JULY 3 — Yesterday afternoon I attended an interfaith dialogue organised by a local Roman Catholic and Muslim leaders.
There were five panellists, each representing their own religion: Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.
Each speaker spoke for 10-20 minutes. Followed by Q&A session. Here's my observation.
All speakers presented their religion very well. There's common emphasis on the goodness of religion. Very positive attitude for mutual learning.
However, there's serious lack of in-depth engagement with the actual interfaith challenges in our society. The panellists have described their respective religion beautifully, which was only possible when religion is abstracted from social reality.
For example, the Muslim presenter talked about the Quranic teaching that people should be respected and protected for their religious practices, “For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.” (Q 109:6)
This of course sounds good. But if we take Malaysian social reality into consideration, where Muslims are the hegemonic majority with non-Muslims as minority, then this Quranic verse actually reinforces the hegemony.
Take for instance, the (for lack of better word) propagation of religion which is equally taken as religious obligation by both Muslims and Christians. If the Quranic teaching of mutual respect for religious practices is to be upheld, then non-Muslims should have their rights to propagate to Muslims be protected in the same way as Muslims' rights to propagate to Christians. Since, “For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.”
But that's not the case in Malaysia where the majority has its hegemony over the minority, and thus only Muslims' religious obligation to propagate to non-Muslims is protected. Non-Muslim's propagation to Muslims is a crime.
The same abstraction from social reality is found across the other four presentations. Take Christianity for example, the speaker emphasises that Christianity teaches people to “love our enemy.”
Again, this sounds good when abstracted. But when we actually look at how this is manifested in history, there are Christian theologians like Augustine and Aquinas who teach about “just war theory” that is not seen as contradictory to loving the enemy.
When abstracted from social reality, all religions can be presented as too lofty to shed light on the real interfaith challenges facing our society.
I raised this during the Q&A session, asked the panellists for opinion on how to engage our interfaith discourse in a more constructive manner. Perhaps the issue is too sensitive, and thus no one attempted an answer at that time.
There was much room for improvement for interfaith work in the country. The programme was no less a good and encouraging initiative and more can be done.
* Joshua Woo Sze Zeng is a municipal councillor and an alumni of Cambridge University’s interfaith programme.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
