In the name of God

A friend recently wrote this for Malaysian Insider on the issue of the usage of Allah by the Christians Herald.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/opinion/ziad-razak/48332-polemik-nama-allah--jangan-gugat-keseimbangan-nasional

Because of his background, the comments that he got are typical of Malaysians that are emotional, short-sighted and political in nature. I've even seen comments on FB that this is the ruling party's conspiracy theory. Gosh, maybe these people are not so different from that grape-eating guy (scary to know there's so many delusional people in Malaysia). At least that guy was polite :p

And another thing that gripe me is the fact that when we have issues internally, we started to compare our country with other countries. For this issue, the role model now is Indonesia (believe it or not!) and the Middle East.

So many people (the Muslims actually) were giving the justifications that the Arab Christians had been and are still using Allah to refer to their God, so why can't the Christians in Malaysia do the same as well. Did it occur to them that perhaps its because of the language factor where Allah meant The God (singular) in Arabic? Hence, the usage of Allah could be the same as our usage of Tuhan. So, in translating God to Arabic will be God = Allah. If we were to translate God into Malay, it will be God = Tuhan. So, if the translation of God into Malay that is what the paper wants, then the right word to be used should be Tuhan, not Allah.

"But look at Indonesia, they use Allah in their Bible, and still Islam is the main religion of the country and they are doing well." One of the commentors pointed this out.

Firstly, how many bombing incidents involving religious extremists have they had again? How many religious war between Islam and Christians have they gone through? Really, do we want to use Indonesia as our role model on this?

Secondly, Indonesia is very strict about the usage of foreign/non-Malay sounding names in the country. Hence, even a Chinese will have to use a Malay name. I saw their problem when one guy on FB shared with us the translation use in the Indonesian bible. The Bible says 'Our LORD God'. To translate this into Malay, it will become 'TUHAN Tuhan kami', which can be confusing I guess, hence they had translated it as 'TUHAN Allah kami'. I guess they can't think of any other alternative for it.

In Malaysia, we had never been strict about translating everything into Malay. Hence, if the paper wanted to maintain using God in the Malay section, or in the Malay-translated bible, no one would have said anything about it.

It is also weird for Christians (and a Catholic some more), to make reference to others rather than to the Pope himself. If truly they (the church that publishes the Herald) believe that Allah is their God, isn't this in contradiction with the Pope, who I'm sure would never use the word Allah in their prayers?

I don't intend to question whether it is right or wrong for them to use kalimah Allah. I'll leave that to the scholars. I'm just questioning why do we want to introduce a new definition when all this while (for centuries even!), we, penduduk tanah Melayu/Malaysia have define it as Tuhan = God, Allah = Muslims's God?