ISLAM THE BASICS

GOD AND ONENESS OF MANKIND
 
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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 al-Llah, 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 'al-Llah' and seem
  to have made the hajj to his shrine [the Kaaba] alongside the
  pagans. -- p. 69
 
  In the Quran, al-Llah 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
  al-Llah 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."]