As a child, I was familiar with two words for God in Islam — one was Khuda and the other was Allah. I assumed that they were synonyms for each other. As I grew up, I learned that Khuda is a Persian (Iranian) word and Allah is Arabic. I noticed that my Parsi friends often referred to God as Khodai, a result of their Persian roots. Currently, I observe that many Muslims avoid using the word Khuda and prefer the word Allah. So, it is no longer Khuda-hafiz for safe journeys, but Allah-hafiz. This shift reveals a transformation in the Islamic world in the past 30 years.

At the time of the World Wars, beyond the traditional Shia-Sunni divide, Islam had many regional forms: there was an Arabic form, there was a Persian form, there was the Indian form, there was an Indonesian form. But, after the World Wars, we find that Islam has transformed and there is a desperate need to homogenise it into a form that is crudely called Arabic, though academics prefer to call it 'puritanical' or the Wahhabi School of Sunni Islam.