By Sadanand Dhume, 08.31.09, 12:00 AM ET | Forbes
Canings, cows’ heads and ethnoreligious apartheid.
If you’re looking for an image that captures the conflict between fervent Islam and basic human decency, look no further than the Malaysian city of Shah Alam, about 15 miles west of Kuala Lumpur.
On Friday, a group of about 50 men, agitated by plans to relocate a 150-year-old Hindu temple to their neighborhood, made their feelings clear by staging a protest march from a mosque to a government building. Amidst the usual cries of “Allahu Akbar” and “takbeer,” the protesters deposited the freshly severed head of a cow–an animal sacred to Hindus–before the building’s gate. The group’s leaders made threatening speeches and, perhaps caught up in the spirit of the moment, hammed it up for the cameras, stepping and spitting on the cow’s head. The police–who have been known to arrest people for such crimes as attending a candle light vigil or wearing black in support of the opposition–stood by and watched.
Ironically, those scanning the globe for a Muslim-majority country that inspires neither dread nor despair often alight upon Malaysia. Until a few years ago, the Southeast Asian nation boasted the world’s tallest building, the iconic 88-story Petronas Towers. Powered by electronics, palm oil and petroleum, Malaysia is the world’s 20th-largest exporter, ahead of Sweden, Australia and India. Per capita income, about $14,000 in purchasing parity terms, is about the same as in Argentina. Apart from the obvious prosperity of downtown Kuala Lumpur, the casual visitor notices the comforting trappings of a British colonial past–a parliament, a judiciary, a professional police force.
But most strikingly, Malaysia (along with next-door Indonesia) can claim something increasingly rare in the Muslim world: a large non-Muslim population. About four in 10 Malaysians are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu , Sikh or Confucian. (By contrast, Turkey, the poster-child for an Islam at peace with the 21st century, is 99.8% Muslim.) Recognizing the power of this statistic in our multicultural age, Tourism Malaysia promotes the country’s allegedly harmonious blend of Malay, Chinese and Indian communities with an odd but nonetheless catchy slogan: Malaysia, Truly Asia.
The reality, of course, is a lot less sunny. Unlike neighboring Singapore, which shares the same colonial past and ethnic mix–albeit with a Chinese rather than a Malay majority–Malaysia has rejected secularism in favor of a kind of ethnoreligious apartheid that belongs more in a medieval kingdom than in a modern democratic republic.
In Malaysia, Islam is the state religion. Higher education, the bureaucracy and vast swathes of the economy are operated as a kind of spoils system almost exclusively for Malays, whom the state defines as Muslim. Race and religion determine everything from your odds of getting into medical school to the amount you’re expected to put down for an apartment. The conversion laws, based on sharia, bring to mind the Eagles’ classic “Hotel California”: You can check in (to Islam) any time you like, but you can never leave.
Over the past 30 years, encouraged by the government and influenced by the Middle East, Malaysia’s growing prosperity has gone hand-in-hand with a heightened piety. But instead of making the country more humane, this has had the opposite effect. Friday’s protest was part of a larger pattern. A 32-year-old Malaysian Muslim model, Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, faces a sharia-prescribed caning, suspended at the moment on account of Ramadan, for the crime of drinking a beer. Muslims have been barred from a Black Eyed Peas concert next month sponsored by Guinness. Two years ago, a Muslim-born woman, Lina Joy, failed in her famous eight-year quest to convert to Christianity to marry the man that she loved. (Interfaith marriages are forbidden.) In another high-profile case, Revathi Masoosai, a practicing Hindu, was forcibly separated from her husband and infant daughter and sent to a religious re-education camp after it was discovered that technically she had been born a Muslim.
Taken together, these cases illustrate two issues–both central to the debate about Islam and modernity–that Malaysia is struggling to come to terms with. Can a Muslim majority live with a non-Muslim minority as equals, or must the former be explicitly dominant–in law as well as in day-to-day life? And can Muslims reconcile piety with a culture where the rights of the individual (say, to order a beer) are given precedence over communal beliefs?
To be sure, not all Malays, perhaps not even a majority of the sharia-minded, approve of the acts of boorishness committed in the name of their faith. Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has ordered police to take action against the Shah Alam protesters, and members of parliament have cut across racial and party lines to condemn the incident. The English-language Malaysian blogosphere is alight with outrage, much of it Muslim. Nor are questions about secularism and individual rights absent in non-Muslim societies. In recent years, thuggish Hindu groups have developed a penchant for roughing up women in bars and castigating young couples for the high crime of celebrating Valentine’s Day. America has yet to come to terms with a woman’s right to an abortion.
Nonetheless, only in Muslim-majority lands are religious bigots given such broad leeway by their secular co-religionists. An Indian feminist is apt to laugh in the face of a pious Hindu who tells her that gender relations need to be ordered by the ancient laws of Manu. In America, the so-called new atheists–most prominently Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins–don’t need to think twice about ridiculing religious beliefs or savaging the most powerful priest or pastor. But in Malaysia, as elsewhere, secular liberals tend to tip-toe around Muslim religious sensibilities. They wield the word “un-Islamic” as an insult rather than as a compliment. Unless this changes, unless Malaysians can find a way to treat Islam like any other set of ideas, scenes like those in Shah Alam on Friday aren’t about to disappear.
Sadanand Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).
Malaysia, Truly Asia is morphing into
Malaysia, Truly 1Malaysia
(Ahem, you interpret lah what 1Malaysia means)
I am seriously confused. So it’s illegal for a born Muslim to leave Islam in Malaysia? But I’ve heard about there being N number of “permohonan tukar agama di JPN” from religious authorities all the time, especially when talking about murtad. Can someone clear this up for me?
Sorry to be a pedant – but are inter-faith marriages really banned in Malaysia, or is it only when one of the couple is Muslim? My Malaysian wedding certificate has 2 different entries under agama.
Oh and, Richard Dawkins is not American – he is British. Perhaps he finds more resistance to his ideas in the USA than he does at home. His most famous book ‘The God Delusion’ is actually not his best, in my opinion. Some of his earlier books on evolution, such as “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker”, are very accessible.
I love the reference to ‘Hotel California’ – that’s superb.
//I love the reference to ‘Hotel California’ – that’s superb//
And yes there will also be some who view the reference blasphemous!
What ‘Hotel California’ ? Why isn’t Mike Jacko buried as a moslem? Why aren’t his 3 children brought up as moslems? Where is JAKIM? Go get ’em, you cowards! Send out the Scorpene submarines and attack New York! Declare war on the US!
“The conversion laws, based on sharia, bring to mind the Eagles’ classic “Hotel California”: You can check in (to Islam) any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Only nincompoops with taxpayer funded education and a bintang for long service with the UMNO-run government would think that Hotel California is actually a hotel.
///The group’s leaders made threatening speeches and, perhaps caught up in the spirit of the moment, hammed it up for the cameras, stepping and spitting on the cow’s head. The police–who have been known to arrest people for such crimes as attending a candle light vigil or wearing black in support of the opposition–stood by and watched.///
Among the fifty how many were NEWMalays?
The extremists are seen as heroes. And when they did all their heroic holy acts and send their videotapes to the t.v. stations, they feel they are so Great.
Read the lyrics.
No joke, there is the most adequate passage:
“… We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969 …”
to be found in Hotel California.
All too true. Alas.
Hopefully the other part will not come to pass here: “….And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast…”
Surely it is no reference to the poor cow whose head had been severed, spat and stomped upon!
Allegory aside, interestingly, there is actually a Hotel California in Todos Santos, Mexico and it was started (in 1950) by a Chinaman Sr Antonio Wong Tobasco & his Mexican wife…
Of course the Hotel became popular when they started the rumour that Don Henley had written that song while renting a room there for $2/night…
If you want to check in, you could email: [email protected]
phone: 011-52-612-145-0525
There’s a warranty that you can definitely check out anytime you wish. :)
///Nonetheless, only in Muslim-majority lands are religious bigots given such broad leeway by their secular co-religionists….But in Malaysia, as elsewhere, secular liberals tend to tip-toe around Muslim religious sensibilities…. Unless this changes, unless Malaysians can find a way to treat Islam like any other set of ideas, scenes like those in Shah Alam on Friday aren’t about to disappear///- Sadanand Dhume.
The warning one gets from author’s statements is that radical and religious bigotry, as exemplified by scenes like those in Shah Alam will become more prevalent if ‘secular liberals’ opposing or uncomfortable with it are going to only incessantly chatter about their liberal principles and (for reasons of fear or lack of will) not put their foot firmly down (as opposed to tip-toeing) against transgressions of civil liberties by this vociferous and aggressive minority group .
It is experience of the many resurgences of radical political Islam in Middle East that radicals will inevitably have their day, swelling their own ranks, influencing and carrying with them the masses.
The perils of ‘tip-toeing’ around radical acts, just because they are perpetrated in the name of and under the banner of faith, is something to be heeded not only by the so called “modern” top echelons of the ruling coalition espousing 1 Malaysia but also the Opposition, campaigning on liberal platforms of Multi racial and Multi religious Malaysia structured upon social justice.
Take for example : 50-odd protesters claiming to be residents of section 23 – protested against the PR State government and the policies of MB Khalid Ibrahim (in having an Hindu temple in section 23) by provocatively throwing a bloody cow’s head at the entrance of the state secretariat….to dramatize their opposition.
What happens next?
MB Khalid calls for a dialogue with local residents on the issue.
Which shows (or can be interpreted) that radical protest always pays; it gets rewarded where more moderate petitions will not! Now who that has any agenda to push will not take radical actions??
We see the same appeasement when countering objections to the MB’s proposed appointment of Low Siew Moi as acting general manager of Selangor PKNS. Just like now we are greeted with deafening “silence” and lack of resistance to the issue of public whipping of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarnor for beer drinking – that has not happened in the last 50 years.
Are we not in the state of acquiescence best illustrated by the allegory of boiling a frog?
If one wants to boil a frog, don’t throw it into a pot of boiling water, it will just jump out again immediately. Far better to put it in a pot of nice, comfortable, cool water and then slowly warm said pot… by the time the frog notices that he’s being boiled, it will be far too late.
/// #9 by digard on August 31st, 2009 23:01
Read the lyrics.
No joke, there is the most adequate passage:
“… We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969 …”
to be found in Hotel California.
All too true. Alas. ///
Yes, the reference to 1969 is very uncanny.
Looks like a song about drugs and shooting up…
// Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way.. //
// Her mind is tiffany-twisted, she got the mercedes bends.. //
I once read from somewhere that while they are hot at meting out such punishments on women (such as the caning of Kartika), no one asked to find out who was she drinking with? Were they non-Malays? Plus, why wasn’t the bar or pub owner being hauled up to face charges of serving alcoholic beverages to Malays?
All these are not new. It is strategy played over and over again since the formation of Malaysia in 1963. One must read how the strategy was used by Syed Jabar, the UMNO secretary general then, how Utusan created public frenzy and how the leadership in KL tacitly supported the ultra movements to create trouble in Singapore (when Singapore was part of Malaysia then). Nearly 50 years have passed – the strategy and the mentality are strikingly similar, no more and no less. The Malays were just over 40% of the population then and yet UMNO was able to use the extreme rightist strategy with great success. Today the composition of the population has changed significantly. UMNO would have no problem with the number. However, UMNO must deal with the fact that whether the Malays have changed. Jaswant ball, if you don’t understand (and I expect so), I suggest you just keep quiet or knock your head against the nearest wall.
How the heck did the classification of non-Malays & Malays came about? It sounds so derogatory and racist. It sounds like being a Malay is a 1st class citizen where else, anyone non-Malay is a 2nd class or lower. WTF!??
Actually, the state at which Malaysia is now has nothing to do with Malays in general. They are just like the Chinese, Indians & all the “Dan Lain-Lain” trying to make a living & survive in Malaysia. It was those goons in UMNO playing up racial issues & setting up idiotic policies that “Promotes” racial segregation, a legacy from the colonial administration. Although we have gained independence for 52 years, our mindset & thinking has not really moved away from that era.
I always laugh at the gov’s effort to promote racial integration. Coming up with all kinds of crappy 1/2 cooked campaigns that is a complete waste of time & tax payers funds. The root cause of the problem is not addressed. It’s noting to do with the Malays, Chinese, Indians “Dan Lain-Lain” not wanting to mix & mingle happily. In fact we do it everyday. It’s only when we have to deal with official matters that we are reminded that we are “Malays, Chinese, Indians & “Dan Lain-Lain”.
Example1, buying a house, Malays get 8% discount & the non-Malays buy at full price. Instantly, we are reminded “Where you stand”.
Example2, Child support, Malays get gov subsidy while a non-Malay gets none. Instantly, we are reminded “Where you stand”.
Example3, Gov project tendering, If you are not a Malay businessmen, you are allowed to tender but it’s open to “all” Malaysians. Har!??
It’s all these little things which piss people off & then when they go home & seeing the neighbour, Aiyar, the mood also bad already lar.
If BN really wants to promote racial integration & create a 1Malaysia, then start working on creating a culture which is fair & moderate. Put religion aside, let civil law & common sense rule. Let those with real leadership to hold positions of power & let those with the right merits to rule.
Sometimes it makes me laugh & yet embarrassed as a citizen of this country, whenever there are issues concerning the conflict of Syariah vs Civil Law. Nobody seems to know what is right & what is wrong. Under which circumstances to prosecute under Syariah and when to go Civil?