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Malaysia’s ethnic, religious tensions on the rise
On July 11, Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee uploaded a Facebook photo of themselves eating bah kut teh, a savoury pork-rib soup popular among ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore.
No harm in that, you might think. But posting such a photo at the start of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting season, in which the devout – banned from eating pork to begin with – spend a full month without eating from dawn until dusk, proved highly provocative in Malaysia, where the majority of the population is Malay Muslim.
The Malaysian couple even posted a halal logo beside their message, which read “Happy Breaking Fast, with fragrant, delicious and appetising bak kut teh.” It was, they said, meant as a gag, but many Muslims didn’t see the funny side of having their annual month-long privations — which include abstaining from sex — mocked by a couple whose previous claim to fame was for posting pornographic images of themselves.
“Let this be a lesson to everyone (not to ridicule and mock other religions). This case is very serious, a stunt which, I believe, is sufficient to rouse the anger of many Muslims,” said Khairy Jamaluddin, Malaysia’s Youth and Sports Minister, speaking to the local media.
The attention-seeking couple, trading off their notoriety with the nickname “Alvivi,” will go on trial August 24 for charges filed under the Film Censorship Act and the colonial-era Sedition Act, despite the fact the government said the latter law is set to be reformed.
Clive Kessler, a long-time Malaysia watcher at the University of New South Wales, says that the charges are politically motivated. “It may have been a case of very bad judgment, even irresponsible,” he told The Edge Review. “But it was not seditious.”
The fact that the two “sex bloggers” are Chinese-Malaysians, who make up 25 per cent of the population and who voted for the most part against the government in the May general election, has been seized on by hardline groups linked to the United Malays National Organisations (UMNO), the main party in the ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front, or NF) coalition and by far the biggest party in Malaysia’s parliament, with 88 seats.
The second biggest party in the legislature is the Democratic Action Party, (DAP), which is dominated by Chinese-Malaysians and has past links to Singapore’s long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). The DAP won 38 seats in the May election, making it the biggest player in Anwar Ibrahim’s Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition.
But that outcome, which came at the expense of the ethnic Chinese parties in the NF, prompted a backlash from Malay Muslim elites in UMNO, who more or less accused the country’s Chinese of treachery.
Ethnic tensions have simmered since the election, with DAP and UMNO leaders slamming each other as racist.
Analysts such as Kessler say the Alvivi case has provided yet another opportunity for Malay-Mulsims to vent racial animosities. “The assiduous cultivation of wounded Malay-Muslim sensibilities has become a spectacular growth industry,” he says.
Also in the firing line is the Vatican’s new man in Malaysia, American Archbishop Joseph Marino, who waded into an old but ongoing row over whether non-Muslims can use the word “Allah” to refer to God. An initial court ruling gave the go ahead, but that has been appealed and a final decision is pending.
The DAP raised the issue in the months before the May election, prompting Perkasa, a Muslim NGO linked to UMNO, to threaten a public Bible bonfire in Butterworth, a town in the DAP stronghold of Penang, in what looked like an unwitting parody of Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who wanted to torch the Koran.
Marino told local media that the Christian Federation of Malaysia had presented a “logical and acceptable” argument to counter the argument by Muslims that “Allah” was exclusive to Islam, and in turn, some of the same Malay-Muslim torchbearers who sought Alvivi’s jailing went after the archbishop.
“Joseph Marino is an enemy of the state,” Ibrahim Ali, president of Perkasa, told the news agency AFP. “His actions have strained race relations in the country.” Unless he retracted his remarks, Ibrahim and others said Marino should be thrown out of the country.
As a result, both the Catholic Church and Alvivi find themselves, well, strange bedfellows in the current bout of post-election ethnic and religious tensions in Malaysia.
The Bishop of Malacca-Johor, Paul Tan, who heads the Catholic Church in the country, spoke up for the foolhardy young couple, pointing to the fact that Ibrahim was not punished for his threat to burn the Bible.
“In the case of Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee, retribution was swift, but I note with regret that such action was never taken against […] Ibrahim,” Tan told Malaysiakini, an online news site.
Choong Pui Yee, senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, says that Malaysia’s ruling coalition is drifting to the right as the country’s post-election tensions persist, amplifying the perceived double standards in the country’s justice system, where Alvivi are charged for offending Muslims but Ibrahim is let off for his threats to Christian sensibilities.
“There is a lack of political will to begin any form of racial reconciliation,” she told The Edge Review. “The double standards in treating Malay and non-Malay issues are an indication of this.”
