Allah is not the personal name of some altogether separate and distinctly different deity (like Odin or Thor, or Zeus or Apollo, or Vishnu or Shiva); the term Allah does not specify some peculiar, foreign, alien, or uniquely Arabian god. Rather, Allah is merely — and quite literally — the Arabic word which means “God.” (Arab Christians, for example, refer quite naturally and unselfconsciously to their explicitly biblical God as “Allah,” since for them that unloaded term is nothing other than simply Arabic for “God.”)