adminKuala Lumpur — Malaysian Islamic authorities yesterday seized hundreds of Bibles from a Christian group and detained two of their officers, one of them said, amid tensions over the use of “Allah”. A court in October barred a Malaysian Catholic newspaper from using “Allah” to refer to the Christian God in its Malay-language edition — a verdict welcomed by Muslim conservatives, but which sparked concern among Christians, a minority in the multi-faith country.
After the verdict, Prime Minister Najib Razak, walking a tightrope between pleasing his conservative Muslim ethnic Malay base without alienating the country’s non-Muslim minorities, assured Christians their practice would not be threatened.
But Islamic officials from central Selangor state, just next to the capital Kuala Lumpur, yesterday seized 16 boxes containing more than 300 Bibles from the Bible Society of Malaysia, the society’s president Lee Min Choon said.
Lee said he and a colleague were also detained “under a state law, which prohibits the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims”.
The seized Bibles, imported from neighbouring Indonesia where Malay is also spoken, were in Malay and Iban, a language spoken by one of the country’s indigenous groups.
“We have been using them [the Bibles] ever since the society started [in 1985], and even before that,” Lee said by mobile phone from a police station. “This is the first time we have been raided.”
It was not clear whether Lee and his colleague would continue to be held or charged. Officials from the Selangor Islamic Religious Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
The dispute over the use of “Allah” by non-Muslims erupted in early 2009, when the Home Ministry threatened to revoke the publishing permit of the Catholic newspaper the Herald for using the word. — AFP
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