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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Malaysia: All in the name of Allah, Islam and Pluralism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Pluralism
Malaysia: All in the name of Allah
By Gwynne Dyer

The row over a Malaysian High Court’s decision allowing non-Muslims to refer to god as ‘Allah’ is getting ugly. The Government must stop playing along with Islamic extremists

In the late-1980s, when I was in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, a friend suggested that I drive out into the desert near Jubail to see the oldest extant Christian church in the world. And there it was, surrounded by a chain-link fence to keep casual visitors and foreign archaeologists out. Experts who saw the site before it was closed said that the church was built by Nestorian Christians, and was probably used from the 4th to the 9th century.

Its existence embarrassed the Saudi Government, which prefers to believe that Arabia went straight from paganism to Islam. But it confirmed the assumption of most historians that Christianity was flourishing in the Arabian Peninsula in the centuries before the rise of Islam. So what did these Arabic-speaking Christians call god? Allah, of course.

I mention this because last week the Malaysian High Court struck down a three-year-old ban on non-Muslims using the word Allah when they speak of god in the Malay language. The court’s decision was followed by firebomb attacks on three Christian churches in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday night, and on Friday protesters at mosques in Kuala Lumpur carried placards reading “Allah is only for us.”

Prime Minister Najib Razak condemned the attacks on the churches, but he supports the ban on Christians using the word ‘Allah’ in Malay and is appealing the High Court decision.

http://newageislam.com/malaysia--all-in-the-name-of-allah/islam-and-pluralism/d/2363


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