‘Allah’ rings out in Malaysian churches despite ban
(TMI) – Malaysian churches defiantly continued to use the word Allah to refer to the Christian God in Sunday services despite the Muslim-majority country’s leader saying they must obey rules against it.
Malay-speaking Christians prayed and sang hymns using the Arabic word, a practice they have observed for hundreds of years but which has sparked an increasingly tense row in Malaysia.
“They all contain the word ‘Allah’,” a pastor at a church near Kuala Lumpur said of the songs sung by the church.
“(The Malay-language Bible) contains the word ‘Allah’. When we preach we have to read the text. It’s a really difficult situation,” he added, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the passions surrounding the issue.
Under pressure from Muslim conservatives, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had said on Friday that Malaysian Christians must heed rules forbidding them from using the word.
Islamist ethnic Malays say the word is exclusive to Islam and must not be used by the country’s non-Muslim minorities. Muslim ethnic Malays make up more than 60% of the diverse country’s 28 million people.
Malaysia has sizeable ethnic Chinese, Indian and other communities. It has about 2.6 million Christians.
Church leaders have vowed not to back down.
“The Christians in Malaysia have no choice but to use the Malay-language Bibles. To say they cannot use these Bibles, it means saying ‘you are not allowed to worship in the language that you want’,” Rev Hermen Shastri (pic), general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, told AFP.
