The “Allah” Issue

January 7, 2009

“Allah” use might have the opposite effect

by Terence Netto (January 6, 2009)

I came to a rather interesting conclusion about the rapidly escalating controversy over the High Court’s decision to allow the Catholic weekly Herald to use the term ‘Allah’ in its Bahasa Malaysia edition.

Purveyors of the concern that Muslims could be ‘confused’ have not considered the opposite prospect: when the term becomes common among Malaysian Catholics, it could pave the way for easier conversion to Islam.

As any Christian theologian would know, explaining concepts to laymen such as the Trinity, Original Sin and the dual nature of Christ is difficult.

In contrast, Islamic doctrine is much more clear-cut. Islam’s rigorous insistence on the oneness of Allah, His total unlikeness to humans, and its view of sin not as an aspect of human nature (the claim of Original Sin), but as something done against the bounds of God’s law, make it an easier religion to teach compared to Christianity.

You do not have to be too learned to know that one of the explanations by Christians for the rapid spread of Islam in the seventh century of the Common Era was the failure of Christian theologians to solve the riddle of the Trinity and Christ’s dual nature.

In this view, Islam is a monophysite religion (opposite of hypostatic, which is the term for the dual nature of Christ) that’s simple in creed and remarkably impervious to heresy. This explained the speed of its spread.

Malaysian Catholics shunned ‘Allah’

There is anecdotal evidence that Malaysian Catholics who were educated in the faith before the New Education Policy made Bahasa the medium of instruction in national schools from 1971 onwards, were uncomfortable over the use of the term Allah in liturgy and prayer.

That use became imperative in the churches when the effects of the language switch became evident by the early 1990s when Christian children in rural and semi-urban areas could no longer speak even a modicum of English.

Holdouts for English in the liturgy saw that their discomfort with Bahasa usage was selfish on account of its inevitability as a medium of discourse in all of Malaysian life and thus began to participate in masses said in Bahasa with greater enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, they were always uneasy with the use of the word ‘Allah’ for God the Father, thinking of it as a term specific to the Muslim understanding of their faith.

Even when they learned that Arab Christians used the term well before the inception of Islam in the 7th century of the Common Era (this marking of dates used to be rendered as AD for Anno Domini which means the year of the Lord), they were reluctant to use it.

But being members of a hierarchical church – and thereby conditioned to obey what the hierarchy decides on matters of faith – they confined their misgivings to murmurs among their peers.

The doubters conceded, however, that having been educated in the English language, they lacked appreciation of the need for the use of the term ‘Allah’ by Catholic kids whose entire schooling in Bahasa meant that the only biblical texts they could comprehend were the Bahasa Indonesia editions, Al-Kitab, where the term ‘Allah’ is freely used for God the Father.

Now this party of the uneasy, watching the current attempt by some quarters to stir Muslims to anxiety over last week’s High Court decision, are rueful over their stance of acquiescence in the hierarchy’s decision to seek judicial review of the Home Ministry’s proscription.

A man after the Catholics’ own heart

It must be said that this section of the Catholic faithful have for some time since written off the UMNO-led BN as irredeemably corrupt. In the corresponding period they watched with great expectation, tempered by a little trepidation, the battle between the liberal and conservative wings of PAS, hoping, praying even, that the liberals would triumph.

Shah Alam PAS MP Khalid Samad’s visit to a Catholic church in his constituency, in the aftermath of the March 2008 general election, was interpreted by these self-same Catholics as a momentous event, the beginnings of hope for a concordat between activists of both faiths in quest of higher standards of morality in Malaysian public life.

Khalid is now, arguably, the favourite PAS politician of Catholics, more so after he came out in support of the High Court decision. Regarded as faintly reprobate by some Muslims, the widely read Khalid, a man with an admirably determined belief in persuasion through reasoned argument, is perhaps keenly aware of medieval history when Christian bewilderment about the Trinity and the hypostatic nature of Christ paved the way for Islam’s spread at an electrifying pace.

Catholics viewing last week’s favourable court decision with a sense of vindication would be well advised to mull the thought that nothing is exempt from the law of unintended consequences.A deeper grasp of that law would lead to the view that life, that history, is tragic, a dimension that tends to be left out from abstract approaches to human affairs.

Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician, observed, the “inner feeling belonging to the grasp of the service of tragedy is peace – the purification of emotions.” Christians recognise this as the peace that transcends all understanding.