Who is Allah?

Allah is the personal name of the One true God. Nothing else can be called Allah. The One true God is a reflection of the unique concept that Islam associates with God. To a Muslim, Allah is the Almighty, Creator and Sustainer of the universe, Who is similar to nothing and nothing is comparable to Him.

He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth. ‘Prior’ to that, He was and nothing was with Him, and He is now, after He has created everything, as He was. Of course, to be precise, the temporal word ‘prior’ is only well-defined in time and can strictly speaking not refer to anything ‘before’ the creation of the universe, which includes the creation of time.

So in fact, this is just another way of saying He is independent of the heavens and the earth. He possesses all His Attributes without the need to refer to the worlds He brought into existence, and no new Attribute of Him came into existence. In other words, the way He describes Himself and the names by which He names Himself and by which His creatures call Him now exist independently from the initiation of the creation.

When He desired the existence of the universe, He originated the "worlds" from His sacred desire (al-Irâdat al-Muqaddas) in accordance with His knowledge as He calls Himself al-‘Alîm- the One Who possesses all and perfect knowledge of everything.

Introduction to Islam

Muslim history began in Arabia with the Muhammad's first recitations of the Qur'an in the 7th century. Islam's historical development has affected political, economic, and military trends both inside and outside the Islamic world. As with Christendom, the concept of an Islamic world is useful in looking at different periods of human history; similarly useful is an understanding of the identification with a quasi-political community of believers, or ummah, on the part of Islam's practitioners down the centuries.

Muslims believe that God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad, God's final prophet, through the angel Gabriel, and regard the Qur'an and the Sunnah (words and deeds of Muhammad) as the fundamental sources of Islam. They do not regard Muhammad as the founder of a new religion, but as the restorer of the original monotheistic faith of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. Islamic tradition holds that Jews and Christians distorted the revelations God gave to these prophets by either altering the text, introducing a false interpretation, or both.