'Allah ban is about subordination, not theology'

Malaysia's ban on the use of ‘Allah' by Catholic weekly The Herald has been described by a Sudanese-born writer with the United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian as not a religious issue but an attempt by the majority ethnic group to seize the national identity of the country.

In an article on the popular website of The Guardian, Nesrine Malik sympathises with non-Muslims, who she says are struggling to re-assert the country's pluralistic national identity.

The ban is as ridiculous, Nesrine adds, as the UK passing a law saying that ‘God' can only be used by Christians.

"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," Nesrine writes.

"The anger expressed by non-Muslims in Malaysia since the ruling and their insistence on being able to continue to use the word Allah do not constitute an aggressive encroachment on some hallowed Muslim space. It is a re-assertion of a pluralistic national identity and of a determination to use a word that is Malay, rather than Muslim."

The Guardian's print and online editions reach nearly nine million readers worldwide.

Nearer home, a Jakarta Post editor has also slammed Malaysia's Court of Appeal's ruling on Monday that The Herald must adhere to the ban on the use of the word Allah as ordered by the home minister, who exerts control over publications printed in the country.

In The Guardian article, Nesrine NONE(left), who lives in London, says she does not consider Allah to be the name of her God alone, as it is a borrowed Arabic term that predates Islam.

"On my first day at a British school, a teacher went around the class and asked us what our respective non-Christian gods were called.

"When I floundered, she exasperatedly told me that my God is 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," Nesrine adds in her article.

She goes on to warn that if Malaysians insist on copyrighting 'Allah', it would create "separate gods for separate religions, and directly contradict the message of the Prophet Muhammad."

This attempt to define 'God', she argues, is possibly a bigger threat to Islam's message of monotheism as stated in the syahadah, the Muslim declaration of faith, which is often translated as "there is no god, but God."

Earlier, an Emirate newspaper The National also published an editorial condemning the Court of Appeal decision as "wrong", arguing that ‘Allah' is freely used by non-Muslims in the Arab world.

Ruling 'unhelpful' 

Meanwhile The Economist's blog on religion and public policy Erasmus, opined that the Court of Appeal decision is an "unhelpful contribution" to a long-standing, sometimes "bloody", dispute among monotheists about the name of God.

It added that while thoughtful arguments on monotheism may not have much impact on heated demonstrations, it is still helpful to consider historical context.

"Whatever the Malaysian judiciary ultimately decides, it will not stop Christians in the Arabic-speaking world, in countries were Arabic influence has been strong, from calling on the name of Allah.

"Go into any traditional church in the Middle East and you will hear the chant: "Quddusan Allah, quddusan al-qawi" ("Holy God, Holy and Strong...").

"That chant is said to have originated in Greek-speaking Constantinople, but the chances are that people were singing something similar in Semitic languages, of which Arabic is one, for centuries before," it noted.