Ilah in the context of "Allāh"

In Islam, God (Arabic: ٱللَّٰه, romanized: Allāh, contraction of ٱلْإِلَٰه al-’ilāh, lit. 'the god', or Arabic: رب, romanized: Rabb, lit. 'lord') is seen as the creator and sustainer of the universe, who lives eternally. God is conceived as a perfect, singular, immortal, omnipotent, and omniscient deity, completely infinite in all of his attributes. Islam further emphasizes that God is most merciful. The Islamic concept of God is variously described as monotheistic, panentheistic, and monistic.

The Islamic concept of tawhid (unification) emphasises that God is absolutely pure and free from association or partnership with other beings, which means attributing the powers and qualities of God to his creation, and vice versa. In Islam, God is never portrayed in any image. The Quran specifically forbids ascribing partners to share his singular sovereignty, as he is considered to be the absolute one without a second, indivisible, and incomparable being, who is similar to nothing, and nothing is comparable to him. Thus, God is absolutely transcendent, unique and utterly other than anything in or of the world as to be beyond all forms of human thought and expression. The briefest and the most comprehensive description of God in the Quran is found in Surat al-Ikhlas.

The Shahada (Arabic: الشَّهَادَةُ aš-šahādatu; Arabic pronunciation: [aʃʃahaːdatʊ], 'the testimony'), also transliterated as Shahadah, is an Islamic oath and creed, and one of the Five Pillars of Islam and part of the Adhan. It reads: "I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God."The Shahada declares belief in the oneness (tawhid) of God and the acceptance of Muhammad as God's messenger. Some Shia Muslims also include a statement of belief in the wilayat of Ali, but they do not consider it as an obligatory part for converting to Islam. A single honest recitation of the Shahada is all that is required for a person to become a Muslim according to most traditional schools.

The Thamud (Arabic: ثَمُود, romanized: Ṯamūd) were an ancient tribe or tribal confederation in pre-Islamic Arabia that occupied the northwestern Arabian Peninsula. They are attested in contemporaneous Mesopotamian and Classical inscriptions, as well as Arabic ones from the eighth century BCE, all the way until the fifth century CE, when they served as Roman auxiliaries. They are also later remembered in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and Islamic-era sources, including the Quran. Prominently, they appear in the Ruwafa inscriptions discovered in a temple constructed circa 165–169 CE in honor of the local deity, ʾlhʾ.

Islamic sources state that the Thamud were an early Arab tribe that had gone extinct in ancient days. Thamud appears twenty-six times in the Quran, where the tribe is presented as an example of an ancient polytheistic people destroyed by God for their rejection of God's prophet Salih. In the Quran, Thamud is associated with a pattern of rebellion and destruction of past groups of people. This is done the most times with Ad, but others as well, like Lot and Noah. When Salih calls Thamud to serve one God, they demand a sign from him. He presents them with a miraculous she-camel. Thamud, unconvinced, injure the camel; for this, God destroys them, except Salih and his followers. This account is embellished with a more detailed background in the Islamic exegetical tradition. Some traditions locate the tribe in northwestern Arabia at Hegra, and in others they are identified as Nabataeans. Islamic genealogy describes the Thamud as among the true Arab tribes, as opposed to the "Arabicized Arabs".

There are various names of God and many titles that refer to God, many of which enumerate the various qualities of a Supreme Being. The English word god (and its equivalent in other languages) is used by multiple religions as a noun to refer to different deities, or specifically to the Supreme Being, as denoted in English by the capitalized and uncapitalized terms God and god. Ancient cognate equivalents for the biblical Hebrew Elohim, one of the most common names of God in the Bible, include proto-Semitic El, biblical Aramaic Elah, and Arabic ilah. The personal or proper name for God in many of these languages may either be distinguished from such attributes, or homonymic. For example, in Judaism the tetragrammaton is sometimes related to the ancient Hebrew ehyeh ("I will be"). It is connected to the passage in Exodus 3:14 in which God gives his name as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh), where the verb may be translated most basically as "I Am that I Am", "I shall be what I shall be", or "I shall be what I am". In the passage, YHWH, the personal name of God, is revealed directly to Moses.

Correlation between various theories and interpretation of the name of "the one God", used to signify a monotheistic or ultimate Supreme Being from which all other divine attributes derive, has been a subject of ecumenical discourse between Eastern and Western scholars for over two centuries. In Christian theology the word is considered a personal and a proper name of God. On the other hand, the names of God in a different tradition are sometimes referred to by symbols. The question whether divine names used by different religions are equivalent has been raised and analyzed.

Names of God in Islam (Arabic: أَسْمَاءُ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلْحُسْنَىٰ, romanized: ʾasmāʾu llāhi l-ḥusnā, lit. 'Allah's Beautiful Names') are names that each contain Attributes of God in Islam, which are implied by the respective names. Some names are known from either the Qur’an or the hadith, while others can be found in both sources, although most are found in the Qur’an.

Allāh is the Arabic word referring to God in Abrahamic religions, thought to be derived by contraction from al-ʾilāh, which means "the god", (i.e., the only god) and is related to El and Elah, the Hebrew and Aramaic words for God. Whether or not Allah can be considered as the personal name of God became disputed in contemporary scholarship. In Islamic usage and indoctrination, Allah was the God's most unique, proper name, and referred to as Lafẓ al-Jalālah (The Word of Majesty). Those who claimed that Allah was the personal name of God also denied that this name was a derivative name. Some Muslims may use different names as much as Allah, for instance Rabb, Rahman or "God" in English. The Quran refers to the attributes of God as "most beautiful names".

In pre-Islamic Arabia, the dominant religious practice was that of Arab polytheism, which was based on the veneration of various deities and spirits, such as the god Hubal and the goddesses al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā, and Manāt. Worship was centred on local shrines and temples, most notably including the Kaaba in Mecca. Deities were venerated and invoked through pilgrimages, divination, and ritual sacrifice, among other traditions. Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of "Allah" (a word in Arabic that is now chiefly associated with God in Islam) in the Meccan religion. Many of the physical descriptions of the pre-Islamic gods and goddesses are traced to idols, especially near the Kaaba, which is said to have contained up to 360 of them.

Other religions—namely Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism—were also represented in the region. The influence of the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Aksum enabled the nurturing of Christian communities in northwestern, northeastern, and southern Arabia. In the other areas of the Arabian Peninsula, Christianity did not have as much of a presence, though it did secure some converts, and with the exception of Nestorianism in the northeast and around the Persian Gulf, the dominant form of the religion was Miaphysitism. Since the beginning of the Roman era, Jewish migration into Arabia had become increasingly frequent, resulting in the establishment of a prominent Jewish diaspora community, which was supplemented by local converts. Over time, Judaism grew throughout southern Arabia and the northwestern Hejaz.