KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia — As the students knelt in a circle at a Christian kindergarten near the shores of the South China Sea, a 6-year-old girl in pigtails read out a chapter from a children’s Bible: “Sepuluh hukum dari Allah” — God’s Ten Commandments.
Technically, she broke the law.
According to a series of government orders and rulings by Malaysia’s Islamic councils, the word for God in the Malay language — “Allah” — is reserved for Muslims. Malay-language Bibles are banned everywhere except inside churches. State regulations ban a list of words, including Allah, in any non-Muslim context.
Malaysia, with its collage of ethnic groups and religions, has a long history of tensions over issues ranging from dietary differences to the economic preferences enshrined in Malaysian law for the Malay Muslim majority.
But there is probably no dispute more fundamental and more emotionally charged than who owns the word God.
For Malaysia’s religious minorities, the government’s ban on non-Muslims using the word Allah, and the repeated seizures by government officials of Malay-language Bibles, is enough to make a smiling and cheery kindergarten teacher snap in anger.
“Honestly I think it’s nonsense,” said Belinda Buntot, the teacher in the kindergarten here on the northern tip of the island of Borneo. “Of course we use Allah. We can’t teach the kids without it.”
Categories: Asia, Interfaith tolerance, Law and Religion, Malaysia, Religious Harmony, Religious Values