Religion & Society

An inaccurate reference to ‘Biblical corruption’ has sparked a storm of protest in Malaysia’s Parliament. The dispute erupted after comments by Muslim MP Nik Muhammad Zawawi Nik Salleh during a debate about increasing fines for drink-driving offenders. Nik Zawawi asserted that religions other than Islam forbade their followers from drinking alcohol. A Christian Member of Parliament, Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham, corrected him, adding that Christians are allowed to consume alcohol, but not to the point of intoxication and debauchery. Nik Zawawi replied curtly that Datuk Ngeh should check his facts as the original Bible, before it was changed, forbade any consumption of alcohol, adding that he had read about Christianity in documents written by Christians. Christian apologists who engage with Muslim critics of the Bible and Christianity are very familiar with the common claim by Muslim polemicists that today’s Bible has been changed. According to this claim, Jesus received an original Gospel which...

   A COURT decision in Malaysia on 29 January has challenged the application of sharia by Islamic religious authorities in this Muslim-majority country.    A panel of five judges in Malaysia’s highest legal tribunal, the Federal Court, ruled in favour of a challenge by a Malaysian Hindu, Indira Gandhi, to her ex-husband’s conversion of their three children to Islam, in 2009, without her consent.    Her ex-husband, K. Pathmanathan, left his Hindu faith that year to embrace Islam, adopting the Muslim name Muhammad Riduan Abdullah. His marriage to Mrs Gandhi broke up, and, shortly after his conversion, he changed the religious status of the three children to Muslim.    At the time, their eldest daughter was 12, their son 11, and the youngest daughter, Prasana, was barely one year old. Riduan Abdullah took Prasana from the family home, and disappeared.    A series of court battles ensued. In 2013, Mrs Gandhi brought the matter bef...

You would expect Malaysia to be a test case for pluralism but for more than 30 years there’s a been a really substantial program of Islamisation in Malaysia pushed by its government. Read on and listen to the interview on Vision Radio Twenty20   here .

Malaysia is a country in ferment. The abduction of protestant Pastor Raymond Koh missing since 13 February after being snatched from a street in Petaling Jaya near the capital Kuala Lumpur, comes against a background of pressure against non-Muslims. The growing demand for Islamic criminal punishment codes, known as hadd or hudud (plural Arabic for 'prohibitions'), which set Pakistan on the road to ruin, is worrying . Hudud crimes warrant severe corporal punishments, including stoning for adultery, and death for apostasy.  Though limited by rules of evidence, their implementation on any statute book creates consternation, and at worst, as in Pakistan, mob rule. Yet demand for and implementation of such penalties are creeping in from conservative fringe states in Malaysia. Emerging Malaysia is described by the CIA as ‘a middle-income country [that] has transformed itself since the 1970s from a producer of raw materials into an emerging multi-sector economy’, so the ...

     The Muslim communities of Southeast Asia have long been regarded as among the more moderate of the Islamic world. The world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia sits alongside the smaller but dynamic Muslim communities of Malaysia and Brunei, as well as the sizeable Muslim minorities in Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Together these nations are home to around 250 million Muslims.      The region has been largely spared from the tormented conflicts of the Arab world. But the temperature is rising in Muslim Southeast Asia, with increasingly bitter debates and, at times, violent conflicts between competing factions of Muslims. One of the key bones of contention relates to an increasing push for the implementation of aspects of Sharia law. Brunei      On May 1, 2014, the Sultan of Brunei enacted Sharia legal codes in his kingdom, one of the wealthiest countries in the world with its vast oil reserves. This step was taken i...

THE New Year has started badly for Christians in Malaysia. In the past week, a number of churches have been firebombed, and Malaysian police have increased security at Christian places of worship around the country. The trigger to these incidents was a ruling, issued on New Year’s Eve, by the Malaysian High Court, which allowed Roman Catholics to use the term “Allah” to describe the Christian God in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia (News, 18 December). This overturned an earlier ban by the Malaysian government. In response, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Mohd Najib, quickly announced that the Ministry of Home Affairs would appeal in the case. The dispute has deep roots. Of Malaysia’s population of 27 million, 60 per cent are Muslim, nine per cent are Christian, and there are sub­stantial numbers of Buddhists (19 per cent) and Hindus (six per cent). The resurgence in Islamic con­sciousness that has swept the world since the 1970s had a profound impact on Muslims in Malay...