Would-be arsonists in mostly Muslim Malaysia struck at a convent school and a sixth church on Sunday while church and government leaders called for calm in a row over Christians’ use of the word “Allah” to refer to God.
Would-be arsonists in mostly Muslim Malaysia struck at a convent school and a sixth church on Sunday while church and government leaders called for calm in a row over Christians’ use of the word “Allah” to refer to God.
And also see this incisive article in Time:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1952497,00.html
Some Malay lawyers claim the proper word for God in the Malaysian language is [i]Tuhan[/i], and non-Muslims should use that word. Of course, one would ask if that is so, why don’t Malaysian-speaking Muslims use that word, too? Why use the =Arabic-language= word for God, [i]Allah[/i]? For that matter, we could ask American-born, English-speaking Muslims the same question. What has happened is that many of the world’s Islamic leaders and masses of their followers in effect have commandeered the Arabic translation of the word for God and made it the official and desired exclusive =Muslim= name for God. At least, in the non-Arabic-speaking world. For in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, Allah is the universal Arabic word translated in English as God, whether said by Arab Muslims or Arab Christians. The Arabic translation of Genesis 1:1 in the Bible from time immemorial has said that in the beginning, [i]Allah[/i] created the heavens and the earth. The word used in Hebrew is [i]Elohim[/i] (interesting enough, denoting plurality). It’s quite likely both words evolved from a common lingual ancestry in that part of the world, long before Islam appeared.
The silence of scholarly Arab academics in the presence of these disturbing trends and developments is stunning. Reasoning and logic are out the window in favor of hotheaded emotionalism and mindless ideology. How sad. How scary.
w.w.