Malaysia’s Religious Intolerance
Last week, a series of firebomb attacks on churches in Malaysia began in response to a High Court decision to overturn a ban on the use of the word “Allah” by Roman Catholics in the majority Muslim country. In Malay, the word for God is “Allah,” as it is in Arabic, and the Christians use the word in the Malay-language edition of their main newspaper, the Herald, which is read “only by Christian indigenous tribes in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak.” Muslims pledged to prevent Christians from using the word they say is exclusive to their religion.
At Friday prayers at two main mosques in downtown Kuala Lumpur, young worshippers carried banners and gave fiery speeches, vowing to defend Islam.
“We will not allow the word Allah to be inscribed in your churches,” one speaker shouted into a loudspeaker at the Kampung Bahru mosque. About 50 other people carried posters reading “Heresy arises from words wrongly used” and “Allah is only for us.
“Islam is above all. Every citizen must respect that,” said Ahmad Johari, who attended prayers at the National Mosque. “I hope the court will understand the feeling of the majority Muslims of Malaysia. We can fight to the death over this issue.”
Following the initial January 8th attack on 3 churches on Friday, there was another wave of firebomb attacks on two other churches on Sunday.
The government has banned the use of the word in Christian literature, saying it is likely to confuse Muslims and draw them to Christianity.
It has also appealed the high court’s ruling.
The bombings may be an attempt to intimidate judges to overturn the decision, said the Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches in Malaysia.
The total number of attacks climbed to nine on Monday, when a church in Southern Malaysia was vandalized.
Regarding the argument that there would be “confusion” if the word was allowed to be used by Christians “trying to win converts”:
On her blog last week, Marina Mahathir, a commentator and columnist, disparaged this view as a “copyright issue.”
She said a confident Muslim “will not walk into a church, hear a liturgy in Malay or Arabic where they use the word ‘Allah’ and then think that he or she is in a mosque.”
Some leaders have publicly denounced the attacks, while also attempting to provide information that might explain the violence and unrest, such as why Malaysia has seen so many attacks compared to other countries. The Home Ministry secretary, Gen. Mahmood Adam, told reporters
“Be fair, you have to compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges. Our landscape is different from other countries. Malays here are different from other countries. The landscape here is different from Indonesia so we can’t compare.”
The violence has strained relations among Malays, who are mostly Muslim and who make up 60 percent of the population, and the Chinese and Indian minorities, who are Christian, Hindu and Buddhist.
Indonesia is less divided, with Muslims making up 90 percent of its population of 240 million.
From the story on the above CBS website:
Prime Minister Najib Razak visited one of the targeted churches on Saturday and called for calm.
Emphasizing his resolve to maintain ethnic and racial harmony in society, Najib also said the Muslim faith prohibits insulting other religions or destroying their sanctuaries.
The religious tensions have been a continuing problem for the country. The hearings on the court case had dragged on for two years before the high court’s ruling in late December.
In recent months, authorities in Malaysia have seized more than 20,000 Bibles because they refer to God as Allah.
The seizures have fed fears among minority groups, which see signs of encroaching Islamic fundamentalism in the predominantly Muslim but multiracial country.
Malaysia has some of the tightest government restrictions on religion in the world, according to a study published last month by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The country was among the 10 most restrictive countries out of 175 in the survey.
But it had relatively low levels of social tension between religious groups, the report found. The Pew study covered events from mid-2006 to mid-2008.
The drama in Malaysia continued Friday in the capital of Kuala Lumpur:
A Malaysian student was charged Friday after allegedly posting comments on Facebook about throwing a gasoline bomb amid a recent spate of attacks on churches, most of which were hit by Molotov Cocktails.
Mohamad Tasyrif Tajudin, 25, allegedly wrote, “You want me to throw a petrol (gasoline) bomb there? We can negotiate the price” in a recent Facebook discussion over the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims.
And to top it off:
The office of lawyers representing Christians in their legal fight for the right to use Allah was also ransacked.
