bobjots : redux

Let me first start with the presumption that the term "Allah" is used as a mischievious ploy to confuse the Muslim faithful as asserted by some such as A. Razak and Fathima Idris.

The Christian Bible is translated from copies of the original manuscripts that were originally written in Hebrew, Chaldean, Aramaic and Greek. In these manuscripts, particularly those of the Semitic languages, various names are used to describe God; eg. YHWH, Adonay, Elohim, etc. In some instances the term "YHWH Adonay" is used in combination and this creates some challenges in translation. When the English language translation of the Bible was made, one method of solving this challenge was to use the term "Lord God" whenever the combination was found and to translate the terms "YHWH" and "Adonay" as "LORD" and "Lord" respectively with the distinct capitalisations. The term "Elohim" is usually translated as "God".

When portions of the Bible was translated into the Malay language shortly after the English translated theirs, this challenge was solved by using "Tuhan" and "Allah" as the translated terms. This is evident from one of the earliest Malay language portion available; the 1629 edition of the Gospel of Matthew. Do note that in that period, a lot of the Nusantara had yet to be Islamised. This convention continued to be used in later translations of the Bible and became the standard that continues to be used 1/3 of a millenia later despite the branching of the official Malay language into Bahasa Melayu/Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia. This would be the pedigree of the usage of the term "Allah" as a common name for God among the Malay speaking Christian community of this region.

As a result, the argument that "Allah" is used by Arab Christians as justification for the use of that term by Malaysian Christians is equally flawed.

While the Malay language does owe a lot of her religious vocabulary from Arabic, it must still be acknowledged that Arabic and Malay are two separate languages with a completely different evolution. It has been argued that while "Allah" remains the common noun for "God" in Arabic, it has evolved into a proper noun in Malay (or at least Bahasa Malaysia) to refer primarily to the God of Islam. This may have been a contemporary development but this does help one understand how the current misunderstanding could have occured.

Such linguistic evolution is not unique to the Malay language alone. Early translators of the Bible into the Chinese language borrowed the term "Shangdi" from Chinese folk religion and mythology but over the years the term has evolved to one that is almost exclusively used by Chinese speaking Christians alone to refer to God.

It is obvious that there is a major lack of understanding among both communities about this current issue. That is why this controversy has continued to rear its ugly head every few years since the initial banning of the Malay language version of the Christian Bible in 1982. Whether this state of mutual ignorance is deliberately maintained is still arguable but what does seem obvious is that there exists a major need for mutual dialogue based on an assumption of mutual goodwill and respect rather than the confrontative stance that appears to have been adopted by both faith communities at this moment.

While we ought to be looking at our shared values of integrity, honesty, justice, peace and mercy, and using these shared values to contribute towards nation building and also keeping our temporal leaders accountable, we have instead been wasting precious time and energy being distracted by this issue which only serves to further divide us a people while deflecting attention from some of the real mischief makers in this country.