be due to the fact that the Portuguese “are not especially great swearers” and that, “[i]n general, the Portuguese do not have the same variety or imagination in swear words that their tropical cousins [the Brazilians] demonstrate” (Vogensen).

7.5 French

In French, Dieu [God] is the 263rd most common word (Escande Unit 14). In a study of the French spoken in Québec, Canada, it was found that the word Dieu [God] appeared 342 times out of 125,000 words (Vikis-Freibergs).

7.6 Italian

According to Alphonse Juilland’s Frequency Dictionary of Italian Words, the word Dio [God] has a total of 27 occurrences, a coefficient of usage of 16.21, a coefficient of frequency of 27, and a coefficient of distribution of 60.02 (110), in a lexical universe of 500,000 words taken from five equal sub-samples of 100,000 words from a multitude of dramatic, fictional, essayistic, periodical, and technical literature (xii). The word Dio is the 1,610th most common word in written Italian (441). As for spoken Italian, the word Dio occurs 146 times out of 489,616 words drawn from the spoken Italian of various social sectors and regions, including Firenze, Milano, Napoli and Roma (Mauro).

7.7 Rumanian

According to Alphonse Juilland’s Frequency Dictionary of Rumanian Words, the word Zeu [God] has a total of 105 occurrences, a coefficient of usage of 51.87, a coefficient of frequency of 105, and a coefficient of distribution of 49.40 (398) in a lexical universe of 500,000 words taken from five equal sub samples of 100,000 words from a multitude of dramatic, fictional, essayistic, periodical, and technical literature (xv). The expression dumnezeu or “My God!” has a total of 299 occurrences, a coefficient of distribution of 228.16, a coefficient of frequency of 299, and a coefficient of distribution of 76.31 (111). The word Zeu [God] is the 495th most common word in Rumanian (414) and the expression dumnezeu [“My God!”] is the 163rd most common (406).

7.8 German

Although the German word for God, Gott, is listed among the first thousand concepts in Helen S. Eaton’s Word Frequency Dictionary (1.11), subsequent studies have not been able to confirm this claim. In Hyde Flipo’s “Word Frequency Worthäufigkeit: The Top 1,000 Words in German,” based on Projekt Wortschatz from the Universität Leipzig, the word Gott does not appear even once. In Amit Dubey’s “Frequency Dictionary of German” the word Gott appears only 8 times out of 355,096 tokens from the Negr@ Corpus drawn from German newspapers.

7.9 Latin

In the Perseus Digital Library, the word Deus [God] appears 8,976 times out of 2,813,462 Latin words drawn from a multitude of classical sources from Augustus to Vitrivius for a frequency of 31.90 / 10 K (Crane).

7.10 Greek

In the Perseus Digital Library, the word θεός or Theos [God] appears 10,655 times out of 4,779,462 Greek words drawn from a multitude of classical sources from Aeschines to Xenophon for a frequency of 22.29 / 10 K (Crane).

7.11 Bengali

The Bengali words for God are Bhэgaban and Iššor. The first occurs 3 times (Dabbs 20) and the second occurs twice (32) in a corpus of 43,961 words drawn from the February 12, 1962, issue of the Ananda Bajar Newspaper, published in Calcutta (Dabbs). The Persian, Urdu, and Arabic names for God, Khuda and Allah, did not appear once, perhaps a reflection of Calcutta’s demographics of 76% Hindu and 23% Muslim or the secular nature of the publication.

In the EMILLE/CILL Corpus, there are 21 instances of ঈশ্বর [Iššor] in 824,699 words; 138 instances of ভগবান [Bhagoban] in 4,824,699 words (3 occurrences in 459503 spoken words and 135 instances in 4,413,478 written words). The Urdu/Persian খোদা [Khuda] has a total of 3 instances in 4,824,699 words (2 occurrences in 459,503 spoken words and 1 in 4,413,478 written words) and আল্লাহ / আল্লা, the Arabic Allah, has 0 instances in 4,824,699 words.

Although Bangla has many idiomatic expressions employing the various names for God, including দুই সতিনের ঘর৴ খোদায় রক্ষা কর dui satiner ghar, khoday raksa kar [Only God can save the family of a man with co-wives]; যেদিকে দশ সেদিকেই খোদা yedike dash sedikei khoda [the voice of the people is the voice of God]; রাখে আল্লা মারে কে rakhe allah mare ke [If God protects, none can destroy], among many others; the overall frequency of the words are low in the language. In recent years, Mahfuzur Rahman has observed an interesting phenomenon: the name Allah XE "Allāh: replacing Khudā in Bangladesh is sweeping away Khuda in both the written and spoken language: on billboards, on television, in political discourse and in daily communication by both adults and children. The supplantation of Khuda by Allah does not indicate an increase in theocentric expressions. Rather, it reflects the increasing “Islamization” of the country.25

7.12 Urdu

In Stanislav Martyny’s list of the 100 most frequent words for Urdu, drawn from a corpus of 440,929 words used in the electronic media, the words ﺁﺪﺧ / Khuda [God] or Allah do not appear at all (7-10). Although some words of Persian and Arabic origin do occur in the 100 Urdu key words, which account for 50.65% of the Urdu corpus (11), with the exception of the word Muslim, which appears in 74th place (10), they do not form part of a religious lexicon.

In a study of 136,738 words drawn from the Urdu press conducted in 1969, the name Allah appears only 30 times, in the expressions Allah tabaraka wa ta‘ala [Great and Almighty Allah] and Allah ta‘ala [Almighty Allah] making it the 576th most common word in the written Urdu of the media (Barker 357).26

The EMILLE/CILL Corpus is, by far, the most extensive source of written and spoken Urdu for lexico-statistics. It consists of 3,020,339, tokens, 473,023 of which are spoken and 2,546,709 which are written. In this database, the name Khuda appears 1,157 times, namely, 38 times per million words; written: 30 per million words and spoken: 81 per million words. Interestingly, the name Allah [ﷲأ] did not occur even once, nor did Rabb [رَبّ], meaning “Lord,” which is the “non-sectarian” name for God. More recent research is required, particularly in the oral realm, as columnists like Ahmed Bashir have observed a significant linguistic development in Pakistan, the rapid transformation of Khuda Hafiz into Allah Hafiz, possibly as part of an “Islamic” resurgence, a phenomenon also occurring in Bangladesh (Hussein).27

7.13 Hindi

In Stanislav Martyny’s list of the 100 most frequent words for Hindi drawn from a corpus of 441,153 words used in the electronic media and accounting for 55.61% of the Hindi corpus, the words for god, Ishvara, Parameshvara, Paramatma, Kartara, and Devata, do not appear. On the basis of this research, the Hindu faith does not appear to have had a major impact on the Hindi language. The 33 million gods from the Hindu pantheon rarely make an appearance in the language of the Hindu media.

In the EMILLE/CILL Corpus, which is based on 13,510,420 tokens, 564,974 spoken ones and 12,942,981 written ones, the name Ishvara occurs 291 times, for a frequency of 20 per million words (20 per million words written and 10 per million words spoken). The name Parameshvara occurs 93 times (10 per million written words and 0 per million spoken words). Paramatma appears 104 times (10 per million words written; and 30 per million words spoken). Devata was found 257 times, that is, 20 per million words (20 per million words written and 0 per million words spoken). As for the name bhag-wan, it is found 51 times in the Hindi component of the EMILLE Corpus which is 12,510,420 token. Interestingly, all of the occurrences were found among the 13,510,420 for written Hindi. The term did not have a single occurrence in the 564,974 tokens for the spoken language.

The expressions Khuda Hafiz XE "Khudā Ḥāfiẓ: transformation into Allāh Ḥāfiẓ and Allah Hafiz are still in currency in the country. However, as Rizwan Ahmad has observed during his fieldwork in Dehli, the same phenomenon of dropping the first in favor of the last is also occurring in India. As Ahmad attests, “sometimes it is strange to say Khuda Hafiz XE "Khudā Ḥāfiẓ: transformation into Allāh Ḥāfiẓ and receive an unexpected Allah Hafiz.” Based on the observations of Mahfuzur Rahman, Ahmed Bashir, and Rizwan Ahmad, this shift appears to be universally affecting the entire Indian subcontinent.

7.14 Bosnian

The Oslo Corpus of Bosnian Texts contains approximately 1.5 million words, and comprises several different genres: fiction [novels and short stories], essays, children's stories, folklore, Islamic texts, legal texts, as well as newspapers and journals. The texts, written by authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, have for the most part been published in the 1990s. Out of 1.5 million words, mislim [Muslim] occurs 496 times, making it the 272nd most common word; Muslimani [Muslims] appears 304 times, making it the 443rd most common; Bog [God] appears 298 times, making it the 452nd most common; god [God] appears 272 times, making it the 497th most common; muslimana [Muslim] appears 243 times, making it the 549th most common; Imam [(prayer) leader] appears 241 times making it the 555th most common; Allah appears 151 times, making it the 905th most common; Allahu appears 78 times, Islam 55 and Mohammed 4 times.

7.15 Turkish

The Turkish words for God include Allah, Tanrı, and İlah. In Bigle Say’s METU Turkish Corpus, a body of 2 million words drawn from written Turkish texts from various genres including samples from narratives, argumentative editorials and so forth, the word Allah and its inflected and derived forms occur 510 times, including over 20 Allah expressions. The word İlah and its inflected and derived forms occur 61 times; Tanrı [God, Father, Almighty, Creator, Divinity, Deity, Eternal, Godhead, the Infinite, and the Providence] and its inflected and derived forms occur 486 times.

7.16 Persian

As the second scholarly and literary language of Islam, Persian deserves particular attention. With the Arabic conquest of the Sassanid Empire which took place from 643-650 A.D., a new language, religion and culture were added to the Persian cultural milieu. Arabic became the lingua franca or, better yet, lingua arabica: the language of government, literature, culture and religion. As a result, Persian, an Indo-European language, became profoundly Arabized, not so much in its grammar, but in its lexicon. According to the Encyclopedia of the Orient, 40% percent of the Persian vocabulary is of Arabic origin; according to Gernott L. Windfuhr, Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, nativized Arabic loan-words represent 50% of the lexicon but only 25% of the colloquial language.28 Persian is also important because it is the medium through which many words of Arabic origin passed into Turkish, Urdu and other languages.

The Titus Database contains several texts in Modern Persian, including, Vis va Ramin, Fakhr al-Din Gurgani’s (d. 1048) epic poem, where the full form of the name Allah appears once while various form of Khuda appear 32 times; Sindbad-Namah by Ahmad bin ‘Ali Ẓahiri Samarqandi in which the expression b’llah [In (the name of) Allah] appears 4 times and Qabuli’s Ghazals, where the various forms of Allah occur 5 times and the name Khuda occurs 24 times. Since Vis va Ramin deals with a consciously pre-Islamic milieu, it comes as no surprise that it is skewed in the direction of Khuda, as opposed to Allah.

Frequency lists from Sufi poetry provide a limited look into the frequency or lack thereof of the Persian Allah Lexicon. In the translation of Rumi’s (d. 1273) Masnavi, the word Allah appears 29 times, and God 711 times out of a total of 98,681 occurrences of 8,159 word tokens. In the translation of Gulistan by Sa‘di, the word Allah occurs 43 times, and the word God 84 times out of 54,764 occurrences of 5,984 word tokens. In the translation of Teachings by Hafiz (d. 14th c.), the word God occurs 23 times out of 10,592 occurrences of 2,138 word tokens. In the Packard Humanities Institute’s Persian Texts in Translation, comprising over 125 classical works, the word God appears 5,116 times and the word Allah, 800 times. The frequency analysis of translations, of course, is unscientific, since, in some cases, the word Allah may be rendered as God in English, thus inflating the occurrence of one word over another. Despite its shortcomings, the data indicates that Persian authors - even those who consciously and successfully incorporate many verses of the Qur’an in Persian meter - tend to refer to God as Khuda as opposed to Allah, a fact which can be confirmed by a survey of the original sources.

In Daniela Meneghini’s Lirica Persica Corpus, which presents 20 separate samples of 1,000 lines taken from the ghazal collections of 20 great Persian poets, including Sana’i, Anvari, Khaqani, ‘Attar, Rumi, ‘Iraqi, Sa‘di, Amir Khusraw, Khvaju Kirmani, Salman Savaji, Hafiz, Kamal Khujandi, Jami, Baba Fighani, Ahli, Vahshi, Naziri Nishaburi, Talib Amuli, Sa‘ib and Bidil, the word Khuda appears 154 times independently, 10 times in compounds like khudaparast [khodaparast] and 7 times in derivative forms like khudayi [khodayi] As for the word Allah, it occurs 125 times by itself, 15 times in derivative forms and 3 times in compounds.

In Meneghini’s The Ghazals of Hafiz: Concordance and Vocabulary, the word Ilah [Elah], in various forms, occurs 39 times; and Ilahi [Elahi] 5 times (728). The word Khuday [Xoday] appears 122 times (833), and the word Rabb or “Lord” occurs 67 times (793). The most ancient of these words, Yazdan, appears once (838). The word Rabb is thus the 67th most common word in the Ghazals (848), followed by Khuday [Xoday], the 79th most common (847), and Ilah [Elah], the 223rd most common (848).

Clearly, the Arabic Allah is not particularly prevalent in the Persian sources we have surveyed.29 Again, this may reflect more on Sufi poetry than on the Persian language as the same phenomenon is found in the Arabic Sufi poetry we examined. Case in point: the word God appears only once in the English translation of ‘Umar Khayyam’s al-Ruba‘iyyat. The reduced range of the word Allah may also be a reflection of the Sufi predilection for using attributes of Allah, such as al-Haqq [The Truth / The Reality] and al-Hayy [The Living], as opposed to the divine name proper.

The corpora from TITUS and the Sufi poetry we have surveyed are rather less than ideal to find the frequency correlate of Allah vs. Khuda . Fortunately, Hamid Hasani has recently published a Persian book titled The Most Frequent Words in Today’s Persian, which includes the 8,000 most frequently used words based on a million word corpus based on 80 texts and over 500 subtexts of contemporary Persian. The texts include 62 books published by IICYA, mostly written over the past ten years, and including 608,350 words; 14 journals from the children and youth sections of newspapers; complete issues of 11 journals and seven pages of seven other issues including 396,240 words. Out of one million words, Khuda occurs 580 times while Allah does not appear at all, with the exception of Ilahi which occurs 70 times and Ya Allah [O Allah] which appears 19 times. According to Ma‘sumeh G. Shambayati, an Iranian sociologist:

[T]he reason for not including Allah in this book may be because we usually don’t use it in our communication as it is Arabic and we have a common Persian word for it [Khuda]… Allah, most of the time, is used for praying.

This preference for the Persian Khuda, Khudavand and Yazdan over the Arabic Allah has been established by our frequency analysis of the works of over thirty Persian poets found in the Persopedia Corpora.

Table 5: Frequency of “God” in Persian Poetry

PoetAllah Khuda Khudavand Yazdan

Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr142610

Anvari18126438

Awhadi Maragha’i68256

Baba Tahir3701

Bahar1637

Parvin I‘tisami11641

Jami121664

Hafiz Shirazi219101

Khaqani12538717

Khvaju Kirmani61560

Daqiqi0135

Dihlavi14251515

Rudaki1052

Sa‘di34707110

Sa‘d Salman0031

Sana’i42201929

Sayf Farghani3641

Shabistari14601

Shaykh Baha’i151511

‘Ubayd Zakani31608

‘Iraqi7900

‘Attar153874

Firdowsi14179764

Farughi Bastami106946

Muhtasham Kashani587129

Manuchihri Damghani18214

Mawlavi41080796125

Nizami Ganjavi101076435

Shahriyar02910

Tabrizi01010

Farrukhi Sistani03227

Vahshi Bafqi164474

Hatif Isfahani122700

Nasir Khusraw0158768

Total8201,7257181,174

Statistically, the Arabic Allah occurs 820 times and the Persian words for God, 3,617 times, with 1,725 occurrences of Khuda, 718 instances of Khudavand, and 1,174 cases of Yazdan. Other Persian names for God, like Parvadigar and Afarinandah, did not appear at all. The differing use of the various words of God in each author is, in itself, a fascinating subject, worthy of in-depth investigation. For our purposes, it suffices to demonstrate the general preference for the indigenous Persian names for God over the Arabic Allah. The most popular divine name among the Persian poets would be Khuda, which has roughly twice the frequency of Allah. In second place is the name Khudavand which is slightly more popular than Allah which comes in third place before Yazdan which falls in fourth place. Evidently, this excludes Firdowsi’s extensive use of Yazdan, which would otherwise tilt the scale.30

All of the data drawn from Persian lexico-statistics indicates that the frequency of word “God” in Persian is similar to that found in other Indo-European languages. A comparative seven-day search of English, Persian and Arabic newspapers conducted in November 2005 seems to corroborate that the Persian use of God is consistent with that found in other languages, with the exception of Arabic, which is unique in this regard:

Table 6: Frequency of “God” in English, Persian, and Arabic Newspapers

NewspaperLanguageCountryFrequency Word

Toronto StarEnglishCanada15 God

Globe and MailEnglishCanada28 God

New York TimesEnglishU.S.A.63 God

Chicago Tribune EnglishU.S.A.62 God

LA TimesEnglishU.S.A.50 God

The IndependentEnglishU.K.49 God

IRIBPersianIran12 / 7Allah / Khuda

Iran NewspaperPersianIran74 / 35Allah / Khuda

Iran DailyPersianIran3 / 0Allah/ Khuda

al-HayatArabic England107Allah

al-AyyamArabicBahrain+ 100Allah

al-RayahArabicQatar+ 130Allah

al-KhalijArabicU.A.E.+ 225Allah

As can be observed, the English language newspapers average 45 references to God; the Persian ones average 44 references to God and the Arabic ones average over 140, reasserting its uniqueness. Not factored into the Arabic statistics is al-Wifaq, an Arabic-language newspaper published in Iran which reported 38 instances of Allah and one of Khuda hinting that the culture of the speaker, and not the language itself, is the driving force behind the Allah Lexicon. How else could one account for the radical reduction in Allah/Khuda expressions by Arabic-speaking Iranians?

7.17 Malaysian

In Ian Proudfoot’s Malay Concordance Project, a survey of a large corpus of classical Malay prose and verse texts covering over 1.7 million words, the name Allah occurs 3,462 times, a total overall average frequency of 2.8 times per 1,000 words. In some individual religious texts, however, the word Allah had a frequency of up to 20.9 / 1,000. The word tuhan [god] appears 1,255 times with a frequency of 0.8; batara [god] 811 times with a frequency of 1.4; dewa [deity] 795 times with a frequency of 0.7; and various forms of ilah, 163 times, including berilah 74; diberilah 27 [I take refuge in Allah]; ilah 6; ilahi 39, menberilah 15 and menterilah 2. The expression masya Allah appears 4 times, and masha’ Allah [It is the will of Allah] occurs once.

7.18 African Languages

7.18 African Languages: Fulfulde, Somali, Oromo, Mossi, Swahili, Yoruba, Zarma, Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka

The Fulfulde or Fulani language is spoken in Central and West Africa, including Sudan, Niger, Mali, Senegal, and Cameroon.31 According to Scott Clark, who has worked among the Fulbe for twenty years, Fulfulbe is not a lingua franca in these countries, though in Cameroon it is an important language of wider communication. So, the Fulbe in Nigeria must speak Hausa to get around or Sango in the Central African Republic. According to Paulène Aspel, the Fulfuble language is “a complex linguistic mixture of old Arabic vocabulary and syntactical forms borrowed either unchanged or Fulanized, usually pertaining to religious matters” (189). This statement gives the impression that Fulfulbe is a “mixed language,” one having the vocabulary from one language, but the structure from another. This is incorrect. Furthermore, most of the Arabic vocabulary in Fulfulbe is limited to the domains of religion and warfare. The vocabulary of daily life is not “old Arabic vocabulary,” though some devout Muslim Fulbe would no doubt like to think that. While a frequency dictionary does not exist for this language, a survey of its literature reveals a preponderance of Allah expressions. As Aspel observes, “[t]he Arabic influence seems to be strong…on this kind of literature” which is based on Arabic models (180). According to Aspel, three main types of formulae trigger the attention of the interested one who stands on the threshold of the Fulfulbe poetry from the Adamawa:

He is first greeted with these words: Allah senido! [God, the Holy One!]. Allah is the central core word, many times repeated, alone, inflected or in combined expressions. The three categories where it appears are: a) the noun-epithet formulas; b) the prefixed and suffixed Allah, and c) the verb formulas with Allah as object. In 225 lines of a dozen poems by Bellow dow Keerol, Allah alone or in combination appears 51 times. It occurs forty five times in 440 lines of Moodi Yaawa’s ten poems; forty eight times in ten poems and 313 lines by Buuba Jariida; twenty one times in the three poems of 195 lines by Hamaseyo; and four times in each of respectively Isa Dembo and Sambo Didi’s single poem selected. (178)

The most frequent of the noun-epithet formulas is Allah senido. Other common forms are Allah sarki [Allah Almighty], Allah teddu’do [Glorious Allah], the word teddu’do meaning “heavy,” the Hebrew root for “glory,” as well as Allah barkini [Blessed by Allah]. The most frequent inflected nouns are lillahi [(Praise be) to Allah], Allahi [Thanks be to Allah], wa Allahi [By Allah], billahi [(I seek refuge) in Allah] and Bismillahi [In the name of Allah] (179). Other examples of the Allah Lexicon in Fulfulbe poetry include the anaphora mi yettoyi Allah [I do thank Allah] in three odes by Hamaseyo, and the formula Allah yafam, Allah hokkam, Allah hisnam [Allah forgive me; Allah give me; Allah save me] from the poet Moodi Yaawa (179).

Indeed, as Pierre Francis Lacroix explains in the first chapter of Poésie peule, the Fulbe society of Adamawa, “née de l’Islam…en est restée profondément imprégnée” [“Born from Islam…it has remained profoundly marked by it”] (qtd. in Aspel 179). According to all assessments, “Islam in a broad sense has penetrated greatly among the Fulbe” (Shimada 95). The key cultural concepts in Fulbe culture are 1) pulaaku, tradition or Fulbeness; 2) diina or the Islamic religion; and 3) daraja or honor (VerEecke 146; Kazuhisa Eguchi 181). Among the Fulbe of Adamawa

[r]eligious faith runs deep and sincere, is accompanied by no more superstitious practices or beliefs than subsist among the majority of the Muslims in the Middle East or the Maghreb, and moreover harbors no typically “African” traits. The faith - of a “quality,” dare one say it, which is rather rare in black West Africa - has never been ground down, among the majority of those concerned, by its contact with economic conditions or modern politics, and even seems to have been refined in certain aspects in the last few decades. (Lacroix: 1980: 206)

The most common feature among the Fulbe, from West Africa to the Sudan, is the “[s]trong Islamic consciousness as the basis of their Islamic identity” (Hino 84). For the Fulbe, Islam [diina] is a significant moral code and ethnic marker:

Its core components include abiding by the Five Pillars of Islam, having piety, faith, “shame,” kindness or charity, mutual respect, along with telling the truth…and raising one’s children in Islam. Because of their similarities, the codes of diina and pulaaku are said to complement each other. It is not suprising, therefore, to find individuals or even entire communities in Adamawa making little distinction between the two, or considering diina a component of pulaaku. (VerEecke 148)

For the Fulbe, Islamization did not induce a simple identity change limited to the religious and moral level: “All aspects of Fulbe lives - moral, religious, economic, material, social, cultural and political - were affected” (Shimada 95).

According to Aspel, “[i]n Fulbe culture, religion and ethics seem to be closely interrelated, the praise of Allah is constantly blended and/or supported by laudatory verse to the Arab-white color” (Aspel 181). Reading Aspel, one gets the impression that the Fulbe love Allah and love the Arabs. This is not exactly the case. It would be hard to find a Fulbe saying that he “loves Allah,” - he would fear Him, but never “love” Him. Furthermore, loving the Arabs would be a stretch. The Fulbe are certainly grateful that the Arabs brought them the message of Islam. However, many of the Arabs come and want them to lose their mother tongue, Fulfulde, in favor of Arabic, something which the Fulbe are generally greatly against. The Sudanese Fulbe, however, often do speak Arabic as their mother tongue instead of Fulfulde as they are in the process of Arabization (Hino 83). Nonetheless, they continue to retain much of their traditional Fulbe culture in their daily life. According to Shun’ya Hino, the Fulbe sometimes criticize the way of life of the Arab Muslims as corrupt and hypocritical, compared to Fulbe piety and profound Islamic belief (83). This profound commitment to Islam has endowed Fulbe society with a rich oral and written culture saturated with semi-Africanized Allah expressions. In this regard, the Fulbe are unique among non-Arab Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.32

As for the rest of black Africa, the spread of the Allah Lexicon seems to be associated with the degree of Islamization and Arabization. In the words of Trimingham,

The spread of a religion possessing a sacred scripture sets up an interrelationship between the sacred language and the languages of the people who adopt the religion. This is especially the case with Arabic. In Hamitic-speaking Africa Islamization was accompanied by Arabization, and the effect we have shown to be profound, but in Negro Africa Islam was spread almost entirely by Africans and Arabic was not envisaged as a living language. Thus the great divide between white (Hamitic) and black (Negro) Africa has been perpetuated by language, for whilst the spread of Islam has been accompanied by the absorption of words and expressions into African languages, in Negro Africa the mediating factor has been the law books in the memories of the clergy. Arabic in Negro Africa was wholly a sacred language with little or no secular usages. Few colloquial or daily-life words penetrated, [with the exception of expressions like barka, baraka, bismillah, insha’ Allah, wa Allahi and alhamdulillah which are very common among all Islamized groups in black Africa: the Zarma, the Hausa, the Kanuri, the Fulbe, the Tamacheq, and so forth], but the language of the law books has enriched the languages of Muslims with hundreds of religious, political, commercial and abstract words and expressions. (101) [the addendum is ours]

In much of black Africa, traditional concepts of a supreme power or spirit, a High God, seem generally to be readily identified with Allah (Lewis 61). For the Somali and the Muslim Oromo, known in the past by the pejorative term Galla, the pre-Islamic conception of the Cushitic sky god waq had many elements in common with the Muslim idea of Allah (Lewis 274). Consequently, the god waq was readily assimilated to Allah (Lewis 61). The Muslim Oromo and the Somali call Allah by the words formerly used for the Cushitic god, with the same connotations (Lewis 274). Among the Somali, the name waq is used in a common expression of sacrifice (waqda‘in: lit. “offering to God”). Besides Alla and Waq, the Somali also refer to God as rabbi, alle and eebbe.33 For the Mossi, the otiose deity winam became the equivalent of Allah; and the Nupe equated their traditional deity soko with Him as well (Lewis 61).

Among the Swahili in East Africa, the traditional creator God mungu became associated with Allah (Lewis 61). The Swahili expression for God Almighty is Jicho la Mungu. Besides Mungu and Allah, the Bantu refer to God as rabi, and rahimi. They use the expression wallah as well as lahaula, a truncated form of the Arabic la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah, in the sense of “God forbid!” Like the Bantu, the Yoruba who embraced Islam also identified their traditional High God - in this case Olorin or Olodumare - with Allah. Among the Zarma, the name for God is irikoy. It is used in expressions like Irikoy ma albarka daŋ ay izo ga [May God bless my son]; Irikoy m'iri cebe yesi (nda baani “or” mansancine) [May God show us next year (in health “or” as now)]. In the first expression, the Arabic word for blessing has been borrowed along with its article. The word Allah is mainly limited to the oath walla used by most Zarmas at the end of statements. It means “by Allah,” and is short for Wa Allahi [(I swear) by Allah]. Generally speaking, the old term for God is frequently retained alongsided the newly acquired term Allah, and both names are viewed as synonymous, the Arabic term is reserved principally for use in poetry and in stock Arabic expressions, phrases and exclamations, while the indigenous name is invoked in informal subjective prayer [du‘a] (Lewis 61; Trimingham 55).

In the case of cultures where there was apparently no distinct pre-Islamic name for a supreme deity - if the concept was ever entertained at all - vernacular terms equivalent to the English “Master” or “Lord” are applied to Allah (Lewis 61). In other instances, the name Allah came to fill that void. In Hausa, the name for God is Allah and it is used in various expressions and interjections including: Insha’ Allah [If Allah wills]; Allah ta‘ala [Allah Almighty]; Allah ya sawwak’a [Allah save you]; Allah wadanka [Allah shall curse you] and Jalla [Praise Allah]. In Wolof the name for God is yalla, an Africanized pronunciation of the Arabic Ya Allah or “O Allah.” Some of the Allah expressions in Wolof include Nit ñi ñep deñu wara wox alxamdulilaa [All people should say Praise be to Allah]; Yaala buur la [Allah is Great]; Dagaan yaala lu baaxla [To worship Allah is a very good thing] and Giñ naa ci turi yaala [I swear in the name of Allah]. In Mandinka, the name for Almighty God is Ala. Godliness is Ala ñaasilaŋo and fearing God is Ala ñaasilaŋo. The Mandinka have a rich repertoire of Allah expressions, including: Tenturro be Ala ye [Praise be to Allah]; Ŋa n tuku Ala la [Let’s rely on Allah]; Ala le mu soorilaa ti [Allah is the one who offers]; Kana Ala sooki [Don’t go against Allah]; Bannaayaa mu Ala la sooro le ti [Wealthiness is Allah’s gift]; Ala maaitanka la seetani la [May Allah protect you from Satan]; Ala la mansabaayaa maŋ naane soto [Allah’s mightiness has no limit]; Ala maa ñ ñaa jamaa la kayira kono [May Allah let us meet again in peace]; Ala be moo kuruŋolu jihadi la [Allah will torment the evil people]; Kana Ala fulankafu niŋ i mu misilimoo ti [Don’t associate Allah with others if you are Muslim]; Ala mu mansa fondinsire le ti [Allah is a merciful King]; Alaladaaroo [Allah’s creation]; Bisimilaay [Allah’s name]; Yaala rek laa dee jaamu [I adore only Allah]; Jeebalu leen ci yaala [Give yourself up to Allah]; Ala warate le [Allah is Great].

7.19 Russian

According to Serge Sharoff’s Frequency Dictionary for Russian, which is based on a corpus of 40 million words, the Russian name for God, бог, is the 244th most common word, appearing 376 times. An earlier study conducted by Brown showed it was the 593rd most common word (39). Prof. Lennart Lönngren’s Uppsala Corpus of one million Russian words consists of 600 Russian texts equally divided between informative prose from 1985-89 and literary prose from 1960-88, drawn from the works of 40 authors from Abramov to Zorin. The compilers assured that the corpus was representative and varied with vocabulary from 25 different subject areas. Out of one million words in the Uppsala Corpus, the word бог appears 72 times. As for spoken Russian, the word бог appears 31 times in the Corpus of Interviews, composed of interviews conducted from 1996 to the present with topics ranging from music, society, economy, and literature to lifestyle and sports.

7.20 Japanese

In Charles Kelley’s Japanese Newspaper Word Frequency List, the word kami [god] is the 664th most common word out of a corpus of 300,000 words drawn from the Japanese press. However, according to the List of Japanese Words published on the web site of the Sakuragoaka High School in Tokyo, Japan, the Japanese word for god comes in 4,568th place, appearing only four times, in a corpus of 282,918 word tokens consisting of 8,481 original words collected from a number of 20th century novels and stories. In Tadashi Kikuoka’s Japanese Newspaper Compound: The 1,000 Most Important in Order of Frequency, the word かみ kami [god] does not appear even once. If one looks at the 20 most common words in Arabic, the word Allah appears prominently. In Japanese, the 20 most common words are related to capitalism, business, money, and government, including: iin [committee member], seefu [government], keezai [economy / finance], rōdō [labor], jimu [business], minshu [democratic], kaisha [company / corporation], and so forth. The most frequent Japanese words may reflect a secular materialistic worldview, whereas the most frequent Arabic words may reflect a spiritual worldview. In Japanese, even the concept of God appears to the outsider to manifest a materialistic mentality. Although the Japanese word kami is often translated as “god,” the word in fact means “spirit,” “soul,” or “mind.” In other words, according to the Japanese worldview, God is in each person’s mind; God is the energy inside our intellects, an idea quite similar to the Marxist conception of God as a dimension of human beings. As Masahiko Minami explains,

Japanese religions are naturalistic onese, as can be seen in Shintoism, which grew out of everyday life of the Japanese people in primitive times. The word kami has a homophone kami, which means “the top, head, or upper part.” This may be my opinion, but kami as the god and kami as the top are in a sense synonymous.

Although the data regarding the frequency of the Chinese character 神 kami or god in the Japanese language is not entirely consistent, it is clear that it is not used very frequently and when it does appear, it is often in conjunction with other characters.

7.21 Chinese

According to Patrick Hassel Zeim’s 5,000 Chinese Characters in Order of Frequency, the Chinese character for God, or shén in Mandarin, is the 226th most common in written texts in modern mainland China. The first 250 characters cover around 60% of any written text in the region. In Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao’s Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, the word 上帝, Shang Di or Shang Ti [God, lit. “Lord Above,” “Sovereign Above,” or “Lord On High”] appears 28 times per million words in the written corpus and occurs 14 times per million in Richard Xiao and Hongyin Tao’s Lancaster Los Angeles Spoken Chinese Corpus. As for the word shén, it occurs 142 times per million in the LCMC and 13 times per million in the LLSCC. According to Jun Da’s “Character Frequency List” from the Xin Yu Si Electronic Books Collection, the word shén comes in 159th place with a raw frequency of 22,973, a cumulative frequency of 10,285,196, and a cumulative percentage of 53.5078% based on a 45 million character corpus.

These statistics, it should be noted, are reflective of Chinese society as a whole, the vast majority of which is Taoist and Buddhist. Estimates of the Muslim population in China vary from 1-2% to 10%, namely between 13 to 130 million people out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. According to other sources, the population may range from 20 to 200 million. The Muslims in China are made up of ten officially recognized ethnic minorities: the Uighur, the Karak, the Kyrgyz, the Uzbek, the Tatar, and the Salar who are Turkish people; the Dongxiang and the Baoan or Bonan who are of Mongolian origin, the Tajik who are of Persian origin; and finally, the Hui, who are of Chinese origin and who represent half of the Muslim population in the country. Our focus in this section is on the Hui as they are ethnic Chinese. An analysis of the Allah Lexicon among the other nine Muslim groups should become the subject of subsequent studies.

Determining the frequency of the words Allah and God among Chinese-speaking Muslims, known as the Hui [pronounced “whey”], is presently impossible and would require the compilation of a corpus of Hui speech. Although the Hui in China primarily speak the language and dialects spoken by the people among whom they live, “they have nevertheless infused these mainly Chinese (Han) languages with Islamic terminology derived from several sources, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other Central Asian languages” (Gladney 393). Known as “Hui speech” [Huihui hua], the phrases and vocabulary items do not comprise a language but serve as linguistic markers of ethnic and religious identity (393). Hui speech represents a unique mix of Chinese and foreign languages, permeated by translations and transliterations of Islamic lexical items (393).

While Qur’anic Arabic is used in Hui Islamic ritual, it has never served as a common language for communication. Hui do use certain Persian and Arabic loan words…that are unintelligible to Han, but these in no way constitute a separate language. Of course, to the Hui themselves, these distinctive non-Han expressions of speech, though not a separate language in any sense, continue to serve as important markers of ethnic identity. (68)

Dru C. Gladney has observed that the use of these terms generally marks outsider/insider status, as Huis often use the Arabic or Persian-derived terms among one another, saving the Chinese terms for when they speak with non-Muslim Han (394). He also noted that daily speech in Hui villages or neighborhoods appeared to be more influenced by Persian, whereas theological terminology used in the mosque by the ahong [teacher] and the manla [religious student] was dominated more by Arabic-derived terms (394).

The Muslim Chinese traditionally refer to Islam as 清真 Qing Zhen, “Pure Way” or “Pure Life.” They also use the more modern term Yisilam. The Muslim Chinese refer to Allah as Zhen Zhu [the True Lord or True God], Zhen Zai [the Primal Cause]. The Arabic Allah is also used; however, it is phonetically adjusted to Chinese as An la, Ahla, Ahlahu, and Anlahu. The Allah Lexicon of the Hui includes Bisimingle [from the Arabic Bismillah or In the Name of Allah], Anlahu ahkebai [Allah is the Greatest], Anlahuteahlia [Great Allah], Hudeteahlia [Most Exalted God], Yiliaxi, [My god], Yizede, teahli, [Most holy and exalted Allah], Hangeteahli, “True God” and Zhenzhu baoyou or “Allah protected me.” The Hui also refer to God as Hu da, the Chinese pronunciation of the Persian Khuda. They employ the following expressions from the Khuda Lexicon: Balehudaya [Great God] and Hudaya [My God]. They also employ implied Allah expressions like Sewabu, from the Arabic thawwab, meaning reward. It is used among the Hui as an expression of thanks with the sense of “May Allah reward you.” As Hui speech does not contain any non-Chinese verbs, the Allah Lexicon in Chinese is limited to a body of already integrated expressions with little possibility of further growth and development.

8. Validity of Data and Methodology

The question of the validity of the frequency data we have provided is sure to arise. Some scholars may argue that the results of our research are debatable and questionable. While a frequency analysis based on several hundred or several thousand words can be called into question, the same cannot be said of comprehensive studies in corpus linguistics based on hundreds of thousands and even millions of words drawn from a multitude of sources, both written and spoken, as the larger the size of the sample, the greater is the probability of its accuracy. While more work should be done on the subject, the corpora we have consulted, which represent 50 to 100% of the vocabulary of their respective languages, are statistically sound and relatively accurate in representing lexical frequency.34 Those who object to these results may simply not want to give weight or import to this body of theocentric language or see how its presence or absence could impact comfort, confidence, and faith. If there is room for debate, it resides primarily in the realm of interpretation. It may be argued that the religiosity of a people cannot be determined solely on the basis of one word: Allah or its equivalent in other languages. However, this would be a misconstruction of our methodology. Our objective in this study is not to assert that Arab Muslims are more religious than others, but to establish, through an initial analysis, that the Arabic language possesses a unique language feature: an unusually high preponderance of religious, theocentric, invocations and idioms, worthy of investigation. Having established the frequency of Allah in the Arabic language, we can now examine its function.

9. Surprises

When we started this study, we postulated that the spread of Islam among Arabs, Persians, Indians, and other groups of people, led to an “Islamization” of both language and culture. We expected to find that the frequency of the Allah Lexicon was highest in Arabic, then in Persian, then in Urdu, then in other Islamic languages. We predicted that the longer a people have been Muslim and the more deep-rooted the Islamic influence has been, the more entrenched the Allah Lexicon would be in their languages in both frequency and diversity. The Arabs were the first to embrace Islam, then the Persians, the Turks, the Indians, and other nations of the world. The longer a people have been exposed to Islam, we believed, the more they had infused in the Muslim faith, the more their language would reflect their religion. We anticipated that Arabic would use more Allah expressions than other Islamic languages, but we expected those Islamic languages to use Allah expressions to a great extent. From the onset, we were convinced that, at the very least, the frequency of the word God would be higher among Muslims than among non-Muslims. We were certainly in the wrong.

Although there is no doubt that Arabic is an ocean of Allah expressions, and that the word Allah is the most frequent lexical item in the Arabic language, the same cannot be said about other “Islamic” languages. As can be seen from the following chart, the frequency of the word “God” is a salient and most distinguishable feature of the Arabic language, regardless of variations in corpora and methods of frequency analysis:

Table 7: Frequency Ranking for “God” in Eleven Languages

LanguageFrequency Ranking for “God”

Arabic1st, 3rd or 18th to 76th

English97th to 292nd

Spanish107th

Chinese159th to 226th

Russian244th

French 263rd

Rumanian495th

Urdu576th

Bosnian 905th

Italian1,610th

Japanese664th to 4,568th

This unusually high frequency of the word Allah is not found in other languages of Islam. In Malaysian, the word Allah appears 2.8 times per 1,000 words. The Bengali words for God rarely occur at all in the printed Bengali of Calcutta. The word Allah is the 576th most common word in the language of the Urdu, meaning that Russians, after 70 years of atheistic communism, may refer to God almost as often as Pakistani Muslims do. In the Persian sources we have examined, the word Allah is not particularly prevalent. It may be argued that, from a very early time, the Persian / Urdu Khuda came to function as a substitute for Allah and this explains the lower incidence of Allah expressions.35 The preference of the Persian Khuda over the Arabic Allah is not an unusual or unexpected phenomenon, but rather the natural result of Persian linguistic nationalism. It does not, however, explain the reduced rate of religious expressions in Persian, using Allah or Khuda.

The Persians do indeed use some common Allah expressions like bismillah [In the name of Allah], insha’ Allah [Allah willing], subhana Allah [Glory be to Allah], la ilaha illa Allah [There is no god but Allah], alhamdulillah [Praise be to Allah], astaghfirullah [I ask forgiveness from Allah], fatabarak Allah [Praise and Might belongs to Allah], a‘udhu billah [I take refuge in Allah], tawakkaltu ‘ala Allah [I put my trust in Allah] and la‘natu Allah [May Allah curse], but their general inclination is to employ Khuda in virtually every other instance. This is consistent with Yavar Dehghani’s impression that “the word Allah is just restricted to religious contexts [Allahu Akbar, Bismillah]; otherwise, it is only the word Khuda which is used in conversation.” The relatively rare use of the name Allah in Persian is curious since much, if not the majority, of its vocabulary is taken from Arabic.

While Urdu speaking Muslims say both Khuda Hafiz and Allah Hafiz, the Persians only say Khuda Hafiz. Some insist on saying la‘natu Khuda [May Khuda curse] rather than la‘natu Allah [May Allah curse] and Binami Khuda [In the name of Khuda] rather than Bismillah [In the name of Allah]. Rather than saying Allah yu‘tik al-sihhah [May Allah give you good health], they say ‘afiyyah [good health] and instead of inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un [From Allah we come and to Him is our return] they say tasliyyah or “my condolences.”

In the time of the Shah of Iran, the traditional greeting was a simple salam [peace]. With the advent of Khomeini’s revolution, the complete Islamic greeting, salamu ‘alaykum, came into vogue, as did other Arabic expressions. With the polarization of the Iranian populace into conservatives and reformers, many “progressive” people have returned to their old linguistic habits of saying Khuda rather than Allah in an attempt to disassociate themselves from the religious right.

With the exception of Arabic, the data indicates that the word “God” often appears less in “Muslim languages” than it does in traditionally “Christian languages,” although in the Islamic world, its use is viewed as pious, whereas in the Christian world, it is primarily pejorative. In English, the word “God” either the 97th, 192nd, or 292nd most common word. In Spanish, it is the 107th most frequent; in French it is the 263rd or the 342nd most common. In Rumanian, it is the 495th, in Russian the 593rd, and in Italian the 1610th. In Latin, the word for God appears 31.90 times per 10,000 while in Greek it appears 22.29 times per 10,000. We expected that the word God would be found more frequently in the traditional languages of Roman Catholicism like Italian, French, Rumanian and Spanish. The high frequency of the word Dios in Spanish came as no surprise. However, the relatively low frequency of the word God in Rumanian and especially Italian, the home of the Vatican and the bastion of the Roman Catholic Church, certainly did. For one reason or another, Allah expressions have not spread to a great extent beyond Arabic into the other traditional languages of Islam. The question is why?

10. Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Limitations of the Allah Lexicon

The length and time a people have been Muslim clearly has no impact on the extent of the Allah Lexicon in a given language. This may be the result of certain socio-cultural or linguistic limitations that play a role in curtailing its spread. Languages, as we know, are reflections of the people who speak them. They are mirrors of mentalities and culturally based constructions. According to Louis Massignon, Semitic languages reflect a monotheistic mindset, whereas Indo-European languages reflect a polytheistic one.36 He explains:

The limited truth, unduly characterized by the theory of Aryan superiority, is that the general grammatical characteristics (vocabulary, morphology, syntax) of our Indo-European languages determine that when an idea is expressed in them, its outer form will differ entirely from its clothing in a Semitic language. The idea’s Aryan presentation, the only one familiar to Western Orientalists, is periphrastic, made of words with unstable, shaded contours and changeable endings, words fit for apposition and combination. Very early on, verbal tenses in these languages become relative to the agent, egocentric, polytheistic; the words also have a didactic order, and are arranged in long hierarchical periods by means of graduated conjunctions. The Semitic presentation of the idea is gnomic, employing rigid words with immutable and always noticeable roots. The few changes allowed are internal and abstract: consonants are interpolated for the general meaning, vowels altered for the precise shade. The conjunctive role of particles is inseparable from the vocalic changes in endings; verbal tenses, even today, are absolute (they concern only the action) and theocentric (they affirm the transcendence and imminence of the One Agent); and finally, word order is lyrical, with phrases parceled into staccato formulas, condensed and autonomous. Whence the misunderstanding of those who, unable to perceive the powerful, explosive concision of Semitic languages, pronounce them unfit for mysticism. They are, after all, the languages of revelation of the transcendent God, of the Prophets, and of the Psalms. (47-48)

This view of the innate monotheism of Semitic languages is also expressed by Jean Grosjean in his “Preface” to Denise Masson’s French translation of the Holy Qur’an:

Le lecteur français doit toutefois se rappeler que, voilées par nos langues indo-européennes, les notions sur lesquelles se fonde tout monothéisme sont évidentes dans les langues sémites. Par exemple, le verbe y exprime plus le mode que le temps. Ses formes indiquent avec naturel si l’acte non seulement est subi ou se réfléchit mais encore son intensité, son intention, son effet ou sa cause, sa réciprocité, etc. Au contraire, nos précisions de temps sont secondaires et ne s’obtiennent que par des moyens accessoires. Les deux seuls temps réels ne font que distinguer entre ce qui est achevé, certain, et ce qui ne l’est pas, sans préjuger l’époque, au point qu’une action future peut être déjà faite. (III-IV)

[The French reader will recall that, while we are veiled by our Indo-European languages, the basic notions of monotheism are evident in Semitic languages. For example, the verb expresses more the mood than the tense. Its forms indicate naturally whether the act is not only received or reflected but also its intensity, its intention, its cause or effect, its reciprocity, etc. On the contrary, our precisions of time are secondary and are only obtained through secondary means. The two tangible tenses merely distinguish between what is completed and certain and that which is not, without indicating the period of time, to the extent that a future action may also be completed.]

As descendants of Abraham through Isaac, the Jews belong to a long tradition of monotheism. The ancient Jews were not fond of fiction, and produced little secular literature. They viewed any literature that stemmed from other than God as suspicious. They reveled in revelation, however, and produced a rich body of religious works. Just as their religion differed from the ancient religions insofar as it is founded on the idea of one God, who is infinitely just, omnipotent and omnipresent, so did their language which reflected this Abrahamic monotheism.37

As descendants of Abraham through Ishmael, the Arabs also belong to a long tradition of monotheism. Although they strayed from the straight path, like the Jews did on many occasions, and turned to idolatry, the Arabs returned to their ancestral monotheism with the advent of Muhammad.38 Since then, the Arabic language has been immersed in an ocean of Islam and the sublime sophistication of the language of the Qur’an became the standard for Arabic grammar.39 As Islam spread among the Arabs so did new Islamic Allah-centric expressions, which have evolved and expanded over the course of the centuries.40

While a process of Islamization occurred among non-Arabic-speaking Muslims, it does not seem to have gone far as it did among the Arabs, at least not in the area of language. Not all Muslim nations were Islamized to the same extent. Consequently, the interpretation and application of Islam manifests varying levels of cultural saturation.41 The Amazigh or Berbers of North Africa, for example, have been Muslims almost as long as the Arabs; however, their culture has not been Islamized to the same extent as the Arabs and some Berbers continue to hold on to some pre-Islamic customs and superstitions.42 Likewise, many Indonesian Muslims continue to mix Hindu and Buddhist traditions with their Islamic practices.43 The same applies to many African-Americans who combine Black Nationalism and Islam, and many African blacks who practice a blend of Islam and animism.44 Superficial Islamization, rather than the length of time a people have been Muslim, may represent the key factor affecting the preponderance of the Allah Lexicon.45

If we assume that all Muslims have been equally Muslimized, the answer to the limited spread of the Allah Lexicon to other languages may be found in the Qur’an. Recited exclusively in Arabic ritual contexts, the Qur’an has not been readily available in translation until modern times. Even today, the vast majority of non-Arab Muslims read the Qur’an in its original Arabic, rarely understanding a word. Among the Arabs, the regular recitation of the Qur’an exposes listeners to multitude of Allah expressions which are understood and integrated into daily speech. With this information in mind, it becomes clear why the vast majority of Allah expression have not spread outside of Arabic: they were simply not understood.

Arabic speakers and Muslims in general are quite conscious of the latent function of Allah expressions like insha’ Allah. In fact, failure to utter the phrase when speaking of future events is often accompanied by a sense of guilt and even fear of divine punishment. In the Arabic and Islamic worlds, it is widely believed that if a wish is not fulfilled, it is because the words “Allah willing” were not mentioned. Muslim children, both Arab and non-Arab, are taught from a young age to always say insha’Allah when speaking of future events. Allah expressions are not strictly ritualistic or formulaic.46 They form an integral structural and cultural component of the Arabic language, a reflection and reminder of the Allah-centricity of the Arabic language and civilization. The French formula, Je vous prie, Monsieur, de bien vouloir accepter mes salutations distinguées, [lit. “I beg you, Sir, to accept my distinguished salutations”], the equivalent of “yours truly,” is clearly a formulaic form of politeness.47 Years of exposure to Arabic-speaking Muslims lead us to believe that Allah expressions are often used with a comprehension of their meaning.48 When Arabic speakers invoke Allah and bless and pray for people, they do so consciously as an act of piety or a religiously or culturally prescribed act of politeness.49 Otherwise, they may remain quiet or use ordinary, non-religious expressions of politeness such as shukran [thank you], ‘afwan [you are welcome], min fadlik [please], and so forth. Since both religious and non-religious forms of politeness exist in Arabic, the use of the Allah Lexicon may be the result of a choice.50 Religious Arabic Muslims may make a greater effort to use Allah expressions while secular Arabic Muslims may try to drop them altogether. Some religious Arabic Muslims will drop the Allah Lexicon when conversing with non-Muslims. Likewise, Christian Arabs, particularly those from Lebanon, often opt for expressions which do not have Islamic associations or implications: for example, preferring sabah al-khayr over salamu ‘alaykum.51 It is thus clear that the use of the Allah Lexicon is conscious and is more than merely ritualistic or formulaic.52

Due to the profound Islamic influence on the Arabic people and their language, Allah expressions integrate easily into the language. They are so common that they are even used by non-Muslim Arabic speakers, be they Jewish or Christian. While Allah yu‘tik al-sihhah [May Allah give you health!] may come naturally in Arabic, it is not quite as easy to integrate it into other languages.53 As Castleton has noted, such phrases reflect an insignificant cultural component and have little extended social meaning within the context of English-speaking traditions (2000a). As El-Sayed has pointed out, “whatever the quantity, the frequency, or the degree of fixedness of formulas in a pair of languages, we are likely to find instances where a fixed formula in one language is not readily paired with any corresponding formula in the other” (1990: 5). In other words, in many traditionally non-Islamic languages, there are simply no equivalent expressions.54 As Castleton explains:

Familiar English interjections such as “By God” and “Great God, Almighty,” although identical lexically to their Arabic partners in the Allah Lexicon - wa Allah [By Allah], and Allahu Akbar [Allah is the Greatest] - nevertheless do not constitute, in English, authentic components of what Wardhaugh calls “a speech repertoire,” a group of words and phrases of compelling importance to verbal and written discourse within a particular speech community (124). He expands on this concept by clarifying that a linguistic repertoire represents lexical choices which speakers use to connect themselves with their community, often in very subtle ways. The English expressions above may well be used by native English speakers as exclamation or comment but there is nothing in the literature which suggests that their use assists the speaker to bond more tightly with their chosen group. (2000a)

As a result of some or all of these factors, Muslim minorities in the West, reverts or immigrants, are hesitant and reluctant to say Allah in its original Arabic and may opt for an equivalent in Western languages. As a result, Allah is lost in translation. Arabic speakers who are accustomed to Allah expressions often make a conscious effort to drop them, or merely whisper them or mention them in their mind, when speaking other languages.55 This is code repression as opposed to code switching and contributes to loss of culture, faith and identity.56

11. Conclusions

In the previous pages we have examined the degree of frequency of the word Allah in the Arabic language with a particular focus on expressions and invocations. We have seen that the Arabic language has the unique honor of being the only language in the world where the word Allah or “God” is the most frequently occurring content word in its lexicon. We have seen that the Arabic language is saturated with a rich variety of expressions invoking Allah explicitly or implicitly and that the name Allah permeates both spoken and written Arabic to the point where we can speak of the omnipresence of Allah in the Arabic language. As a result, an Arabic speaker could scarcely conceive of a conversation where the name of God would not appear. Surely, there are few situations that do not encourage or require the use of the Allah Lexicon as it forms a fundamental, natural and essential aspect of the Arabic language, binding identity and culture to language and religion.57 We have observed that the Allah Lexicon exists to a much lesser degree among non-Arabic-speaking Muslims, and that the length of time a people have been Muslim bears no relation to the frequency of Allah expressions in their language. We have demonstrated that the word Allah has the highest functional yield in the Arabic language and is not nearly as prevalent in the other languages of Islam. The great Nicaraguan writer, Rubén Darío, was certainly right when he described Arabic Muslims as “las razas más creyentes del orbe” (OC 3/956) [“the most believing races on earth”].58 Arabic is truly the language of Islam, the language of the Qur’an and the language of Allah.59

• 1. Editor’s Note: The expression “the Allah Lexicon” was coined by our colleague Barbara Castleton.
• 2. Editor’s Note: Arabs and Muslims often refer to Arabic as literally “the language of Allah.” This is often taken to mean that Allah’s language is Arabic, a notion with no basis in reason or religion. In Surat Ibrahim [Abraham], Almighty Allah says “We sent not an apostle except [to teach] in the language of his own people, in order to make [things] clear to them” (14:14). In his commentary to this verse, Muhammad Hamidullah explains that:

  Les commandements divins sont…révélés dans autant de langues que de prophètes cependant que Dieu est au-dessus du son et de la langue. On peut le comprendre peut-être par la métaphore que la révélation est comme le courant électrique incolore et invisible; venant de la génératrice, il prend la couleur et la force de la lampe qu’il illumine. Le prophète est comme la lampe, sa langue est la couleur de la lampe, et son rang est la force de la lampe. (255)

  [Divine commandments are…revealed in as many languages as there were prophets despite the fact that God is above both sound and language. Perhaps this can be understood by means of metaphor: revelation is like an invisible and colorless electrical current. When it comes from the generator, it takes the color and the power of the lamp it enlightens. The prophet is like a lamp, his language is the color of the lamp, and his rank is the power of the lamp].

  Hence, if the Arabic language deserves the title of “the language of Allah” it is because of its preponderance of Allah phrases. It must be noted, however, that Arabic existed prior to Islam and, as taught in non-Arabic and even Arabic-speaking venues, does not focus on the Allah Lexicon as a functional element in the language. Since the Allah Lexicon is a religious, cultural and structural component, fluency in the Arabic language cannot be attained without mastery of Allah expressions, for true linguistic literacy requires cultural literacy as well. As Mahmud Husein Salih and Hussein S. ‘Abdul-Fattah confirm, “It is axiomatic by now that developing one’s communicative competence in his native language or in a second language entails learning their respective routinized utterances, including of course the routinized oath expressions” (113). Clearly, the Allah Lexicon is an essential aspect of daily discourse and culture.

• 3. Editor’s Note: Literature is also a means of understanding culture. As we explain in “Étude comparée de la Chanson de Roland, le Poema de mío Cid et le Rawdah Khani,”

  La littérature est le reflet d’une société. Si nous examinons la littérature d’un peuple à un moment donné historique, cela nous permet de comprendre de nombreuses choses au sujet de la vie de cette époque, des conditions sociales et des idées prévalentes. La littérature nous permet de pénétrer dans la mentalité ou la psychologie d’une société ou d’une partie de celle-ci, nous permettant de comprendre la vision du monde de ses gens et leur comportement d’une façon beaucoup plus concrète et profonde que les livres d’histoire nous permettent. (32)

  [Literature is the reflection of a society. If we examine the literature produced by a people at a given moment in history, it enables us to understand many things about the life of the period, social conditions and prevalent ideas. Literature allows us to penetrate into the mentality or psychology of a society, or part thereof, enabling us to understand its worldview in a much more profound and concrete way than history books permit.]

• 4. Editor’s Note: Since this work falls under the general category of sociolinguistic research, rather than something more purist, our job is not to sort out the chicken and the egg. It is sufficient that the vastness of the Allah Lexicon, which arose through the distinctions drawn by Muhammad, should have altered the thought-patterns of Muslim Arabic speakers as a consequence. Readers can disagree with aspects of this and still find the topic valuable.
• 5. Editor’s Note: Even simple concepts such as “bread” are viewed differently from culture to culture. The word “bread” does not conjure the same images in the mind of Europeans as it does among Americans, African or Asians. In Egyptian colloquial Arabic, the word for bread is ‘ish or “[source of] life,” conveying the vital importance of this staple food. For detailed examples of differences in language and worldview see “Languages” in Richard Hooker’s Cultures in America.
• 6. Editor’s Note: Cultural studies, which bring together in interdisciplinary equilibrium the various fields of anthropology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, religious studies, and sociology, among others, is inconceivable without linguistic considerations of the psycho-biology of language and its relationship to culture.
• 7. Editor’s Note: Ahadith is the plural of hadith and refers to the sayings of Prophet Muhammad and, for the Shi‘ites, the Twelve Imams from his Household.
• 8. Editor’s Note: A hadith qudsi or sacred hadith is a tradition in which the Prophet Muhammad quotes Almighty Allah. The ahadith qudsiyyah include revelations not included in the text of the Qur’an. One of the best collections of sacred ahadith from Shi‘ite sources is Kalimat Allah compiled by Shirazi. Unfortunately, no idiomatic English translation of this text is available. The most complete collection of sacred hadith from Sunni sources is al-Ahadith al-qudsiyyah compiled by the Committee of the Qur’an and Hadith of the Higher Council for Islamic Affairs in Egypt. It consists of all the sacred hadith found in the six canonical collections and in Malik’s (d. 795) al-Muwatta’, containing four hundred sacred ahadith with variants where they occur. For an informed introduction to the sacred ahadith, refer to Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies’ Forty Hadith Qudsi.
• 9. Editor’s Note: Takbir is the act of saying Allahu Akbar or “Allah is the Greatest.”
• 10. Editor’s Note: An example would be the famous tasbih the Prophet prescribed for his daughter, Fatimah al-Zahra’ (d. 631-32), which consists of reciting Allahu Akbar 34 times, alhamdulillah 33 times and subhana Allah 33 times. The hadith is found in both Sunni and Shi‘ite canonical texts, including Majlisi’s (d. 1627-28) Bihar al-Anwar. See chapter 40 of Ordoni’s Fatimah the Gracious.
• 11. Editor’s Note: By “traditional Islam,” we refer to the true Islamic intellectual and hermeneutic traditions of the mainstream Sunni, Shi‘ah and Sufi, as opposed to the reductionist, revisionist, literalist, essentialist and innovative interpretations of Islam made by the wahhabiyyah and salafiyyah who, in an effort to “return to the roots of Islam” and “follow the letter of the law,” as opposed to its spirit, wish to disregard and even wipe out over fourteen centuries of sound scholarship. For further details on Wahhabism, refer to Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, by Hamid Algar and Luis Alberto Vittor’s insightful remarks in “El Islam shi‘ita: ¿ortodoxia o heterodoxia?” on pages 19-22.
• 12. Editor’s Note: Tasbih, literally, the recitation of subhana Allah [Glory be to Allah] is used in the general sense of praising God, while tahmid means the saying of alhamdulillah [Praise be to Allah].
• 13. Editor’s Note: As such, the Allah Lexicon is used to varying degrees by all Arabic speakers, regardless of their religion, showing the pervasive effect of the dominant culture.
• 14. Editor’s Note: Despite being antithetical to Islamic values, popular Arabic music makes common use of secularized Allah expressions. Islamic music, regardless of its language of expression, invokes Almighty Allah in perpetual praise. In North America, rapper Malik Shahid employs the Shi‘ite war-cry Allahu Akbar, Ya Husayn as a chorus in his song “The War of the One” while singer Safiyyah combines English and Arabic Allah phrases in her Flowers of Faith: Islamic Songs for Children. In the U.K., Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, has produced numerous Islamic songs utilizing the Allah Lexicon in English and Arabic. In Malaysia, the Muslim music group Raihan reached international stardom with their Islamic songs interlacing Allah expressions in Arabic and Malaysian. In Pakistan, Nusrat Fateh ‘Ali Khan, and other Qawwali musicians, spread the Allah Lexicon in a combination of Arabic and Urdu. In the U.K., Sami Yusuf has harmoniously combined the Arabic-English Allah Lexicon in his CDs: al-Mu‘allim and My Ummah. In Morocco and other Arabic nations, Allah expressions are the cohesive element in the ever popular nashid and amdah, Islamic songs, praises, and odes. Allah is further used freely in Arabic love songs, music videos and by the most liberal of society’s artists, and without any religious or transcendent intent--it is merely part of the lingo in such cases.
• 15. Editor’s Note: In Arabic, traditional Islamic medicine is known as Yunani or Greek Medicine. It consists of a combination of Prophetic, Galenic and Arab medicine. In countries like India, Islamic medicine is a combination of al-tibb al-nabawi, or prophetic medicine, and Ayurvedic medicine. In any of its forms, Muslim medicine seeks to heal both spirit and body. The spiritual needs are addressed through verses from the Holy Qur’an, by seeking protection with the names of Allah, the Exalted, seeking intercession and prayer. The physical needs are addressed through herbal medicine. For hundreds of examples of the Allah Lexicon used for medicinal purposes, refer to Islamic Medical Wisdom: The Tibb al-’A’imma, translated by Batool Ispahany and edited by Andrew J. Newman, as well as al-Tibb al-nabawi, by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 1350).
• 16. Editor’s Note: According to one study, “72 percent of Muslims voted for Bush, 19 for Ralph Nader…and merely 8 percent for Gore” (Reichley 345). While President Bush’s use [or abuse] of the word God was meant to appeal to the religious right, he seemed to have reaped an unforeseen benefit, the Islamic vote, with Muslims voting for him in masses, perhaps inspired, consciously or subconsciously, by his repeated references to God. However, as a result of Bush’s foreign policy, Muslims as an American minority have categorically reviewed this habit. For more on religion in American civil life, see With “God on our Side?” How American “Civil Religion” Permeates Society and Manifests itself in Public Life by Bruce Murry, available online at:
  http://www.facsnet.org/issues/faith/civil_religion1.htm#god.
• 17. Editor’s Note: Davies concurs that “the English-speaking learner of Arabic is likely to be struck, sooner or later, by the proliferation of religious references in formulas” (81). Such extensive use of religious expressions in daily discourse and interaction demonstrates the dominance of Islamic ideology in the life of Muslim communities (‘Abd el-Jawad 2000: 219).
• 18. Editor’s Note: Further research on frequency and distribution, both regional and social, of Allah across the Arabic-speaking world is much needed and would be a valuable contribution to scholarship. As Schmidt observes, “almost everything that sociolinguistics can discover about the sociolinguistic patterning of Arabic will have some relevance for the teaching and learning of Arabic as a second language” (55). When it comes to the Allah Lexicon, in many areas impressions, as opposed to data, dominate. It is clearly established that Allah expressions permeate both classical and colloquial Arabic. However, is there any particular dialect where they are used more prolifically than others? The issue of regional differences in the frequency of the Allah Lexicon needs to be researched, as does its relation to education and social class and the particular contexts in which they are used.

  Research has so far focused primarily on positive Allah expressions as opposed to negative Allah expressions such as Allah y‘atik humma [May Allah give you fever!] and Allah yal‘anak [May Allah curse you!]. As ‘Abd el-Jawad observes, “despite its linguistic and sociocultural richness, high functional load, and high frequency,” conversational oaths “in an Arabic context has been unduly neglected to the extent that it has rarely been studied as a linguistic phenomenon” (2000: 220). ‘Abd el-Jawad’s study on “Swearing in Arabic” provides a good overview, demonstrating that swearing “is not just a routine formula with low functionality; it is a cultural index with a wide range of communicative functions” (2000: 239). Sadok Masliyah’s article “Curses and Insults in Iraqi Arabic” has also provided a large list of negative Allah expressions; however, more work needs to be done on similar expressions in other Arabic dialects.

  Studies also need to be conducted to determine whether there are any gender differences when it comes to the use of the Allah Lexicon. Several studies have demonstrated that unlike women in the rest of the world, Arabic-speaking females tend to approximate standard Arabic to a lesser degree than Arabic-speaking males: “male speakers consistently use the standard linguistic forms more than women” (‘Abd el-Jawad 1981: 324); “women use the standard prestigious forms in both careful and casual styles less often than men” (1983: 103); “male informants use more prestigious forms than females” (Kojak 1983: 4); Cairene speakers “did not fit the Western sociolinguistic model [because of] the absence of any apparent greater sensitivity on the part of women to the prestige of the classical / standard norm” (Schmidt). Ibrahim’s study, “Standard and Prestige Language: A Problem in Arabic Sociolinguistics,” which insists that “All available data indicates that Arab women in speaking Arabic employ the locally prestigious features…more than men” (124) does not debunk the aforementioned studies and merely demonstrates a difference of opinion as to what constitutes prestigious Arabic. For ‘Abd el-Jawad, Schmidt and Kojak, it is classical Arabic; for Ibrahim, it is colloquial Arabic as spoken by the urban elite. As to the direction women’s speech takes in the Arabic world, the jury is still out. Abu Haidar, for example, challenged Ibrahim’s findings. In her study of a speech group of Baghdadi men and women, Abu Haidar showed that in Baghdad the prestige variety of spoken Arabic was in the direction of literary or classical Arabic and that women, more than men, tended to favor this variety, generally eschewing stigmatized forms of the urban vernacular (Emery 198). As female Arabic speakers tend to use less classical Arabic than their male counterparts, it might be assumed that their Allah expressions are drawn more from ‘ammiyyah [the vernacular] than from fusha [the formal literary language].

  It would also be interesting to note if female Arabic speakers prefer some expressions over others; for example, formulas of compassion and mercy as opposed to formulas of wrath and divine retribution. Accordingly, ‘Abd el-Jawad observes that women, especially older ones, tend not only to swear by worldly objects, such as the dear members of the family or other natural, social and cultural phenomena, more often than men do, but they also tend to use more elaborate linguistic formulas in swearing, e.g., the rhymed oaths, than men do. Their oaths seem to be more complimentary, human, and family-oriented. (2000: 228)

  ‘Abd el-Jawad also notes that “older uneducated women…rarely swear by God” (2000: 227). According to Stewart, “[c]ognate curses are often used by parents or superiors towards children and subordinates. These cognate curses are used by women more than men and typically by women of lower socio-economic status in traditional society” (344). Cognate curses, it should be noted, rarely invoke God. So, Arabic women do indeed curse; however, the curses they employ rarely invoke the Deity.

  Emery has touched upon some of these gender differences in Omani Arabic, noting that older people, especially women, often use ta‘aqqabna ‘alaykum al-‘afiyyah [May good health follow you], darbak khadra [may your path be green] and qiddaish al-Rahman [Allah, the Compassionate, is before you] while men appear to favor hayyak Allah [May Allah give you life] and young women tend to employ the pan-Arabic ma‘a al-salamah as a closing exchange more than men (208). Congratulations at weddings appear to have gender differences, with religiously minded men given to using some variation of the phrase din wa dunya [may your marriage be successful spiritually and materially] while younger men and women use the expression mink al-mal wa minha al-‘ayyal [money from you and children from her] (210). When congratulating women on the birth of a baby, women tend to use sympathetic formulas and invocations such as ahwan insha’ Allah [less pain, Allah willing] and khatirah wa salamah insha’ Allah [danger, then safety, Allah willing] while it is considered socially inappropriate for a man to congratulate the mother unless she is directly related to him (210). Invocations to ward off the evil eye such as al-salatu wa al-salam ‘ala Muhammad, among others, pertain to the feminine domain. In the Dhahira region mainly older women use the expression mu intu wa rahma with the root-echo response Allah yirham walidik [May Allah have mercy on your parents] whereas men tend to say ni‘imtu bi al-rahmah [blessings of rain]. The traditional Qur’anic words of condolence inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un [to Allah we belong and to Him is our return] is used mainly by men who also refer to the inevitability of fate in the expression hadha ma qaddara Allah [this was decreed by Allah]. In Morocco, expressions such as msakum [your afternoon] and qata‘at min fummak bi al-‘asal [I cut it from your mouth with honey] are used only by women (Davies 84). Evidently, more work needs to be done and any future research should be conducted by female scholars since, in Arabic-Islamic culture, “[m]ale/female exchanges where participants are not related…tend to be very brief” (Emery 202) and women are generally inhibited around men. In light of these distinctions, there may be many linguistic forms which are only adequate for women and others only suitable for men.

  We do know that some Allah expressions are only appropriate for children, such as “May Allah keep you” and that children have a different repertoire. We know that some Allah phrases are meant for Muslims, such as “May Allah forgive…” and others are meant for non-Muslims, like “May Allah have mercy upon,” as the Qur’an prohibits asking forgiveness for non-Muslims. As Almighty Allah explains,

  “It is not fitting, for the Prophet and those who believe, that they should pray for forgiveness for Pagans, even though they be of kin, after it is clear to them that they are companions of the Fire” (9:113).

  Although Abraham did pray for his polytheistic step-father, saying

  “Forgive my father, for that he is among the astray” (26:86), he did so “only because of a promise he had made to him” (9:114).

• 19. Editor’s Note: Ironically, Christian and Jewish Arabs call upon Allah more frequently than non-Arabic-speaking Muslims do.
• 20. Editor’s Note: As Castleton has shown, the Allah Lexicon does not transfer pragmatically and lexically into the English language when Arabic speakers switch to that language (2000b 5:3). For non-Arabic speakers, the implementation of Allah expressions poses particular problems. Without understanding the contexts which call for the Allah Lexicon, many English-speaking Muslim converts use them erroneously and inappropriately. While a process of adaptation may be at play, if these individuals study the Arabic language and attempt to employ Allah expression in Arabic in the same way they have done in English, they can make themselves the object of ridicule.
• 21. Editor’s Note: The basmalah or tasmiyyah is the introductory “In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful” that precedes 113 of the 114 chapters of the Qur’an.
• 22. Editor’s Note: “The Arabic term ism shares with the Latin term nomen the grammatical meaning of ‘noun’ as well as the semantic meaning of ‘name,’ with the further ambiguity that ‘noun’ can also mean ‘verbal noun’ or ‘adjective’” (Burrel and Ḍaher 195, note 20).
• 23. Editor’s Note: On the one hand, there may be a secularizing tendency which aims at purging the written language of the press of the most common word in the Arabic language: the name of Almighty Allah. On the other hand, there may be a culturally specific pattern at play which places elements of the Allah Lexicon in very personal, intercommunicative venues, rather than second and third level media, an idea which is interesting but which requires further research to support it. The paradox here is not so much that the Allah Lexicon phrases are missing from the press as the disparity between the language of the press and the language of the people. Hundreds of languages have died out due to edict, colonization and cultural imperialism.

  For the Allah Lexicon to survive, and for religious and cultural values to survive, be preserved and prevail, it is not sufficient to remember Allah and to mention His name merely in one’s mind. If Muslims were to start saying bismillah [In the name of Allah], alhamdulillah [Praise be to Allah], ash-shukrulillah [Thanks be to Allah], and so forth, in their heads, the name of Allah would soon completely drop out of the spoken language. The Qur’an dictates that the name of Allah needs to be openly expressed, not suppressed. Allah expressions repeatedly reinforce an Islamic worldview, beliefs, ethics and morals.

• 24. Editor’s Note: Rabbinic Judaism prohibits mentioning the name of Yahweh. In order to refer to God, religious Jews recur to the names Adonai and Elohim, “Lord” and “God,” and even these are used sparingly so as not to “use the name of God in vain.” In fact, as Shmuel Bolosky explains, there is a tendency to say ha-Shem [the name], adoshem, or Adonai; in Israel one says Amonai while some Jews would say Elokim rather than Elohim. In Rabbinic literature, in their voice rather than quoting the Bible, the main Hebrew name for God appears to be ha-kadosh baruch hu, “the Holy One (blessed be He).” Although it is often abbreviated, Michael Carasik found 953 of these in the Babylonian Talmud alone. According to Rabbi Chaim Golberger from Kenesseth Israel Congregation in Minneapolis, “Speaking the name of God in vain is a serious offense in Judaism, in that it invokes significant spiritual repercussions, but it is not a capital offense in that the Jewish court system can assess an earthly penalty.” According to Michael Carasik, the real-world effect of the holiness of the Tetragrammaton results in treating any document that contains it in written form (like this book, for example) as something that is holy cannot be destroyed. Hence, it is used most sparingly--generally only in copies of the Bible.” As Rabbi Goldberger elaborates, “Where the Tetragrammaton is spelled out in print in Hebrew letters we do not permit destruction of the paper. Rather, we collect it for burial, in the same way we bury a Torah scroll no longer fit to be used.”
• 25. Editor’s Note: This same phenomenon has been taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India for many decades and is driven by Wahhabi/Salafi activists who claim that the use of Khuda is an “innovation” and thus “forbidden” in “Islam.”
• 26. Editor’s Note: A study of spoken Urdu is certainly in order to see whether in fact it is only the written press that is lacking in the Allah Lexicon or whether it is a reflection of the language as a whole.
• 27. Editor’s Note: Ahmed Bashir wonders whether this change is indicative of anti-Iranian or anti-Persian sentiment. Intizar Hussain contextualizes this linguistic change:

  In his time, Mawlana Ghulam Ahmad Pervaiz was very fond of using the term ajamiyat [foreigners] in a derogatory way. In his hands, this term came to mean something anti-Islamic, a term indicative of Iranian influence under which Islamic concepts lost their purity. It gave birth to a rejectionist attitude towards Persian terms for Islamic concepts and rituals. In Ziaul Haqq’s time, this trend won official approval… In fact, it was during this period that the idiomatic expression Khuda Hafiz underwent an amendment. Khuda Hafiz was replaced by Allah. Recently, a Maulvi talking in a TV program was heard saying that the true Islamic concept of one God is couched in the name of Allah, not in Khuda.

• 28. Editor’s Note: One Persian writer, Jamalzadah, has described the linguistic situation in Iran as one in which Western-oriented persons use foreign words freely, the clergy refers to Arabic terms and the average Iranian struggles to understand both (Arasteh 50).
• 29. Editor’s Note: The sources we have relied upon reflect the Persian from Iran. The impression of Dr. Franklin Lewis, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University and President of American Institute for Iranian Studies, is that Allah is more frequent in Dari Persian of Afghanistan than in Iranian Persian and that it is even less frequent in the Persian of Tajikistan. Whether this is indeed the case from a scientific standpoint remains to be explored.
• 30. Editor’s Note: The poet’s extensive use of Yazdan was part of his attempt to “purify” the Persian language. The results for Firdowsi clearly demonstrate his preference for “pure” Persian, with 764 occurrences of Yazdan, 179 cases of Khudavand, 4 cases of Khuda and 1 case of Allah. Fascinatingly, the frequency of these words and their order reflects the order of their linguistic appearance. Yazdan, the most ancient of these words for God, is used intensively, Khudavand, to a large extent, Khuda, occasionally, and Allah, a single time. The same trend can be seen in the poetry of Nasir Khusraw.
• 31. The Fulbe people are called “Fulani” by Hausa and English speakers in Nigeria and the French call them “Peul.” The Fulbe who live in the bush are called Mbororo. They all speak the same language called “Fulfulde.” The singular of Fulbe is Pullo. The written form of the language, using Arabic script, is known as ajamiya.
• 32. Editor’s Note: With the exception of the Arabs and the Fulbe, the degree of Islamization in sub-Saharan Africa has generally been superficial. As J. Spence Trimingham notes, “Islam in Africa south of the Sahara was a very marginal region in relation to the wider Islamic world” (1). As J.A.K. Leslie observed with regards to colonial Dar es Salam, “The vast majority of the population are Muslims, but many of these are really pagans in Muslim clothes” (qtd. in Trimingham 107). The superficiality of Islam among many black Africans was the very justification for the jihad of ‘Usman bi Fudi. As his son, Muhammad Belo (d. 1837), described:

  Islam was brought to this country [Bornu] by traders and travelers. Whoever wished adopted the faith; some practicing it as sincerely as they were able to, others mingling it with elements which nullified it. Such was the case with the majority of the kings of the country; they adopted Islam, confessed to the unity of God, observed ritual prayer and fast, yet never got rid of their inherited practices, nor abandoned one whit of their customs (qtd. in Trimingham 19).

  As I.M. Lewis explains with regards to the Songhay Empire, of which the Zarma are descendants:

  Islamization…was restricted mainly to the ruling dynasties and chief administrators of the various kingdoms and, as one would expect, it was only the capital cities and other large centers where Islam had much effect, and even in these places its influence was only partial. From al-Mahili’s “Replies” it is evident that the situation was much the same as situation ‘Uthman b. Fudi complained of in Hausaland four centuries later. Most so-called Muslims were half-hearted in their allegiance to Islam and, while making a lip-profession of faith, still believe in other gods whom they called upon in their shrines and at their sacred rocks and trees. Free women walked about unveiled except in Timbuktu…and in Jenne young girls customarily walked entirely naked until marriage…By the time of the Moroccan invasion in 1591 there seems to have been a marked relapse into paganism. (134)

  While Paul Balta is correct in asserting that the Islam practiced in much of black Africa is “faconné par les traditions locales tells le culte de la nature et l’animisme” (84) [influenced by local tradition such as the cult of nature and animism], it should be recalled that there are many different levels of Islamic participation in the continent from nominal Muslims who remain profoundly pagan, to deeply committed Muslims.

• 33. Editor’s Note: The Somali are among the earliest people to be converted to Islam, having embraced it in the ninth and tenth centuries. Since then, “Islam has been an integral part of their culture--to be Somali is to be Muslim” (Lullin 364). As I.M. Lewis has noted, “the Somali as a whole, and this should be emphasized, are highly orthodox and inclined to a fervent and deep attachment to their faith” (242). Despite their black African origin, and the fact that they speak a Cushitic language, Somalians are often identified as Arabs, so much so that Somalia is a member of the Arab League. Although its influence has diminished due to the official spread of Somalian, the Arabic language is still widely spoken in the country, particularly among those who are middle-aged and older. A study of these bilingual speakers would shed light on the transfer of the Arabic Allah Lexicon into the Somali language.
• 34. Editor’s Note: The scientific accuracy of this study is in stark contrast to “opinions” and “impressions.” In his article “Khoda Hafez versus Allah Hafez: A critical inquiry” Mahfuzur Rahman claims that “In terms of its usage in everyday life, [Khuda]…is at least as common as Allah, perhaps more so.” In Man in Society in Iran, A. Reza Arasteh claims that “Persians commonly use the expression insha’ Allah [If God wills it]” (42). Dr. Franklin Lewis’ initial impression, which he admitted was unscientific, was that “Rumi’s Masnavi consciously and successfully incorporates many verses of the Qur’an in Persian meter, so it must be skewed toward Allah - but it talks about the deity far more than Vis and Gurgan does, which being a consciously pre-Islamic milieu, would be skewed in the other direction, toward Khuda.” As the reader will note in the Persian section of chapter one, this is not the case. During the course of our research we came across Pakistanis who claimed specifically that Allah was the 15th most common word in Urdu and Persians who insisted that they used Allah expressions as often as Arabs did, without any scientific proof to support their claims. When presented with the facts, many non-Arabs were defensive and often unwilling to accept the evidence.
• 35. Editor’s Note: As Intizar Hussain explains, the sacred name Khuda “has undergone a long process at the hands of Muslim poets, thinkers and religious scholars, assimilating the devotional feelings and thoughts we associate with Allah.” As a result, “It has gained a status equivalent to that of Allah, finding the same position in Muslim thought and the collective imagination of Muslim people.”
• 36. Editor’s Note: As Benjamin Clark explains, Massignon “thought that Persian, like all of its Indo-European cousins, including French, was an idolatrous language, friendlier than Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic to paganism and the vanity of esthetes” (Massignon XXVII).
• 37. Editor’s Note: According to Hitti, who was Christian, Islam, in its original form, is “the logical perfection of Semitic religion” (1968: 5).
• 38. Editor’s Note: For more on paganism among the Jews see Nigosian’s Occultism in the Old Testament. Some of the pre-Islamic Arabs retained their ancient monotheistic faith and were known as the hanif [The Rightly-Guided]. The Prophet Muhammad and ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib never adored idols as they formed part of this hanifi tradition.
• 39. Editor’s Note: Almighty Allah describes the Holy Qur’an as “Arabic, pure and clear” (16: 103). As Elsayed M.H. Omran explains, “From the time of Sibawayh [765-96 CE] up to the present day there is hardly a page in any manual of Arabic grammar which does not contain one or more verses from the Qur’an.” There is no doubt that “the Qur’an was instrumental in the codification of Arabic grammar in the second and the third Islamic centuries.” Omran, however, fails to mention that the first Arabic grammar was dictated by Imam ‘Ali to Abu al-Aswad al-Du‘ali (Jordac 80). As George Jordac explains, “With his perfect knowledge of syntax, [his] eloquent tongue and great power of thinking,” Imam ‘Ali “formulated the rules and principles of correct Arabic” (80). This is further documented in M.A. al-Husayni (119) and Sayyed Safdar Husayn’s Histoire des premiers temps de l’Islam (427-28) which draw from Major Jarret’s translation of Suyuti’s (d. 1505) Tarikh al-Khulafa’ or History of the Caliphs (183). As Muhammad Hamidullah explains,

  Il convient toutefois de mettre en garde ceux qui connaissent l’arabe et lisent le Coran dans l’original: qu’ils n’assujettissent pas le Coran aux avis, post-eventum, de Sîbawaih et d’al-Asma’î; que, bien au contraire, les grammairiens post-coraniques se soumettent a l’usage du Saint Coran (XXIV).

  [It is important to warn those who know Arabic and read the Qur’an in its original language that they should not subject it to the post-eventum opinions of Sibawayh and al-Asma’i, but rather, post-Qur’anic grammarians who submit to Qur’anic usage.]

• 40. Editor’s Note: An argument can be made that a reliance on the Allah Lexicon and its high frequency of use among Muslims aided in the spread of Islam by anchoring its focus so firmly on oral exhortation.
• 41. Editor’s Note: As Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains, “Wherever Islam went, it did not seek to level existing social structures to the ground, but to preserve and transform them as long as they did not oppose the spirit and form of the Islamic revelation: the result was the creation of a single Islamic identity” (2002: 88).
• 42. Editor’s Note: In all fairness, we must admit that even the Arabs XE "Arabs: pre-Islāmic maintain pre-Islamic customs and superstitions. The Berbers, however, are an exception in terms of language. On the basis of our interaction with Middle Atlas Berbers in Morocco, the Tamazight language appears to abound in religious invocations but with a preference for the word Rabb [Lord] as opposed to Allah. The preference for Rabb over Allah is also common among Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians. As most of the Amazigh people were Christians or Jews prior to embracing Islam, it may be that the use of “Lord” forms part of their pre-Islamic cultural, religious and linguistic legacy. In Amazigh villages in Morocco, the typical greeting made to passersby is Allah y‘awn or “May Allah help you.”
• 43. Editor’s Note: According to Thomas J. Abercombie, “Hinduism and Buddhism color Islam in Indonesia... Indonesians wove local culture into the fabric of their new faith” (259).
• 44. Editor’s Note: For the combination of Black Nationalism and Islam, one need not look any further than Noble Drew ‘Ali’s Moorish Science Temple, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the 5% Nation of Islam, the Ansar Allah and other similar sects which speak for less than 1% of the 2.5 million African American Muslims. The followers of Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan are outside of the fold of Islam for, as the “Muslim Program” explains on their web site and their publications, they “believe that Allah (God) appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad, in July 1930; the long-awaited “Messiah” of the Christians and the “Mahdi” of the Muslims.” The NOI believes that Master W. Fard Muhammad was Allah and that Elijah Muhammad was his Final Messenger. This is whom they refer to when they say “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger.” The belief in hulul [incarnation] is the antithesis of tawhid [oneness of God] and the belief in a prophet after Muhammad is clearly inconsistent with the Qur’an and Sunnah.

  The NOI believes in racial separation and that “intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited” while Islam has abolished racism (49:13: 4:1; 2:213; 6:98; 7:189; 21:92; 23:52). As the Prophet said in his Farewell Sermon, “All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black nor a black has any superiority over a white - except by piety and good action” (Muslim, Ahmad, Darimi, Ibn Majah, Abu Dawud, Ibn Hibban et al.). The NOI believes “in the resurrection of the dead--not in physical resurrection--but in mental resurrection” while Islam believes in physical resurrection. The NOI believes that black people “are the people of God’s choice” while Islam does not believe in Chosen People. In short, the Nation of Islam has little in common with Islam besides its name. Claude Andrew Clegg is thus in error when he claims that “[i]n regards to traditional or orthodox Islam, the Nation of Islam was heterodox in many of its views and practices; however, it was arguably a legitimate Muslim sect given its marginal adherence to central tenets of the Islamic faith.” (68). He adds that “[o]verall, the basic outlines of both religious traditions do appear to overlap enough to allow the black organization to reasonably claim membership in the body of Islam, albeit as a heretical limb” (69). The Nation of Islam cannot be heterodox, a legitimate Muslim sect, a member in the body of Islam and a heretical limb at the same time. It should be noted that Warith Deen Muhammad’s Muslim American Society, though originally nationalistic in nature, is Sunni in orientation and part of mainstream American Islam.

• 45. Editor’s Note: In one hadith, Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq (d. 765-66) purportedly criticizes the superficial conversions to Islam of Sindis, Zinjis, Khuzistanis, Kurds, Berbers and Razis, all of whom share the dubious distinction of not having the sweetness of belief enter their hearts (Ibn Babawayhi 321).
• 46. Editor’s Note: Throughout this book, we have generally avoided the use of the term “formula”, which, in English, has a meaning that somehow diminishes the process and removes levels of sincerity and emotion. Consequently, we have opted for terms such as: “expression”, “phrase”, “pattern”, “honorific”, and so forth. As Castleton explains in regard to Allah expressions, “it would be a mistake to assume that...their use is strictly ritualistic, without form or function” (2000b 5/2). Recognizing that Allah phrases are not merely formulas, Eirlys Davies finds it preferable to recognize a continuum with expressions possessing various degrees of fixedness in between the entirely invariable and conventional and the entirely original (75). While there is truth in Nelson’s claim that since they exist as formulaic chunks of discourse, “[t]he potential for varying the formulas is minimal” (417), this applies only to formulaic Allah expressions and not Allah expressions as a whole. The name Allah, it should be remembered, can be followed by virtually any Arabic verb to express a specific sense: Allah loves, Allah gives, Allah guides, Allah helps, Allah heals…leaving the speaker with a virtually inexhaustible repertoire of possibilities.
• 47. Editor’s Note: Allah phrases, however, are quite different. As Castleton explains,

  Alhamdulillah, as a culturally appropriate response to kayf halik [How are you? - Egypt], Labas [How are you? - Morocco], Shlonak [How are you? - Kuwait], may appear to be as ritualistic as the phrase, “Fine thanks, and you?” offered in English to the same salute, yet alhamdulillah functions in dozens of other circumstances as well, many of which are also frequent episodes. (2000b 5/1)

• 48. Editor’s Note: Like Masliyah, we do recognize that oaths such as wa Allah, wa Allahi and bi Allahi also have secularized uses in everyday speech where they are utilized as dummy words, as entreating and conjuring words, as a preliminary to further speech with the sense of “well…” as well as to express emotion or surprise (1999: 97-98). Mentioning God in such circumstances is much like saying “Ah, God” in English when one is not happy about something, “God Almighty” upon surprise, and “God damn it” when one hurts oneself. In these instances, the speaker is not sincerely calling upon God. The speaker is not seriously invoking God’s help or wrath. However, when an English-speaking person says “God bless you” to someone who has done a great favor, the intent is evident. The same applies with Arabic. A Wa Allahi here and there may be said without consciously contemplating the Creator. Clear invocations, supplications, prayers and calls for blessings from Almighty Allah, however, call for a higher degree of consciousness. While some Allah phrases are not necessarily used for religious reasons, these secularized sayings form a small segment of the Allah Lexicon, the vast majority of which are Islamic in nature: oaths containing God’s beautiful names and attributes, Qur’anic expressions and reference to God, oaths involving the Prophet, Imams, saints and other venerated personalities, oaths and invocations involving the Qur’an and non-scriptural oaths expressing veneration of God.
• 49. Editor’s Note: Davies claims that “it is not necessarily the case that any Moroccan who uses the formula Allah y‘awn has its religious significance uppermost in mind, any more than English speakers are likely to be conscious of the originally religious reference in ‘goodbye’ every time they utter it” (81). Although the religious significance of the expression may not be uppermost in mind, it still remains in mind as its Islamic nature is explicit. This cannot be said of the English “Goodbye” as few English-speakers are even aware that it is an abbreviation of “God be with you”, just like the Spanish Adiós is a contraction of Anda con Dios or “Go with God.” Most Muslims, regardless of how religious or learned they are, can identify the main expressions from the Allah Lexicon as being derived from the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah. Whether they mean it or not, whether they are consciously thinking about it or not, whether they are sincere or not, is really not the issue. The issue is that they use these expressions because they are religiously required forms of courtesy. They are Muslims in the literal sense of submitting to God and in the linguistic sense of submitting to the Islamic dictates governing their language. This view is in accord with the most widely recognized Arabic dictionaries: Lisan al-‘arab, Muhit al-muhit and al-Mu‘jam al-wasit, which define complimenting as treating someone with courtesy but not necessarily with sincerity.
• 50. Editor’s Note: As Davies explains, “[f]ormulas may be restricted with regard to the kind of speaker who may use them, the kind of addressee to whom they may be used, the medium [speech or writing] through which they may be expressed, and various aspects of the setting in which they are used” (84).
• 51. Editor’s Note: Christian Arabs do swear by Allah and His Properties, but not necessarily by His Most Beautiful Names, most often preferring to use al-Rabb, the Lord (‘Abd el-Jawad, 2000: 228).
• 52. Editor’s Note: To demonstrate our point, it is worthwhile to translate a brief encounter we observed between an Iraqi woman and a Moroccan woman at a Wal-Mart in Kansas City on February 15, 2004, and which is reflective and representative of ordinary Arabic speech which is so saturated with invocations to God, prayers, and blessings:

  Moroccan: May Peace be upon you!
  Iraqi: May the peace, blessings and mercy of Allah be upon you!
  Moroccan: How are you?
  Iraqi: I am well, praise be to Allah. And how are you?
  Moroccan: Praise to Allah!
  Iraqi: Is this your son?
  Moroccan: Yes, praise and thanks be to Allah
  Iraqi: There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. May Allah shower blessings on Muhammad! Please be our guests.
  Moroccan: May Allah bless you but we are pressed for time.
  Iraqi: And may Allah bless you as well.
  Moroccan: Go in peace.
  Iraqi: May Allah give you peace.

• 53. Editor’s Note: Religious reasons aside, the form of the Arabic language may play a part in the frequency of formulaic exchanges (Coulmas 11). By the same token, “it may be that the ubiquitous root-echo response in Arabic is facilitated by the morphological structure of the language, specifically the ease with which verbs and nouns are derived by means of lexical roots” (Emery 197). It should also be recalled that Arabic literature, both ancient and modern, makes frequent use of the semantic device of “tracing”, a literary reliance on repetition for the purpose of dramatic interest, typically applying to facts, actions, songs and words which form a leitmotif (Aspel 187). The frequent use of Qur’anic verses in the Allah Lexicon may also be attributable to the fact that they are concise and emphasize moral rules and precepts, acting much the same way as proverbs do as models of thrift. In fact, many Arab proverbs invoke Allah and are thus part and parcel of the Allah Lexicon.
• 54. Editor’s Note: It is conceivable that a politeness expression from the Arabic Allah Lexicon may supplant or alter a pre-Islamic politeness phrase from another language. For example, there are many cases of expressions which are a mixture of the Arabic Allah Lexicon with other languages, such as Khuda Hafiz, with Khuda, God, in Persian, and Hafiz, the Protector and the Preserver in Arabic; and other similar cases in Malaysian and Fulani. Where politeness expressions existed, the Allah Lexicon may have modified them. However, not all languages have politeness expressions. This may account for the relatively low frequency of Allah expressions in East Indian languages which have few, if any, indigenous expressions of courtesy, and the ones they have, like shukriya, are borrowed from Arabic. This is not to mean that East Indians are rude, although they are sometimes perceived as such by Westerners. They are actually very kind and hospitable people concerned with sincerity. In Pakistan, for example, people do not say “thanks” for trivial matters. They thank people when they have gone out of their way to do something.
• 55. Editor’s Note: The suppression of the Allah Lexicon has been documented by Castleton (2000b 5/3).
• 56. Editor’s Note: See Castleton’s “Arabic and the Allah Lexicon: The Loss of Culture in Second Language Acquisition” (2000c). El-Sayed has also pointed out this problem and concludes that “the poor performance of Arab learners in rendering correct politeness formulas warrants the need for such functions [as expressing politeness] to be introduced into curricula of English as a foreign language” (21). He also feels that Arabic speakers who study English should not be expected to accept English formulas as they are and that EFL/ESL teachers “should empirically validate a set of English formulas that are not ethnocentric and that Arab learners can manage and accept” (13). As he explains, “There is indeed no reason why anyone, because he speaks English, should not follow his own cultural traditions. It would be a very limited view to expect the foreigner [in our case the Arab learner] to forget his identity the moment he speaks English” (13).
• 57. Editor’s Note: As a result, “language learners should be exposed to oaths for them to develop their global sociopragmatic competence in the target language” (Salih and ‘Abdul-Fattah 113).
• 58. Editor’s Note: The Arabs belong to a language family, not a single race. They are made up of a multitude of different races and are united by language, culture and history. They are heterogeneous not homogeneous. As Clovis Maqsud explains, “An Arab is the one whose ‘destiny’ is either by force of circumstances or intentionally bound to the Arab world as a whole… whoever is descended from Kurdish, Negro or Armenian stock but has inhabited an Arab country, becomes an Arab by force of circumstances and by reason of the free association of his own destiny with that of the Arab world” (qtd. in Laffin 27). According to H.A.R. Gibb, “All those are Arabs for whom the central fact of history is the mission of Muhammad and the memory of the Arab empire and who in addition cherish the Arabic tongue and its cultural heritage as their common possession” (Laffin 27). One of the reasons that Arabic was so readily adopted by non-Arabic-speaking people like the Amazigh was that it was viewed as a religious language, carrier of civilization and science, as opposed to the language of a given race. As Algerian President Chadli recognized, “la langue arabe a acquis un contenu dénué de toute oppression de nature raciale” (qtd. Balta 133) [“the content of the Arabic language is devoid of racism”].
• 59. Editor’s Note: As Castleton explains, “[t]hose who are directly connected to Arabic have absorbed a repertoire of divine sentiment into their daily speech, assigning Allah influence over every area of their lives” (2000b).