Gwynne Dyer: Risking fragile compromise in Allah's name

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 recently 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 decision was followed by firebomb attacks on three Christian churches in Kuala Lumpur, and 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 against the High Court decision.

"We ... have the right to use the word 'Allah'," said the Rev Lawrence Andrew, the editor of the newspaper of the Catholic Church in Malaysia, the Herald, whose use of the word in its Malay-language edition triggered the crisis. Parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang simply observed that "the term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed".

Of course it was. Arabic-speaking Christians predate the rise of Islam by three hundred years, and what else were they going to call God? The word "Allah" is a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- and the noun 'ilah, which means god. In parts of ancient Arabia it once referred to the creator-god (who was not the only god), but for a very long time it has meant the One God.

This Arabic word was imported into the Malay language by converts to Islam, which arrived in the region several centuries before Christianity. All ethnic Malays are considered to be Muslim under Malaysian law, but there are numerous Malay-speakers, especially in northern Borneo, who are Christian and not ethnically Malay. They also use the word Allah for God.

What's the harm in that? Why are Malaysia's Muslims so paranoid? The real paranoia, alas, is ethnic.

Malaysia is an ethnic time-bomb that has turned itself into a peaceful and prosperous country by a huge effort of will. The original population was mostly Malay, but under British rule huge numbers of Indian and Chinese immigrants were imported to work the mines and plantations.

By independence, Malays were only 60 per cent of the population, and much poorer than the more recent arrivals. They resented the past, the present, and the probable future.

After several bouts of savage anti-Chinese and anti-Indian rioting, the country arrived at its current, successful compromise. The Malays dominate politics, but the Chinese and the Indians thrive in trade and commerce - and most people understand they are ultimately in the same boat, which is called Malaysia.

The state spends a lot of money to raise the living standards of the Malays, and gives them preference for university places and government jobs. They haven't done badly out of this deal, but nevertheless they feel perpetually insecure.

Since they are all Muslims, while few other Malaysians are, they also feel their religion is under threat. Some respond by being aggressively intolerant of minorities.

Not all Malays behave this way. Major Muslim organisations, including the Islamic political party, PAS, have agreed the other "Abrahamic religions" - Christians and Jews - may call their God Allah in Malay.

But it's getting ugly, and it's high time for the Malaysian Government to stop playing along with the extremists.

It should take a lesson from the early Muslims of Arabia. Both the archaeological and the textual evidence suggest that most Arabs in northern Arabia and along the Gulf coast had been Christian for several centuries when Islam first appeared in the 7th century. They were swiftly conquered by Muslim armies, but they were not forcibly converted.

As in all early Islamic empires, Christians had to pay higher taxes, but they were allowed to keep their property and practice their religion. It is highly improbable they were forced to change the word they used for God.

They did gradually convert to Islam, but the last Christian churches in the region probably survived into the early 9th century.

The Christians, Hindus, animists and others who make up 40 per cent of Malaysia's people pay higher taxes, in the sense that they subsidise the poorer Malay/Muslim majority. Few of them will ever convert to Islam, but they are not its enemy either.

Malaysia has achieved a fragile but workable compromise that gives its people a good life. It should not endanger it so frivolously.

* If you need a reference on Christians in 4th-7th century Arabia, the best is a scholarly article by John A. Langfeld, Recently Discovered Early Christian Monuments in Northeastern Arabia, published in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 1994: 5: pp. 32-60. It is available online (Wiley InterScience), but you have to pay to view it.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.Malaysia's ethnic and religious divisions.