Islam Allah is based on moon worship?

[Vicomte13]

Welcome to the forum, Isaac Varghese. It is good to see another Oriental Orthodox person here. There are very few of us on this website overall.

I am fond of Oriental Orthodoxy. Two things distinguish it in my eyes. First, it's from really REALLY far away, outside of the ancient orbit of ancient Rome, even, meaning that it has barely been a part of all of the tiresome and endless "inside baseball" bickering that divided Eastern Orthodox from Catholic, Protestant from Catholic, Protestant from Protestant, etc. I have not encountered all of the armor and battlements and old entrenched battle lines of thought in the Oriental Orthodox as in all of the other Christians, because that separation came so long ago that it is outside of memory.

Also, I think the miaphysite position on the original dispute that separated Chalcedonians from Non-Chalcedonians seems more correct. In other words, I agree with you on this.

Third, your Ethiopians have preserved Enoch and, I believe, the Didache, in their canon. This is wonderful because, of course, that USED TO BE the Catholic Church also, so those things USED TO BE canon within (part of) the Catholic Church. The Didache is the original catechism, and it answers certain questions and SHOULD BE part of all of the canons.

And Enoch forces the mind to a go/no go place. I'm rather glad that it is not in the Catholic canon now, because it would really force a confrontation of ideas that can be avoided as is. (Though I understand that the Copts don't have Enoch in your canon, so you are not forced into that confrontation either.)

Finally, the Oriental Orthodox are particularly long-suffering, being almost wholly submerged in Muslim lands. The Eastern Orthodox have much of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Catholics and Protestants have the rest of the world. But the Oriental Orthodox have been Christians under pressure for 1400 years, and have kept the faith. Very admirable to my eyes.

Because I share none of the culture and understand none of the languages, I think it would be pretty ridiculous for me to do more than visit an O.O. church. Still, I have a great deal of warm feeling towards it, untinged by the historical memory of centuries of battle that - to my knowledge - never happened. And that makes Oriental Orthodoxy very different from Eastern Orthodoxy in my mind. Though I like the Eastern Orthodox ok, I do find that in religious dialogue they are somewhat contentious with Catholics. I have never observed this from the Oriental Orthodox at all. I think sheer distance in time and space have made that so.

I suspect, though I have never researched, that the imperial era in which Western Europe pretty much took over the world for about a century may have pushed OO and EO closer together, but that the differences still remain, and that the OO and EO still do not agree on what they didn't originally agree upon.

 

[Rubiks]

The god in Islam is a conflation of the Judeo-Christian god and the pagan deities at the time of the founding of Islam.

 

[dzheremi]

I am fond of Oriental Orthodoxy. Two things distinguish it in my eyes. First, it's from really REALLY far away, outside of the ancient orbit of ancient Rome, even, meaning that it has barely been a part of all of the tiresome and endless "inside baseball" bickering that divided Eastern Orthodox from Catholic, Protestant from Catholic, Protestant from Protestant, etc. I have not encountered all of the armor and battlements and old entrenched battle lines of thought in the Oriental Orthodox as in all of the other Christians, because that separation came so long ago that it is outside of memory.

Also, I think the miaphysite position on the original dispute that separated Chalcedonians from Non-Chalcedonians seems more correct. In other words, I agree with you on this.

Third, your Ethiopians have preserved Enoch and, I believe, the Didache, in their canon. This is wonderful because, of course, that USED TO BE the Catholic Church also, so those things USED TO BE canon within (part of) the Catholic Church. The Didache is the original catechism, and it answers certain questions and SHOULD BE part of all of the canons.

And Enoch forces the mind to a go/no go place. I'm rather glad that it is not in the Catholic canon now, because it would really force a confrontation of ideas that can be avoided as is. (Though I understand that the Copts don't have Enoch in your canon, so you are not forced into that confrontation either.)

Finally, the Oriental Orthodox are particularly long-suffering, being almost wholly submerged in Muslim lands. The Eastern Orthodox have much of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Catholics and Protestants have the rest of the world. But the Oriental Orthodox have been Christians under pressure for 1400 years, and have kept the faith. Very admirable to my eyes.

Because I share none of the culture and understand none of the languages, I think it would be pretty ridiculous for me to do more than visit an O.O. church. Still, I have a great deal of warm feeling towards it, untinged by the historical memory of centuries of battle that - to my knowledge - never happened. And that makes Oriental Orthodoxy very different from Eastern Orthodoxy in my mind. Though I like the Eastern Orthodox ok, I do find that in religious dialogue they are somewhat contentious with Catholics. I have never observed this from the Oriental Orthodox at all. I think sheer distance in time and space have made that so.

I suspect, though I have never researched, that the imperial era in which Western Europe pretty much took over the world for about a century may have pushed OO and EO closer together, but that the differences still remain, and that the OO and EO still do not agree on what they didn't originally agree upon.

Hello. I don't really want to drag this thread too far off from its original purpose, but since you mentioned interest in the Ethiopian canon, here it is as they list it: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

I don't see the Didache in there, although not being Ethiopian myself I am not sure what some of these books are ("Reproof"? "The Book of Herald"?), so it could be in there under a different name. Perhaps you are thinking of the Didascalia, which is explicitly listed there?

The Ethiopian canon is incredibly interesting to me. As far as I understand it, it is the way that it is because the Ethiopians received the Bible in its "pre-canonized" state, and hence have preserved within it books that were either translated from Greek or Aramaic into Ge'ez (the church's liturgical language) and then lost, or perhaps originally composed in Ge'ez while it was still an everyday spoken and written language. So they're not available anywhere else. I have not read Enoch (only portions of it), but I do not think it is disallowed or discouraged to do so.

As to your other comments, I think you are correct with regard to OO/RC relations in comparison to EO/RC relations. This is to be expected when you had some 600+ more years of communion with the Eastern Orthodox than we did, as I find a lot of the things that you guys (Chalcedonians) argue about among yourselves doesn't really make sense to me or have any bearing on anything. A lot of these arguments are centuries younger than the Chalcedonian schism. So we are, in a sense, free to see good and bad in whatever argument is put forth, and in some we come down more with the EO (ecclesiology and many points of theology), and in some we come down more with the RC (organic diversity in liturgical forms, as contrasted with the historical Byzantinization of the Eastern Chalcedonians which has sadly robbed them of much of their earlier diversity and made them a lot more outwardly "Greek").

You are welcome to visit the OO forum if you would like to discuss things further. And of course I would recommend a visit to any OO church. The Armenian Apostolic Church, for various historical reasons (e.g., interaction with the crusaders that we did not have in Egypt), is very outwardly "Roman-appearing" in comparison to the Coptic, Ethiopian, etc. churches, so perhaps that would be a good experience for you.

Armenian Apostolic Church badarak (liturgy/mass) in Istanbul. Yes, that is Armenian Apostolic, not Armenian Catholic.

 

[Vicomte13]

I live near NYC, so I expect I can find all of the various forms of OO there. I suppose I could Google it, but this is more fun. Besides, I learned that the term "APOSTOLIC", when tagged onto an eastern ethnicity, means Oriental Orthodox. The Catholics always say Catholic. And the Eastern Orthodox tend to say "Orthodox". Do the OO's frequently use "Apostolic"?

I have noted that various Protestant churches like to call themselves "apostolic", so whenever I have seen that name in a name in the past I've always assumed it was a Protestant church claiming to be apostolic. I suppose the Lutherans and Anglicans might be able to make that claim - but they call themselves Lutheran or Anglican or Episcopalian, so they don't.

 

[The7thColporteur]

...I hope this clears things up.

I asked about the name.

PS. it also didn't address do you teach that the Father is "allah", that the Son is "allah", and that the Holy Ghost/Spirit is "allah", if so, that is not what Muslims teach, nor is it possible by scriptural standards, since "allah" is a singular, not plural word, as is the Hebrew Elohiym.

 

[dzheremi]

I asked about the name.

PS. it also didn't address do you teach that the Father is "allah", that the Son is "allah", and that the Holy Ghost/Spirit is "allah", if so, that is not what Muslims teach, nor is it possible by scriptural standards, since "allah" is a singular, not plural word, as is the Hebrew Elohiym.

I think you might be confusing Christian and Islamic theology here, my friend. Of course what Christians teach -- in Arabic or in any other language -- is not the same as what Muslims teach. Christianity and Islam are different religions, with different theologies. So of course we teach that the Holy Trinity -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- is God, while they do not. We are Christians, they are not. I do not understand why you claim this is not possible. It is already what happens, and has always happened. In fact, the earliest Christian apologetic text we have in Arabic, written 788, is called في تثليث الله الواحد Fi thathlith Allah el wahid, which means "On the Triune Nature of God" (thathlith "Trinity", adjectival form). You can find it in Hoyland (Ed.) Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, a book I have recommended on this website many times which is available for the time being on archive.org.

Anyway, in Arabic as used by Christians, Allah is in no sense a proper name. It is simply the word that we use for "God", in the same way that speakers of related languages have cognates which come from the common root ('-L-[H]), such as Alaha/Aloho ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ in Syriac and modern Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew Eloah אלוהּ, etc., and in the same sense that an English speaker would say "God", a Spanish speaker "Dios", a German speaker "Gott", etc. Any Islam-related theology concerning the use of the word is of importance in that religion only and has nothing to do with what we do.

Islam explains how the various non-Arab people of the Middle East and North Africa like the Coptic people, the Maronites, and others came to be native Arabic speakers. That's it. Theologically, Islam is a non-entity in a Christian context. Whatever Muslims claim is just that, and we don't abide by it in any language.

 

[dzheremi]

Further evidence of the above position, this time in the form of the Coptic spiritual song "Nasgood L-Ism el Thaluth" (done in Western pop style, for some reason! ), or in English, "We bow to (worship) the name of the Trinity" (note: nasgood can mean prostrate/bow or worship):

The opening line in Arabic is:

نسجد لاسم الثالوث الرب الآله العظيم
الواحد فى اللاهوت المثلث الأقانيم

Nasgood l-ism il-Thaluth el-Rabb el-Ilahu el-'azim
el-wahid fil alahut el-muthalath el-aqanim

in English:

"We bow to/worship the name of the Trinity, the Lord, the great God, one in divinity, in three Persons"

The thing to note here is that el-alahut اللاهوت is the Arabic word for "divinity" (also for "theology"), and quite obviously comes from the same root as "Allah" itself, linguistically-speaking. This is because the common Semitic root from which it is derived is the same as Allah itself, as I've already explained in the previous message ('-L-[H]), in exactly the same way that the English word "Theology" is clearly just the Greek word for God (Theos) with the productive -ology suffix (also from Greek, as best as I can recall) attached to mean "the study of". Arabic is not as consistent in this aspect, as a great deal of names for individual disciplines have been imported entirely from English, and many others are put in the construct 'ulum _____ "the science of ____": علم اللغة 'ulum el-lughat 'linguistics' (lit. science of language), 'ulum el-tarikh 'historiography' (lit. science of history), etc.

But that is how it works: if you're dealing with something having to do with God or divinity or theology, no matter if you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Judaism or any other religion, if you're speaking in Arabic you're using word linguistically related to Allah: if not Allah itself, then ilah, alahut, ataluh (Theosis), etc. This doesn't mean that Christian or Islamic or Jewish theology are going to necessarily agree or disagree, only that we're all speaking the same language and hence share some of the same terminology. In reality, as we can see in academic works such as Jeffrey's Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, the Qur'an and hence Islam and the Arabic language borrowed a lot of its religious terminology from Syriac, which is also a Semitic language, and hence it is probably most proper to say that the unique claims attached to the use of this or that word by Islam and Muslims are a later invention, and hence they are in debt to us and not the other way around.

 

[SolomonVII]

The god in Islam is a conflation of the Judeo-Christian god and the pagan deities at the time of the founding of Islam.

Agreed
The sources of Islam are eclectic, and Islam is an amalgamation of the more sophisticated cultures and religions that surrounded the Arabic proto-Muslims. Ancient Arabia itself was polytheistic, and it is from that source that the so-called Satanic verses of moon goddesses made their temporary appearance into the religion. To say that Islam is a moon-goddess religion is nevertheless the ultimate misnomer of what Islam is about.
Just ask Salman Rushdie, if you can find where he is hiding from moment to moment.