The controversy in Malaysia shows the arrogance and ignorance that often underlie fanaticism. But it is also heartening to discover the strength of Malaysia’s public sphere.
by C. M. Naim
The foundational creed for all Muslims is: “There is no god save Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet”—with the Arabic word Rasul indicating Muhammad’s status. Rasul literally translates as “someone who was sent,” but in common usage in Arabic—and in Islamicate languages such as Urdu and Persian—it means a prophet or apostle. According to the Qur’an, Jesus too is a Rasul of Allah’s Rasul, as are in fact all the prophets of the Old Testament. However, in Islam, Jesus is not God’s Son; though immaculately conceived, he is described only as the son of Maryam or Mary. A useful summation of what the Qur’an tells Muslims about Jesus is found in 4:156–8, where the Jews are chided—“[156] … because they denied and spoke dreadful calumnies of Mary; [157] And for saying: ‘We killed the Christ, Jesus, son of Mary, who was an apostle of God;’ but they neither killed nor crucified him, though it so appeared to them. Those who disagree in the matter are only lost in doubt. They have no knowledge about it other than conjecture, for surely they did not kill him, [158] But God took him to Himself, and God is all-mighty and all-wise.” (Ahmed Ali, Al-Qur’an, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 93-4.) Christianity, obviously, is six centuries and few decades older than Islam, and every reader of the Qur’an knows that its earliest verses directly and repeatedly, though not exclusively, addressed the Christians of Mecca, reminding them Allah and His Rasul, Jesus, while pointing out their “errors” in belief about the latter.
In other words, Allah was the Arabic word that the people of Mecca—Christians, Jews, and so-called Pagans—were quite familiar with and understood it to represent a singular Supreme Being in Arabic, their shared language. The word, no doubt, had an earlier history, but that is not of concern here. Of importance is the simple fact that a fairly large body of Arabic speaking Christians had been using the word “Allah” for at least a few centuries before the advent of Islam. And that for any Muslim to make a monopolistic claim on the word in the name of Islam would be an act of abysmal ignorance and absolute arrogance. To my limited knowledge, no Muslim, had ever made such a claim in the past.
But these are bad times, reminding us of the words that Yeats made memorable some ninety years ago: “… everywhere // The ceremony of innocence is drowned;// The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.” And so we have the situation in Malaysia, where some Muslims recently attacked and vandalized nine churches because they did not wish some Malaysian Christians to use “Allah” to refer to their own God.
I have above used the word “some” twice advisedly. According to an Associated Press report of January 9, “Only the Malay-language prayers for indigenous tribes people in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak use ‘Allah,’ as they have for decades.” And the Catholic weekly, Herald, uses the word only in its Bahasa Malaysia edition. It had been doing so since 1995, but it was not until 2006 that it was warned by the government to stop. And it is only some Malaysian Muslims who, individually or collectively, have been involved in the recent arson and vandalism. (The most recent being an attack on the offices of the lawyer for the Catholic Church.) The many reports in the New York Times barely hinted at that “some-ness.” I had to go online and find some English language Malaysian blogs and newspapers to discover that while the problem was more extensive there was also greater dissent and resistance to the ban among Malaysian Muslims than was reported in the American press, and that any number of prominent academics and journalists had severely criticized the attacks, while bringing to light the issue’s fuller history within the context of Malaysia’s somewhat unique federal political system.
Apparently, there was a local ban and a fatwa to that effect in 1986 in the state of Selangor, which was made into a state law in 1988, and eventually became established in March 2009 as a fully gazetted law in all the constituent states of Malaysia—though not without challenge and opposition from various religious and secular organizations. The ban, in fact, concerned four words, the other three being “Kaabah,” “Solat,” and “Baitullah.” The enacted law prohibited Non-Muslims from using those four words with reference to any occasion or activity that was not Islamic.
It may be recalled that not too long ago there was in Malaysia another brouhaha. A fatwa was issued and nationally confirmed making Yoga a “non-Islamic” practice that Malaysian Muslims were told not to engage in. Earlier there were other controversies—over beauty pageants and also whether it was right for Malaysian Muslims to greet their non-Muslim compatriots on the latter’s religious occasions. I should note that the mufti of Selangor disapproved of the pageants and Yoga but allowed offering greetings to non-Muslims. Indonesia, incidentally, did not prohibit Yoga to its much larger Muslim majority population.
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