Qur’an 59:23 states: “Allah is He, Whom there is no other god;- Sovereign, Holy One, Source of Peace, the Guardian of Faith, the Preserver of Safety, the Exalted in Might, the Irresistible, the Supreme: Glory to Allah. (Who is) above the partners they attribute to Him.”

The total attributes number 99, and one of them is desperately needed in our own generation: ‘Source of Peace’.

One of the most important lessons Religious Educators should teach; is why there should be so many different names for the One God of monotheistic religions and peoples, both now and even in the Messianic future (“All the nations will walk in the name of their gods, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.” Micah 4:5); when different names for one God seem to produce so many problems.

Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, (2/17/15) that “Over the first two weeks in February (2015), arsonists and vandals in Malaysia attacked 10 Christian churches and Sikh temples. The attacks were provoked by a controversy over the use of the word “Allah” by Malaysia’s Christian community, which numbers over two million, or about 10% of the Malaysian population.

Ibrahim writes: “In late 2007, the Home Ministry banned the use of the word Allah by the Herald, a Catholic newspaper, and later confiscated 15,000 copies of Malay-language Bibles imported from Indonesia in which the word for God is translated as ‘Allah’. A Dec. 31, 2009 ruling by the Kuala Lumpur High Court overruled the earlier ban, asserting constitutional guarantees regarding the freedom of religion in Malaysia. Since then, an already tense situation boiled over, largely due to incitement by a few reckless politicians and the mainstream media.

“So how did we get to the point where some angry Muslims in Malaysia end up attacking houses of worship of other people of the book; in direct violation of the Qur’an statement: “For had it not been for Allah’s repelling some men by means of others, cloisters, churches, oratories and mosques, wherein the name of God is oft mentioned, would assuredly have been pulled down.” (Qur’an 22:40). All this because of God’s name ‘Source of Peace’.”

In the days of Abraham, the religions of the Near East, India and China had hundreds of gods, and hundreds of different names for their different gods. Thus, The Encyclopedia of Gods by Michael Jordan contains over 2.500 entries of individual deities from ancient and modern cultures and societies. Jordan even includes several entries of important spiritual teachers and miracle working humans who lived and died among their fellow humans, and were then in retrospect elevated into Gods. For........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)