Atheist’s Guide to Religion: why do Muslims ‘revert’ to Islam, not ‘convert’?

A new column on religious literacy by David Warden with some AI assistance

I'd like to share two bits of learning about Islam with you. The first relates to why Muslims use the word “revert” instead of “convert”; the second relates to whether “Allah” is a generic term meaning “the God” or the actual name of God in Islam.

Reverting, not converting: what Muslims mean when they say this

I belong to the Many Faiths Together school visiting team based in Bournemouth. We’re a team of five representing liberal Protestant Christianity, fundamentalist Islam, liberal Judaism, Nichiren Buddhism, and humanism. Tama, our Islamic representative, grew up as a Roman Catholic in Ireland, but when she went to university in England she became a Muslima (the feminine form of Muslim). However, instead of saying that she converted to Islam she always says that she reverted to Islam.

For Tama, who had initially wanted to be a Catholic nun, "reverting" to Islam entailed wearing a similar style of dress.

The reason for this is that, according to Islamic teaching, every human being is born in a state of fitrah—a kind of natural, original purity that includes an innate disposition to submit to God (Allah). In this view, belief in one God is not something we acquire through culture or tradition. It is something embedded within us from birth. Therefore, when a person embraces Islam, they are not adopting a new religion; they are returning to their original, natural state. They are reverting.

This assumption stands in contrast to more pluralistic or secular understandings of human nature. From a humanist perspective, humans are born not with ready-made beliefs, but with the potential for curiosity, questioning, and ethical development. Religion, like language, is something acquired through upbringing, culture, and choice—not an innate condition we are straying from or returning to.

The idea of reversion has implications for interfaith dialogue and religious identity. It frames Islam not as one option among many, but as the default truth—the original setting to which all humans are naturally inclined, even if they don’t realise it. This isn’t unique to Islam, of course. Many religions regard their truth claims as universal. But Islam expresses this more explicitly than most.

For humanists engaging with Muslims—whether in education, dialogue, or daily life—understanding this concept is important. It helps explain why some Muslims speak with such certainty, not just about their beliefs, but also about yours. If you're not Muslim, you’re seen as having deviated from the natural path, whether through ignorance, culture, or misguidance. A revert is someone who has seen through the illusions of other systems and found their way back home.

Allah – the God or the name of God?

An ex-Muslim member of our humanist group recently told me that Muslims don’t think of the term “Allah” as a generic term for God. They understand it as God’s actual name. I was surprised by this because I had always understood that the Christian “God” and the Islamic “The God” are equivalent, except for the Arabic addition of the definite article. So is “Allah” a title, as in “The God”, or a proper name, as in “Yahweh” or “Zeus”?

Linguistically, “Allah” comes from Arabic. It’s commonly understood as a contraction of al-Ilah—meaning The God. Arabic, like many Semitic languages, uses the prefix “al-” to denote “the”. So in its roots, “Allah” simply means the God, in the same way as a French speaker might say le Dieu.

But theology doesn’t always follow grammar. For Muslims, Allah is not just a placeholder or descriptor. It's the personal name of the one true God, the same God worshipped by Jews and Christians (though with important theological differences). This belief is woven into the fabric of Islamic practice, prayer and scripture. The Shahada, Islam’s central declaration of faith, uses “Allah” deliberately: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger. There is no substitution here. To replace “Allah” with a different word—say, God, Yahweh, or the Divine—would strip the sentence of its power and precision.

So while “Allah” may have started as a definite noun (The God), in Islam it has taken on the weight and function of a personal name. It's not just a word for God—it is God, named.

Some people wonder if the "-lah" in Allah relates to other names of God, such as El or Elohim in Hebrew. The root idea is broadly similar: all these words derive from ancient Semitic roots meaning "god" or "deity." In Hebrew, El and Eloah are among the oldest names for God. In Aramaic the word is Alaha. So there’s a family resemblance. The -lah in Allah isn’t a suffix or a fragment, though—it’s simply part of the whole word, with Al- functioning as the definite article.

This shared linguistic ancestry doesn’t mean all these names refer to the same kind of deity. But it does remind us that Judaism, Christianity and Islam didn’t arise in isolation—they evolved from a common cultural and linguistic ecosystem in the ancient Near East.

For humanists, understanding how theists relate to the names of God is an important piece of religious literacy. A Muslim saying Allah is not just using a generic term—they are invoking a sacred presence, a uniquely named reality. Misunderstanding this can lead to accidental disrespect—or missed opportunities for deeper dialogue.