GOD AND ONENESS OF MANKIND

The Quran

   O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and

   female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that

   you may come to know one another. Truly, the most

   honored of you in God's sight is the greatest of you in

   piety. God is All-Knowing, All-Aware. -- 49:13

   Do not dispute with the people of the Book [Jews,

   Christians, Sabeans], unless it be in a way that is

   better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We

   believe in that which has been revealed unto us, and

   revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto

   Him we surrender. -- 29:46

Prophet Muhammad

   Reflect upon God's creation but not upon His nature or

   else you will perish.

Roger Du Pasquier, Unveiling Islam

  ... in the imagination of most Europeans, Allah refers to the

  divinity of Muslims, not the god of the Christians and the Jews;

  they are all surprised to hear, when one takes the trouble to

  explain things to them, that 'Allah' means 'God', and that even

  Arab Christians know Him by no other name.

Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography Of The Prophet

  By the beginning of the seventh century, most of the Arabs had

  come to believe that Allah, their High God, was the same as the

  God who was worshipped by the Jews and Christians. Arabs who had

  converted to Christianity also called their God 'Allah' and seem

  to have made the hajj to his shrine [the Kaaba] alongside the

  pagans. -- p. 69

  In the Quran, Allah is far more impersonal than Yahweh in the

  Jewish scriptures or the Father who is incarnated in Jesus Christ.

  In the early tribal religion of the Hebrews, Yahweh had inflicted

  disasters or conferred benefits on men and women as an expression

  -- sometimes rather arbitrary -- of His good pleasure. But when

  Allah somehow causes people to drown, for example, He is

  inspired by no personal animus. He is closer both to the rerum

  natura and the sublime God of the later Hebrew prophets, who

  utterly transcends all purely human concepts of good and evil,

  right and wrong:

   My thoughts are not your thoughts

   my ways not your ways -- it is Yahweh who speaks.

   Yes, the heavens are as high above the earth

   as my ways are above your ways,

   my thoughts above your thoughts.

  The Quran emphasizes that God eludes our human thoughts and that

  we can speak about Him only in signs and symbols, which half

  reveal and half conceal his ineffable nature. The whole mode of

  the Quranic discourse is symbolic; it constantly speaks of the

  great 'similitudes' that it offers for the consideration of

  Muslims. There are no doctrines about God, defining what He is,

  but mere 'signs' of a sacramental nature where something of Him

  can be experienced. -- p. 98

  [For a "brilliantly lucid, splendidly readable book" on how "the

  three dominant monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity,

  and Islam -- shaped and altered the conception of God" read Karen

  Armstong's "A History of God."]