Christian-Muslim dialogue and Mahathir
NEW MANDALA
Whenever reports on the state of inter-religious relations in Malaysia find their way into the world media, the tenor is worrying. One reads of “body snatching,” ominous places called “faith rehabilitation centres,” attacks on houses of worship, and the atrophying ties of friendship and trust between the country’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities.
Tellingly, whereas media reports from the 1970s and 1980s depicted Malaysia as a plural country marked by “racial” divides, these now appear eclipsed by religious differences. Editorials on Malaysian politics paint a similarly bleak picture, highlighting the cynical manipulation of religious sentiment by an increasingly authoritarian state, the “radicalisation” or growing conservatism of Malaysia’s Muslim majority, and the ensuing resentment, even intellectual “ghettoisation” among some in the country’s non-Muslim minorities.
Whose responsibility?
Reading media coverage of Malaysia, one might be forgiven for thinking that one man alone is responsible for this situation: Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia between 1981 and 2003. The complex legacy of his twenty-two year long premiership cannot be dealt with at the requisite depth in an essay of this length, but I would argue that the overall failure of an inter-religious dialogue culture to take root in Malaysia has less to do with elite machinations than with widespread, if misplaced, misgivings over such dialogues.
Nonetheless, as such encounters are thankfully becoming increasingly normal around the world, inter-religious dialogue appears to be gradually finding greater acceptance in Malaysia, too. This will also be helped greatly if the spirit necessary for such dialogical encounters, the attitude of “come as you are, not as I want you to be,” is respected. Because while many Malaysian Muslims appear convinced by the need to engage more substantively with their Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, animist or atheist compatriots, many others are put off by what they perceive to be unwarranted meddling in theological matters by forces hostile to their religion.
It is thus intellectual dishonesty to use fictitious, disingenuously arabicised terminology such as “ummat kitab” to seek theological legitimation for out-conversion from Islam. Of course, many learned scholars have argued that the act of leaving Islam must be distinguished from the act of treason, and such a debate is an important one for Muslim communities to have. However, foisting a discussion of so-called “apostasy” on calls to strengthen the much needed inter-religious dialogue in Malaysia is counterproductive. I wish to steer clear of the “apostasy” question that featured in some of the previous contributions, and focus instead on the actual instances of inter-religious dialogue in Malaysia – or rather the impediments such dialogues face.
The ‘resurgence’ of religion
No religious community speaks with a singular voice – including, of course, Malaysian Muslims. But that there are a couple of hundred, perhaps even as many as tens of thousands who have left the religion of their birth, should not detract us from the fact that for many millions of others, Islam matters more than ever before. Their turn to religion was of course cleverly utilised by the Mahathir government, which portrayed itself as a spirited defender of Muslim interests. But it was not public policy that led so many Malaysian Muslims, along with co-religionists elsewhere and, in fact, people of religion around the world, to become more observant of their religious duties.
Although he never had much time for public displays of piety, Prime Minister Mahathir had in his own ways strong sympathies for the abstemious and yet tolerant, open-minded kaum muda-suffused interpretation of the Islamic message which he had imbibed in his childhood and youth. He appreciated earlier than most of his contemporaries the rallying and motivating power inherent in Islam, and he understood that his vision for modernisation was best realised with rather than against the faith.
An Abrahamic dialogue
Although his detractors in PAS (The Islamic Party of Malaysia) employed various unsavoury epithets to highlight Mahathir’s opposition to the establishment of Islamic rule, at no point of his career can he be described as someone opposed to religion or even as a secularist in the received meaning of seeking to separate the religious from the social and relegate the sacred to the private sphere alone.
It is important to remind ourselves that Mahathir’s positive predisposition towards religion extended beyond his own. In many of his speeches, he stated that human relationships in situations marked by a retreat of religion from society – a condition which Mahathir had detected in the predominantly Christian countries of the modern West – become brittle and ultimately unravel under the burden of materialism and selfishness.
Humankind, Mahathir often stated, was unable to order its universe without reference to a higher being. It was thus, Mahathir averred, post-Christian and not Christian Europe that had “lost its spiritual anchor” and was confronting meaninglessness and decline on account of its “spiritual emptiness.”
While one must remain mindful of the many discriminatory effects of the government’s “Islamisation” policy on the country’s non-Muslim communities, it is important to acknowledge the deep respect for religion, in particular the Abrahamic faiths, which Mahathir expressed in this and many similar instances. Some of his views on Hinduism and Buddhism, on the other hand, are deeply problematic, but must be explored elsewhere.
