For God’s sake?
Those of us who know something about Malay village life, either as inhabitants of that older, now disappearing world or else as intrusive cultural analysts and reporters, know of the role of the village bomoh, the spirit healer, and of its great social and human importance.
Clive Kessler, New Mandala
Disputation in Malaysia over the Kalimah Allah, the name of God, has not abated.
On the contrary, it continues to become ever more acrimonious and worrying.
These days we now even have some enthusiastic “idealists” who give advance notice of their readiness for a virtually premeditated amok —— or to excuse others who might resort to that kind of intimidatory violence —— in order, paradoxically, to uphold their notions of moderation, mutual acceptance and tolerance in interfaith relations.
A question of many parts
There are many aspects to this dispute, all of them requiring close and serious consideration.
There is the constitutional and legal aspect, which is fundamental, and which —— especially in habitually litigious Malaysia, where everybody always seems ready for a large and long-lasting “lawyers’ picnic” —— can never be ignored or taken lightly.
There are important considerations in the areas of political philosophy, especially of democratic and multicultural theory, which are relevant and need to be acknowledged.
There are questions in the area of historical linguistics, especially in the field of comparative Semitic philology (from old Syriac and Ugaritic through Hebrew and Aramaic to Arabic) which must be considered.
After all Middle Eastern Christians have been using the name of Allah to denote, and reverentially to address, their God for many long centuries going back to the time before the birth of Muhammad.
There are issues that arise from the religious and civilisational history of the Southeast Asian world, especially the fact that the Bible, or key parts of it, have been translated into Malay in which the idea of the Christian God has been rendered as Allah for several hundred years.
All these aspects of the current dispute are important.
They need to be fully discussed.
But I shall not go into them here. Others have already explained these matters with great patience and precision.
Instead I wish to suggest and explore another, different dimension of the present controversy over the invocation of God’s name.
The cultural anthropology of the Malay world
I wish to address and highlight a cultural aspect of the problem.
I want to suggest that this controversy is “a very Malay thing”.
Here I mean “a very Malay thing”, or “something that is in its own way very Malay”, in a very specific sense and manner.
I mean in a “cultural” sense, as old-fashioned cultural anthropologists used to, and might still, understand the matter.
Those of us who know something about Malay village life, either as inhabitants of that older, now disappearing world or else as intrusive cultural analysts and reporters, know of the role of the village bomoh, the spirit healer, and of its great social and human importance.
How does the bomoh work?
By calling upon the “spirit world” through spirits with whom he is familiar, with whom he has a continuing relation, upon whom he may make some kind of moral claim.
And how does the bomoh do this?
He does so by summoning those spirits to him, into his presence, in a séance or spirit mediumship session.
He summons them by means of powerful jampi, invocations.
If you have ever heard these jampi recited —— or read about them in the old works of Skeat, Gimlette, Annandale, Wilkinson, Winstedt and the like —— you will know how they work.
Through these jampi the bomoh calls upon his connections in the spirit world.
He calls upon them, imploringly but at the same time commanding them, virtually requiring them to come and help him.
He does do by asserting ritually, in his densely coded jampi or incantation, his right to their presence, assistance and serviceable intervention.
He does so by reminding them they are not strangers to him, nor he to them. That he has a claim upon them, and that they are obliged to recognize his claim upon them.
How does he assert this?
He does so by means of a number of the standard “formulaic” expressions of his ritual language —— through the arcane phraseology and idioms of his jampi.
“I know you!” he declares. “I know your name. I know your origins.”
That is crucial.
Knowing its name and then to assert knowledge of a spirit’s origins and place in the hidden recesses of the cosmos is to be able to hold it to oneself, and its power to one’s needs and purposes.
By the affirmation of this relationship —— a special and very personal, even exclusive, relationship —— the bomoh not only reminds the spirit that he, the bomoh, is there.
He affirms his claim, and asserts an obligation on the spirit’s part, for that power to come to him, to help him, to render some special assistance to him: some special assistance that the spirit would not and need not render to others who do not know its name —— who do not know and therefore have no basis or right to call upon it, since they do not have that same special relationship with the spirit.
The spirit has a superhuman or supernatural power. By the ritual affirmation of that special relationship, the bomoh asserts and establishes his right to recognition, consideration and assistance from that extra-human power. He voices his claim to enjoy the benefits of that power that he is able to invoke.
Power and knowing names in the Malay world
This matter of knowing the names of things and their origins —— and the idea that this knowledge is both empowering and that it is also an entitlement of power, that this knowledge confers and revalidates and announces a great moral power that the person who knows these things may enjoy —— is not just a matter that applies to bomoh.
It is a more general and pervasive theme in what used to be called “traditional Malay culture”.
To give but one example, one of some recent and contemporary significance, people may recall how on a number of occasions in modern memory various state rulers have intervened with the designated road, highway and mapping authorities to insist that certain street and place names be changed.
The names given by the road and mapping authorities may, by the latest standards and conventions, have been linguistically impeccable. They may have pleased the sign-makers and mapping experts, but so far as the Malay rulers were concerned they were simply wrong.
And, in the end, it is the Malay ruler who truly knows the proper, correct names of places. He knows because it is he who —— perhaps ironically, as part of his pre-Islamic Hindu-Buddhist cosmological inheritance as focus of the human world and anchor of its relation to the wider universe —— gives them their names, on the basis of his authoritative knowledge of their true if obscure origins.
So “incorrect” place names and signage are changed.
They are changed because the ruler says so.
But not capriciously.
He says so because that is what, in part, it means to be a ruler. In the “traditional Malay cultural universe”, places and people have no names and no fixed, clear social existence or identity until they are named and recognized by a ruler —— in their royally-given names.
The leading scholar Anthony Milner has written an important work entitled Kerajaan expounding this idea. And he does it with great clarity and scholarly depth.
