Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Confusion of Words Used by Malaysians.

Last week we were informed by the press about the chaos happened in our nation due to misunderstanding of the usage of a word.
Few churches were being attacked by unknown parties due to the decission of the High Court on the 31st of December 2009 to allow non-muslim to use the word 'Allah'.
Here, I would like to comment as a non-muslim and a non-christian.
I'm confused about the definition stated in Oxford Dictionary.
As stated in the book, the word 'Allah' means God in Arabic and it is first used by the Arabians since the exixtance of Abraham by his followers.
As we know that, Abraham existed before the era of Islamic Civilisation as stated in our textbooks.
If the word 'Allah' is not allowed to be used by all, I think that the word Tuhan cannot substitute it as it means 'The Lord'. So what should say in malay when it comes to 'The Lord God', Tuhan Tuhan?According to the malay metaphore, it shows plurality in the phrase and it might caused confusion to the public that Christianity practices polytheism. In this era, no religion practices polytheism which includes Christianity.
In my opinion, the word should be allowed to be used by all God believers but I'm not in a state of oppossing our muslim friends rights to exclusive it.
If we want to exclusive it for muslims, we should ask the linguistic experts to invent a new word to substitute the word 'Allah', so the new word can be used by non-muslims.
Besides, I heard some words like 'bin' and 'binti' should be only used by muslims.
Here again, according to Kamus Dewan, 'bin' means 'anak lelaki kepada' or son of in Arabic same goes for 'binti' as for daughter.
Futhermore, Arabic names like Hussein also being used by non-muslim which includes a prominent leader, Barrack Hussein Obama. This does not means his muslim.
In conclusion, we must not make so much of fuss over words that can disrupt our nation's peace.
Thus a new word should be invented to substitute the word 'Allah'. If we want to preach 1Malaysia and unity we must not add oil to fire as history proved us that unity is important for nation's interest.

J.Z.Wong

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