Free Malaysia Today（http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/）
Centhra’s fondness to scapegoat evangelicalism?
4 July 2017
Faulting local Christians as the cause of Muslims converting, and calling for a ban on evangelical groups, seems to be an attempt to scapegoat local Christians.
by Joshua Woo Sze Zeng
The CEO of the Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (Centhra), Azril Mohd Amin recently said that Christian evangelicalism should be banned because there were 400 Muslims who had converted to Christianity. This is, according to him, a matter of “national security”, and it is against Article 11(4) of the Federal Constitution that forbids the propagation of other religions except Islam to Muslims in the country. Assuming that there were indeed 400 Malaysians who switched to attending church, how is that a national security concern?
The language of national security refers to any serious threat to the sovereignty of an independent country and/or the lives of citizens of a nation. As such, terrorism is a matter of national security. To say that religious conversion is a national security concern implies that conversion is akin to an act of terrorism. So, does Azril think that being a member of a church is akin to joining a terrorist cell? In any case, how the CEO of a research centre comes to see conversion to Christianity as being on par with terrorism is really beyond common sense. Azril alleged that the cause of the 400 conversions was due to local Christians’ propagation to Muslims, which is against Article 11(4).
In the present information age, people have easy access to knowledge of all religions. We can read up on the Internet or books, or watch online videos or listen to podcasts to learn about whichever religion that we are curious about. We can even have online chats with people from other countries to learn about other faiths. Moreover, people are also highly mobile nowadays. We can learn about other religions while traveling, working or during student exchange programmes overseas. We can also learn simply through casual chit-chat with friends from other religions, or by attending an interfaith event.
What individuals want to do with the knowledge they have about other religions is entirely up to themselves. If they choose to stay in their own religion, that is their liberty. If they choose to convert, that is also their liberty. I think none of these is against Article 11(4) of the Constitution, unless one ridiculously believes that this rule should also forbid Muslims and non-Muslims from exchanging information about their own religion. Ignoring the other possibilities and faulting the local Christians’ propagation work as the cause of Muslims’ converting, so much so as to call for the banning of evangelical groups, seems to be an attempt to scapegoat the local Christians. Why the CEO of Centhra harbours such fondness to scapegoat local Christians remains a mystery. Unless it is bigotry. I have pointed out in an earlier article that Azril had very ill-informed ideas about “evangelicalism.” His latest remark has shown that he has more of such ideas on other things.
・Joshua Woo Sze Zeng is a municipal councillor with the Seberang Prai municipal council (MPSP) and an alumni of Cambridge University’s Inter-Faith Programme.
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