Propaganda and Allah

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 10/22/01 3:54:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU writes:

> I assume the Deity (with capital) is, as the OED2 defines it: 3. "A
>  supreme being as creator of the universe; the Deity [in bold italics], the
>  Supreme Being, God."

In my experience "God" is frequently used as a name but "deity" with either
upper or lower case "d" is strictly a description, e.g. "Allah is the Deity
of the Moslems".
Why the capital "D"?  It strikes me as the proper courtesy when mentioning
believers, as in "Gitchi Manitou is the Deity of many Algonquin nations".
However, "the ancient Greeks had a committee of Olympians rather than a
single deity."

This is my personal usage.  Apparently you found it ambiguous or misleading.
Such is life.

I wonder if this is what happened in Arabic, that Mohammed or perhaps his
disciples referred to Arabic "the Deity" so often that it came to be the NAME
for the Moslem Deity and lost its sense of being a descriptive term.
However, this is Anglocentrism, assuming that here the Arabic definite
article behaves the same way as English "the", and I know from Hebrew (a
Semitic language related to Arabic) that such is not a safe assumption.

         - Jim Landau