Why Is Allah ‘He’?

Many people have asked: Why do we refer to Allah with the male pronoun? We refer to Allah with the male pronoun in English because Allah refers to Himself in the Arabic language with the male pronoun. Were we to stop here, we’d be oversimplifying the issue. Whenever we talk about the Arabic language, we should add at least one layer of nuance because the language demands that we do. And when the conversation veers into Qur’anic vocabulary, we ought to elaborate. 

‘He’ and ‘huwa’ do not contain the exact same meaning because the latter refers not only to males but also to non-humans and inanimate objects. The English ‘he’ does not carry the same range: it refers exclusively to biological males, whether human or non-human. Likewise, the English ‘she’ and the Arabic ‘hiya’ are not exact corollaries for the same reason: the latter can refer to human and non-human biological females as well as objects. Both Arabic pronouns refer to things that are either biologically gendered or non-gendered. So, the sun, ‘al-shams’ is referred to with ‘hiya’ even though the sun doesn’t have biological femininity; and the moon ‘al-qamar’ is referred to with ‘huwa’ even though the moon is not biologically male. 

Whenever Allah uses a pronoun to refer to Himself, we understand that He uses it in a non-gendered way, which the pronoun ‘huwa’ is suited for and just as other pronouns Allah employs like I or We, which are non-gendered. As a rule, whatever adjective or descriptor Allah uses for Himself has to be dissociated on some level from how we conventionally understand those words, even pronouns. Just as Allah’s vision and hearing are unlike our own, so too is Allah’s self-referentiality dissimilar to our own. Allah is a personal God, not a person. 

All this aside, it still begs the question, why does God refer to Himself with male pronouns and first-person pronouns to the exclusion of female pronouns? Some argue that this is a matter of psychology, that the use of female pronouns would have alienated too many Arabs who could not conceive of a God who refers to itself that way. This psychological defense is the same reasoning used for the apparent lack of female prophets and messengers. However, Arabic, Greek, and other ancient cultures were quite familiar with female oracles and priestesses and used them as part of their method for determining divine directives. 

Ancient cultures, including the Arabs, held female goddesses as part of their pantheon. It’s tough to argue that men were not receptive to a female person in communion with the divine or divine herself. Yet, it is also noteworthy that a male god typically sat at the head of the hierarchy of gods-- that particular position was associated with masculinity. Pre-Islamic Arabic religion incorporated goddesses who they believed to be daughters and intercessors between humanity and the supreme God, who was not female. For the ancient Arabs, divinity could manifest itself in male or female, but the head of the pantheon was referred to by the masculine pronoun. We cannot forget that even in a society in which people believed in goddesses, baby girls were nonetheless devalued and killed routinely. A double consciousness existed between the adoration of the divine feminine and the actual treatment of girls and women. 

As far as the argument that referring to Allah with the feminine pronoun was too alienating, it’s not foolproof. For one, pagan Arabs already worshipped female goddesses. Secondly, plenty of aspects of the religion of Islam were alienating to the pagan Arabs: monotheism, equality, modesty. For so many reasons, Islam grew rather slowly in the beginning and faced incredible resistance. 

So, why does Allah refer to Himself with the masculine pronoun? The simple answer is that ‘huwa’ functions not only as a masculine pronoun but also as a neutral and default pronoun when the designated gender of a thing is not yet known. ‘Huwa’ functions as a default pronoun whereas ‘hiya’ does not. ‘Hiya’ exclusively belongs to female humans and non-humans as well as “feminine” objects. It follows that if we were to use any pronoun to facilitate talking about Allah, we would choose the one with the widest range in order to distance Allah from an association with gender. As the poet Jami once said, “For the feminine gender is no shame for the sun, nor is the masculine gender an honor for the moon.”