The nirguna Brahman was a philosophical concept at the heart of Hinduism, but people needed to worship something they could imagine and visualize. Hence the idea of the saguna Brahman—the Absolute given form, qualities and attributes, also known as Ishvara or Bhagavan. Strictly speaking, Ishvara is the best translation of God in the Christian or Allah in the Muslim sense of these terms, since those faiths have no equivalent for God in the sense of Brahman.
