I was recently made aware of Rachel Leow‘s fascinating website. She is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who writes on a broad range of regional topics (Tang dynasty trade, Ho Chi Minh’s poetry, loanwords, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, etc). One of her recent essays deals with Malaysia’s recent “Allah controversy”. This is a topic that has been discussed on New Mandala too. Leow’s conclusion is worth quoting:

To be flippant: if Malays were really interested in being more ‘Malay’, they should in fact use the word Tuhan, which is much more ‘Malay’ for having deeper regional Austronesian roots, than Allah, which is, after all, an imported name for an imported God.