There's a piece online from TIME right now about Malaysia's High Court ruling that the word Allah is not exclusive to Muslims. This allows Christian (and presumably other faiths) to publish the word in their newsletters, and claim that Allah is their god as well, apparently a controversial statement because of the country's religious/ethnic makeup.
Some 60% of Malaysia's 28 million people are Malay Muslim, while the rest are ethnic Chinese, Indians and indigenous tribes, practicing various faiths including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and animism. Among Christians, the majority Catholics number about 650,000, or 3% of the population.I know little about the Malay language but the Catholic Church in Malaysia has apparently been using Allah in its Bibles and otherwise for a long while, and in a court case in 2008 cited pre-Islamic use of the term.
But the point missed here by many parties seems to be that as Abrahamic faiths, there is a common god, regardless of names. As the latter part of the TIME article describes, the fact that the Muslim community is so strongly opposed is one of a series of worrying incidents of intolerance in Malaysia. It seems, to me, a missed opportunity for understanding and dialogue.
5 comments:
As a total religion n00b I may not be qualified to comment, but I can *sort of* see where this is coming from; many cultures/religions have forbidden names for God (Judaism anyone?). However, I do think that allowing *some* people to use certain names while others cannot is kind of silly. And using this issue as an excuse for intolerance is just wrong.
You've got a point but in the case of the specific word Allah, that's not really true as far as I understand it. Etymologically speaking, some contend that"Allah" descended from the Arabic "al-Ilah," meaning literally "the god" or "the deity." (http://www.submission.org/allah-god.html)
Many other sources disagree (http://www.muslim.org/islam/allah.htm), and claim that "Allah" is a proper name, derivative of no term. I think that's pretty suspect from an etymological perspective, but I'm not a scholar on this kind of thing.
Judaism specifically forbids (and actually, if I remember correctly, impedes) the pronunciation of God's true name, though (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton). This is at the root of the words Yahweh and Jehovah, and probably others. If I remember Hebrew Scriptures class from high school accurately, the original pronunciation has been either hidden or lost.
I see. It comes down to whether Allah is a name or a noun, yes?
Oh, and sort of unrelatedly, there's an interesting tangent about how YHWH sounds like breathing, as in, God's name is literally the breath of life. How and when that became something forbidden to pronounce, I'm not sure, but it's a cool factoid.
Interestingly enough I remembered a specific term used for God in Hebrew, translating both as "breath" and "spirit": ruah
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Ruah/id/137475
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