Let me rephrase my main point: “Allah” is not a “false god” in the same sense as, say, Jupiter. Jupiter is simply a fictitious person. He simply does not exist.
“Allah,” on the other hand, is the name given to God by Muslims.
Do they believe a host of false, monstrous things about “Allah” and how to serve him? Absolutely.
My main point was simply that “Allah” is a very impoverished, irrational, distorted notion of God—but Muslims do believe in the one actual God, not some figure of pure fiction, like Jupiter.
That does mean that Mohammed ever had any revelations from the one, true God! In fact, it seems to many who have studied Mohammed far more deeply than I ever have, that some of the “religious” experiences he had are attributable to mental illness and/or demonic activity.
“Allah” is the Arabic word for “God” and has been so long before the existence of Islam. The names “Allah” and “God” are generally interchangeable within the Muslim religion and in Middle Eastern cultures. Some English translations of the Qu’ran (Koran) use the name “God,” others use“ Allah.” This sometimes comes as a surprise to Christians who were raised in Western cultures. Among former Muslims, many converts to Christianity commonly refer to God as “Allah.” (This is despite the fact that they recognize clear differences in the character of God as described by the Bible compared to Islamic writings)...
Of course, the word “God” does not actually appear in the original Hebrew or Greek manuscripts of the Bible... “God” is an old English word which developed from an Indo-European word, meaning “that which is invoked,” which is also the ancestor of the German word Gott (meaning: God).
The Navigators, a well-known evangelical Christian organization, published the following:
“…It’s interesting to observe that, in rejecting the Athenian’s erroneous concept of God, Paul did not reject the word they used for God, Theos, which was the common Greek word for God.
Some Christians unthinkingly say that Allah is not God.... Allah is the primary Arabic word for God. It means ‘The God.’ There are some minor exceptions. For example, the Bible in some Muslim lands uses a word for God other than Allah (Farsi and Urdu are examples). But for more than five hundred years before Muhammad, the vast majority of Jews and Christians in Arabia called God by the name Allah. How, then, can we say that Allah is an invalid name for God? If it is, to whom have these Jews and Christians been praying?
And what about the 10 to 12 million Arab Christians today? They have been calling God ‘Allah’ in their Bibles, hymns, poems, writings, and worship for over nineteen centuries. ... Those who still insist that it is blasphemy to refer to God as Allah should also consider that Muhammad’s father was named Abd Allah, ‘God’s servant,’ many years before his son was born or Islam was founded”
My two cents worth consists of trying to make the point that the same word may mean different things - such as the LDS understanding of Jesus which is very different from Christians’.