I respect your faith will you respect mine?

I came acroos this article recently, eventhough it was published sometime in 2006 yet i find it somehow relevant.


I respect your articles of faith - will you respect mine?In Malaysia, Islam seems to coexist as an official religion with a tolerant, multicultural society. But all is not as it seems

Timothy Garton Ash in Kuala Lumpur The Guardian, Thursday February 16 2006
Article history
In the space of a few dusty hours and clamorous city blocks I have contributed my quart to the gallons of milk being ceremonially poured over a statue of the Hindu Lord Ganesh (thus removing all obstacles to prosperity, peace and success), been enlightened under a bodhi tree by a Buddhist businessman of Sri Lankan origin, inhaled the incense offered to selected gods by the Chinese marking the end of their new year in the See Yeoh temple, listened to a Malay choir practising English hymns in the Anglican church of St Mary and discussed the finer points of Islamic banking with a Malaysian sheltering from torrential rain at the beautiful Jamek mosque. This is not just multiculturalism but multi-cultism in one city. All human faith is here. Yet Malaysia is a majority Muslim country, where Islam is the official religion.
At first glance I would seem to have found the holy grail of the post-9/11 world, proof positive that Islam in power can allow and even encourage a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural society.

That is certainly what the country's political leaders, who join us in the aptly named Hotel Shangri-La for a conference on relations between Islam and the west, wish us to understand. And measured by the standards of the Middle East, indeed of most majority Muslim states, Malaysia is an exemplar of interfaith coexistence.

As the maritime trading crossroads of south-east Asia, it has for centuries been a place where all of what Europeans have called "the east" has met - Indians, Chinese and Japanese, as well as the native peoples. Its population became even more diverse under the aegis, at once repressive and transforming, of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialists. (From the window of the National History Museum, which is housed in a building where John Major once worked as a banker, you still peer down on a somewhat melancholy cricket pitch.) This place was globalised well before anyone talked of globalisation.

Look a little closer, however; talk to Malaysians from the minority faiths as well as critical observers within the Muslim community, and the picture becomes more muddy - as befits a city whose name means "muddy confluence". For a start, the communities coexist rather than co-mingle. I'm told there is relatively little intermarriage. This is no melting-pot. "We live and let live," says the Buddhist businessman of Sri Lankan origin. Apart from anything else, the different groups' religious prescriptions often prevent them eating each other's food.

Of course there's nothing wrong with such peaceful coexistence. The same was true of another often-lauded exemplar of multiculturalism, Sarajevo, before the second world war, and it is probably true of parts of London and New York today. Only advancing secularism (as in Sarajevo under the communist regime led by Marshal Tito) or farreaching assimilation (as has been traditional in France and America) produces the deeper mixing. But retaining separate communities does mean that politics remain group-based and there is always the potential for violent conflict to erupt, as happened here in 1969, if one group feels strongly disadvantaged.

In Malaysia, all communities are equal but some are more equal than others. Although the National Front coalition, which has been in power since 1957, includes Chinese and Indian parties, the Muslim Malay majority is dominant. While the Chinese still have a predominant position in the business community, there is affirmative action for the Muslim Malays, and other "indigenous" groups, in access to higher education, jobs in the civil service, government contracts and housing. Inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict is avoided not by the systematic balancing mechanisms of a liberal democracy, with fully representative politics, free media and independent courts, but by a semi-democratic, semiauthoritarian balancing act, with a distinct tilt towards the Malay Muslim side. The day I arrived, the government announced the indefinite suspension of the Sarawak Tribune newspaper, which published one of the Danish cartoons. It also made it an offence for anyone to publish, import, produce, circulate or even possess copies of the caricatures.

A government spokesman explained that since Malaysia currently chairs the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which is dedicated to promoting Islamic solidarity between its 57 member states and peoples, "it would be awkward if Malaysia slams the west for [its] insensitivity when in our own backyard we don't have control". The law used to ban the Sarawak Tribune dates from 1984 and gives the government draconian powers to limit free media, while other laws (at least one of them, the Internal Security Act, traceable back to the British-led repression of communist insurgents in the so-called Emergency) enable it to curb other forms of dissent.

So the Malaysian way is to keep the lid on a simmering cauldron. But as anyone who cooks pasta or noodles knows, if you keep the lid on and the heat underneath is too high, the pot will eventually boil over.

Whereas the country's secular courts still use a version of English common law, there is a separate, parallel structure of Islamic courts. There is, quite literally, one law for Muslims and another for everyone else. All Muslims must go through these courts for most aspects of family law and a few of criminal law. Here, sharia law is applied with variable rigour of interpretation, depending on which of the country's federal states you are being charged in. Offences may range from eating in public during Ramadan or drinking alcohol to apostasy - the deviation from or renunciation of Islam, punishable by a fine or imprisonment. One young Malay made it clear to me that it is extraordinarily difficult and risky for a young man - let alone for a woman - from a Muslim family publicly to renounce Islam, and above all, to renounce it in favour of secularism. What people believe in the depth of their hearts they alone know ("I go my own way," one told me, cryptically) but public conformity is enforced by family, community and state sanctions.

So, yes, compared with most of the Muslim world, Malaysia is a positive example of live-and-let-live multi-cult co-existence, but Shangri-La it isn't. You may say: what right have I, as a westerner, a guest and a descendant of British colonialists to boot, to point these things out? Indeed, the religion with which I grew up teaches that one should start by criticising one's own faults rather than those of others. That seems to me a good principle. So my first responsibility is to look at the way my own communities - Oxford, Britain, the EU, the west - treat their own minorities, not least their Muslim minorities. We have plenty of discrimination and double standards of our own.

Does that disqualify me from commenting on other countries' shortcomings? I think not, especially when what I'm doing is reporting criticisms made to me by Malaysians, people who do not feel they can speak entirely freely in their own country and who would not be published if they did. In fact, I believe that as a writer with access to free media I have a duty to speak up for those who cannot speak freely for themselves. That's my strongly held belief, and I trust that political leaders of other faiths, including Islam, will respect my beliefs. Then we can have a productive interfaith dialogue.

timothygartonash.com