Malaysia's Federal Court ruled in an appeal case that an eight-year-old ban on The Catholic Herald newspaper using the word "Allah" to refer to God should stand. The decision was made by a vote of four to three. This disagreement in the panel of judges gave the Christians a small hope that the decision could be tried once more, but the court rejected this. Thus, all avenues of appeal have been exhausted.
This pleases the Islamic nationalist circles in Malaysia. Their next step will most likely be to ban the distribution of the popular Malaysian Bible, which uses "Allah" wherever it says "God" in a Danish Bible, just as the Malay and closely related Indonesian peoples have done for the 400 years of Christian mission in the area.
There is already an ongoing case where the internal Islamic religious police in the state of Selangor raided a bookstore belonging to the Malaysian Bible Society six months ago and confiscated all 321 Malaysian Bibles in the warehouse. Both the Attorney General and the Prime Minister have ordered the return of the books, but the religious police have so far refused to comply with the order, suggesting that they will destroy all the Bibles.
Malaysian Christians are naturally outraged by this. Bible Society President, Bishop Ng Moon Hing, told World Watch Monitor: "Bibles are the religious books of the Christian community. Under what civil law do they think they have the authority to propose such an act?"
The Secretary General of the Malaysian Council of Churches stated that the Islamic religious authorities showed a dangerous contempt for the law and that the Federal Court ruling will lead to a further blurring of the line between Islamic and civil law enforcement.
That it's not just fears, shows other cases of harassment against religious minorities in the country. Earlier in June, Islamic religious authorities interrupted a Chinese funeral and seized the body of a 38-year-old waitress on the grounds that someone had claimed she had converted to Islam as a teenager and therefore could not be buried in a Taoist ceremony. Taoism is the traditional Chinese religion. The family denied this, and after further investigation, she was declared a non-Muslim, and finally buried four days later according to Chinese custom.
This and several other instances where Islamism attempts to trump the secular nature of Malaysian society, shows that religious minorities have good reason to be concerned about how much room there will be for religious freedom in the country in the future. (Sources: AsiaNews and WorldWatchMonitor)
