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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

That question is meaningless, because "Allah" is the translation into Arabic of the English word "God".

Neither of these two words is a name of a god, which normally does not matter, because both the Christians and the Muslims believe that there exists only one god, so it is not necessary to have a proper name for that god.

Obviously, whenever a Christian believer or a Muslim believer speaks about the "God", they speak about the only god they believe in, so it makes no sense to ask them which god they mean.

A non-believer may speak about the God of the Muslims and about the God of the Christians, to make clear the intended meaning, and the latter phrase might be translated into Arabic with words meaning "the Allah of the Christians".

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This is not completely correct. Allah is a name as much as it is a "type". One of the things Arabs will point out is that Allah is "special" because it cannot be pluralized and hence is a better name for the monotheistic God than English God or Persian Khuda (which can be).

I'm a non-arabic speaking Muslim who prefers in non-liturgical context to use Khuda and have occasionally been "corrected" by well meaning folk.

Allah can no longer be pluralized now, but it could be pluralized in older Arabic, before the conversion to the Muslim religion.

Remnants of that time can still be seen in the Christian/Judaic Bible, where the plural of the cognate Hebrew word, i.e. "Elohim", can be encountered, though even there it has acquired in many places a singular meaning.

my informal understanding is that Allah is a contraction of al-ilah or (the God), which was also at the time the name of a particular deity (a sort of supreme God also associated with rain). That might have to do with the associated inability to pluralize.

They are the same God though, for Christians and Muslims. The God of Abraham.

muslims deny the divinity of Jesus and therefore do not have the same God.

So do Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.

How do you distinguish between "having a different God" and "having different beliefs about the same God"?

Depends if you believe it's the same god or not...

But if we both claim to know a guy called John Brown, but I say he's kind, generous, hard working but a little dim and you say John Brown is hedonistic, self-entered and brilliant, are we talking about the same person?

Normally if our descriptions are similar enough that we can chalk it up to perspective, we might think it is. But if our descriptions of the person become strongly contradictory, we must conclude that we are talking about a different person.

Now if we both claim that there is only one John Brown in existence, then we might be willing to overlook slightly more of the inconsistencies, because the alternative is that one (or both) of us is misguided/wrong/a liar.

Here's a plot twist, though. Old Testament is canon to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. The God in there is the same one. It's the treatment of New Testament that differs - Judaism ignores it, Christianity considers it canon and Jesus is God, while Islam considers it a kind of "beta canon", acknowledging Jesus, but only as a prophet.

>But if we both claim to know a guy called John Brown, but I say he's kind, generous, hard working but a little dim and you say John Brown is hedonistic, self-entered and brilliant, are we talking about the same person?

I don't think this example really is catching the core of discussion about Allah (The God). Because we both know a president who bombed two cities and by nuclear bombs. Some people will call him a war hero because he ended WWII, Some people will say he is a war criminal. You will always find something like this when you are talking about a human. Maybe it is also not just different opinions, but different access to information can give us different view on the same person. But we agree that we are talking about the same person, I just find this person to be different from what you think he/she is.

Things are totally different from religious point of view. The discussion between Christians and Muslims is mainly about the nature of The God, not that there is "The God". This also might extend to Judaism, but I don't know much about it.

I agree. And on top of that, neither of us have actually met John Brown face to face. Our _entire_ knowledge of him is based on indirect interactions. We've seen things he's (ostensibly) done, artifacts of his work, we've deduced a set of characteristics about his nature based on his behavior. In a sense, John Brown is nothing more than the label we give to the entity having characteristics A,B,C,D.

So like you say, if the overlap between your A,B,C,D and my A,B,C,D is sufficiently small we should probably acknowledge that it's not the same entity. See also: Ship of Theseus.

While it may be the same abrahamic god, there is a distinction. In Christianity, god/deus/yahweh is a proper name. In Islam, Allah is from al-Ilah - The God. It’s a label rather than a name, and the linguistic distinction affects the available worldviews.

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