Your question deserves a long reply, that addresses both the scholarly, linguistic aspect in the context of Eastern Christianity and the history of religion in the Middle East, and a theological reply, about the true nature of our God vs. what Muslims believe.
I think the article has interesting arguments on early Islamic history, and the possible sources Muhammed drew from when creating his religion (under diabolical influence) but fails in one crucial respect, that being a distinction has to be drawn between the false god worshipped by Muslims, who we as Christians do not worship, and the generic Semitic word stem ALH, from which we get El, Elohim, and Alaha, which are all names used exclusively by Jews and Christians to refer to God, El being Hebrew and Alaha Easr Syriac Aramaic (or in West Syriac, there is another vowel shift like I mentioned previously; going from Hebrew to Classical Aramaic there is a shift from E to A which we see in Ben becoming Bar, and Elohim or El becoming Alaha; West Syriac Aramaic speakers replace non-consonantal As with Os. (Aleph is regarded as a consonant in the Semitic orthography for reasons I don’t fully understand, so in Classical Syriac script, God is written ALH; the intermediate vowels are omitted in the ancient Semitic writing systems)
So a West Syriac speaker, who is going to be a Christian almost certainly, would say Aloho rather than Alaha, just as the West Syriac form of “My Lord” is Mor rather than Mar. West Syriac also has five vowels vs. seven in East.
Now, statistically, the largest number of Christians in the Middle East do speak Arabic as their primary language; of these, the Copts use Coptic while praying but have less knowledge of it than Syriac Christians so are more likely to use the word “Allah”; West Syriac Christians were massively killed by the Ottoman Genocides against Christians in 1915 and most West Syriac Christians do not use Syriac but rather Arabic as their vernacular language (but several pockets of West Syriac speakers do remain, for example, there are a number of Syriac Orthodox Christians who speak Turoyo, a West Syriac Dialect). On the whole, most Syriac Orthodox in the Middle East speak Arabic in the vernacular, and the same is also true of Chaldean Catholics, but both groups are highly likely to refer to God as “Alaha” in the case of the Chaldeans and some Iraqi Syriac Orthodox, and “Aloho” elsewhere. Only the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East have a majority of congregants who speak Syriac, or rather a derivative dialect called Modern Assyrian Eastern Neo-Aramaic.
This takes us to the Maronites, who spoke Syriac historically and still use some Syriac phrases in worship, but in the vernacular are highly likely to pray to our Christian God as Allah.
Then we have the “Rum”, or “Romans”, Arabic speaking Chalcedonian Christians who were in ancient times allied with the Roman Empire and are usually of a mix of Greek and Semitic ancestry, who are divided into two groups: Melkite Catholics, and members of the four Eastern Orthodox churches in the Middle East, of which the most prominent and Arabic speaking is the Antiochian Orthodox Church (the Patriarchate of Antioch), which is found in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The other three tend to be more Greek, tend to import clergy from Greece, and tend to be Hellenic. But the Antiochians and Melkite Catholics are certainly likely to use the word “Allah” to refer to God in a generic context.
So the error the article makes and that some Christians make is the logical fallacy of composition. They assume that Allah is an exclusively Islamic word which is proper name and only a proper name for the false Islamic deity. In fact this is not the case; the Islamic creed literally translates to “There is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet.” The Muslims believe their false god is the one originally worshipped by Christians and Jews but that Christianity and Judaism became corrupted doctrinally.
There is nothing objectionable or offensive about Middle Eastern Arabic speaking Christians referring to our God in the generic Arabic word “Allah” when they are praying to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. We are talking about Christians who believe in Jesus Christ, and are also the most martyred and persecuted Christians at present. The status of the Christian community everywhere in the Middle East is endangered, as members like
@prodromos ,
@Pavel Mosko and
@dzheremi can attest. So the idea these Christians who are being slaughtered by terrorist cells derived from ISIS and Al Qaeda are worshipping the same Allah that the Muslims worship is absurd. The sole reason why the word Allah is used in Arabic to refer to God is Arabic is closely related to Aramaic; the triconsonantal Semitic stem ALH instead of being Alaha becomes Allah.
Now our Lord Jesus Christ did speak Aramaic, Gallilean Aramaic; I don’t know what the word for God is best rendered in for that specific dialect; there was a member on this site,
@SteveCaruso, who was an Aramaic scholar with a lot of expertise in the Gallilean dialect, but I believe he is inactive. Nonetheless he might be worth a Google. However, it is likely that when our Savior Jesus Christ said God in a generic context, and not by the name YHWH, he would have said El, El-Elyon or Elohim in formal liturgical contexts and Alaha or some variation on Alaha elsewhere. Just as He would have used the word “Bar” to refer to a Son.
So with that out of the way, as long as we are absolutely clear that the word Allah is legitimately used by Christians, severely persecuted Christians we must stress, to refer to our God, and indeed, these severely persecuted Middle Eastern Christian communities are also the most ancient in Christendom for reasons of geographical proximity to the Holy Land and contain the most Christians descended from ancient Jewish converts, hence the retention of Jewish last names among many, I will say the god worshipped by Muslims, colloquially referred to in the West as Allah, is a false god.
Now, why do we in the West tend to refer to the Islamic deity as Allah? Well, because Muslims regard Classical Arabic as a holy language and it is a violation of Islamic principles in general to pray in another language, in most sects of Islam. This is why regardless of what Islamic country you are in, whether it is Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Iran, or a more distant place with a different native tongue, like Burkina Faso or Indonesia, the prayers in the mosques are going to be in some attempt at Classical Arabic. A good analogy would be the historic use of Latin in the Roman Catholic Church as the main liturgical language in the Roman Rite until the reforms post-Vatican II.
Now, as much as the Muslims might wish otherwise, they don’t own the Arabic language, which is a beautiful language historically widely spoken by Christians, Jews and Samaritans, among other religions, nor do they own Arabs as an ethnicity; as I said earlier most ethnically Arab Christians are members of the Antiochian Orthodox or Melkite Catholic Church, while many other ethnic groups like Maronites, Chaldeans and Copts use Arabic for vernacular speech.
In the case of Coptic Christians, the reason Coptic was supplanted by Arabic as the everyday language is particularly tragic: about a thousand years ago, after Egypt had been ruled by Muslims for a few hundred years, there was a cruel Caliph who enacted harsh laws persecuting the Christians of Egypt, which included cutting out the tongue of anyone heard speaking Coptic! It’s a miracle the Coptic language survived in the safety of their Christian worship and has been preserved that way.
But again, to reiterate, the Islamic god referred to by Muslims as Allah is not the same God we Christians worship. We worship the holy trinity, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We believe God has three persons. We believe the Son was the Messiah, and died on the cross for our sins and rose again on the third day. We believe God is love, infinitely merciful and forgiving to those who seek Him, and so interested in our welfare that His only begotten Son sacrificed his own life so as to be a ransom for many. God died and then rose from the grave so we could do likewise.
Muslims reject all of these beliefs. Because Christians call our God Allah, because they speak Arabic, and Arabic Christianity predates Islam by centuries, many centuries, in fact, Arabs were among the earliest converts to Christians, so we could say Arabic Christianity began in 33 AD and Islam 600 years later, I don’t think we Christians should be as tolerant as we are of people using the word Allah to signify the Islamic devil-god. I think we might consider an idea to call their false god, who I believe to be demonic, “Lalala” instead, so as to avoid inadvertently taking the name of our Lord in vain, for whatever word Christians of different languages use to refer to God should be held by us as sacred.
Now, my own theory on the false Islamic devil-god, is one that in some countries would probably get me jailed for Islamophobia or some nonsense. And that’s not the case; I have many Muslim friends and I pray for them, that they might be delivered from their error and find the peace of Jesus Christ.
Specifically, unlike our Christian God, or Allah as He is properly referred to by Arab Christians, the Islamic devil god who I propose we call Baal or blahblah or Beelzebub or whatever floats our respective boats, is I think a demon. A demon who impersonated the Archangel Gabriel, and then possessed or influenced Muhammed for a time. The result is extremely tragic. Muhammed was studying Christianity, but whoever tried to catechize him got the basic facts so wrong that Muhammed believed the Virgin Mary was part of the Trinity! So his encounter with heretics did not help him.
The Muslims in general, with some exceptions, do not believe in a Trinity, but believe in a Unitarian conception of god. Their god is believed to have no attributes and to be completely removed from us. Any form of anthropomorphology (applying human traits to God) was rejected by several medieval Islamic theologians as being inherently idolatrous. Their god is an impersonal being who demands unconditional submission, commands revenge rather than forgiveness, does not identify himself or is not identified as love, and in general the decisions of their god are not open to human questioning. Their god is completely arbitrary with no specific sympathy for his creation in general, only for those who follow his laws given in the Quran and worship him exclusively.
A very different being from the God we Christians worship, including Arab speaking Christians. So pray for the Muslims, because even if the assertion the article you linked to is wrong, and the Muslim demon-god-imposter they refer to as “Allah” is not the same demon as Baal was (Psalm 96:5 in the Greek Septuagint translation reads “The gods of the gentiles are demons”), it does not matter, because ultimately the Muslims have been deceived by the agencies of Satan into worshipping a distorted idol rather than the true God who died on the Cross for our sins.
And pray also for the Arabic speaking Christians who worship the real Allah, that being God the Father, His Word and Only begotten Son our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, our Helper (Paraklete).
We should even pray for those who persecute the Christians in the Middle East because Jesus told us to pray for those who persecute us. How difficult a commandment that is! And we must not allow the devil to persuade us into hating Muslims, for it is bad enough he persuaded them to hate us.
