Battle Over Use of 'Allah' Continues in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysia is bracing for a bruising linguistic battle after its government vowed to challenge a court ruling allowing local Roman Catholics to refer to God as Allah.

NAJIB ABDUL RAZAK

The legal tussle is raising tensions between Malaysia's ethnic-Malay Muslim majority, who comprise around 60% of this resource-rich nation's population, and its large ethnic-Chinese and Indian minorities. Muslim groups already are preparing demonstrations against a High Court ruling on New Year's Eve to overturn a three-year-old government ban on the Catholic Church using the Arabic word Allah as a translation for God in its Malay-language newspaper.

Government spokesman Tengku Sharifuddin Tengku Ahmad said Sunday the government will file an appeal against the ruling. Among other things, the verdict potentially upholds the constitutional right of the Church's Herald newspaper to refer to Jesus Christ as the son of Allah -- something that might inflame many Muslims here and set back Prime Minister Najib Razak's efforts to bring Malaysia's different religious groups closer together.

The Arab word Allah has been used by Malay-speaking Christians for centuries, much as it is used by Christians in Arabic-speaking countries or in Indonesia, where, like Malaysia, the concept of a single God was introduced by Arabic-speaking traders. Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, says there's no other appropriate term for God in Malay.

Many powerful Islamic leaders here disagree, however, and fear some Muslims could be misled by Christians using the word Allah. The say the word should be reserved for Islam alone.

Now the controversy is quickly becoming a lightning rod for dissent against what some minority groups and moderate Muslims see as part of a broader Islamization of Malaysia that could deter investors.

Malaysia was, and many cases still is, a moderate, Muslim-majority nation. Its large Chinese and Indian minorities have encouraged trade links and investment, while multinationals helped create a large technology industry to complement Malaysia's large natural gas and agricultural reserves and propel it into the ranks of the world's top 20 exporters.

Nonetheless, Muslim Shariah courts have spread quickly, encouraged in part by a government eager to co-opt the agenda of radical Muslims who hope to eventually turn Malaysia into Southeast Asia's first Islamic state.

Muslim-oriented lobby groups exert a strong influence over the government. In the last six months, a Shariah court for the first time sentenced a woman who drank beer in a hotel to be caned, while a group of Muslim men near Kuala Lumpur threw a severed cow's head onto the site of a proposed Hindu temple -- a gross act of sacrilege.

"Despite official boasting about the country's diverse population and commitment to pluralism, Islam and the government have essentially merged," says Maznah Mohamad, a Malaysian political scientist at the National University of Singapore.

The New Year's Eve ruling penned by Judge Lau Bee Lian was one of the few times that a secular institution has intervened to block the advance of an increasingly political interpretation of Islam in Malaysia. She ruled that under Malaysian law, Christians have "a constitutional right to use [the word] Allah."

The Herald newspaper filed a lawsuit in 2007 challenging a government ban on it using the word Allah as a translation for God, complaining that the prohibition discriminated against Malay-speaking indigenous tribes who converted to Christianity decades ago. The newspaper has a tiny circulation of about 14,000 and is only available in Catholic Churches, although Muslims have complained that it is possible to look up Malay-language material using the term Allah on the Herald's Web site.

Muslim activists were quick to mobilize as soon as the high court verdict was delivered on Thursday afternoon. The National Union of Malaysian Muslim students urged the government to take the case to the Appeals Court, arguing that Christian missionaries using the word Allah could trick Muslims into leaving their faith, and the influential Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement is planning a large demonstration against the verdict in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

The Malay-language Utusan Malaysia newspaper, meanwhile, reported that the influential mufti of northern Perak, Harussani Zakaria, called the verdict "an insult to Muslims in this country."

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Saturday that authorities should set strict conditions for non-Muslims using the word Allah to avoid to provoking a Muslim backlash.

"What I am afraid of is that the term 'Allah' might be used in such a way that could inflame the anger of Muslims, if [non-Muslims] were to use it on banners or write something might not reflect Islam," the state news agency Bernama reported him as saying.LINK