Perception & prejudice

If you thought religious bigotry was an exclusively South Asian phenomenon, you should come to supposedly pragmatic Southeast Asia, where I am writing this. Two students at the Singapore Internet Research Centre seminar I took last Friday spoke with concern of the resurgence of religious fervour in their countries, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Now, I see that Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council (NFC) has denounced “rioting, causing disturbance and damaging public property” as “haram”. That sounds exemplary but closer inspection suggests the ban is more political than religious. It followed a massive opposition rally in Kuala Lumpur demanding clean elections that resulted in violence between the police and demonstrators.
As Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak spoke darkly of a plot to topple his government, the NFC obligingly declared that Islam did not approve of demonstrations. It didn’t go on to say Islam doesn’t approve of democracy either, but Malaysian mullahs can be pretty obtuse. They have objected to Christians using the word “Allah” for God and announced chopsticks are unIslamic. The former had the effect of depriving Malay Christians of the only word in their language for God — which (as this column noted on February 7, 2012, The Malta metaphor) is also so in Malta where no one objects to High Mass to Allah. The latter discriminated against 6,960,000 Chinese or almost a quarter of Malaysia’s population.
Muslim clerics are constantly watching for men and women who are guilty of “khalwat” (“close proximity”), which is interpreted as sexual impropriety.
The religious police made itself a laughing stock by arresting an American husband and wife holding hands in a park. That fiasco didn’t dampen police ardour. When I invited a Malaysian Army officer who had dropped me off at my hotel in Kuala Lumpur to come in for a drink, he apologised that the religious police were notorious for raiding hotel rooms camouflaged as ordinary civilians.
Malaysia’s 1.6 million Hindus (six per cent of the population) fare worst. The massive demonstration and class action suit filed in London some years ago by the Hindu Rights Action Force to demand $4 trillion in damages for “150 years of exploitation” didn’t end discriminatory laws and the demolition of temples. The complaints of Hindu girls being forcibly married to Muslim men and converted to Islam now heard from Pakistan also crop up regularly in Malaysia.
Singapore, when I lived here in the Nineties, was witness to two religious revivals. The born-again Christian sects became immensely popular. So did Islam, forcing the government to make it compulsory for Muslim children to go to ordinary schools. Otherwise, their parents preferred madrasas. More and more women, even sari-draped Bangladeshis, took to wearing the hijab (headscarf).
But I was surprised when the Filipino and Indonesian participants at the seminar spoke of similar revivals. Both represented the Asian Journalism Fellowship, which the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI), where I used to teach once upon a time, runs at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. These young people are trained professionals selected for their potential to lead the media institutions they work for in their home countries. I mention that to emphasise that being neither political activists nor religious zealots, they can be expected to present an objective appraisal. The picture both described was of Islam on the rampage.
The Philippines is a largely Catholic and somewhat Americanised nation. Referring to Spanish and American colonial rule, a historian wrote it had spent 400 years in a Catholic convent and 50 in a brothel. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the south wants nothing of either legacy. In the past, it was helped by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. With that godfather gone, the MILF still clings to its historical and religious arguments to secede.
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation but also now seeks to present a secular front to the world. Islamists, whether of the traditional kind in Sumatra’s Aceh district or militants rallying to the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) organisation which is suspected of links with Al Qaeda and whose avowed purpose is to create a caliphate in Southeast Asia, oppose this. The JI was responsible for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, mainly whites.
It attacked former President Megawati Sukarnoputri whose mother was Balinese as a Hindu. It opposed the pluralist policies of another President, Abdurrahman Wahid, who repealed many laws that reduced Indonesian Christians to second-class citizens. But the law is one thing and practice another. More than 1,100 churches — not stately edifices with spires as in India but simple huts surmounted by a cross — have been forcibly shut or destroyed in the Javanese town of Bogor in recent years. When Indonesia’s Supreme Court decreed that one church should be allowed to reopen, the local authorities insisted on a mosque being built across the street.
Indonesia’s Civil Registration Act of 2006 abolished the need to declare one’s religion on official forms unless the person belongs to one of the six officially recognised religions — Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. But the aim of ending minority discrimination is hardly well-served since anyone who doesn’t admit to one of the recognised religions must belong to the 2.5 million in the “others” category.
In conclusion, I must in all fairness add that the senior white American professor sitting next to me at the WKWSCI’s 20th anniversary dinner — a lavish five-course affair with white and red wine followed by champagne at a smart five-star hotel — told me that “Muslims had a thin time of it in India.” He had been told so by a Muslim writer in the US. I didn’t bother to rebut the charge. Truth is no defence against the perception and prejudice that comprises propaganda.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author