God Needs A New Name Today, As Broad As the True Meaning of “The One”! Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi
The 'supreme entity' or the 'ultimate reality' is commonly referred to as 'God' or 'Lord' or 'Ishwar' or 'Allah' in different faith traditions. But in the 21st century and in this day and age of glocalisation, God needs a 'new name' to encompass the broader qualities of the Supreme Being, perfect in power, knowledge, divinity and goodness, who is revered as the Creator, Brahma, Khaliq, and the Sustainer, or Rabb, of the cosmos in Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism, etc.
Therefore, I would request my spiritual friends to help me create a term as broad as the true meaning of “The One” or “The Divine”.
In fact, if we use “Ishwar/Allah” as hyphenated or interchangeably in an invocation, it would sound more appropriate, as people like M.K Gandhi used in his prathna/dua’a (invocation): “Ishwar/Allah tere naam” (Ishwar and Allah are Only Your Names).
We have a more faith-neutral term in Urdu & Farsi as well as in Hindustani. It’s “Khuda”. But then Urdu, after the partition of India and Pakistan, has become a ‘Muslim’ language:). Thus, it’s no longer of the same use as earlier before we were divided on the religious lines.
There needs to be a more appropriate name for “The One”. In Hindi, Ishwar and Paramatma (परमात्मा) might serve the purpose as of now. But still we need to create a more faith neutral term for God/Ishwar/Allah, a term or name which could appeal to all people regardless of their religions.
Some Hindu fellows use Devta, instead of Bhagwan and it is more like Ishwara. A similar term is: Deva, which means “heavenly” or the “divine”, but the problem with this is that it is used for a deity in Hinduism, which is not consonance with Islam. Also, Deva or Devta is a masculine term and the feminine equivalent is Devi, unlike Allah or Ishwar which are gender-neutral terms. They are neither masculine nor feminine words (La Yudhakkar wa La Yuannath).
In brief, the ‘supreme entity’ or the ‘ultimate reality’ is commonly referred to as ‘God’ or the ‘Lord’ in English. But I think in the 21st century and in this day and age of globalisation and netizenship, God needs a ‘new name’ to encompass the qualities of the Supreme Being, perfect in power, knowledge, divinity and goodness, who is revered as the Creator, Brahma, Khaliq, and the Sustainer, or Rabb, of the cosmos in Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism.
#GRD with love!
