God versus Allah II

Etymology is a noble and necessary noun. It refers to “the science or investigation of the derivation and original signification of words” (Chambers English Dictionary). The title of this essay, as with that of Mark Durie (Quadrant, July-August 2011), cries out for a forensic examination, because so very much of the present state and future of Western civilisation depends upon the conclusions that may be drawn from the comparison of two obviously contesting concepts. The two appellations are neither epistemologically nor heuristically synonymous. Therefore, each must be treated as a separate etymon, to demonstrate that any proposed synonymy between them is intrinsically tendentious, and that each carries a comprehensive worldview with apocalyptic consequences, one for the other. In other words, they are essentially contradictory appellations referring to supernaturally conflicting beings, each with their own following, for better or for worse. One being must be true, the other false. Or they are both equally true, in which case they are both equally false. But the task before me is not to prove the ontological reality of either or both, but to demonstrate the truth or falseness of a claimed pedigree—of the continuity of either with the Creator God of the Book of Genesis. Upon that claim of continuity, much of our civilisation now critically depends.

And so, from the perspective of recorded human history, the simplest and most effective tool is to go back to the origins and meanings of these names. This complex task was not conducted by Mark Durie, because his essay was essentially a critical (and successful) review of a submissive and obsequious book, Allah, by Miroslav Volf.

The Muslim claim to a limitless licence to destroy and replace every known religious, political and social system on this earth is founded solely on their clamorous belief that their deity, Allah, commissioned Mohammed to be his final and definitive vicar/prophet/apostle in the third of a series of Old, Christian, and Islamic Testaments. Implicit in and vital to this totalitarian dream is their further claim that their Allah is indeed one and the same deity who is adored, worshipped and obeyed in the Old Testament of the patriarchs and the New Testament of Jesus Christ. This Islamic claim of biblical continuity is its central justification for world revolution because Muslims claim it to be the final scriptural Revelation of the Supreme Deity. This claim either confuses or totally deceives even the best minds, whether religious or atheistic, in non-Muslim societies, especially in the West.

My intention in this essay is to demonstrate beyond doubt that the Muslim claims are easily controverted; that their Allah is indeed not only not the God of Abraham, Moses and the New Testament, but is in fact a demonstrable confection contrived out of pagan myths, pseudo-Judaic elements and ignorant distortions of Christian revelation. Furthermore, I will demonstrate incontrovertibly that the Islamic worship of Allah is a direct contradiction of the will of the eternal God of the Decalogue, in the First Commandment in particular, and the other nine in general. As to the Islamic acknowledgment of the Decalogue, I will discuss this a little later.

Before I begin to apply the anatomist’s scalpel, a little bit about myself. I am, on my father’s side, a Catholic of Sephardi origin, who practises and believes the unbroken Catholic and Christian faith, going all the way back to “the first Christians, who were Juda’s own children; [who] had been told of the impending destruction foretold by the prophets, and an order from God bade them depart from Jerusalem” (Dom Guéranger. Vol XI: 92). They had been led away beyond the Jordan, by their bishop, St Simeon, and eventually found their way to ancient Iberia. We have been Christians ever since. My maternal grandmother was, I believe, a Maronite Christian of Lebanese birth. So, my Semitic pedigree I think relieves my putative enemies of any accusations of inherent racism or bigotry. Some of my Iberian ancestors were amongst those who, led by Isabella Catolica, finally threw the Muslims out of the Peninsula in 1492. There was another of my ancestors present, fighting alongside Cervantes at the Battle of Lepanto. So, my experience of Islam is not merely something recent, but is part of my very history. My people have been Christians for 500 years longer than Islam has existed (and 1500 years longer than Protestantism). Islam disturbed us as an anti-Christian novelty then, and it disturbs me more today, simply because since the council known as Vatican II at least, there has been a great reluctance on the part of modern Catholics to confront Islam’s demonic attack upon their civilisation and upon the triune God upon whom it was established. 

In the Indo-Germanic languages, the name God has its origins in old German (Gott) derived from the Persian, khoda, or from the Gothic root, gheu, or Sanskrit, hu, meaning “one who is invoked or made sacrifice to”. In the Latin languages, Deus originates in ancient Greek Thios or Theos. In the Semitic languages the cognates ‘el (Hebrew), ‘elaha (Aramaic), ‘ilu (Babylonian-Chaldean), and ‘ilah (Arabic) also indicate the supreme monotheistic deity. In Arabic the word ‘ilah becomes an appellation by the application of the definite article Al, resulting in Al-ilah, slurred to sound the name Allah. Pre-Christian civilisations and less developed societies were either Hebrew (Old Testament) or pagan. Hebraic societies worshipped the single Supreme Deity of Adam, Abraham and the prophets. Non-Hebraic societies were pagan, and either polytheistic or animist/polytheistic. With the birth and death of Christ most of the pagan societies were not simply converted to the Hebraic God of the prophets, but fulfilled or completed in the Messianic figure of Christ. Several societies remain outside that Messianic fulfilment, and principal amongst these are Buddhists, Confucians and Muslims. Islam differs from the other two because it lacks their philosophical foundations, addresses a single deity and is extremely violent in its aims and accomplishments.

The beginning of the first half-millennium of Christianity was marked by the Crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. He demonstrated his divinity by rising from the dead three days later, in fulfilment of the prophets who came before him. But in doing so, he completed the old covenant and began a new and eternal covenant with mankind, demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt the unbroken continuity of the revelation of the Creator-God from the Old into the New Testament. This continuity is well-documented by his apostles and the Church Fathers. In its violent rejection of the triune God, Islam automatically destroys any suggestion of continuity of itself and its Allah with the Abrahamic God of the Old and New Testaments.

The Old Testament God, known previously by the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH, had already revealed something mysteriously astonishing about himself to Abraham. The redactor of Genesis (18:1–3) recounts: 

1. And the Lord appeared to him in the vale of Mambre as he was sitting at the door of his tent, in the very heat of the day.

2. And when he had lifted up his eyes there appeared to him three men standing near him: and as soon as he saw them he ran to meet them from the door of his tent, and adored down to the ground.

3. And he said: Oh Lord, if I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away from thy servant.  

Note: “Oh Lord” in the singular.

In ancient Jewish tradition, in the so-called Targums (Chaldee translations of the Old Testament), there are numerous references to the “Word of YHWH” from Genesis onwards. About 20 BC the Hellenic Jew, Philo, treats of the “Word of Yahweh” much more comprehensively, where several references are made not only to the “Word”, but to “the angel of Jahweh”, “the face of Jahweh”, “the name of Jahweh”, and so forth. The “Word”, in Philo’s literature of course, is the much more familiar to us, “Logos”, which appears in the celebrated opening lines of the gospel of St John. Further, since the earliest days of the Christian church, scholars have also referred to what they called the “Theophanies”, in which God, “Whose face no man can see and remain living”, is manifested to the patriarchs and the prophets in various means that are not constricted by time, place or manner.

Returning to Jewish tradition, there is much evidence that the Hebrew prayer of triple adoration beginning with the words kadosch, kadosch, kadosch (which translates into the Latin sanctus, sanctus, sanctus announcing the Canon of the Mass and approaching Epiclesis) is an expression of the traditional and mystical Hebrew understanding of the triune God first revealed to Abraham (Genesis 18:1–3). (Serious Toraphist scholars of antiquity, especially of the Hillel tradition, do not positively refute the doctrine of the triune God—they simply deny that Christ is the messianic second person of that Trinity.)

Christ’s short life on this earth was spent living the Jewish religion. He taught in the temple almost daily, and from the age of twelve, engaged the temple priesthood, Pharisees and Sadducees in open debate. He was steeped in the knowledge of the scriptures and the prophecies, as well as of the fabricated rabbinical legalisms then being passed off as “The Law”. His “crime” of course was to push that envelope of Pharisaic hegemony beyond its limits by revealing his own divinity as part of the triune godhead first revealed to Abraham, and foretold repeatedly by the subsequent prophets. For this “blasphemy” he paid with his life.

Subsequently, the advance of Christianity over the next 500 years is the story of the development of understanding and definition of the nature and attributes of the triune God, Who having first revealed the Trinity in Genesis would later establish his covenant with Abraham. The Council of Nicea in 325 clearly defined the dogma of the triune God, binding on all who would claim to be Christians. The Nicene, Athanasian and Apostles’ creeds were all profoundly considered responses of the church to various heresies of the time, which denied both the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

From the times of the Church Fathers the guiding theological principle of the Christian Church has been encapsulated in the axiom lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief). So vitally central to Christianity is the understanding of God in the Trinity, that in order to deter the heterodoxy of often militantly heretical sects springing up everywhere, the Church imposed the obligatory practice of the termination of every prayer to God with one of five basic Trinitarian formularies. This practice of the Trinitarian Coda to every prayer is still de rigueur in the Catholic Church, but has long since been abandoned by most of the Protestant sects. Catholics (Western and Oriental) also precede every prayer to Heaven with an invocation of the Trinity in word and gesture—the Sign of the Cross. A further part of the “law of prayer” in the Christian religion is the constant repetition of the Doxology. This short paean of praise to the Trinity may be heard in every church or gathering of Latins, Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Copts, and even Christian Arabs, because they all understand perfectly the idea of the essence of the triune God, which is so emphatically rejected by the followers of Allah. 

At this point it is necessary to declare that even to this day, not all those who claim to be Christians believe unequivocally either in the Trinity or in the divinity of Jesus. Liberated by the Lutheran theology of private judgment, Protestants have been blinded to the unfolding of revelation through the divinely guided magisterium of the church founded by Christ. In particular, the Arian heretics have had their successors throughout the ages. In 1567 French Huguenots, together with William of Orange, negotiated with the Turk, Piali Pasha, for an alliance of all the Protestant powers with the Muslims, for the destruction of Catholic Europe, promising that following the elimination of Christendom, “they would all unite together and be of one faith with the Turks”. So, in 1602, at Albe-Royal (now Székesfehérvár, in Hungary), an army of 18,000 Catholics found itself compelled to resist an invading force of 80,000 Muslim Turks and Protestants. Led by a crucifix-carrying Capuchin, Lorenzo da Brindisi, after two days of terrible fighting, the Catholics prevailed. Then again, amongst the reformers were Michael Servetus (Calvin’s disciple), and his followers Socinus, Paruta and Blandreta, who according to Graetz (History of the Jews), “undermined the foundations of Christianity … rejecting the veneration of Jesus as a divine person. They were scoffed at by their various opponents as ‘half-Jews’.” 

In Protestant England, neither Elizabeth nor her Secretary of State, William Cecil, had any firm theological beliefs other than the destruction of Catholicism and the consolidation of the Lutheran doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. They thought nothing of sending vast amounts of gold in support of the Turkish Sultan, Selim the Sot, as the rest of Catholic Europe girded itself for a decisive battle in defence of Christianity against the superior naval forces of the all-conquering Muslims. This reached a climax at the Battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571).

Just before this betrayal of the Christian faith, Elizabeth and Cecil were deeply engaged with Muslim slave-traders, who were raiding the African coast in their inhuman and vile practice. In Elizabeth’s case the Spanish ambassador to London, Guerau de Espés, had protested sharply to the Queen herself, who phlegmatically assured him that any such fleet would not venture anywhere near Spanish territory in Africa. Sadly, he was deceived. Of the fleet that did visit Spanish possessions in Africa, four of the ships had been contributed personally by Elizabeth as one of the willing commercial partners in that appalling business. A commentator of the philanthropic banking house of Fugger sardonically observed of that venture, “it is the nature and habit of this nation not to keep faith, so the Queen pretends that all has been done without her knowledge and desire”. By then, Popes Pius II, Leo X and Paul III had formally condemned human slavery in all its forms as being anti-Christian and a contemptible “act of disobedience to God the Creator and Father of all men”.

It is a significant but uncomfortable historical truth that when at that time the established church in England turned a blind eye to this—the vilest of anti-Christian practices by its supreme governor siding with the Muslim slave-traders—it contradicted any vestiges of belief it might have proclaimed in the triune Creator-God of the Old and New Testaments. It is therefore not a surprise that the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, sees nothing incongruous in suggesting the introduction of sharia law in Britain today.

Regrettably, the modern Catholic Church does not provide an edifying example in its response to the undisguised aggression of Islamic pressure upon the West. Since and because of Vatican II, the Christological aspects of Catholic dogma and doctrine have been diluted or compromised in the name of “Renewal” and “Ecumenism”. The three principal theologians in the destruction of the Christological aspects of traditional Catholicism, and the causes of the watering down of Catholic dogma, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx, have done their work well. Consequently the profound sense of the numinous—the ever present divine Christ, has been lost. The bulwarks of personal piety and discipline have given way to gross cupidity and salacious venality, especially amongst the clergy—corruptio optimi pessima! Pius X (circa 1910), aware of the siren charms of modernism, said of the future church, that it would experience a “religio depopulata”. Today monasteries, convents and seminaries are little more than valuable real estate, many being bought up by Muslims.

Since Vatican II the ancient doctrine of the real presence of Christ as God in the tabernacles of Latin-rite Catholic churches has been consistently diluted. The tabernacle itself in most churches has been sidelined—no longer in its central place of honour in the sanctuary. Many priests and bishops no longer believe or preach this vital doctrine, as their office requires. In this, they side with Protestants and Muslims, who both find such a doctrine repugnant to the point of killing those who believe in it. The Tudors certainly did then, and the Muslims do so today wherever Christians are in a minority amongst them.

Thus, in spite of the De fide constitutions of all the popes and councils since Nicea (325 AD) consolidated at Lateran IV (1215) and Vatican I (1869), modern pontiffs, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have all at some time compromised their sacred office by declaring that “Muslims and Christians worship the same God—the God of Abraham”. As Vicars of Christ surely they would know only too well of the attacks on the Trinity in the Koran (2:116, 4:171–172, 5:16, 5:71–72, 5:115, 18:2, 19:88, to mention just a few). As such they are obliged by their unique office to proclaim Christ in his divinity, the centre and being of the Christian religion in the presence of his enemies, to the death if necessary. They have the example of St Peter himself, and his first twenty-nine successors. The papacy is the very rock upon which Christ is believed to have founded his church. It is the bulwark against errors about God and his commandments.

The popes of the Middle Ages understood Islam perfectly. They recognised that it had no theological or historical merit, so did not deserve any theological repudiation. They recognised Islam simply as a social and military contagion, and encouraged the civil forces to deal with it militarily. 

The point of mentioning these uncomfortable facts is because such dogmas are the very fortifications of Christian belief, for in their definitions they clearly identify a specific and binding deity. That deity, unequivocally the Creator-God of the Old and the New Testaments, the triune God of Abraham, is represented to all mankind in what the Greek theologians call the trinitarian perichoresis. It is in the gradual falling away from, and the dilution of those central Christian dogmas of the Trinity and the real presence, that Western society through syncretism, indifferentism and the relentless pursuit of pleasure, is making itself vulnerable to the invasive force of the anti-Christ, anti-God, the Muslim Allah. St John (1 John 2:22–23) proclaims, “Who is a liar, but he who denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is anti-christ who denieth the Father and the Son. Whoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.”

There are interesting parallels. When Islam in the sixth century began to sweep through Arabia, we learn from scholars of the period that Christian Arabs with the luminous exception of the Najranites (see below), in the times preceding and after the rise of Mohammed, placed no great value on the practice and dogmas of their religion. These mostly Nestorian Christians were lax in their religious obligations and lukewarm in their beliefs. It appears that any religion or belief was acceptable, as long as it placed no obstacle in the path of the Arab culture of permissiveness and utter sensuality. Those who truly know Islam can attest to the fact that Mohammed and his followers deliberately played on such sensuality and licentiousness, as much in the Koran is a pandering to such excesses, this time however, given sanction because done in the name of Allah masqueraded as the God of Abraham. Every human vice and excess is permitted as long as the victims are “unbelievers”, or female human beings (who are given a status only just slightly above dogs). No wonder then, that felons and criminals in Western prisons are being converted in their dozens to Islam, because part of the conversion process includes convincing them to be ashamed of their Christian or other past, and not of the foul deeds they committed. These deeds (they are assured) have legitimacy against Christians or other religions when sanctioned and performed in the name of Allah as part of the warfare of jihad against “unbelievers”. 

So much for a brief history of Judeo-Christian understanding of the biblical Creator-God through the Old and New Testaments, and the present declining state of Christianity in relation to the long-established dogmatic definitions of that unique Creator-God. I will now trace in brief the origins of the name Allah as defined for itself by Islam, and will show, unequivocally, that all and any attempts by Muslims to establish synonymy of their deity with the Triune God are duplicitous and carry an anti-Jewish and anti-Christian agenda.

Mohammed, the illiterate Quayrish trader and soldier of fortune, was born circa 570 AD, somewhere in the Hijaz. Up to that time the Arabian Peninsula was either Christian, Jewish or pagan, the pagan religions being those of ancient Babylon. The condition of Christianity in southern Arabia was subject to the whims of several Jewish communities scattered around Yemen. These had acquired much political, financial and religious influence, to the point where they constantly thwarted the survival of Christian communities. One of these Jewish kingdoms (Himyar & Yemen) was ruled by a Jewish king, Dhu Nuwas (523–525). This man, against all the precepts of the Torah, went about forcing conversions to Judaism with fire and sword. One particular town, Najran, to the north of Yemen, was seized by him, and all its inhabitants—some 20,000 lay folk and nearly 450 clergy and nuns—were massacred. Dhu Nuwas finally met his end at the hands of the Christian convert Abramos, who was a vassal of the Negus (or High King) of Abyssinia. But the ghastly episode of the Najranite massacre is even recorded in the Koran (Sura 85). By the time Mohammed appears, this story is already very much part of the history of Arabia. What is more to the point, the Arian heresy (denial of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ) had infected most of Christian Arabia. There is some evidence that Mohammed himself briefly engaged with such heretical Christians. Nevertheless, at that point he was neither Christian nor Jew, and could only have been a follower of the religion of his pagan tribe.

The religion of the Quayrish, Kenanah and other nomadic tribes was a form of astral paganism that over centuries had been abstracted and modified from ancient Babylon. The use of the Arabic word for any deity was ‘ilah. These pagan tribes had many gods, but only one of them was treated as the supreme god. The idea of a unique deity (peculiar to the Jews and Christians) was not yet acceptable to these pagan tribes. Nevertheless they loosely adopted the appellation Al-ilah used by the Christians and the Jews to denote the God of the Bible. On the other hand the pagan Al-ilah was identified by the moon, and was the spouse of Akkan, the sun goddess. Their offspring were three female stars named Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat, still referred to amongst the Arabian tribes and some of the African and Asiatic Islamic peoples as the “daughters of Allah”. Three centuries of archaeology have revealed ample evidence in sculpture and art, of the continuation over centuries, if not millennia, of the pre-eminence of the moon-god Allah as the supreme deity of non-Hebrew Semitic tribes, particularly the Babylonian-Chaldeans, in the Middle East and Arabia. 

When Mohammed was a young man he was wont to visit the Christian cathedral at Sanaa, to hear the sermons of the famous bishop, Qussa ibn Sa’ida. Many Jews and pagan Arabs were converted to Christianity by that bishop’s eloquence and piety. But what attracted the pagan Mohammed most was the novel doctrinal notion of a unique, omnipotent and all-knowing male God—the Christian Allah. But that God came with baggage—the Trinity, the honouring of women in the person of the Virgin Mary and other holy women, free will versus the Ten Commandments (a check on the culture of Arabic sensuality and excess), but most of all, the divinity of Jesus Christ, who, Mohammed was convinced by local Jews, did not die as claimed in the Christian scriptures, and most certainly did not rise again on the third day.

Therefore, in his new religion Mohammed simply did away with all of those things, taking what he wanted (“Angel Gabriel”, “Heaven and Hell”, “Last Judgment”, “the Flood” and other non-threatening—to himself—motifs), and decided to make himself the most powerful socio-religious force in Arabia. His all-knowing deity would simply be the same one worshipped by his ancestors—Allah, the moon-god, shorn of his embarrassing (and inferior) female relatives. And to distinguish his new moon-god by sign, from the Christian God of the Cross, he logically imposed the traditional Babylonian crescent moon as the banner of his religion of total submission (Islam) to the moon-god (Allah) through himself as sole and final prophet/apostle.

The Koran and the Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed) nowhere contain any endorsement of the development of the idea of the absolutely moral and infinitely loving and loveable Creator-God of the Jews and the Christians. Mohammed simply grafted his tribal paganism onto the superficial aspects of two societies whose religions were connected and whose power was burgeoning throughout the world. It would appear that he wanted a piece of the action, if not all of it.

There is some evidence that he was put up to the whole fantasy by a certain vengeful Rabbi Herban, who some years earlier had lost a series of public debates (on Christ and the Trinity) with the sainted Bishop Gregentius, Bishop of Tafar (Dhafar). Evidence of the Herban connection can be found in the entirely novel idea put into Mohammed’s untutored head, that he was the direct descendant of Abraham through Ishmael, the son of Hagar the Egyptian slave woman. Ironically, since Mohammed was illiterate, he could not have read the angel’s prophesy in Genesis (16:11–12), “Thou shalt call his name Ishmael … He shall be a wild man, his hand will be against all men, and all men’s hands against him: and he shall pitch his tents over against all his brethren.” Rabbi Herban (if the account is true) would certainly have omitted to inform Mohammed that the Jews on the other hand were descended from Isaac, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sara, who were to be the sole foundation of God’s Covenant with Abraham—and the ancestors of “Jesus, Son of David”. This probably explains, in a small way, the unending hatred of Muslims for the Jewish people.

W.G. Palgrave, an apostate Jesuit, wrote a famous work entitled Personal Narration (1865) about his travels through Arabia disguised as an itinerant Muslim physician. He later represented the British government in ambassadorial capacities in many countries. He made a profound study of Islam, both scriptural and practical. Here are some of his observations: 

One might at first sight think that this tremendous Autocrat, this uncontrolled and unsympathising Power would be far above anything like passions, desires or inclinations. Yet such is not the case, for He has with respect to His creatures one main feeling and source of action, namely jealousy of them, lest they should perchance attribute to themselves something of what is His alone, and thus encroach on His all-engrossing kingdom. Hence He is ever more ready to punish than reward, to inflict pain than to bestow pleasure, to ruin than to build. It is his singular satisfaction to make created beings continually feel that they are nothing else than His slaves. His tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better acknowledge His superiority and know His power above their power, His cunning above their cunning, His will above their will, His pride above their pride; or rather that there is no power, cunning, will or pride save His own. But He Himself, sterile in His inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save His own and self-measured decree, without son, companion or counsellor, is no less barren for Himself than for his creatures; and His own barrenness and lone egoism in Himself is the cause and rule of His indifferent and unregarding despotism around. [my emphasis] 

Palgrave then turns his critical attention to the alleged author of the Koran: 

in fact, every phrase of the preceding sentences, every touch in this odious portrait has been taken to the best of my ability, word for word, or at least meaning for meaning, from “the Book”, the truest mirror of the mind and scope of its writer. And that such was in reality Mahomet’s mind and idea is fully confirmed by the witness-tongue of contemporary tradition [that is, Islam’s other foundational texts, especially the canonical Hadith, as well as the most esteemed Koranic commentaries] 

Mohammed said in one of his Hadith that “War is deception”. To this end Allah in the Koran clearly endorses deception and dissimulation (2:225, 3:28, 5:89, and 16:106). This doctrine of permissible deception or dissimulation is called in Arabic Takiyya (sometimes spelled Taqqiya). The word translates into Arabic as “caution”, “disguise” or “fear of discovery”. It permits, as the occasion demands, total falsehood, the telling of the most grievous untruths, even an utter denial of Islam or Muslim society when there is a fear of threat, compulsion or discovery of any kind in a non-Islamic society. All Muslims are taught from infancy to practise Takiyya, especially when under oath in un-Islamic surroundings, or whenever the occasion demands an advantage to Islam even in Islamic societies. The specific conditions in which Allah will not hold a Muslim responsible for untruthfulness or deception are in the event of war (all relationships with “unbelievers” constitute warfare), certain sexual activities, or when attempting to effect a brokering of peace to the sole advantage of Islam.

Even when Western societies rush to the aid of Muslims suffering natural or other disasters, their charity is still seen by the beneficiaries as an admission of defeat by “unbelievers”, and their submission to Allah, in a continuing state of war. Paradoxically, rich Muslim societies, on the other hand, regard their suffering brethren with indifference, because such sufferings, they piously claim, are “Inshallah”.

The Takiyya of Allah in the Koran is the very tip of the iceberg of an anti-morality that defies the absolute morality of God in the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai, to apply to all people for all time until the end of the world. How then can the Allah who defies the Ten Commandments and the Trinity, be identical with the numinous and eternal God of the Decalogue and of the indivisible Trinity?

One final thing. The Koran teaches that “Allah can do all things” (2:148). On the other hand, the God of Abraham is indeed omnipotent, but clearly he cannot do all things. Specifically, he can “neither deceive nor be deceived” (Catechism of the Council of Trent). 

One of the world’s best-known naturalists and lepidopterists, Bernard d’Abrera is also a historian, philosopher of science and director of Hill House Publishers.