As I pointed out in my post – any illustration taken from the English language that does not display morphological inflection/declension suffers from some inherent limitations. My aim in giving the illustration is specifically directed at my Malaysian Muslim friends.

So far, Malaysian Muslim scholars simply assert that other people cannot use the word ‘Allah’ because Islam uses it as a monadic noun. Indeed, they simply assert that ‘Allah’ is a proper name without giving any supporting evidence (If it were a personal name it would suggest a unique reference to the God of Islam).

(As an aside, local Muslim scholars managed to supply two references to the great E. W. Lane Arab-English Lexicon and Duncan McDonald to support understanding ‘Allah’ as a proper noun, but this view is disputed by contemporary Arabic scholars who now have access to additional classical Arabic sources since Lane, especially ancient Arabic poetry).

I could have simply quoted my Arabic Christian friends who personally assured me that ‘Allah’ is linguistically a general term. I give the simple (though limited) illustration of the ‘queen’ and ‘Elizabeth’ to help readers see that even if the Englishman uses a general term (‘queen’) in a monadic sense it does not justify the assertion of the term ‘queen’ as a proper noun/proper name (Elizabeth) regardless of the semantic identity in the case of the English speaker. The word ‘queen’ remains a common noun.

Analogously, just because the Malaysian Muslims use the general word ‘Allah’ in a monadic sense (the One God) there is no justification to assert that ‘Allah’ is a proper noun, much less a proper name – at least when we take into account the morphology of the term ‘Allah’ and its classical usage.

Personally I am puzzled why Malaysian Muslim scholars insist that Allah is a personal name. Are these Muslim scholars saying that their Allah has revealed his personal name? If it were a proper name in the meaning of ‘personal’ name, that would contradict Islamic theology which does not speak about God as a ‘person’. Is it not the case that Allah is not to be associated with attributes of his creation (shirk) and that names and attributes may be used of God only “without knowing/asking how” (bila kaif)?

See my earlier post Analogical Language in Islamic theology LINK http://www.krisispraxis.com/archives/2006/07/analogical-language-in-theology-part-1/

I await a Muslim clarification on this matter.

I regret that I cannot make the same apply to your examples, to wit, “God save the Queen” and “God save Elizabeth”, for here we leave the realm of grammar and enter into semantics, with the equivalence of the two nouns “Queen” and “Elizabeth” being grounded in the latter rather than the former — English having lost all its declensions save the possessive and the pronomial object form, turning the accusative, dative and ablative into the same thing. (That is to say, “he” in English, turns to “him” both in the direct and indirect object; and “his” in the possessive (or genitive, in the old language). This is a function of Germanic languages as opposed to Romance.)

For this reason I am unable to see how “God save the Queen” and “God save Elizabeth” should share anything but a semantic identity that expresses the hope that God might save two distinct individuals, one being the Queen and the other Elizabeth — that they might be the same person, or not, is not logically or grammatically necessary to adequate application.

For example: even if saying “God save Elizabeth” in Trafalgar Square on a rainy Thursday evening to a woman called, say, Elizabeth Pope, elicits the understanding that Queen Elizabeth II is meant, it does not follow that this is a function of grammar and only one Elizabeth can possibly be meant. (I have, in fact, done this — but sadly in a different city and cannot thus demonstrate my point with the force I desire.)

I am not sure how this affects your argument in response to Helen or Hadi Awang, but I thought I ought to point it out.