Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (36 page)

On July 26, 2005, at the same congress that renewed its 1980 fatwa against the Ahmadis, the MUI issued ten other edicts, one of which banned the Liberal Islamic Network (JIL). This network began in meetings among Muslim intellectuals at the
Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information (ISAI) in Jakarta but soon attracted more people, formed a website, and began publishing online.

The radical Islam Defenders Front had already targeted one of JIL’s founders, Ulil Abshar Abdalla. In 2002, a group of religious scholars, the Bandung Indonesian Ulemas Forum (FUUI), issued a fatwa saying he should be killed after he published an article in
Kompas
newspaper entitled “Freshening Up Islamic Understanding,” in which he defended the freedom of people to choose their own beliefs and emphasized that Islam must be understood in its historical and cultural context. He insisted that aspects of sharia law, including amputations, were no longer applicable. Abdalla also called for an understanding of Islam that distinguished between what is “the creation of a local culture, and what are fundamental values…aspects of Islam that reflect the mirror of Arab culture, for example, do not need to be followed.” A fatwa issued by Islamic clerics associated with Unity of Islam, the Prosperous Justice Party, and even the mainstream Muhammadiyah movement, accused Abdalla of blasphemy for saying that Muhammad was primarily a historical figure and for questioning the basis of Islamic law. One cleric who helped draft the fatwa, Athian Ali, stated, “[A]ccording to Islamic law, anyone who slanders Islam can be punished with death.” The fatwa also pushed for Abdalla’s arrest, but he remained free; however, for a time, he did have security guards.
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In August 2005, East Java’s Malang district court sentenced Muhammad Yusman Roy to two years in prison for inciting hatred after he challenged local clerics on the issue of bilingual prayers. Born to a Dutch Catholic mother and an Indonesian father, Roy embraced Catholicism as a teenager but converted to Islam in his early thirties. Like most Indonesian Muslims, Roy never learned Arabic. This can become a problem when performing
salat
, prayers recited by Muslims five times a day while facing Mecca; conservative Muslims interpret the Qur’an to require that
salat
be performed in Arabic. In 2002, Roy began translating
salat
prayers into Indonesian for himself and a few others at his boarding school in Malang. These unorthodox prayers went unnoticed at first, but that changed when he distributed tapes of himself to local mosques, performing the prayers in Indonesian. The Islamic Defenders Front confronted Roy during a debate at his school, and local and provincial ulema councils issued fatwas against him. At one point, police even posted guards at his house and school to protect him from angry mobs. In August 2005, he was put on trial and found guilty of inciting hatred through his challenge to local clerics. Curiously, he was acquitted of the further charge that his teachings deviated from Islam. He was released from prison on November 9, 2006, after serving eighteen months. He plans to continue to push for the adoption of bilingual prayers.
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On February 2, 2006, the online edition of
Rakyat Merdeka
briefly republished one of the “Danish cartoons” from
Jyllands-Posten
, illustrating an article critical of the
cartoons. After Muslim groups protested in front of
Rakyat Merdeka
’s offices, the cartoon was quickly taken down, having been posted for less than a day. However, the radical Islamic Defenders Front filed a complaint with the police. On July 19, Teguh Santosa, the chief online editor, was arrested and held briefly in Cipinang prison. He was charged with offending Islam, in violation of Article 156(a) of the criminal code. His trial began on August 31, 2006, and, on September 20, 2006, a Jakarta court dismissed the charges on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
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While there are exceptions, in Malaysia, religious identity is highly correlated with ethnicity. The majority of ethnic Malays are Muslim, and ethnic Indians and Chinese usually practice Buddhism, Christianity, or Hinduism. In the population of some twenty-six million, about 60 percent are Muslim, though this may be skewed by the fact that the constitution defines all ethnic Malays as Muslim. About 19 percent are Buddhist, 10 percent Christian, 6 percent Hindu, and 5 percent “other,” including Confucian, Taoist, and traditional Chinese religions. Article 3 of the federal constitution provides that Islam is “the religion of the Federation,” but “other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony.” Article 11 provides, “Every person has the right to profess and practice his religion and…to propagate it.” The civil justice system is applicable to all citizens, and there is a state sharia court system that has jurisdiction over Muslims in family law. When sharia court decisions affect non-Muslims, the defendants may, in theory, seek recourse in the civil courts.

In practice, the government significantly restricts non-Sunni Muslim beliefs and systematically discriminates against non-Muslims. Using guidelines issued by the Islamic Development Department, and with the consent of sharia courts, the federal government represses what it considers “deviant” interpretations of Islam and has prohibited over fifty deviant teachings, including Shia. So-called deviants may be arrested and detained in order to be “rehabilitated.” The federal government also requires that all Muslim civil servants attend government-approved religion classes, and Islamic religious instruction is mandatory for Muslim children in public schools. The government has also rebuffed efforts at building interfaith coalitions to discuss religious freedom, maintaining that “matters concerning Islam could only be discussed by Muslims.”

As part of its efforts to prevent its Muslim population from being exposed to any nonapproved religious belief, under Section 7(1) of the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984, the Malaysian government restricts and bans books and other publications if it believes that they are contrary to the official version of
Islam. According to the government’s Bernama news agency, between 2000 and July 2009, 397 books were banned.
⁶⁶

The censorship includes non-Muslim books. In 1986, the Interior Security Ministry banned the word “Allah” from publications of the non-Islamic community, on the grounds that this could confuse Muslims, though the ordinance was not always applied. This restriction is unusual since Arabic-speaking Christians have used the word for centuries, as have Christians in neighboring Indonesia. Apparently, the Malaysian government thinks its population is easily confused. In April 2005, the prime minister even declared that Malay-language Bibles should have the words “Not for Muslims” printed on the front, could only be distributed in churches or Christian bookshops, and could not be used in Malay homes. In 2003, the government stopped publication of a Bible in Iban, the language of an indigenous Malaysian tribe, ostensibly to prevent Christians from proselytizing.
⁶⁷

The ban on the use of “Allah” was invoked in December 2007 in a lawsuit, by the Islamic religious councils of seven Malaysian states and the Malaysian Chinese Muslim Association, against the Malay-language
Catholic Herald
magazine, published by the Catholic diocese of Kuala Lumpur. Christians responded that the use of “Allah” as a general term for God predates Islam, that the word is a variation of the Hebrew “Elohim,” that it has been used for centuries, including in Malaysia, as a “common reference to God” by Christians and Muslims, and that only recently had Malay diction started to treat “Allah” as “the God of Islam.” Christians also maintained that, in any case, Malaysia’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom allowed them to use the word.
⁶⁸

The Interior Security Minister sided with the Islamic councils and banned the magazine on the grounds that using the term “could increase tension and create confusion among Muslims.”
⁶⁹
While the
Herald
is generally distributed only in Catholic churches, some Muslims complained that the offending word could be found on the newspaper’s website. In January 2009, the
Herald
was allowed to publish but was still prohibited from using “Allah.” Malaysian authorities also asked the
Herald
’s publisher to mark the front of the paper with the words
terhad
, or “restricted” in Malay, as solely for distribution to Christians or churches.
⁷⁰
On December 31, 2009, Judge Lau Bee Lan of the High Court ruled that Christians have “a constitutional right to use [the word] Allah,” though only because the
Herald
was focused on reaching Christians. The government appealed for calm but quickly said that it would appeal, and, on January 6, Judge Lan suspended her judgment pending an appeals court decision. Subsequently, eleven churches were vandalized, some were firebombed, a Sikh temple was vandalized, pigs’ heads were found in two mosques, two young Muslims desecrated a communion wafer, and the
Herald
’s lawyers’ office was ransacked.
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Subsequently, Selangor state, using the relevant Selangor sharia Criminal Offences Enactment, 1995, which can carry sentences of up to two years in prison, said that non-Muslims should not use thirty-five “Islamic” terms including “Allah,”
Firman Allah
(Allah’s decree),
solat
(daily prayers),
Rasul
(prophet),
mubaligh
(missionary),
mufti, iman
(faith),
Kaabah
(the Holy cubicle),
Qiblat
(the direction in which the Muslims pray), and
haji
(Muslims who have done the pilgrimage). Mohammed Khusrin Munawi, director of the Selangor Islamic Religious Department (Jais), said: “These are listed under the Control and Restriction of the Propagation of Non-Islamic Religious Enactment. They cannot be used to promote religions other than Islam.”
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Beginning in March 2009, government officials seized Christian books and other materials containing “Allah.” By the end of the year, Malaysian port and customs authorities had impounded some 15,000 Bibles. The Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) said that this violated a 2005 agreement that it had with the government. It also created the problem that, since Indonesia, whose language is similar to Malay, has Bibles with “Allah” in them, Indonesian Bibles and other Christian literature could not be imported to Malaysia.
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Despite these increasing restrictions on non-Muslim literature, the government’s major efforts are directed toward books that do not conform to its version of Islam or, as the official bulletins say, that contain “twisted facts on Islam that can undermine the faith of Muslims.” Some of these are materials of more radical Muslims, including Wahhabis, while others are more liberal interpretations of Islam. In some cases, there is no obvious rationale, as when it banned Paul Marshall and others,
Islam at the Crossroads: Understanding Its Beliefs, History and Conflicts
. In June 2007, the Interior Security Ministry banned thirty-seven publications “containing twisted facts” on Islam. A spokesman for the interestingly named “Secretary of the Publications and Quranic Texts Control Division,” Che Din Yusoh, said twenty-one of the publications were in English and published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Jordan, while sixteen were in Malaysian and published in Malaysia and Indonesia.
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In July 2008, the control division banned more books and specified, with reference to the Printing Presses and Publications Act, that anyone reprinting or possessing the publications could be jailed for not more than three years or fined not more than RM 20,000 (about $6,000 US) or both. One of the banned books was
Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism
by Norani Othman, published in 2005, which the government thought might confuse Muslim women. Published by the Malaysian Muslim women’s organization Sisters in Islam (SIS), the book summarized discussions among Muslim women’s groups from Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
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SIS describes itself as “Muslim women committed to promoting the rights of women within the framework of Islam. Our efforts to promote the rights of Muslim women are based on the principles of equality, justice and freedom enjoined by the Qur’an as made evident during our study of the holy text.”
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Sisters in Islam received no formal communication from the Ministry of Home Affairs or the Publications and Quranic Texts Control Division about the ban.
⁷⁷
In December 2008, they appealed the banning in the Kuala Lumpur High Court, and, on January 25, 2010, Justice Mohamed AriffYusof said that the facts of the case did not justify the banning, especially since the book had previously
been in circulation for two years without incident. He ordered the government to pay SIS’s court costs.
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In recent years, Malaysia has faced increased controversy over a series of conversions from Islam to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Christianity. While there have been some threats and detentions, these cases, unlike in some other countries, especially in the Middle East, are usually addressed nonviolently and through a legal process. In practice, Muslims are restricted from converting to another religion. Ten states—Terengganu, Kelantan, Selangor, Perak, Kedah, Malacca, Pahang, Negeri Sembilan, Johor, and Perlis—have laws limiting the spread of other religions to Muslims.
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The process for conversion in Negeri Sembilan is for the applicant to be counseled for a year by a mufti. If, after a year, the person still wants to convert, a sharia judge may permit the application. No other states have procedures for an applicant to leave Islam; in some, attempted conversion is punishable by a fine or jail term. Sharia courts have also traditionally denied requests for conversion out of Islam and have sentenced applicants to confined “rehabilitation.”