In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions.
In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. Christians in Borneo have used Allah for ‘God’ for hundreds of years, but the idea has got around among Malaysian Muslims that no non-Muslim should use the word to refer to God.
Linguistically it is hard to think the High Court was wrong. I don’t know Arabic but it is easy enough to discover that Allah derives from al-ilah, ‘the god’. Historically there is no doubt that the Meccans before Mohammed’s time used Allah to mean ‘God’.
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