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The Malaysian authorities’ refusal to renew the publication of the weekly Catholic newspaper The Herald unless it stops using the word ‘Allah’ as the word for God in Malay is a demonstration of racism and linguistic ignorance, not religious purity.

According to Deputy Internal Security Minister Johari Baharum, “Only Muslims can use ‘Allah’. It’s a Muslim word, you see. It’s from (the Arabic language). We cannot let other religions use it because it will confuse people,” he was reported as saying by Malaysiakini .

“We cannot allow this use of ‘Allah’ in non-Muslim publications, nobody except Muslims. The word ‘Allah’ is published by the Catholics. It’s not right.”

What Johari revealed was his ignorance of his own professed religion, of the Arabic language in which the Quran is written and of the history and culture of Muslims throughout most of the world. God and Allah mean the same in different languages.

Muslims, like Christians do not worship a person called Allah. They worship a single supreme being which the Arabic language denotes as ‘Allah’. The very word ‘Allah’ derives from the singular nature of the monotheistic deity. In the Arab world, Allah has always been used by Christians (a significant minority) and Jews (a smaller but important minority until the creation of Israel) to denote the one God which the religions share. Ditto in Farsi.

In Indonesia, 100 million Muslims have no problem with their Christian brothers using ‘Allah’ to denote the supreme being in Bahasa Indonesia. So why should an Umno politician unless for some reason to ramp up Malay prejudice against non-Muslims and reinforce the notion that all Malays are and always will be Muslims? Likewise, the Latin (the Roman Catholic church’s lingua franca) word for God is ‘Deus’ and is used without discrimination between Christians, Muslims and Jews.

The Johari version of the world displays the same kind of ignorance found among Christian fundamentalists in the United States and elsewhere who insist that Muslims worship Allah rather than the God (an English word) that the two religions share. An English Quran uses the words “In the name of God the compassionate and merciful,” not “In the name of Allah the compassionate and merciful.”

If Malay Malaysians are confused about the distinction between Islam and Christianity because they use the same word to describe the one God, clearly there is a lot wrong with the educational system. But if a minister is so ignorant, how can the rakyat be expected to know better? For Muslims, Jesus was a prophet of Islam. For Johari, on the eve of Jesus’ birthday, to make this astonishing decision is an insult to his own religion as well as to Christianity from which Islam sprang.

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