Back in 2011 I wrote a blog post because of a sermon Dwight Nelson gave where he claimed that Allah is the same God that Christians worship. I recently updated the article when I found a Progressive internet pastor making the same claim. As if Allah just means God, and it could be any god, apparently. That is, of course, untrue, so my older article goes over that idea. So I wanted to deal with this a little more in depth. As the progressive pastor takes the path of denigrating anyone, like me, who tells him he is wrong.
First, here is his video. Shawn “Riff-Raff” Broadnax (Riff-Raff appears on his YouTube channel). His Facebook Reel is titled: “They need you ignorant”
Here is some of his transcript:
they kept you ignorant on purpose, see...
This is why I have a problem with fundamentalism because that's not just wrong, that's the...kind of ignorance that creates enemies out of neighbors. Allah isn't God. Sir, Allah. Literally means God. There are millions of Arab Christians who call God. Allah, open the Arabic Bible. So screaming, we don't worship Allah. We worship.God is like screaming, I don't believe in Amarillo, I believe in yellow. Why congratulations You just successfully rebuked Spanish, but here's where this stops being.Funny, some of us grew up hearing this nonsense. We were taught that Muslims worshiped...some evil foreign deity. We were taught other religions, weren't things to be understood. But they were threats to defeat, and that's not fundamentalism keeps people trapped. Fear first, facts later, preferably never. Because education is dangerous to fundamentalism. Education makes you ask questions, questions make you investigate, investigation, introduces nuance. And nuance is kryptonite to anybody whose entire theology depends on us good and them evil.
Christianity and Islam are not the same religion. And they make profoundly different claims about God. Islam rejects The divinity of Jesus, Christianity does not. That is a theological disagreement. But Muslims Identified the God they worship as the God of Abraham, the God who...called Moses, the God known within the biblical tradition. You don't have to agree with what Islam says about God to understand which God they're actually talking about. That is religious studies 101 and some of these preachers skip the class.”
The above is the part I
will deal with; he continues his straw-man rant, but you can listen to
that for yourself.
First, we should note that Allah is not simply a name for any generic god. In Mecca, where Muhammad lived before going to Medina, to become a warlord. He lived in a polytheistic city. In pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, Allah was not an invention of Muhammad, but an established, supreme high god within the pagan pantheon.
Linguistically, the word Allah is a contraction of al-ilāh, meaning simply "the god". It is structurally and etymologically related to the older Semitic words for God, such as El and Elohim in Hebrew.
Recent breakthroughs in epigraphy and archaeology, spearheaded by scholars like Ahmad Al-Jallad, paint a highly specific picture of how pre-Islamic pagans understood Allah long before the 7th century.
In Meccan and broader Arabian paganism, Allah occupied the top tier of a hierarchical polytheistic system.
The Cosmic Architect: He was recognized as the supreme master of the universe, the creator of the heavens and the earth, and the source of rain and life.
The Quran's Confirmation: This is one of the few historical claims where the Quran and modern archaeology entirely agree. The Quran itself explicitly states that if you asked the Meccan polytheists (mushrikin) who created the cosmos, they would readily answer, "Allah". They did not deny Him; they simply did not worship Him exclusively.
Muhammad did not introduce a new god to the Meccans; he commanded them to radically alter their relationship with a god they already knew. The theological revolution of Islam was not preaching the existence of Allah, but demanding that the Meccans destroy the 360 lesser idols, eliminate the concept of his "daughters," and afford the supreme high god exclusive, uncompromised worship (Tawhid)
Another crucial difference is where Broadnax says that Islam has the God of Abraham. Not quite; in the Bible, God is often referred to as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Seven times in the Old Testament and five times in the New Testament. Islam bypasses much of the history of the Old Testament.
Structural supersessionism (often referred to as replacement theology) operates precisely on the framework of bypassing the patriarchs. By jumping directly from the Fall of Man in Genesis to the cross of Christ, it effectively renders the specific history, lineages, and divine covenants established with Israel obsolete.
Islam bypasses most of the story of Israel.
Theologians argue that structural supersessionism treats the literal history of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob not as an unbroken, ongoing national covenant, but merely as a historical backdrop or a collection of temporary allegories. By treating the physical line of Jacob as historically vacated, the theological necessity of the Jewish people is systematically erased from the future redemptive plan. This also removes the Christian Messiah'
The Irrevocable Covenant
Scholars use Romans 11 to demonstrate the structural flaws of bypassing Jacob. Paul explicitly states that "the deliverer will come from Zion; he will remove ungodliness from Jacob," and underscores that "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." From this theological perspective, attempting to erase or bypass the line of Jacob invalidates the structural integrity and trustworthiness of God's promises altogether and destroys the entire meaning of Jesus Christ as the Messiah and a fulfillment of many Old Testament prophecies.
From a historical-critical perspective, as well as from the viewpoint of Jewish tradition, the Islamic narrative is often seen as a retroactive reinterpretation of history. The Hebrew scriptures, detailing the specific covenant passing through Isaac and Jacob, were compiled and preserved millennia before the emergence of Islam. By changing the son of sacrifice from Isaac to Ishmael and shifting the center of Abraham's spiritual geography from Canaan (Jerusalem/Moriah) to Arabia (Mecca), Islam effectively bypassed the foundational history of the Jewish people.
In Islam, the purpose of rewriting the lineage is to undermine the concept of Jews as the exclusive "chosen people" and to legitimize a new religious community by attaching it directly to the firstborn son of Abraham, Ishmael. Islam's counterpoint is that Islam does not view itself as an attempt to "bypass" history, but rather as a restoration of the original, uncorrupted history of Abraham. Islamic theology asserts that the original revelations given to Moses and Jesus were altered or corrupted over time by human hands. Therefore, Islam claims the Quran came to correct these errors rather than invent a new story. The Concept of Tahrif: The corruption of the Old Testament text and meaning corrected by the Quran that was revealed to Muhammad as the final, uncorrupted, and perfectly preserved criterion to correct and supersede them.
From the perspective of Islamic theology, Islam does not view itself as an attempt to "bypass" history, but rather as a restoration of the original, uncorrupted history of Abraham.
Islam claims the Quran came to correct these errors rather than invent a new story. Islam does not completely erase Jacob or the Israelite prophets. The Quran repeatedly honors Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David as true Muslim prophets who submitted to the one God. However, it argues that the physical descendants of Jacob broke their covenant, leading God to transition the final prophet (Muhammad) through the parallel branch of the family—Ishmael.
In Islam, the focus shifts away from an ethnically bound covenant (the lineage of Jacob) to a universal, spiritual covenant based entirely on submission (Islam) to God, which they believe Abraham modeled perfectly before the designations of "Jew" or "Christian" ever existed.
Without third-party archaeological or textual evidence from antiquity to support the claim that Abraham built the Kaaba or that Ishmael was the son on the altar, the Islamic narrative requires a complete bypass of the existing historical-textual record, replacing it entirely with an appeal to divine authority. So is that divine authority the same God as the Judeo-Christian God, or is it another god? They cannot both be the same God!
