Malaysian Christians will attend services in guarded churches alongside plain-clothes detectives tomorrow after another week of unsolved attacks on religious institutions provoked by a controversy over the use of the word Allah. Six more churches in different parts of Malaysia were vandalised or firebombed after the first round of four attacks the week before, amid growing suspicion that the police were deliberately refraining from arrests to avoid further inflaming Muslim anger.
No one has been killed or injured in the attacks which, apart from one serious fire which gutted a Protestant church in Kuala Lumpur, appear to have been intended to intimidate.
There are fears that they will scare off crucial foreign investors and tourists, as well as contribute to a growing sense of alienation among the country’s non-Muslim minorities, including Chinese, Malays and indigenous tribespeople.
“The church attacks shattered notions of Malaysia as a model secular Muslim nation in the eyes of the international community,” an opposition member of parliament, Charles Santiago, said.
“Although the firebombing of churches alarmed Malaysians, it underscored the magnitude of the real problem. It showed that after 52 years of living together, nation-building and national unity is in tatters.”
The office of a law firm representing a Roman Catholic newspaper was ransacked on Thursday in a professional and well-organised break-in.
“[The attacks are] not being discouraged, because the police are not striking back,” said Ooi Kee Beng, a Malaysian-born analyst at the Institute of South-East Asia Studies in Singapore. “It’s a sign that they are tolerating this.”
The uproar originated in a court ruling last month which rejected as unconstitutional a ban on the use of the word Allah by anyone other than Muslims. The word is widely used by Malaysia’s Christian majority as the Malaysian language equivalent of the English word God.
On 3 December the Herald, a Catholic newspaper which publishes a Malaysian edition, won an appeal on against the ban. The judgement has been suspended in anticipation of an appeal by the Government, but it has already stirred up Muslim anger in a country with a dread of ethnic and racial confrontation.
Many churches have hired security guards and installed closed-circuit television cameras, and uniformed police and plain-clothes detectives are patrolling areas around churches and even taking places among the congregation, according to Lawrence Andrew, a priest who is editor of the Herald.
“Some people are taking precautions, intensifying their prayers, fasting, saying that we must resist persecution and be strong,” he told The Times. “Others are saying, ‘Why can’t we give up that word, and live in peace?’. People feel insecure.”
The word Allah has been used for centuries by Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia, as well as in Malaysia.
The Government argues that it should reserved for the Islamic God, to avoid “confusing” Malaysian Muslims, who make up 60 per cent of the population. For many non-Muslims it represents the latest manifestation of a growing Islamisation of a country which was formerly regarded as a model of harmonious and peaceful relations between different faiths and ethnicities.
Last year Muslim demonstrators outraged Hindu opinion by marching with the head of a dead cow, an animal sacred to Hinduism, to oppose the construction of a proposed temple. In an unusual show of zealousness police responsible for enforcing sharia, which applies only to Muslims, raided hotels over the new year and arrested unmarried couples sharing rooms. In August a 32-year-old mother was sentenced to caning after being caught drinking a single can of beer.
Since 1969, when Malaysia saw violent attacks by Muslim ethnic Malays on Chinese communities, the ruling United Malays National Organisation has practised a form of positive discrimination which gives Malays favoured access to education. Until recently this was tolerated by many minority ethnic groups for the stability that it encouraged, compared to ethnically turbulent countries such as neighbouring Indonesia.
But recently the opposition parties, led by the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim, have demanded an end to the so called “Bumiputra” (literally ‘Sons of the Soil’) policy, on the grounds that they alienate and drive away talented Malaysians from the minorities.
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