The government of Malaysia ... has informed the The Herald, a Roman Catholic newspaper, that its license to publish will not be renewed if it continues to use the word Allah in reference to God.
This is because the idea is to stop non-Muslims from using terms that Muslims associate with specifically Muslim things: God, houses of God, etc. Presumably this will have the effect of making Christian inculturation more difficult. It's an anti-syncretic move, if you like. Of course there are problems with this not least of which for Arabic speaking Christians Allah is simply the normal word for God, so it's not really syncretism and either this law is a sledge hammer working on a nut or it's more than syncretism they're after. I'm also not sure how things would measure up given that Arabic is not the first language of most Malaysians, Muslims included, but Malay is and there are presumably dimensions in this that are to do with loan-words and social identity which would be interesting to hear/see more of.
Bill Poser at the Language Log is right on the theological issue too, imo.
If one believes in the existence of multiple deities, it make sense to distinguish one from the other. If your favorite deity is Thoth and mine is Isis, it makes sense to keep their names distinct to avoid confusion between the two, but if, as Muslims believe, you believe that there is only one god, you can believe that other people have false ideas as to what God is like and what she wants but you cannot reasonably believe that the god that someone else worships is different, for that would imply the existence of two gods.
htt. Language Log: A New Approach to Censorship:
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