Fresh after the Catholic Church’s failure to strike out a government appeal over the banning of the usage of the word ‘Allah’ by Christians, they are inviting Malaysians to see their point of view through a fact sheet on the matter.

Released to media by the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) yesterday, a four-page fact sheet that was first distributed to churches last May was appended to a press statement on the court decision.

“We pray that this matter will not be be politicised but that the Court of Appeal be allowed to fairly adjudicate over the matter.

NONE“With sincere intentions and in order that the public may better understand our position, we attach the CFM fact sheet on ‘When, why and how Christians use the term 'Allah’,” CFM chairperson Reverend Eu Hong Seng (right) said.

Eu said the fact sheet was being released in hope that the church’s “factual perspective on the issue will prevail in the courts of our land”.

In the fact sheet that addresses why Christians use the word ‘Allah’, CFM touches on the issue through historical and linguistic perspectives.

It also explores the consequences of substituting the word ‘Allah’ with ‘Tuhan’ for the “more than 60 percent” of Malaysian Christians who worship in Bahasa Malaysia and mostly reside in East Malaysia.

“Some Muslims have claimed repeatedly that the Christians in Malaysia refuse to stop using the word ‘Allah’ because they want to confuse and convert Muslims, thereby posing a threat to national security.

“This claim is groundless as there has been no evidence offered of any threat to security. These remain unfounded accusations,” the fact sheet says.

From a historical perspective, it said, the word ‘Allah’ has been used by Christians in Southeast Asia for “centuries” without opposition, with the oldest evidence found in 1514.

It said the ‘Kitab Salat as-Sawai’ or Christian catechisms in Malay written in 1514 was published around 1545.

It added that the ‘Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam’ and the ‘Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World’ also support that the word ‘Allah’ was a term “used for the supreme god in a pantheon of gods, before the revelation of Islam”.

Shameful to allow edits to scripture

According to CFM, the al-Kitab (the Bible in Bahasa Malaysia) was not translated into Bahasa from English, but from Hebrew and Greek.

The word ‘Allah’, it argued, is a word rooted in the Semitic languages and dates back to the 5th century.

“In the Hebrew language, the word ‘God’ has the same root as in the Arabic languages.

So, when the word ‘God’ was first translated into Bahasa Malaysia, the translators merely followed the Arabic Christian usage and retained the word ‘Allah’,” the fact sheet adds.

It said that substituting ‘Allah’ with ‘Tuhan’ in worship would cause confusion as some chapters of the al-Kitab have the words ‘Tuhan’ and ‘Allah’ in the same sentence.

These two words correspond with the English ‘Lord’ and ‘God’ respectively, it said, and as such substituting ‘Allah’ with ‘Tuhan’ will mean a term like ‘Lord God’ will be translated to ‘Tuhan Tuhan’.

“The repeated words ‘Tuhan Tuhan’ indicate plural in Bahasa Malaysia, will create the impression that Christians believe in many Gods, which is unacceptable.”

It said Tuhan Yesus refers to Jesus Christ and is used to “affirm the deity and teach the doctrine of trinity”.

It added that by replacing the word ‘Allah’ with something else, the church would also be allowing a secular government to edit the scripture.

“This would be shameful and an unprecedented development for any religion and government.”

CFM fact sheet