Siege mentality over 'Allah'

comment The decision by the Kuala Lumpur High Court to allow Catholic newsletter The Herald to continue its Bahasa Malaysia publication using the word ‘Allah’ is causing a stir amongst some Malaysians.

There is fear that the sanctity of Islam as the official religion will be tarnished and that the word ‘Allah’ will confuse Muslims into becoming Christians.

More damagingly, one Umno leader said that all this is due to Malay disunity, whilst another warned of impending racial strife. One PKR MP suggested that the judge is non-Muslim hence the verdict!

Here is a classic case of language confusion reframed as “racial strife” owing to siege mentality.

During my recent trip to Syria, a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim and that has the tombs of saints venerated by Muslims and Christians alike, I found out that ‘Allah’ is used by both communities without controversy.

‘Allah’ is Arabic for the English-equivalent ‘God’. In Malay, the word is ‘Tuhan’ whilst in Hindu Bali, ‘God’ is sometimes referred to as ‘Hyang’ as in ‘Sembah-Hyang’.

Zulkifli Noordin, the PKR parliamentarian, said all religions have specific names for 'God'. He may know his own religion but when it comes to other religions, he still needs to read more.

Buddhism, for example, is pantheistic and the idea of a unitary ‘God’ as in the canonical religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) does not exist. Buddha is not ‘God’

Taoism is basically nature-worship and the Chinese pantheon of gods and demi-gods (always referred to in lower-case) is a mixture of nature-worship and ancestral homage. Once again, the canonical (religions of the book) idea of ‘God’ does not apply.

The closest thing to a unitary god is Thee Kong (god of heaven) which is more like the Greek god Zeus, king of the gods. Hinduism is even more complex and beyond my ability to describe. Suffice it to say that one cannot make a direct comparison between these religions and the canonical ones.

Why the word?

However, if there is a Malay equivalent to ‘God’ which is ‘Tuhan’, why is it that Catholics use the word ‘Allah’? The reason is that in the Middle East, where both Christianity and Islam originated, the word for ‘God’ is ‘Allah’.

‘Tuhan’ is pre-Islamic and possibly even pre-Christian. For the missionaries to distinguish their God from the ‘Tuhan’ of the locals, they introduced the word ‘Allah’ into the local vocabulary. Both ‘Tuhan’ and ‘Hyang’ are throw-backs to Malaysia's pre-Islamic past. Locals were then Hindu, Buddhist or animist.

This is one reason why the framers of the Rukunegara used ‘Tuhan’ and not ‘Allah’, because ‘Allah’ would have referred to ‘God’ in the canonical religions whereas ‘Tuhan’ is more inclusive and acceptable to the Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists and other non-canonical
religionists.

Zulkifli should give the framers of the Rukunegara more credit. Malaysian leaders in those days were people of much higher intellectual calibre than today.

Moreover, the Malay section of The Herald caters mainly to Catholics in Sabah and Sarawak where the medium of religious instruction is Malay. Till very recently, the government did not interfere at all with the use of the word ‘Allah’ in this publication.

For more than 150 years, the Catholics in these two states have been using that word when referring to their ‘God’. To suddenly deny them that right, the High Court has rightly ruled, is unconstitutional.

This issue also brings into the light the great divide between Peninsular Malaysia and the Borneo states. In Sarawak, roughly 50 percent of the population is Christian. A bumiputera who is also a Christian must be quite unimaginable to the bumiputera in the peninsula.

But constitutionally, you do not have to be a Muslim to be a bumiputera although you have to be a Muslim to be Malay. The siege mentality that originates in the peninsula does not make sense in Borneo and I suspect even over here their influence is fast dissipating.

Zulkifli 's claim that the High Court’s decision is reminiscent of the Natrah (or Maria Hertogh) case in Singapore of 1950 is also baseless. By conflating the two totally different trials, the PKR parliamentarian has proven that he is unable to see beyond his own narrow racial and religious lens.

Today, about 90 percent of Malaysians are literate. This means that they are able to read and write. But there is a small group, a fringe group, who cannot understand what they read.

Apparently, if they come across the word ‘Allah’in the Kitab Injil (Bible), they get confused. Is there any wonder that they cannot understand the constitution? This siege mentality is no longer a laughing matter. Like Zulkifli, it is turning into an embarrassment.

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NEIL KHOR has recently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is co-author of ‘Non-Sectarian Politics in Malaysia: The Case of Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia’ (2008).