More on the Lina Joy case, and other examples of the "creeping Islamicization" of Malaysia. Sharia Alert, and an Islamic Tolerance Alert, from the International Herald Tribune: "Letter from Malaysia: Nation's secular vision vs. 'writing on the wall'"
KUALA LUMPUR - The idea of a secular state is dead in Malaysia," says Farish Noor, a Malaysian scholar who specializes in politics and Islam. "An Islamic society is already on the cards. The question is what kind of Islamic society this will be."
It is hard to square this view with a drive through modern Kuala Lumpur, its downtown bars and nightclubs not exactly the symbols of a budding theocracy. Yet as Malaysia marks 49 years of independence from Britain on Thursday, lurking behind a cosmopolitan facade is a tense and divisive battle over the country's future.
Those who want to maintain the country's secular roots are fighting what they call creeping Islamicization. Muslim women who at the time of independence often wore silky, tight-fitting outfits today do not leave the house without a head scarf, which is now also required for female police officers of all religions during official functions.
Muslim prayers are piped into the loudspeakers of government offices in the new administrative capital, Putrajaya. And Islamic police officers routinely arrest unmarried couples for "close proximity."
"I see the writing on the wall," said Ivy Josiah, the director of the Women's Aid Organization, a group that lobbies the government on women's issues. "It's only a matter of time before Malaysia becomes another Taliban state."
Malaysia, a multiracial country where just over half the population of 26 million is Muslim, is testing the limits of compatibility between traditional Muslim beliefs and Western- style democracy.
In Europe, the threat of terrorism posed by disaffected Muslims has spurred religious leaders and politicians to wonder whether there is a better way to assimilate Muslim and Western traditions. The experience of Malaysia appears to show that there is no easy solution, even after five decades of trying.
In recent years, a number of high- profile court cases have highlighted the clash between Muslim and secular laws, but none so much as the lawsuit brought by Lina Joy, a computer saleswoman, who is challenging the Malaysian government over its refusal to officially acknowledge her conversion from Islam to Christianity. After two lower courts ruled for the government, Joy awaits a judgment from the country's highest court.
The case has aggravated already mistrustful relations between Muslim, Christian and Hindu communities. It has led to death threats against one prominent lawyer, large protest gatherings and a ban by the government on any further public debate. At the heart of the case is the fundamental question of which is supreme in Malaysia: Muslim law or the country's secular Constitution.
Malaysia has a hybrid legal system that incorporates both Islamic and civil laws for personal and family matters: Muslims are governed by religious laws against drinking, eating during the daylight hours of Ramadan and having close proximity between unmarried women and men. Marriages, divorces, funerals, and inheritance are governed by Islamic laws.
For non-Muslims - Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs - civil laws apply. But the hybrid system is now in crisis and the multiracial fabric could fray.
[...]
"You are seeing worldwide a common thing happening," said Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a Muslim lawyer. "Muslims are defining themselves by their religion instead of their country." Malik recently asked for police protection after receiving death threats for his role in the Lina Joy case: he submitted a brief in defense of Joy's right to convert.
"Lina Joy is important because it's finally brought to light the tensions that exist between those who favor an Islamic state and those who believe in the universal values entrenched in the Constitution," Malik said in an interview.
Lawyers who back the government's position in the case say Muslims in Malaysia are subject to Islamic law. "We are not saying you do not have any choice of religion. But if you want to convert out you must do so in the Islamic court," said Zulkifli Noordin, a lawyer who submitted a brief in support of the government's position.
In reality, converting out of Islam is frowned upon if not actively discouraged in Malaysia. Only one state, Negri Sembilan, allows apostasy and usually after ordering the person through a lengthy rehabilitation program - an attempt to keep them from converting.
Zulkifli says 18 people have successfully left the faith, although many others are thought to have done so unofficially. In the country's most conservative state, Kelantan, local laws call for the death penalty for apostates. The law has not yet been applied.
The context of the tensions in the Lina Joy case is a Muslim community that says it feels under siege and threatened by a thriving evangelical Christian movement. Newspapers cite wild estimates of mass conversions if Lina Joy wins her case and call for a strengthening of religious law.
"Malaysia, a multiracial country where just over half the population of 26 million is Muslim..."
"The context of the tensions in the Lina Joy case is a Muslim community that says it feels under siege and threatened by a thriving evangelical Christian movement."
The Muslims are the majority, yet THEY feel under siege?!?
Where are all those wonderful UN Human Rights organizations (Where Have You Gone Mary Robinson, a nation turns it lonely eyes to you) and where are those marvelous EU "international" courts that want to prosecute Western (read US and Israeli) leaders as war criminals???
Isn't it a basic human right to choose one's faith or lack of it? The sheer hypocrisy makes me grit my teeth.
Well if the non Muslim Chinese and Christians leave, the economy will go completely down the tube.
Heck, we could welcome those people to the UK...but somehow I doubt it. We made it hard for the Hong Kong Chinese to come here but so easy for Muslims who hate us.
I see an urgent need for birth control.
I believe that the IHT is an organ of the New York Times, and if you read the linked article, you'll notice that at the bottom they give "context" --- a growing evangelical movement. So it's really the "fault" of the Christians living in Malaysia, who are daring to propagate something that is not Islam. They are not being good Dhimmis.
An encouraging thought is that it appears that it is, for the time being, possible for alternatives to Islam to grow in a state that is not fully Islamized.
Paladin's report suggests that the Malays are fearful of conversion away from Islam, which suggests that such conversion is not as unthinkable in Malaysia as it is in more Islamized parts of the work.
Does anyone have ideas of ways that folks in the West can help to stem Islam in Malaysia. Are their organizations that one can help fund. Or would that be unwise?
"Some of them are resenting what they see as Arab imperialism and feeling vestiges of pride in their Malay heritage which is largely derived from Hindu/Bhuddist influences (think Bali).
An excerpt: 'You are a shame to the Malay race for saying that the Arabs are smarter than us. Arabs with all the money and oil in the world, cannot even educate their own. Most smart Arabs are living in Bushland the USA/ England. If you love Tantawi so much, why don't you migrate to Saudi? Nearer the stone what....Oh yes to the rest of the Malays who wants to be Arabs, the ARAB RELIGION is nothing more than pliagarisation of the religions of the Middle East, mainly Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and pagan stone worship all in one...So Melayu, get out of your blind stupor and hypnosis by the Arabs and start living a life, for GOD's sake...It is as though there is an awakening from the shackles of the Arabs and the lies that they attribute to GOD are slowly being exposed and eroded. To all those Melayus who wants to be Arabs, we are watching you from afar. Why watching from afar, because whatever bad that happens to you is because of your own doing and we, the Melayus who do not want to worship stones, have nothing to do with it.'"
-- from a posting above
The resentment of non-Arab Muslims for Arab Muslims, so far felt mainly by the most farseeing and intelligent, should be encouraged in every way. For this is one of the three Great Divides in the Camp of Islam. The two others are: the Sectarian Divide between Sunni and Shi'a (adherents of Ibadiya Islam are far too few to matter), and the Economic Divide between the oil-and-gas rich Muslim states, especially those around the Persian Gulf, and the poor Muslim states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and that pseudo-polity and pseudo-people known as the "Palestinian Authority" and the "Palestinian people." The latter group of states and pretend-states have been allowed to come to rely entirely, as their due, both received and given in the spirit of tje Jizyah-tribute paid as protection money by non-Muslims to Muslim masters in Dar al-Islam, on foreign aid from Western Europe and North America.
It would be good for this theme to be repeated by intelligent non-Arab Muslims, exercising their quasi-freedom of speech in the period before the full darkness of Shari'a descends, during that soomerki svobody, that Twilight of Freedom, for which a melancholic and mandelshtamian note is apposite, appropriate, a postiively killer app. Hard to believe that Malalya was, in the early 1950s, not at all a center of Islamic madness, that the Malayan rebellion put down by the British was Communist in its promptings, and that Malaya, or later Malaysia, had not yet succumed to the steady demographic conquest by Muslims that has been the most important development in the history of the area. Hard to believe, too, that just fifty years ago, in Singapore, the leading political figure among the local labour movement, the man who became the Chief Minister of Singapore following independence, was David Marshall, from a well-known family of Iraqi Jews (formerly located in Mumbai, quondam Bombay, where one of them even had as a fellow classmate young Bhutto, in the pre-Pakistani period of his existence), similar in their histories, if not quite as famous, as the Sassoons and the Kadouries who left Baghdad (in the 1920s, the second Jewish city of Asia, after Jerusalem), and established themselves in Hong Kong and, almost as an aside, also became the founding fathers of that city now seen as the embodiment of modern China, Shanghai.
On a different note, some will recognize in the seemingly unremarkable phrase "the two others are" an echo of the list of hitherto unpublishable themes enumerated in "On a Book Entitled 'Lolita'" and wonder if the poster (HF) meant it deliberately. He did. Indeed he did.
http://www.itv.com/news/index_ba524d4099ee6506656a1a08ea45d398.html
Off topic, but as we're talking about increasing islamification...
How can the muslims feel that they are threatened? If islam is so great then no one should want to leave. If the law ever allows people to leave islam without going through the crazies courts, I predict a whole lot of apostacy. I think that the non-muslims have more to worry about the muslims. I agree with Freewoman, they need birth control, which is also against islam.
How can the muslims feel that they are threatened? If islam is so great then no one should want to leave. If the law ever allows people to leave islam without going through the crazies courts, I predict a whole lot of apostacy. I think that the non-muslims have more to worry about the muslims. I agree with Freewoman, they need birth control, which is also against islam.
From the link just above: the young girl stolen away from...Stornoway? The words "Islam" and "Stornoway" just don't fit together. A little like trying to make a connection between Hadith and Harris Tweed, or madrasas and the machair. Can't be done.
Well said, Paladin!
Not only is Islam a totalitarian imperialist ideology that destroyed the Hindu/Buddhist civilization of the ancient Malays (Srijivaya and Majapahit were two of the most advanced societies of their time) but rendered them second class to Arab culture. Malaysia also reflects this imperialism by its colonial subjection of non-Muslim Sarawak and Sabah.
Just 30 years ago, mineral rich Sabah had the highest standard of living in Malaysia. Today it is the poorest state. 95% of all income from its mineral wealth is confiscated by the central government and only 5% is sent back to Sabah. The situation in Sarawak is similar. Yet the so-called anti-imperialist Left remains completely silent about this Muslim neo-colonialism.
If Islam was truly of God, then the leaders of Islam would not be afraid. It is a sign that they have a feeling that what they teach is not of God. Malaysia has a history of persecuting Christians. Many of the Christians fled more than 40 years ago to other countries, including to Australia.
As usual, the Muslims, who were not the native population in the first place, had imposed their system upon the natives, thus the horror of Islam came to the Middle East.
This one case concerns a girl who has converted to Christianity. There are other cases where girls are in hot water for entering a beauty contest, and even in the schools they are demanding that their children are not to attend singing classes. Those who pander to these demands are making the situation worse. They have adopted a utopia that is supposed to be about understanding others. They fail to see that the end result will be subjugation.
All other races and creeds in Malaysia are heading for subjugation. If Islam wins in Malaysia then other Asian nations might also fall. Australia has a large Muslim population too. We need integration, not segregation.
This is exactly why Moslems should not be accorded citizenship in any country they inhabit.
Multiculturalism cannot be stopped. Malaysia may turn into Afghanistan, but it probably won't matter. Even France could become an Islamic state, and people would still continue to think that multiculturalism will work flawlessly.
Dear Paladin & Provoslavni, well said guys.
I am a malaysian, a non muslim.
Firstly, what I Studied in school about islam was totally different from what islam is in reality.
I stressed that I first had saw, witness & understoof what islam is all about.
Islam is a Arab religion that manipulates gods words to get other races to fight & defend them. In other words, they make a fool of Malays & make them defend their religion.
We, the non muslims & some good muslims built this country. Heck, we were the first that defended this country during the Japanese occupation. But unfortunately, its the other way around now, we are being warned to be thankful to the Malays & muslims to be allowed to stay in Malaysia.
Its very disturbing, out rights have been taken away slowly. Non Muslims kid have to really struggle hard to get into a university, the other have to spend their hard earned money to educate their children. Whats worse is that these policies are not getting better, it is more bias than it ever been before.
Malays in malaysia are a total disgrace. They dont know their own religion, their own race & will be stupid enough to follow blindly without thinking.
Malay children are not tought about science, they master the difference of Muslims & kafirs. Ask most malays/muslims about non muslims & they will say Non Muslims have no morals because:
1. They pray to idols.
2. Have a dog as a pet
3. Eat non Halal food or pork
4. Drink Alcohol
From what I what I have seen, malays would do 2,3,& 4 when they are abroad. This trend is very common.
I was irked about our Prime Minister's speech yesterday. He constantly remimded us about the May 13, 1969 Race Riots & he said the goverment has to control it & not let it happen again.
While I agree partially, The entire problem was a result of the goverment itself & It was NOT A RACE RIOT. It was RELIGIOS RIOT.
It was the MUSLIMS vs NON MUSLIMS. And the mosques were blasting quaranic verses & encourating the malays to attack the chinese that were the non muslims. I say this confidently as the Mosque was used as a base of operations, period.
I personally dont care if Islam is a pegan religion, It seems very clealy to me that muslims around the world have to pray to mecca but god is everywhere & allmightly. but somehow worshippers will coincidentally pray towards the black stone, going around it & kissing it. Im convinced that Islam is a pegan religion in disguise. A deviation from the semetic religion that wants some attention.
Slowly, the malay culture will fade away & become arabs. And why, its because of Islam.
I would like to ask muslims that read this to answer: "Whats the origin of Halal" (in terms of food), how did it first started. From your answer, you could judge what you understand.
All evidence are pointing to strategical political agenda that uses islam to dominate & then impose shahria law over everyone.
Remember, the goal of sharia is to clearly state that Muslims are Kings and non muslims are SLAVES to the Muslims.
It has already started, the civil laws are somehow lower than the Sharia laws. Theres no true freedom of religion & practically if you are born a non malay or non muslims, you are fated to be a slave to the muslims.
Since I dont believe in allah & their fate, I dont believe in bullshit either. If muslims do not respect non muslims, they dont deserve respect.
If they dont let us live in peace, they dont deserve to live in peace.