The Simple Religion

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hi Ibrahim

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I am comfortable enough in arabic to read and comprehend, but I am desperately hopeless at composition (to join the arabic discussion) let alone the more difficult task of translation, so there's no way I can faithfully translate the arabic discussion into this thread and be of help to you.

The Joker's thread of argument seems to be as follows.

1. god has 99 names in islam
2. they may sound like attributes but they're not attributes (he gives an example, a man called Karim need not necessarily be a generous (karim) person)
3. therefore, these are not attributes of a god, but 99 gods (this is a rather interesting point to which I will come to later)
4. finally, the evidence that the joker produces that this is indeed how practicing muslims think of their god, is that they name people in this way (abdallah, abdelfattah,abdelkarim etc...)

On the first point, islam's god indeed has the much celebrated 99 names, but it's not at all clear from this fact alone that there are 99 islamic gods, this requires some more evidence, and as I mentioned earlier, the judaeo-christian god has a lot of attributes and names as well, but this does not by itself imply pantheism.

On the second point, the islamic names for god may or may not accurately depict the truth (he may be called karim, but is not actually a 'karim' individual) is purely a matter of faith, not logic.

On the third point, which is that the 99 names are not merely names of god but an aggregation of all the pre-islamic arab conceptions of god, the point is largely valid historically.

At a certain point in history arabs were feeling left out, sensing that god had spoken to the christians and the jews and gave them divine revelations, but left the arabs out. In response, it was decided that muhammad was going to have some revelations of his own, and that any arab who could not identify culturally with christians or jews could at last have their very own words and prophecies from god.

This fatuous and self centred argument is written in history, from the way that the koran was haphazardly plagiarised from snippets of many different religions, to the way that the early muslims took it upon themselves to spread the faith by the sword, to the way that they insist until this day that no true koran can be written in any other language but arabic.

On the fourth point, which is that muslims 'prove' that there are 99 gods by naming their children after the 99 names I have to protest this in two ways.

First, it is again illogical to jump from 99 attributes of god, to 99 gods.

Second, it is unfair and it is not something that you would like to have done to you as a copt. There are plenty of copts with names such as abdelmalek, abdelnour, abdelmassih, abdel.etcetera

To make the leap between multiple names of god and multiple gods in islam, but to completely ignore this in coptic tradition is, just on the face of it, stupid.

[Ibrahim Al Copti]

Hello Faith
Nice points

I am going to answer from my prospective not the Joker's of course

The only thing I sense is that you are thinking about it from the prospective of a Christian

Theologically, Islam belief in the absolute oneness of Allah .... Some kind of a numerical one and he is not omnipresent accroding to Sunni majority

On the contrary, we believe that God is one in Nature but with infinite existence (more elaboration needs another thread)
These are alien terms to Muslim theologians

So, Muslims claim that you cannot worship except Allah, but literally they worship his names too (AbdalRahman, AbdalRahim ... etc) where Abd means worshiper or slave of

Of course some Copts and Arab Christians adopted the same concept ... but without a Christian theological basis

So, my original question was

If your Allah is an absolute one, where did this multiplicity come from ?

The answer puts the Muslim between two choices

+ The multiplicity from within (so, why they won't accept a similar concept like the trinity)

+ Or Multiplicity from without which leads to Shirk (or polytheism in Muslim terms)

So the leap you are talking about here

First, it is again illogical to jump from 99 attributes of god, to 99 gods.

is an internal theological problem within Islam
that is why I refered to "Islamic logic", and you see it as illogical

This is a very fast response because I am at work right now ...

God Bless +++

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hey Ibrahim

I think I understand you, but this information is far more about muslim theology than I would be familiar with.

On your comment,
Of course some Copts and Arab Christians adopted the same concept ... but without a Christian theological basis

I don't get that at all, what people adopted is just a habit in naming their kids, not a polytheitic concept.

There is no contradiction between having one, say, president, but describing him in a multiplicity of ways, commander in chief, head of executive branch of government, head of state. And I would say that this is exactly what arab christians do, and until now I assumed that this is what muslims were doing.

But, if you say that their theology supports this, not merely the naming of kids, then so be it.