KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 22 — Kuala Lumpur City Hall’s decision to nix an upcoming beer festival following protest from PAS and conservative Muslims has once again resurfaced the problematic overlap of Muslim and minority rights in Malaysia.

To many non-Muslims, the Better Beer Festival ban signalled growing intolerance in the country. Conservative Muslims, on the other hand, argued that such festivals are an affront to Islam and the country’s Muslim-majority population, who are prohibited from consuming alcohol.

The latter view is rooted in a long-held belief preached by hardline Muslim clerics that alcohol consumption inevitably leads to vice and social decadence.

The PAS leader who initiated the protest against this year’s edition (the fifth) of the Better Beer Festival was no less dramatic: He declared that a beer festival was a pesta maksiat (vice party) and allowing it to take place would turn Malaysia into “Asia’s vice den.”

On social media, conservative Muslims used this argument to justify calls for authorities to ban the beer festival. The more extreme elements have taken things a step further by using the same reasoning to call for the total shutdown of entertainment outlets and bar alcohol sales altogether.

But is the view corroborated by data? Or are they merely repetitive anecdotes?

Effects of alcohol

From one angle, the anti-booze crusaders may have a point. The negatives outweigh the positives in almost all studies conducted on heavy drinking.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) noted that alcohol, a psychoactive substance with dependence-producing properties, is a “social and economic burden in societies.”

The harmful use of alcohol is also the component cause of more than 200 disease and injury conditions in individuals, most notably alcohol dependence, liver cirrhosis, cancers and injuries, WHO says.

Alcohol-related deaths are also high. In 2012, about 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9 per cent of all global deaths, were attributable to alcohol consumption, WHO noted in its Global Status report published in 2013. In the same year, 139 million DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), or 5.1 per cent of the global burden of disease and injury, were attributable to alcohol consumption.

There are many other studies that echo the concerns raised by WHO’s global report on the economic and social impact of alcohol abuse and addiction.

Economically, healthcare costs for some countries with heavy-drinking problems have prompted governments to enforce tighter regulation and impose heavier penalties to discourage alcohol-related offences.

However, there is a big catch: WHO also noted that different cultures and environment determine the varying degree of alcohol-related problems. In the same report quoted above, the world body explains:

“Environmental factors such as economic development, culture, availability of alcohol and the level and effectiveness of alcohol policies are relevant factors in explaining differences and historical trends in alcohol consumption and related harm.”

This means factors like culture, level of education, socio-economic development play a crucial role in determining just how bad a particular country’s alcohol-related problems; so a highly-educated society with comfortable income may drink more than a country that frowns on alcohol, but the potential for social issues to appear may be limited.

It’s also important to note that most alcohol-related studies focused on the effects of heavy alcohol use, so the findings were mostly confined to health and economic impacts of alcohol abuse.

While WHO did suggest a need to look into the social costs of heavy alcohol-use, it noted that there is no conclusive study to link beers and liquors to social vice, or if the presence of alcohol itself can lead to the corrosion of moral values in a particular society, as claimed by some PAS leaders or Islamic hardliners.

Malaysia’s global crime ranking

The global crime ranking could further debunk the argument linking alcohol consumption to social decadence.

Malaysia has one of the lowest booze-intake rates in the world, according to WHO’s global status report  on alcohol. In its 2010 world ranking, the country was ranked 162nd among 191 countries.

Malaysia also has moderate risk in the agency’s patterns of drinking score, which is used to identify risky drinking patterns. And while the country scored relatively high in the episodic drinking score (around 20 per cent per capita), WHO noted that the figure may not accurately reflect the population’s overall drinking behaviour:

“There are also differences among countries with similarly high adult per capita alcohol consumption. In some rather low consuming countries, such as India, Malawi, Pakistan and Zambia, a high proportion of drinkers drink heavily on single occasions, suggesting an ‘all-or-nothing’ type of behaviour. In some European countries, such as France with high APC, heavy episodic drinking is rather low, suggesting that APC can be driven by more regular but moderate drinking patterns.”

Yet Malaysia has one of the highest crime rates in the world, sitting in the top 20 list of online crime rate perception surveys like Numbeo and Nationmaster compared to countries with liberal drinking cultures like Singapore, South Korea, Japan or Germany.

Germany, the birthplace of Oktoberfest, a month-long coming-together and beer-appreciation event that Germans and people from over the world celebrates yearly, is one the highest booze drinking nations in the world, sitting at 23rd spot. But Germany is the seventh safest country in the world, according to London-based research house, The Legatum Institute. South Korea, the soju-loving country, drinks more than Germany. The country was ranked 17th by WHO in its 2010 alcohol consumption rate index but like Germany, it sits in the lowest bracket of Numbeo’s crime perception index, at 86th spot out of 110 countries.

Japan and Singapore are ranked 71st and 152nd in the list. Yet the two countries, which are also known to hold the type of open festivals that religious hardliners have blamed social ills on, are the two safest countries in the world, according to numerous surveys.

It is also important to note that these data pose questions about claims linking piety to social discipline. For example, more than half of Japan’s population are not religious, but crime or social ills barely exist there.

On the contrary, a religious country like Pakistan has one of the highest rape cases in the world, averaging at 28.8 per 100,000 people, according to a report published earlier this year.

Back home, analysts say Kelantan’s problems with social ills shows religion is no measure for a morally upstanding society. The state had been under Islamist rule for over two decades, yet it has some of the most glaring social problems.

Kelantan is among the top four states with the highest reported rape cases, and HIV infection cases increased last year, according to official data.

Three of Malaysia’s most religiously conservative states also have a porn fetish. Just recently, website Quartz reported that Terengganu, once controlled by PAS, had the highest number of internet searches for porn among the 13 states in the last 12 months next to Kedah and Kelantan, according to Google Trends data.

Kelantan and Terengganu also had the highest Internet search for former Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa when she visited Malaysia in May, according to Google data compiled by a former journalist.

Ignorance

Recognising the serious impact booze-related problems can have on its population and finances, governments around the world have enforced tighter regulation. But none of the measures constitute an outright ban of open events involving alcohol.

WHO has noted that member states have drawn up a “wide range of effective global, regional and national policies and interventions are in place to reduce the harmful use of alcohol” which has been effective in scaling down the problems for the past few decades.

For example, Singapore enforced a new law in 2015 barring alcohol from all public places from 10.30pm to 7am. Locations designated as alcohol-prone with higher potential for public disorder have stricter conditions, The Straits Times reported. Countries like Norway or Japan also impose time curfews and designated drinking areas.

Malaysian alcohol laws are also relatively similar. Local councils have the absolute power to decide who sells alcohol and where they can be sold under Section 32(1) and 33(1) of Malaysia's 1976 Excise Act Law, which requires all vendors, retailers, shops and restaurants to have a licence to sell liquor.

Among the prerequisite for licences are pubs and bars must operate at designated locations, usually far from Muslim-majority places. This explains why alcohol-serving outlets are confined in pockets of specific areas around and outside the capital city. The arrangement is similar in other parts of the country as well.

For events in open spaces that involve alcohol sales, organisers must apply for special permits. Among the preconditions for approval is also for organisers to hold the event within a designated confined space. Based on the permits issued for past beer festivals, compliance by organisers was never an issue.

The fifth edition of the Better Beer Festival would have been no different. This year’s location of choice was the Publika complex, situated within Dutamas, a posh and cosmopolitan upper class enclave which is well-known for its bars and alcohol-serving restaurants.

Mybeer (M) Sdn Bhd, the company behind the event, in response to the ban said the planned event met all the necessary requirements. Among them was that the fifth Better Beer Festival would have been held close to the bars and pubs in the complex, so there wouldn’t have been any issue about the event’s proximity to Muslims since they are not supposed to be there in the first place.

Malay Mail Online’s assessment on comments posted about the controversy on social media found that the opposition against the beer festival was mostly based on a perception that there would be unregulated drinking, held openly and near Muslims.

This has led to the belief that the festival would be one of debauchery where people will be having sex freely or engage in criminal activities.

But there is little data to support the view. Up to now, no crime or health-related cases linked to previous festivals have been reported to date.

The decline in the global alcohol consumption rate as noted by WHO’s study, and the reported decline in alcohol sales further indicate the ability of responsible adults to regulate booze intake, without any need for moral policing.