Some insights on the use of 'Allah' issue

Original article on The Malaysian Insider: A Letter to a Muslim Friend.

It's a letter written to highlight some historical facts relevant to the issue. Based on these, it's clearly obvious what kind of politicians we have running the country, who are trying to split people apart on skewed/twisted religious grounds - those who think more with their chaotic emotions, misplaced gut feelings, baseless presumptions, personal/private interests rather than with reasons, rationality, books, knowledge, history, established facts, valid evaluations, etc.

Here's the article in its entirety:

JAN 19 — Recently, someone whom I consider a very close and trusted friend, and who is a Muslim, wrote an email to me with a very simple question: “What was The Herald asking for exactly?”

As someone who knew what the issue was from the start, having once been a freelance contributor to The Herald, I gathered my thoughts and spoke to a few relevant people and started writing down the facts of the whole issue.

Instead of the creative and open writing style that is normally employed in any article, I decided to keep it strictly to the point with the facts itself, following the style of a former prime minister whose blog name is one letter short of the anagram for the word “CHEATED”, which is rather ironic since many of us still feel that way over events of the past 28 years.

Anyway, this was my letter to that Muslim friend.

Dear brother Malaysian,

I wish all Muslims (and even some non-Muslims) were like you, stopping to ask what the issue was instead of playing straight into the tactics of people (and some media) who have personal and political agendas. Here are the facts of the issue, which I am sure will answer your question easily.

1. The Herald has been around for more than 15 years.
2. The Herald was first published in English only.
3. By the late 1990s, there already was a Bahasa Malaysia edition, which occasionally contained the term “Allah”.
4. Upon request, and to meet growing demand, Tamil and Chinese editions were added simply to allow Catholics who were more familiar with those two languages to have their community news and spiritual guidance explained for their better understanding. These editions covered a few pages respectively.
5. Likewise, the thousands of East Malaysian students in government universities in Peninsula Malaysia, who are active in the Catholic Students Society in their respective universities, had requested to have pages added in Bahasa Malaysia (BM).
6. These East Malaysians students over the past 15 years were naturally those who were educated completely under the Bahasa Malaysia medium and with little exposure to English (for the majority of them).
7. In addition to the students, thousands of East Malaysians have been flocking to the Klang Valley for better prospects and simply to “cari makan”, just like other Malaysians from all over the peninsula. Again, the majority would be BM-educated and more comfortable worshiping in Bahasa Malaysia than in English.
8. Like for the Tamil and Chinese editions, the East Malaysians naturally wanted the Bahasa Malaysia edition to be about their own community news, besides some local and global Catholic church news translated from English to Bahasa Malaysia.
9. Bahasa Malaysia was, after all, their common denominator, i.e. the national language, propagated by the government themselves over all other languages since the late 1970s (hmmm . . . I wonder who was the education minister who started it all).
10. The East Malaysians themselves wrote the original content and translated some of the English pages in The Herald to Bahasa Malaysia. One can easily surmise this from the writers’ by-lines as well as from the “Letters to the Editor” in the Bahasa Malaysia edition since its beginnings, around 12 years ago.
11. If these East Malaysians used “Allah” in their praise and worship all their lives — as did their parents, grandparents and the generations before them — it would only be natural that they would write their articles and reflections, as well as do translations, using the only word they know for the “Lord our God”, the God of Abraham and Moses. The one Almighty God.
12. The word “Allah” was never and will never be used to refer to Jesus in any Bahasa Malaysia translation. That is one blatant piece of misinformation that so many peninsula Malaysian Muslims have been wrongly led to believe.
13. When former Home Minister Datuk Syed Hamid Albar imposed a blanket ban on the use of the word “Allah” in The Herald, as well as on imported Christian Bibles and other literature in both print and multimedia formats from Indonesia, the church appealed.
14. After appeals and all other avenues failed, the Catholic Church had no choice but to go to court because it is a basic deprivation of human rights in not allowing East Malaysian Christians the right to worship God in a manner they have used to worship Him all their lives and for generations past.
15. The Herald just wants the right for their Klang Valley-based East Malaysian readers to practise their faith, and share their community information, while learning about their own faith, in the only language they share, being as they are from various Bumiputera groups, and as how they have been practicing it all these years.
16. The Herald is only sold within church grounds, and has also complied with government requests to have “TERHAD (restricted)” and “FOR NON-MUSLIMS ONLY” on the cover, even if it was never to be sold or distributed outside church grounds in the first place.
17. The greatest lie being repeated over and over again, by ministers, morally-corrupt politicians, some Muslim scholars, some government-controlled media as well as misinformed members of the public is that the church started using the term “Allah” in The Herald since only a few years ago.
18. The other great lie is that the term is also intended for use in the English edition.

Thanks again for asking your very important question, my brother.

Please do enlighten your fellow Muslim brothers and sisters on how it all started and why it was a non-issue, then made into an issue by the government, and now has become the biggest possible threat to Malaysian unity, peace and harmony, after more than 50 years of independence.

Thanks.

Take care and God bless.

Look also at this article by Marina Mahathir to get other rational perspective.

On the isue of using "Allah" in Malaysia...

I found commentaries by Marina Mahathir to be the most apt in what our response should be on this issue.

Excerpt from Marina Mahathir in The Malaysian Insider:

While some idiots are mourning over the “loss” of the word “Allah” and therefore basically telling the world that they are people easily confused by nomenclature, and others are predicting riots over what is basically a “copyright” issue, let me define what I think a confident Muslim should be:

1. A confident Muslim is unfazed by the issue of God's name. God speaks to all of humankind in the Quran and never said that only Muslims could call him by the name Allah.

2. A confident Muslim has 99 names to choose from to describe that One God. My favourites are Ar-Rahman (The All-Compassionate) and Ar-Rahim (The All-Merciful).

3. A confident Muslim never gets confused over which is his/her religion and which is other people's. For instance, a confident Muslim knows exactly what the first chapter of the Quran is. And it's not the Lord's Prayer.

4. A confident Muslim will not walk into a church, hear a liturgy in Malay or Arabic where they use the word “Allah” and then think that he or she is in a mosque. A confident Muslim knows the difference.

5. A confident Muslim is generous, inclusive and doesn't think that his or her brethren is made exclusive through the use of a single language. The confident Muslim is well aware that in the Middle East, all services of ANY religion are in Arabic because that's what they all speak.

6. A confident Muslim knows the basis of his/her faith are the five pillars of Islam and will not be shaken just because other people call God by the same name.

7. A Muslim believes in only One God. Therefore it makes sense that other people should call God by the same name because there is no other God.

ART THOU NOT aware that it is God whose limitless glory all [creatures] that are in the heavens and on earth extol, even the birds as they spread out their wings? Each [of them] knows indeed how to pray unto Him and to glorify Him; and God has full knowledge of all that they do: (Surah Nour, Verse 41) (Asad).

So I would ask those people demonstrating against the court decision, have you no pride? Are you saying you're easily confused?

One of the biggest idiot refererred to in her article must obviously be Khir Toyo per his comment in The Malaysian Insider. Touche...

Ku Li: BN has destroyed Malaysia’s future

KUALA LUMPUR: Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (picture) today painted a bleak future for Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional government, saying it had squandered the nation’s oil wealth to the tune of billions of ringgit.

The former Finance Minister said Petronas’s oil profits had been used “to bail out failing companies, buy arms, build grandiose cities amidst cleared palm oil estates.”

“Instead of helping eradicate poverty in the poorest states, our oil wealth came to be channeled into our political and politically-linked class,” the first Petronas chief and former Umno vice president said in a speech at the Young Corporate Malaysians Summit.

He said Petronas money had been used as a slush fund to prop up authoritarian rule, to corrupt the entire political and business elite and to erode constitutional democracy.

The Gua Musang MP told the conference that Petronas had contributed 40 percent to the national budget over the years.

But such a great reliance on oil income was getting untenable, he said. “The oil that was meant to spur our transition to a more humane, educated society has instead become a narcotic that provides economic quick fixes and hollow symbols such as the Petronas Towers.”

Read the rest of this article at FreeMalaysiaToday.

Antara Raja, Menteri, Negara, dan Rakyat...

A really sharp article from Dr. Asri on apparent hypocrisies that all of us Malaysian know so well but yet nobody has the guts to say something about because of the political/legal repercussion that might befall. Finally, here comes MAZA with the much needed guts and conviction that

Tanggungjawab di hadapan Allah lebih besar daripada segala-galanya.

But the big question is, do these people, those directed in his article (but not all of them obviously), have the capacity to think wisely and the guts to do the right thing, or maybe they just don't have the cpacity to think at all! Or maybe some of them are just born with inherent genetic abnormalities with the tendency to only prioritize about getting their pockets and bellies bloated.

Wallahualam...