Islam is a significant force in Malaysia, given that virtually all Malays, who comprise just over half the population, are Muslim; in Singapore, where three-quarters of the population are Chinese, Buddhism is the main religion. There’s a smaller, but no less significant, Hindu Indian presence in both countries, while the other chief belief system is animism, adhered to by many of the indigenous peoples of Malaysia. While the colonial period drew Christian missionaries to the region, the British, in a bid to avoid unrest among the Malays, were restrained in their evangelical efforts. Christian missionaries had more success in Borneo than on the Peninsula; indeed, the main tribal group in Sabah, the Kadazan/Dusun, is Christian, as are many or most Kelabit and Iban in Sarawak. That said, Christianity is a significant minority religion in Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, with a notable following among middle-class Chinese and Indians.
One striking feature of religion here is that it can be a syncretic blend of beliefs and influences. In a region where fusion is visible in everything from food to language, it’s not hard to come across individuals who profess one faith, yet pray or make offerings to deities of another, in the warm-hearted belief that all religions contain some truth and that it therefore makes sense not to put all your spiritual eggs in one devotional basket.
Although many of Malaysia’s indigenous groups are now nominally Christian or Muslim, many of their old animist beliefs and rites still survive. In the animist world-view, everything in nature – mountains, trees, rocks and lakes – has a controlling soul or spirit (semangat in Malay) that has to be mollified. For the Orang Asli groups in the interior of the Peninsula, remaining animist beliefs often centre on healing and funeral ceremonies. A sick person, particularly a child, is believed to be invaded by a bad spirit, and drums are played and incantations performed to persuade the spirit to depart. The death of a member of the family is followed by a complex process of burial and reburial – a procedure that, it is hoped, ensures an easy passage for the person’s spirit.
In Sarawak, birds, especially the hornbill, are of particular significance to the Iban and Kelabit peoples. Many Kelabit depend upon the arrival of migrating flocks to decide when to plant their rice crop, while Iban augury interprets sightings of the hornbill and other birds as good or bad omens. In some accounts of Iban beliefs, two bird spirits are involved in the creation of the Earth and sky, and the Iban themselves are descended from a bird spirit named Sengalang Burong.
Hinduism arrived in Malaysia long before Islam, brought by Indian traders more than a thousand years ago. While almost all of Malaysia’s ancient Hindu past has been obliterated, elements live on in the popular arts like wayang kulit (shadow plays), the plots of which are drawn from the sacred Ramayana.
The central tenet of Hinduism is the belief that life is a series of rebirths and reincarnations that eventually lead to spiritual release. A whole variety of deities are worshipped, which on the surface makes Hinduism appear complex; however, a loose understanding of the Vedas – the religion’s holy books – is enough for the characters and roles of the main gods to become apparent. The deities you’ll come across most often are the three manifestations of the faith’s supreme divine being: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer.
Hinduism returned to the Peninsula in the late nineteenth century when immigrants from southern India arrived to work on the Malayan rubber and oil-palm plantations. The Hindu celebration of Rama’s victory – the central theme of the Ramayana – in time became the national holiday of Deepavali (or Diwali; the festival of lights), while another Hindu festival, Thaipusam, when Lord Subramaniam and elephant-headed Ganesh, the sons of Shiva, are worshipped, is marked by some of the region’s most prominent religious gatherings.
Step over the threshold of a Hindu temple in Malaysia or Singapore and you enter a kaleidoscope world of gods and fanciful creatures. The style is typically Dravidian (South Indian), as befits the largely Tamil population, with a soaring gopura, or entrance tower, teeming with sculptures and a central courtyard leading to an inner sanctum housing the presiding deity. In the temple precinct, you’ll invariably witness incense being burned, the application of sandalwood paste to the forehead, and puja (ritualistic acts of worship).
Islam gained its first firm foothold in the Malay Peninsula with the conversion of Paramesvara, the ruler of Melaka, in the early fifteenth century. The commercial success of Melaka accelerated the spread of Islam; one after another the powerful Malay court rulers took to the religion, adopting the Arabic title “sultan”, either because of sincere conversion or because they took a shrewd view of the advantages to be gained by embracing this international faith. On a cultural level, too, Islam had its attractions – its concepts of equality before Allah freed people from the Hindu caste system that had dominated parts of the region. Even after the Melaka Sultanate fell in 1511, the hold of Islam was strengthened by the migration of Muslim merchants to Brunei.
The first wave of Islamic missionaries were mostly Sufis, representing the mystical and generally more liberal wing of Islam. In the region Sufism absorbed some animist and Hindu beliefs, including the tradition of pluralist deity worship. However, Sufism’s influence declined in the early nineteenth century when the puritanical Wahhabi sect of mainstream Sunni Islam captured Mecca. The return to the Koran’s basic teachings became identified with a more militant approach, leading to jihads in Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu against the Malay rulers’ Siamese overlords and, subsequently, the British.
Islam in Malaysia and Singapore today is a mixture of Sunni and Sufi elements, and its adherents are still largely comprised of Malays, though a minority of the Indian community is Muslim, too. While Islam as practised locally is relatively liberal, the trend away from tacit secularism that has swept the Muslim world in the last two or three decades, has not left the two countries untouched. There’s now a better understanding of Islam’s tenets – and thus better compliance with them – among Muslims in both countries.
Of course, this drift has its social and political dimensions. In Malaysia, with its history of sometimes awkward race relations, Islam is something of a badge of identity for the Malays; it’s significant that the Malaysian constitution practically regards being Malay as equivalent to being Muslim. Thus Malaysia has seen an increase in religious programming on TV and in state spending on often ostentatious new mosques, while even in consumerist Singapore, the Malay minority is becoming more actively engaged in religion. Malaysia’s religious establishment has also become more vocal, making proclamations to discourage Muslims from practising yoga (because of its supposed Hindu origins) and Muslim women from wearing short hair and trousers (because this would apparently encourage lesbianism). In 2017, there were also instances of Muslim-owned launderettes displaying signs barring non-Muslims from using the facilities; the government, seemingly afraid of confronting part of its support base, merely noted that it disapproved of segregation, and it took intervention from Malaysia’s sultans – who normally avoid getting embroiled in politics – to force them to back down, at least for now.
One striking way in which Islam influences day-to-day affairs is that in certain areas, Muslim and non-Muslim citizens are subject to different laws. In Malaysia, for example, while it would be acceptable for an unmarried couple to share a hotel room if neither person is Muslim, it would be illegal (an act known as khalwat) if both were Muslim; if only one of them were Muslim, only that person would be committing an illegal act. This legal divide is reflected in the judicial systems of both Malaysia and Singapore, in which syariah (sharia) courts interpreting Islamic law exist alongside courts and laws derived from the British legal system.
Both Malaysia and Singapore limit Islamic jurisprudence to matters concerning the family and certain types of behaviour deemed transgressions against Islam, such as khalwat, or for a Muslim to consume alcohol in public. In this regard, the syariah courts are in many ways subservient to the secular legal framework. This also means the harsher aspects of Islamic justice, such as stoning or the cutting off of a thief’s hand, are not deemed permissible; an attempt in the 1990s by the state government of Kelantan, run by the Islamist opposition PAS party, to introduce them within the state was thwarted by Malaysia’s federal government. The Islamic standard of proof in a case concerning rape – requiring the victim to be able to produce four witnesses – also does not apply, since rape cases are tried within the secular system.
However, the two juridical systems are experiencing a sort of territorial dispute in the important area of religious conversion. It’s very difficult for Malaysian Muslims to convert out of Islam as the secular courts are unwilling to uphold their choice without the involvement of the syariah court, which might refuse permission or, worse, wish to punish them as apostates. In this Catch-22 situation, any Muslims who take up a new faith or no faith at all can never make their choice official, and for the most part simply keep mum. Controversy has also arisen when one person in a marriage converts to Islam and then wants to use Islamic law to divorce the spouse or change the registered religion of their children, for example. The roles of the two legal systems in these situations ought to be clarified as a matter of urgency, but there has been little progress.
An important link between animism and the Islam of today is provided by the Malay bomoh, a kind of shaman. While bomohs keep a low profile in these times of greater Islamic orthodoxy – no bomoh operates out of an office, and there are no college courses to train bomohs or listings of practitioners in the telephone directory – the fact is that every Malay community can still summon a bomoh when it’s felt one is needed to cure disease, bring rain during droughts, exorcize spirits from a newly cleared plot before building work starts, or rein in the behaviour of a wayward spouse. A central part of the bomoh’s trade is recitation, often of sections of the Koran, while – like his Orang Asli counterparts – he uses techniques such as burning herbs to cure or ease pain and disease.
In Malaysia, every town, village and hamlet has its mosque, while the capital city of each state hosts a grandiose Masjid Negeri (state mosque). You’ll rarely see contemporary mosques varying from the standard square building topped by onion domes and minarets, though the oldest mosques reveal unusual Sumatran or other Southeast Asian influences. Two additional standard features can be found inside the prayer hall, namely the mihrab, a niche indicating the direction of Mecca, towards which believers face during prayers (the green kiblat arrow on the ceiling of most Malaysian hotel rooms fulfils the same function), and the mimbar (pulpit), used by the imam.
One of the five pillars of Islam is that the faithful should pray five times a day – at dawn (called the subuh prayer in Malay), midday (zuhur, or jumaat on a Friday), mid-afternoon (asar), dusk (maghrib) and mid-evening (isyak). On Friday, the day of the communal jumaat prayer, Muslims converge on their nearest mosque around noon to hear the imam deliver a khutbah (sermon); all employers allow Muslim staff a three-hour break for the purpose.
The three different strands in Chinese belief ostensibly point in very different directions. Confucianism is a philosophy based on piety, loyalty, humanitarianism and familial devotion, a set of principles that permeate every aspect of Chinese life; Buddhism is a religion primarily concerned with the attainment of a state of personal enlightenment, nirvana; and Taoism propounds unity with nature as its chief tenet.
The Chinese are seldom doctrinaire; someone who claims to be Buddhist, Taoist or Confucianist may be in practice be a mixture of all three. Ancestor worship is also common, as is devotion to folk deities such as Tua Peh (or Pek) Kong, sometimes described as the God of Prosperity.
The rules of feng shui are rigorously applied to the construction of Chinese temples, so that each building has a layout and orientation rendering it free from evil influences. Visitors wishing to cross the threshold of a temple have to step over a kerb intended to trip up evil spirits, and walk through doors flanked by fearsome door gods; fronting the doors may be two stone lions, providing yet another defence.
Temples are normally constructed around a framework of huge, lacquered timber beams, adorned with intricately carved warriors, animals and flowers. More figures are moulded onto outer walls, which are dotted with octagonal, hexagonal or round grille-worked windows. Larger temples typically consist of a front entrance hall opening onto a walled-in courtyard, beyond which is the hall of worship, where joss sticks are burned below images of the deities. The most striking element of a Chinese temple is often its roof – a grand, multitiered affair with low, overhanging eaves, the ridges alive with dragons, phoenixes and folkloric characters in scenes often assembled using multicoloured pottery shards, an artistic technique known as jiannian. In the temple grounds you’ll see sizeable ovens, stuffed constantly with paper money, prayer books and other offerings; and possibly a pagoda – the presence of which is, once again, a defence against evil spirits. Temples linked to individual clans may also have an ancestral hall displaying ranks of upright ancestral tablets, each representing a forebear of a clan member.