The Malaysian ‘Allah’ ban is about putting minorities in their place

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Oct 17, 2013

The ‘Allah’ ruling is as ridiculous as a UK law saying that ‘God’ is a Christian designation, and other religions can’t use it

Nesrine Malik, The Guardian

“Allah” means God, unless you are a non-Muslim Malaysian, in which case you have to find another word. After a recent court ruling in the country, Allah can now be used only to refer to the Muslim God, and non-Muslims (mainly the Malaysian Christian Catholic community and press) have been banned from using it. It is a decision that has inflamed opinion among minority religions and disheartened Muslims. Apart from all the practical implications of this (re-printing Bibles and so on), there are other intangible but more heartfelt grievances. At first glance it looks like a petty scuffle over semantics, but the roots of the dispute go deep into the issue of national identity.

The ruling was flimsily justified by the “risk” of conversion. Announcing the change, the judge said: “It is my judgment that the possible and most probable threat to Islam, in the context of this country, is the propagation of other religions to the followers of Islam.” But the ban is less about religion than about putting non-Malay minorities in their place, subordinating their status to that of Muslims, the majority population.

The issue is made more complex by the fact that “Allah” is an Arabic loan-word and, when imported into other languages, can come to be thought of as a proper noun. On my first day at a British school, a teacher going around the class and asked us what our respective non-Christian gods were called. When I floundered, she exasperatedly told me that my god was called Allah, and I couldn’t quite explain to her why that felt wrong. To me, Allah just meant “God” in Arabic. It wasn’t a name.