Anwar: I’ve been active in interfaith dialogue since before Umno
(Malay Mail Online) – Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim denied today claims he was seeking cheap publicity, saying he had played an active role in inter-religious dialogues long before he joined the government.
Umno-linked Malay daily Utusan Malaysia recently denigrated the de facto head of the Pakatan Rakyat bloc, following Anwar’s recent remarks on reading the Bible while in jail.
“Why didn’t Utusan take issue with me when I was deputy prime minister [and] organised a conference on Islam and Confucianism?” he told reporters when met at the High Court here.
“I have held discussions in church, I was active, going for church dialogues even during my Abim days,” Anwar added, using the Malay acronym for the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement founded in 1971.
He said that Utusan’s news reports should not be taken seriously as the newspaper has lost many defamation cases in court.
“I don’t read Utusan, I don’t take them seriously,” the PKR de facto chief added
Anwar had recently said that besides reading the Quran, he also read the Bible “every other day” when he was in prison.
The federal opposition leader who was imprisoned for six years on corruption charges in 1999, has said it was an international embarrassment that Bibles were seized by religious authorities who had initially refused to return the Christian holy book in Malay and Iban languages with the word, “Allah” deemed by the religious bodies as exclusive to Muslims.
“I could assume some difficulty although I don’t, if you recall Father George, in prison, other than reading the Quran, I can assure you every other day I would also look at the Bible,” he told a predominantly Christian crowd at a hall in the Holy Family Catholic Church grounds here during a joint Deepavali-Christmas celebration earlier this month.
Controversy over non-Muslim use of the Arabic word for God first erupted when the Catholic Church initiated a legal suit against the federal government after it was first banned from publishing the word in the Bahasa Malaysia section of its weekly newspaper, Herald, in 2007.
The Federal Court is scheduled to review the Catholic Church’s case on January 21.
Other churches and individuals have followed and similarly sued the government for allegedly violating their constitutional freedom to practise their religion.
Christianity is Malaysia’s third-biggest religion after Islam and Buddhism but the issue remains highly incendiary in this country where over 60 per cent of the population is Muslim.
The issue has become a religious flashpoint in a country where the line between creed and ethnicity is often blurred.
