Titular Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur v Home Minister: What is the Name of God?

Abstract

The name of God is sacred. Although God is capitalised, God is not actually God's name. God is a common noun. If God has a name, that name would be a proper noun. In Judaism, God has a name that must not be pronounced. Where the Jewish tradition has the Tetragrammaton, the Christian tradition has the Trinitarian formula: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Again, Father, Son and Spirit are common nouns, not proper nouns. In the Islamic tradition, insofar as Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, Allah too is a common noun, not a proper noun. But that is not so in Malaysia, after the case of the Titular Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur v Home Minister. The Court of Appeal in that case has done what generations of prophets have not dared to do: to name God, that is, to give God a proper name. In Malaysia, the Islamic God has a proper name and that God's name is Allah. As Allah is the name of the Islamic God, no one else but Muslims can use that name to refer to God. Even if one disagrees with the court's judgment, one nonetheless has to admire its chutzpah.

This chapter will begin by setting out the facts of the case (section I) and the legal reasoning in the judgments of the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Federal Court (section II). Section III will point out the hodgepodge of legal errors in the Court of Appeal's judgment. Section IV will focus on one particularly audacious proclamation in the judgment: the Court's attempt to name God. Section III will address the legal errors, while section IV will address the theological-philosophical errors. When the secular judiciary intervenes in matters of religion, there is necessarily a degree of presumptuousness, for what do secular judges know about divine law? The job of human judges is to judge human law, not God's law. Even accepting a degree of presumptuousness that is necessarily present in such cases, the Court of Appeal judgment has surpassed even that. The Court of Appeal in this case claims to know the name of God or, more audacious still, to name God. This chapter argues that the name that the Court of Appeal has purportedly given to God is not only wrong in law, but also wrong in fact. Show more