Church protest over Malaysia Bible ban: The Church of England Newspaper, March 18, 2011 p 7.

Bishop Bolly Lapok of Kuching

First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.

Church leaders are “fed up” with the Malaysian government’s discrimination against Christians and have condemned the seizure of 35,000 Bibles imported from Indonesia for Malay-speaking natives of Borneo.

In a statement released on March 10, the Anglican Bishop of West Malaysia, the Rt. Rev. Ng Moon Hing, speaking as president of the Christian Federation of Malaysia, said the government’s refusal to release the Bibles, seized in 2009, threatened religious liberties.

Malay-speaking Christians were “greatly disillusioned, fed up and angered by the repeated detention of Bibles,” the bishop said.

“It would appear as if the authorities are waging a continuous, surreptitious and systematic program against Christians in Malaysia to deny them access to the Bible;” known in Malay as the al-Kitab.  Imports of English and Chinese language Bibles, however, are not banned.

The Bible ban centers round the use of the word “Allah” in the Malay Bible to refer to God.  In 1986 the Malaysian government introduced legislation forbidding the use of “Allah” in non-Muslim texts.  Christians in Borneo and other Malay speakers, however, have used “Allah” to refer to God since British missionaries brought the Christian faith to the island in the Nineteenth century.

In 2009 a Roman Catholic newspaper, The Herald, successfully challenged the ban, and the country’s High Court struck down the Allah law.  The Home Ministry appealed the ruling, but no re-hearing has yet been scheduled.

The chairman of the Associated Churches of Sarawak (ACS), Bishop Bolly Lapok of Kuching  last week said using the word “Allah” was “fundamental to our faith.”

The word has been used “for centuries and is already in the DNA of our vernacular” he told an ACS meeting on March 14 and was “banned for the exclusive possession of a certain race.”

The government’s ban served only to foster tension and mistrust, he said and would fuel sectarian tensions.  “It is restrictions such as these that provide a perfect recipe for murdering the spirit of goodwill and peace among neighbours,” the Anglican bishop said.

The Allah fight was a defining moment for Malaysian Christians, he said.  “I call it a crossroad because never before have the churches ever encountered, [been] rattled and stunned by the events that occurred during our tenure of office,” he said

Bishop Lapok’s views found support in a separate statement issued by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Malacca and Johore, Paul Tan.  The church would not back down from their 1989 declaration “not to relinquish its right to use the word ‘Allah’ in its rituals of prayer and worship, and the dissemination of its teachings to the faithful,” Bishop Tan said on March 14.

“This right is grounded on history, etymology and now by secular jurisprudence,” he said, asking the government to honor its commitment to religious freedom, and “match deed to word as otherwise sloganeering becomes mere posturing, and words become platitudes.”