Perhaps it's time for church to desist

In deference to the maxim that discretion is the better part of valour, the titular head of the Catholic Church in the archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur should not appeal the appellate court's decision to restrict the use of the term ‘Allah' to Muslims.

To appeal would likely invite another panel (coram) of Muslim judges, this time from the Federal Court, to engage in the legal and literary gymnastics that masqueraded as reasoned judgment of the three Court of Appeal judges who handed down their rulings yesterday.

The Archbishop of KL, the respondent in this case, might want to spare a hypothetical panel of the apex court the indignity of another display of contorted semantics.

In doing so, he would be deferring to another bit of wisdom, this time biblical rather than secular, which is the need for rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

The Malaysian Caesar, which is Umno, wants to control the Muslim narrative. Christians are helpless to prevent this. Only Malaysia's Muslims can do anything about it.

Until then, if the Malaysian Caesar decides that the term ‘Allah' is exclusive to Muslims and if our appellate courts doff their judicial hats to this, Christians on the peninsula at least, should restrict themselves to the limited form of demurral that thus far has seen them take the matter to court, win it at the one level and lose it at the next.

If those demurrals were unaccompanied by the stoking of tensions between Muslims and Christians, the latter could usefully take their disputation to the apex court.

But the fact is it has been attended by a heightening of tension between the two communities such that Christian persistence in appealing for further adjudication of their claims that the use of the term ‘Allah' should not be exclusive to Muslims is imprudent.

Granted, the tensions are contrived and their fomenters seemingly enjoy a licence not afforded exponents of other causes.

But they have had an effect: who can deny that the vote in rural areas at the last general election was not influenced by the propaganda of these licentious agitators? Who can discount the necessity for a shift in this vote if the tenure of the Malaysian Caesar is ever to end?

Stoking of tensions 

Christians are counseled by the renowned theologian Thomas Aquinas to place high priority on prudence in the application of principle.

Muslims, especially Malaysia's Muslims, frown on non-Muslims holding forth on their religion, a distaste that is probably based on the theory that non-believers are not competent at understanding the Islamic religion.

Christians are not comparably censorious when non-Christians expatiate on their beliefs, though some would have taken umbrage at the opinion of justice Mohamed Apandi Ali, who headed the panel which decided yesterday's ruling, that "use of the name 'Allah' is not an integral part of the faith and practice of Christianity."

But it is difficult to find fault with Apandi's opinion: whether Christians refer to their God by the Arabic ‘Allah' or by the Hebraic ‘Yahweh' or ‘Jehovah', the terms are not germane to doctrinal conceptions of the nature of their God.

Sure, the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion should allow Christians to use terms they see fit by which to call their God. More so when such terms as they use were employed by Arab Christians even before the advent of Islam.

But whether it is Allah, Yahweh or Jehovah by which they call on their God, these terms do not conjure up the nature of the divinity that is worshiped, in the way, for example, that the word ‘Jesus' (which is Hebrew for he who saves) is pregnant with an essence that is constitutive and reflective of his mission.

If that is so, and bearing in mind that a continuation of their legal endeavours to lay claim to the use of the term ‘Allah' is certain to be accompanied by the stoking of tensions between Muslims and Christians, a cessation to the legal battle is prudent at this juncture.

Lesson from Sabah

A significant bit of history should help support the point. Christians should recall the last days of the run-up to the country's 8th general election in October 1990.

The opposition Gagasan Rakyat (People's Might) led by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was on course to denying the ruling BN its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority on the back of widespread discontent with the autocratic ways of then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

An eleventh-hour defection to the Gagasan from the BN camp by the Christian-dominated Parti Bersatu Sabah, which ruled the state government of Sabah, was cynically exploited by the BN-controlled media to seem like as Christian plot to subvert Muslim rule in Malaysia, a conspiracy said to be abetted the Vatican.

The propaganda, whose mendacity Christians found appalling, succeeded in frightening Muslims away from voting for Gagasan, which had grouped PAS, Razaleigh's Semangat 46, DAP and Parti Rakyat Malaysia in an opposition coalition electoral pact that rode a wave of popularity on which loomed the prospect of BN's loss of its traditional supermajority in Parliament.

Loss of Malay-Muslim voter support is critical to the success of any effort to deny BN a two-thirds majority.
But BN escaped, in this instance, with its two-third parliamentary majority intact. Malaysian Christians were stupefied at the spectacle that so many Muslims could actually labour under the delusion that there were sinister international plots to overthrow Muslim rule in Malaysia.

Acts of arson

When the ‘Allah' issue sizzled in the public arena after the High Court had in December 2009 granted the Catholic weekly, TheHerald, permission to use the term in their publication, there was a palpable intake of breath among Christians that, following hard upon acts of arson to churches, some goons threw pig's heads and committed other acts of desecration to mosques and other places of Muslim worship.

Clearly, the aim of the desecrators was to stir Muslims to retaliatory action against Christians.

Fortunately, the desecrations did not provoke hostile reaction from Muslims; they must have believed that this wasn't the handiwork of "Christian plotters" against Islam though they were not terribly keen to know who the actual culprits were.

A Muslim-dominated police force obliged with the usual lethargy on catching the arsonists and desecrators, a trait otherwise absent when criminal suspects are in the cops' lethal cross-hairs.

Suffice gullibility is not an enduring trait of some believers. Nor is permanence to the thrall under which worldly Caesars can hold their wards in bondage to what's not true.

Taking due note of these nuances should invite reconsideration of any move to continue with the legal battle over the ‘Allah' issue.

As for Christians in Sarawak and Sabah who have for several decades now been using the term to no apparent consternation of the territories' Muslim denizens, the appellate court's decision on making ‘Allah' exclusive to Muslims may well turn out to be the eventual lever that breaks Sabahans' and Sarawakians' vaunted fealty to BN.

Indeed, yesterday's unanimous Court of Appeal decision on the ‘Allah' issue is a triumph that could bring much travail to its proponents.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.