Navigating multiculturalism in Malaysia

Apr 12, 2025

Making Sense - Emmanuel Joseph

As Lent draws to a close, and we celebrate Palm Sunday today, Catholics finally enter the last phase of our Easter preparation, one week from the “joyous” mood our Muslim friends got into two weeks ago when they celebrated Hari Raya, while many of us were still unable to partake in the rendang dishes, unless they are vegan meat, which as the name suggests, is …a mockery?

Coinciding with most of Lent was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This usually presents an opportunity for Muslims and Christians who observe to come together, but thanks to a rise in politically driven conservatism, such occasions are now somewhat frowned upon. Even multireligious breaking of fast, a commonplace event for years, has been waning, in part due to increasing restrictions on Muslims from participating in such events, and in part from fear of misunderstanding by non-Muslims organizing them. These days, apart from such feel-good features in English dailies and sporadic initiatives from relevant government agencies, celebrations of multiculturalism through religious lenses are becoming less common.

But it is precisely because of the rise in misunderstandings that these events need to not only carry on but be expanded, to both stem the increasing tensions over race and religious relations, and to improve it.

The unusually heated argument that happened in the past few weeks over the erection of a new Madani mosque in Kuala Lumpur is evidence of it. This incident, interspersed with videos of random people being slapped by security guards to motorists dominated our Internet browsing for weeks. Unfortunately, this negative news trend doesn’t seem to be dying down.

Both sides had valid points in their arguments - the temple, at the end of the day, was sitting on private land, but the government, via DBKL, perhaps should have considered the temple’s position before selling off the said land.

This is, unfortunately, a common problem we see with Hindu temples here, where urban migration, a shift in historically Tamil occupations, increasing price of land and shifting religious demographics are pushing worshippers away from their historical sites into rather distant and sometimes unrealistic places of worship, that while on paper makes sense in terms of geography or land size, presents the new issues of accessibility and lack of historical context.

Catholics too, face this problem as a significant portion of our flock originate from Tamil estates and we have seen closures and mergers of many chapels, especially in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan. Unlike Catholics who have overarching authorities like diocesan committees to guide the faithful, many of our Hindu friends worship in temples that are local and largely autonomous. Overseeing bodies tend to be coordinative and advisory in nature, like the Malaysian Hindu Sangam.

This problem is compounded by complex land ownership issues and trusts, most of which depend on goodwill from either state or municipal authorities, private land owners like housing developers and real estate investment trust funds, plantation owners, government or semi government agencies who own land banks and reserves that sometimes need to be activated at the cost of farms, structures, and sometimes, even houses of worship.

To their credit, most of these people respect places of worship, especially those that served as historical places of worships of previous workers, despite its dwindling population - our national utility company for example, has a few temples on their headquarters grounds. Some of our military camps maintain chapels on or near premises, as do a few universities. Our police force has a gurdwara near its old headquarters.

For the rest, the places of worship are relatively well-funded and contributions stream in from the business communities whose worshippers use it as a form of community service responsibility (CSR).

Can the Church, or its members, do anything? Perhaps not directly, but as members of a shared community, we could be agents of peaceful dialogue and communication.

Often politicians respond to their respective community sentiments, and it unfortunately makes sense for them to pick a side and hold on to a communal position, it would be difficult to expect politicians to navigate out of this situation due to the risk involved with it. While empathizing with these sorts of situations, we could offer rationale, expertise and compassion instead of adding fuel to the fire.

As humans, we have, unfortunately, a tendency to view things as binary in naturewinning and losing, oppressor and victor, right and wrong, black and white.

In a complicated, multicultural society such as ours, this is rarely the case as there are a hundred and one things to be weighed and measured to maintain all sides of sensitivities, in the face of communalism, increasingly partisan politics, rapidly shifting global trends, changing local demographics and so on. This has been the case for the past 100 years, just that we did not have half a dozen social media outlets for opportunistic parties to capitalise on issues.

These conversations need to happen at long tables in meetings rooms along the corridors of power, but those important discussions are culminations of thousands of Malaysian small talks that happens over water machines in offices, tables in coffee shops, outside fitting rooms in shopping malls, at strategic points in sermons about empty tombs during the Easter Octave, and even over plates of rendang, at a Raya or Easter gathering.

(Emmanuel Joseph oversees IT as his 9-5 job and from 5-9, he serves a few NGOs, think tanks and volunteer groups. He serves as an advisor for Projek Dialog and is a Fellow with the Institute of Research and Development of Policy.)