id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-1363	Ibrahim, Zakyi	To Use “God” or “Allah”?	2009.0	7	.pdf	application/pdf	3051	134	58	According to some famous scholars like al-Zajjaj the philologist (d. 923, author of Tafsir Asma’ Allah al-Husna) and Sibawayh the grammar- ian (8th CE), Allah is only a proper name for God without any etymological derivation from ilah. Therefore, the shift to the proper name must have occurred when the Arabs added al to ilah (al-ilah) and specifi- cally reserved that term for the supreme being, God, all the while referring to other gods as ilah/aliha and particularly relating them to tribes, clans, peo- ple (e.g., ilah bani fulan: god of such and such people).8 One would be justified in postulating that al-ilah is both the point of connection and of break for Allah with its etymological roots.	cache/ajiss-1363.pdf	txt/ajiss-1363.txt