Is Allah for everyone?

There was a SAPA-AP report in the Cape Times of 04 January 2010, entitled “Malaysia awaits ruling on whether Allah is God to Muslims only”, which I found interesting. Apparently, the government of Malasia is set to challenge a High Court ruling that Christians have a constitutional right to use the word Allah to refer to God. The High Court ruling struck down a government ban on non-Muslims translating the word “God” as “Allah” in their literature. Mild protests apparently followed.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit, filed in 2007 by The Herald in its Malay language edition. The Herald is the Roman Catholic Church’s main publication in Malasia. The problem seems to be that some Islamic commentators agree with the government position that the word “Allah” is an Islamic word, which should be used exclusively by Muslims and that its use by other religions is misleading. Naturally, there are also other Islamic scholars, who say there would be no problem in the use of the word by non-Muslim people, seeing it, simply, as a translation, and nothing more.

Now, this raises some interesting questions. If the word is, in fact, nothing more than a simple translation of the word “God” into Arabic, then it seems to me that any kind of restriction on the use of the word is going to be difficult at best and nonsensical at worst. How would one control it?

Would one need to substitute another word in its place (pretty much as the Jews do, so as to protect the sacred tetragrammaton YHWH with other words and circumlocutions such as “Jehovah”, or “Elohim”?) My suspicion is that it is this sense of reverence which is some of the motivation behind the attempt to protect the word “Allah”.

On the other hand, it could be the view that any use of the word by non-Muslims, particularly in the context of Christian evangelism, is somehow a deliberate attempt to blur the distinctions between the two religions. I have no doubt whatsoever, in a strongly proselytizing environment, that this could well be the motivation. In which case, I suppose, there really can be no rules of engagement!

But the bigger question would be this: If only Muslims can use the word “Allah” because, somehow, that word is connected to Muslim people, what would be the relationship of “Allah” as an entity, to non-Muslims? Is there hidden in this view, the understanding that there is a different God, called “God” for non-Muslims, and “Allah” for Muslims? Because that would be extremely strange in a monotheistic environment.

Some time ago, my eldest son, aged 7, asked me whether the name of God was Allah. I said yes, it was. Then I had a moment’s thought. I said, “But Christians also call God...” I thought some more, and came up, ingeniously, with “God!” I wonder, now, was I wrong?

The Minaret, the Swiss and the question of tolerance

My memories of working on a pig farm, as a 19 year old, near a village called Chesierès in Switzerland are mostly pleasant. I needed to work on the pig farm, because I had started hitching around Europe with the princely sum of £50 in my pocket. The money really didn’t last long – even then, and as I got deliciously thinner and thinner, living on a diet of powdered soup and demi baguette, I needed to seriously consider my options. One of them was actual work – which hadn’t really crossed my mind previously.

So, I hitched to this very beautiful place, in the Alps and found work as a muck-raker on a pig farm. You get used to it after a while. You even get on a first name basis with some of the sows. The deal was that I didn’t actually get paid – that somehow got lost in translation – but I did get a place to stay and food.

The food was good – pasta in various forms with cheese, as I remember it. The place to stay was the barn, which stank of cat wee and had lots of straw in it. I noticed, fairly quickly, that I was not the only person working in this Swiss slave galley – there were students from all over the world. We were young. We were horny. We were reckless and we were happy.

And that was my experience of Switzerland, besides brief forays into to Basel and Geneva, which I simply could not afford – whatever I did! But even with that, I have a very clear picture in my head of what Switzerland looks like. It has very imposing, very protestant churches in Geneva, with nothing of any interest inside them. It includes red geranium-filled window-boxes and it includes shop windows filled with chocolates. And the picture does not have Minarets in it.

Now, I wonder – is that a good or a bad thing? A new found friend, who is actually an old school friend that I have recently re-found on Facebook (you know how this happens) lives in Israel. He is (how can I put this mildly?) anti-Islamic. I think, from the little I have read, it would be not untrue to say that he hates Islam with every fibre of his being. I would venture to say that it is likely that he hates everyone who doesn’t hate Islam! It is, as I say, something fairly strong.

But his religion is, and always has been, a non-proselytizing one. Judaism has never sought converts. That has been both its strength and its biggest weakness. Its strength, because it has maintained a kind of inner coherence and integrity through the ages – and a fairly strong ethical centre. But its weakness, because it has, to a large extent become focused on and confined to a tiny, disputed, piece of land. It has no room to breathe. Its members who live elsewhere have usually built fairly discrete Temples with architecture not dissimilar to that around them. Because of the ban on art, their presence (certainly amongst the Hasidim) is noticed largely because of their peculiar Eurocentric (and of a particular period to boot) dress and untamed sideburns. But they have always preferred to keep to themselves.

Islam and Christianity, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They have, in the past and for both of them also in the present, shown no hesitation in expansion. In Empire building. In rampant domination. Christianity has simply adopted prevailing culture where it has encountered a clash, baptised it and then usurped it. Where it met with other forms of resistance, it has shown no hesitation in killing and subjecting everything in its path until it held sway and established itself as primary. And the way in which it did that was by altering the skyline.

And Islam seems to have the same kind of appetite for cultural imperialism, though, I would argue, not quite as virulently as Christianity – yet.

The rapprochement which presently exists between Judaism and Christianity is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the Gospels themselves, and Matthew’s Gospel in particular – the Jews are, pretty much, the enemy. And it has taken many a century to get beyond the “Christ killer” instinct of the early church. And now, the tactical alliance between Zionism (as distinct from Judaism) and right-wing American Christianity (read American dominance in world politics) is much more than mutual respect for divergent views. It is fundamentally a political alliance.

So, I find myself wondering what the real basis for the recent government objection to a Minaret in Switzerland is. Is it cultural? Architectural? Or is there, somewhere in the back of Swiss consciousness, a memory of just how quickly things can change and how other world orders can easily come to dominance? The problem is not anywhere else, but in the proselytizing nature of the religions themselves. I think, like Chinese manufacturing, it is an unstoppable reality.

Football, Art and Religion

I attended the opening of an exhibition by Port Elizabeth artist, Duncan Stewart, at the Ron Belling art gallery, in the city. The exhibition was entitled “Football: a dialogue for Hope”.

From the invite, it was a bit difficult to know what to expect. On arrival, as I fought my way through the crowds to get in, I saw the Organising Committee’s Danny Jordaan and his wife, Roxanne, whom I knew from many years ago, as a theologian. It was really good to see her again. I remember the level of awe in which we all held her in the 1980s. Women theologians were, then, a rarity. Black women theologians were even rarer. Black women theologians who actually spoke to white theologians and didn’t have a rather large carrot up their rear ends, were probably singular – so I was pleased to see her again. And glad that she remembered me.

To my surprise, she was called upon to open the proceedings with a prayer. I listened closely to her careful choice of words. No “Lord”; no “father God”. Everything she said was deeply generic and inclusive.

Not so with the artist. The artist was clearly a vocal Christian of some description, who did not hesitate to tell us that he was, in some detail. He explained that this was the basis of his art and his exhibition. That is why he had entitled the exhibition “Dialogue for Hope”. He had a very strong feeling that “the Lord would be using the 2010 event to do wonderful things for South Africa”.

I raised the matter with Roxanne Jordaan. I said isn’t it a bit of a problem when there is such a heavy infusion of Christianity into an event such as this? She agreed. She explained that for that reason she had been careful to use as much inclusive language as possible in her prayer. She said that, of course, that is the place where this particular artist, whom she seemed to know fairly well, happens to be – so one should see it as that.

Now, I do wonder about this. Recently, I had the experience of a sponsor – a very large FIFA partner (which for the sake of momentary charity on my part will remain nameless) stood up on the state at a Public Viewing Area and asked the audience to please bow their heads. I thought I had heard wrong. But no, he ploughed on relentlessly. “Father God”, he continued, “We would just like to thank you for bringing us to this place, Lord, and blessing us so mightily”. At this point I was frantically calling the event organiser to shut him up and get him forcibly removed from the stage. But no, he continued – “And Jesus, I just wanna ask you to bless each and every person here tonight and to pour your Holy Spirit into their lives”. And so it continued and continued. He ended with the flourish of telling the assembled people of Plettenberg Bay that he loved each and every one of them and he prayed God would bless them powerfully. By the time I had reached the stage to physically drag him off it, if need be, he was gone.

The sheer arrogance of the man was astonishing. This was, after all, a government event. We are, thank God, a secular state. Nevertheless, he thought it appropriate to impose his peculiar form of Christian belief on the crowd, simply because he was in the kind of position of power that gave him access to the microphone.

Now I am not suggesting the same for Duncan Stewart, who seemed to me to be entirely sincere in what he was doing and entirely within his rights. The only point I am making, is that in these kinds of public spaces, there is a level of appropriateness which becomes extraordinarily difficult when a fairly overtly, and singular, religious position is brandished.

Stewart's work is fairly subtle in this regard. There are hints and flashes of Christian themes all over the place. For instance, the charcoal drawing he gave to Danny Jordaan as a gift was an aerial view of the Port Elizabeth stadium – but with a large plastic fork in the middle of it, making it look very much like an aluminium airline dinner server. The title of that work is “Feeding the Multitudes”.

Generally, Stewart’s art was not my taste. I find this kind of slightly sentimental, hidden allusion stuff, rather irritating. But there was one piece which, I have to say, blew me away. In the crush, I almost tripped over it – it was a bronze piece, lying in a corner of the staircase. No title. A street child, lying on a piece of cardboard. A discarded KFC box (I think it should have been MacDonalds, as a FIFA sponsor) and a crushed Coke can lying nearby. The child is asleep, and clutching a football. It is a brilliant piece. It is evocative. It is touching. It speaks to the very heart of the matter.

The rest, with titles like “Bafana Bafana 2040” were really, to my mind anyway, just a bit too sentimental and just a bit too obvious. But that one piece, will live with me forever. That is real art, to my mind. That is the essence of religion.

Taking the Train to Fish Hoek

It’s about education, I told myself. It’s going to be fun! Whatever the now distant motives, I landed up on a train to Fishhoek with two children aged 4 and 6, a childminder, who was suffering from a peptic ulcer, and a partner, who insisted on disagreeing with everything I said. It was Sunday afternoon. The sky was blue. The sea was emerald and white. Cape Town was as beautiful as only Cape Town can be, when it wants to be.

Sometime before, I thought I would just dash into the station beforehand to get a timetable. I asked politely. The man looked bewildered. “A what?” he asked, as though I had enquired about a coelacanth or a spotted genet. “A timetable!” - I pressed him - “You know, the things you use to tell when the trains are coming?”

He looked as though he just might have remembered, momentarily, what a timetable might be. Then he pulled his bottom lip downwards from both sides of his mouth. “No,” he said shaking his head slowly from side to side, “we don’t have those”. I was dumbstruck! I hadn’t for one moment imagined that I might not be able to get a timetable in a train station. “So how do people know when the train is coming?” “The whistle!” he said. I stared into his eyes disbelievingly. Then I saw the glimmer of humour in his eye. “Got you hey!” he said “It’s up there on the wall”. And so it was. The timetable. You either memorised the times the train came and went, with variations on weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays – or you didn’t! That’s the way it is!

When the train arrived, to much squealing and whooping from the children, the doors opened and, timidly, we got in. The particular carriage we got into was so unwashed, so murky with years of unwashed grime, that you could not see out of the window. So, to get any idea of the passing beauty, you had to stand up and peer sideways through a tiny slit of a window on the top. The smell of a train, I noted, is the same, whether it is in Johannesburg, or Cape Town, or Manchester of Zurich. That is something as universal and as precise as the recipe for Coca-Cola. The carriage had been swept, that is true. But the grime on the windows was cultivated – and for a very long time.

The signage on the stations we came to was sometimes obvious, and sometimes not. So, you really had no idea where you were most of the time. And the windows did little to help matters.

On the train back, the carriage was clean, and so were the windows. There were some rather fresh looking teenagers on the train. The one opposite me, a sixteen or seventeen year old girl kept giving me milky smiles – which I half returned. She did that thing which seems to be collective habit amongst teenagers these days, she stretched her pullover sleeves over her hands, so that the edges could be clutched, giving the whole outfit an Oliver Twist Victorian London kind of feel.

It seemed as though a few of them were friends by the way the milky smiles were being handed out – but who could be sure? I was way out of my cultural comfort zone here. Then, to my utter surprise, the girl opposite me – she of the milky smiles and stretched sleeves – stood to give a middle aged woman her seat. I thought this to be verging on peculiar, and to my horror, I noticed that two of her friends had done the same! It was too strange for words.

But then the motive became clear. They, all three of them, stretched sleeves and a tad too clean cut, stood casually in a row and started, softly at first, then lounder and louder, singing Christian choruses. I recognised them from my youth. And I looked at these kids with seraphic glows breaking out on their faces, and I remembered myself, long ago.

They sang and they sang. “Jesus” this, “Jesus” that. “My Reedeemer” this and “my Redeemer” that. And the more they did, the more I wanted to stand up and slap them. Or say something foul and uncouth. With the most extraordinary effort, I restrained myself. I wanted to say to them, who the hell did they think they were? What made them think they had some kind of God given ordination to this sham of a testimony? This imposition of their brain-numbing theology on hapless travellers. I wanted to apologise to the rest of the carriage and tell them, that not all Christians are this arrogant or this idiotic. I wanted to tell the Muslims and the atheists and the non church goers on the carriage (there must have been a few!) that I was hugely embarrassed that the passion and beauty of a two thousand year old religion had been reduced to the unpalatable ash of these ghastly evangelical choruses.

But I didn’t. I got off at my station and I went home. And I remembered again, that I too had done this once. Not in a train, perhaps. Not in a carriage full of people. But when I was that young, I too had been brainwashed into thinking that there were souls out there that would benefit from hearing my brand of the ‘Wordagaaad’. The young are easy meat. That's why so many of them are suicide bombers.