A ruling by a Malaysian appeals court, banning non-Muslims from using the word Allah to refer to God, is a worrying development that has little, if any, religious justification and only works to further inflame sectarian tensions in a country where various faith and ethnic groups live side by side.
The ruling appears to target Malaysian Christians, who, along with other Malaysian faith groups, refer to God as Allah in Malay.
In the Arab world, from which the term was taken, Muslims, Christians and Jews have use the word Allah to refer to God for centuries without difficulty. The term may have been made popular by Islam, but it is one that precedes the faith.
Perhaps most worrying about this ruling is that it undermines the very message of Islam that the revelation that Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) received was a continuation of those received by Prophets Jesus and Moses (PBUT). That notion by nature indicates that the God that is worshipped by followers of the three monotheistic faiths is indeed Allah.
