Malaysia goes to the polls on March 8 and the campaign “is turning into a battle for the religious high ground among majority Muslims,” as our correspondent Jalil Hamid writes. The latest twist is an offer by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s UMNO party to build or repair at least 500 mosques if it wins. Election promises like that show how tough its battle is against the fundamentalist Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS), led by clerics who promote “purer” Islamic values. “UMNO and PAS are engaged in a battle: ‘I’m more Islamic than you are’,” says political analyst Ooi Kee Beng.

For its part, the PAS warns darkly of violence and says it doubts the election will be free and fair. It has been especially critical of a change in rules for registering candidates that it says could discriminate against it. “If the Election Commission rejects the nomination papers, we will run amok,” PAS Vice-President Mohammad Sabu told reporters. “But we don’t want this election to end up as in Kenya.”

Analysts point to this growing rivalry for Muslim votes as a gathering cloud over the religious pluralism the country has long been known for. Malaysia presents a religious kaleidoscope, with about 60% Muslims, 20% Buddhists, 9% Christians, 6% Hindus and smaller minorities following Confucianism, Taoism, other faiths or none at all. Religious freedom is the law, but in practice Islam enjoys an advantage over other faiths and the gap between it and the others has been growing.

In a recent post on the blog The Other Malaysia, political scientist Farish Noor captured the sense of loss felt by Malaysians who value the pluralist tradition. He called it “Still Looking for an Islam to call Our Own?” –

Malaysia, and Malaysian-Muslims in particular, seem to have lost their historical bearings and do not know what sort of Muslims they want to be. The emergence of the dreaded moral vigilantes, of exclusive Muslim lobby groups and NGOs, the calls for more Islamic norms to be inculcated in the conduct of governance, the demands for Shariah to be made national law, and the calls for a further Islamisation of Malaysia all seem to stem from a new wave of Muslim political normativity that is so alien to the Islam that was first brought to this part of the world by the Indian-Muslim mystics and missionaries of the 13th to 15th centuries. If in the past Muslim preachers were happy to preach the universal values of Islam using an idiom and discourse that was replete with local cultural references, what we are seeing today is more than simply the Islamisation of Malaysia: it is the Arabisation of our Asian society.

Now I write this without any hint of anti-Arabism in mind. But in a global age where cultural nuances are being effaces and cultural particularities are being flattened out, I am just as wary of the Arabisation of Malaysian society as I am of the Americanisation of Malaysian society. Between Starbucks and MacDonalds on the one hand, and Wahabbism – with its fervent distaste for Sufi mysticism, eclecticism and pluralism on the other – we are lost and still looking for an Islam to call our own.

Noor also offers a good introduction to the complexities of religion and politics in Malaysia in the recent post The Threat to Secular Democracy in Malaysia for the blog Malaysia Votes.

Mark Bendeich, our bureau chief in Kuala Lumpur, says Noor — a Malaysian Muslim — echoed the views of many secular Malaysians. “The trend he describes is an increasingly loud lament of Malaysia’s large non-Muslim community,” he added, noting this trend had accelerated under former Prime Minister Mahathir, “whose critics say he wrapped himself in the cloak of Islam to defend against opposition Islamists. But Malaysia is still a very long way from Wahhabism. You can still find churches, Hindu temples, Chinese temples and mosques on opposite street corners in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Malacca… Malaysia still clings to its pluralist tradition, but the grip is getting weaker in the eyes of many Malaysians .”

Remember the “burkini”? This cover-all swimsuit made a big splash in Australia last year when its introduction allowed Muslim women to stay covered but swim and even become lifeguards. The lycra suit looked like an ingenious adaptation of tradition and technology that could help integrate Muslim women more into Australian society. Our story from January 2007 said about 9,000 had been sold so far.

Its debut in the Netherlands has not been as successful. A young woman was ordered out of an indoor pool in the northeastern city of Zwolle last Thursday after only five minutes in the water with her two-year-old son. The pool manager said users found burkinis objectionable so the woman — a convert named Liselotte Buitelaar — should swim only in special hours set aside for separate groups. Like the obese, who have their own special hours, he told the daily Dagblad van het Noorden (English here). The manager said he was afraid other swimmers would stop coming if they saw a burkini there. “It costs me clients. Money is money,” he told the daily Trouw.

Trouw said the burkini figured in The Hague’s parliamentary question time last month and Jet Bussemaker, state secretary for sport, said he thought it helped integration. In the Zwolle local council, the Socialists and Greens have protested against the ban, saying people should be able to decide themselves what kind of swimsuits they wear.

A Dutch company called Woortman Sportswear has been selling burkinis for about a year, in different cuts and colours (that’s their ad at the right). Their designer, Lebanese- Australian Aheda Zanetti, says on the website:”When a Muslim woman is participating or competing at a national or international level, the first comments made about her concern Islam or the way she dresses … By providing the appropriate clothing for the Muslim woman, who complies with religious, cultural and sports obligation, we are helping to bring out the best in Muslim woman, to prove that a Muslim woman is a role model to other women in the world, not an oppressed, no name, and no face being.”

In this Reuters video below, Zanetti says the burkini is also good for protection against the sun. Mecca Laalaa, the trainee lifeguard pictured above, tells how she can now swim after years of going to the beach with friends but never joining them in the water.

Rising tension between Christians and Muslims in the Arab world have come out in the open with the expulsion of foreign Christian charity workers from Jordan and the conviction of a Catholic priest in Algeria. Although the cases seem different, the background is similar. Evangelical Christians have been increasingly active in the Islamic world, doing charity and development work and also seeking to convert Muslims. The missionary part is usually a crime in Islamic countries and local authorities — rightly or wrongly — often suspect the charity part is a cover for this proselytism. This sets the stage for clashes over religious freedom, national laws, Christianity, Islam and modernity — an increasingly frequent mix in a globalised world. It also has serious effects on the long-established but fragile Christian communities living in those Muslim countries.

In Jordan, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said this week that Christians had come to Jordan under the “pretext of charitable and voluntary activities, but they had violated the law by undertaking preaching activities and were expelled”. This followed a long report by Compass Direct News, an agency that focuses on persecution of Christians around the world, that Jordan had “deported or refused residence permits to at least 27 expatriate Christian families and individuals in 2007, a number of them working with local churches or studying at a Christian seminary“.

One report said those involved were from the United States, South Korea, Egypt, Sudan and Iraq. “It is puzzling that certain small groups with a few hundred members and which are foreign to Christians in Jordan and to the history of Muslim-Christian relations, permit themselves to speak in the name of Christians and act as protectors of Christianity as if it were in danger,” it quoted the Council of Churches, the highest Christian body in Jordan, as saying. AsiaNews says: “According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, the group of eight missionaries was distributing Christian material among the Bedouins to the north and east of the capital Amman.”

The Catholic Archbishop of Algiers Henri Teissier told William Maclean, our chief correspondent for North Africa, that increased activity by evangelical Christians in Algeria had caused problems for Catholics. “For the last two years, we have serious difficulties made for us by the Algerian administration every two or three months,” he said this week. “I think it’s due to the fight against the proselytising by evangelical groups … We are not responsible for this evangelism. But the administration continues to take measures against us … (Evangelicals) have arrived in Africa. And the first to have suffered from the actions of these groups are Catholics.”

Teissier was commenting on the case of French priest Pierre Wallez, who was given a suspended one year prison sentence last month for praying with Christians in western Algeria in a place not authorised for religious worship. The Christians were illegal migrants from Cameroon based on the border with Morocco, part of a shifting community of mostly Ghanaian, Nigerian and Cameroonian migrants who have been visited by Roman Catholics priests in the area for years.

Wallez was convicted under a two-year-old law that limits non-Muslim worship to specific buildings approved by the state. The law, which also forbids proselytism, was prompted by what officials have described as an increase in the activities of Christian evangelical groups. Complaints by government officials about the alleged conversion efforts have reached a crescendo in recent weeks.

Algerian observers say conversion among Muslims there is a marginal activity rooted in a mistaken belief among some Algerians that Western countries will more readily issue them visas if they have converted to Christianity.

These tensions have arisen before in different countries around the Muslim world and they’re sure to come up again. Do you think it’s right for Christians to go and break laws in Islamic countries to convert Muslims? Or is the question whether Islamic countries should have laws against conversion and missionary work in the first place?

An interesting thing happened in the Pakistani elections this week. A country where radical Islamism has been on the rise in recent years went to the polls and voted Islamists out of office. In North West Frontier Province (NWFP), the most “Talibanised” part of the country, an avowedly secular Pashtun party — the Awami National Party — emerged as the largest party by far. This bucks what seemed to be a trend in the Muslim world, i.e. the freer the election, the more chances the Islamists have. Think back to late 1991, when the Algerian military cancelled the run-off round of elections after the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) took a strong lead in the first round. In more recent years, elections in Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza have shown Islamists doing well at the polls. In a very different context, Turkey’s “post-Islamist” AKP has gone from strength to strength thanks to the ballot box.

We expected the Islamists to lose but that doesn’t make the result any less interesting. The Islamist parties won only about 1 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, a precipitous drop from the 17 percent they scored in the 2002 vote. One crucial factor here is that opposition parties like the PPP of the late Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League were allowed to run, in contrast to the 2002 poll that the then soldier-president Pervez Musharraf restricted to”friendly” parties. The conspiracy theory in Pakistan was that Musharraf made sure the Islamists advanced in order to make himself indispensable to the United States, the argument being “if you drop me, they’ll take my place”.

In NWFP, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance of Islamist parties won only 11 of 99 seats in the provincial assembly after governing there with a majority in the assembly for the past five years. One of the most prominent Islamist leaders, the Taliban-friendly Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was defeated in his NWFP home town of Dera Ismail Khan in his bid for re-election to the National Assembly. In Baluchistan, the other province with Islamists in government, the MMA won only five of the 65 seats in the provincial assembly.

The big winner in NWFP was the Awami National Party (ANP), which went from 7 to 31 seats. The ANP was founded by Wali Khan, a secular left-winger whose father Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a legendary figure among the Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as today’s Taliban. Known as the “Frontier Gandhi,” he was an ally of Mahatma Gandhi who opposed the partition of India and creation of a “Muslim homeland” in Pakistan. A suicide bomber killed at least 16 people at an ANP rally in Charsadda, near Peshawar, only days before the election. In short, this party comes as close as could be to the opposite of the religious parties.

“The greatest achievement of this transition to democracy is the rout of religious extremists who wanted to plunge Pakistan into anarchy,” wrote Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times. “It is the rise of liberal democracy … that will help solve the problem of religious extremism in Pakistan.”

Ali Eteraz has taken a close look at what this means:

The success of the ANP in the face of the Islamist programme … shows that one way of defeating Islamism is to offer a potent and viable alternative narrative. The ANP does that in the form of Pashtun nationalism.

In my opinion, the secular resurgence has far more to do with material concerns than ideological ones. Ordinary Pakistanis didn’t vote for the ANP because they suddenly became hip to Thomas Jefferson or because they became persuaded by some blogger in Birmingham. They voted for the ANP because they want clean water. If the ANP fails to deliver the essentials of life - and simply uses nationalism the way Islamists use Islam - then they will be replaced. If western interests want to maintain the secular resurgence, they are going to have to make sure that these groups do not fail. At the moment, though, I don’t see any discussion about this in our press.

The New York Times has an interesting article about how the Muslim Students Association (MSA) there is adapting to life in the United States. Founded in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted to pray together, the chapters “were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia. Women were banned. Only Muslim men who prayed, fasted and avoided alcohol and dating were welcomed. Meetings, even idle conversations, were in Arabic.” The MSA was largely financed by Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi views presumably came along with the cheques.

The local culture and the growing number of American-born Muslims have over time influenced even an organisation like this. Now some MSA chapters have held barbecues, dodge ball games and other events where men and women could mingle freely. There are debates about whether this is proper, but the events happen. “As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

(The article doesn’t say whether the funds still flow so freely from Riyadh, but after 9/11 that seems unlikely.)

That Islam changes and adapts, both in the Muslim world and elsewhere, is nothing new. The American experience is especially interesting, though, because U.S. society is both highly individualistic and tolerant of religious practice. I discussed this with an American imam last year. Islam is adapting to local cultures in Europe as well, but with more difficulty.

The MSA example seems like one that Charles Taylor could have included in A Secular Age to illustrate how religion changes and adapts but still persists even in a post-modern world. Not that he needed another example, of course — the book is already 874 pages long…

At a conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, debate on how to tackle al Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms “jihad” and “jihadist”.

The terms have became synonymous in the West with “holy war” and “holy warrior” against the West, and al Qaeda itself has used it in that sense. But for most Muslims, as our Security Correspondent Mark Trevelyan points out, it originally means a spiritual struggle and they don’t want it hijacked anymore.

“Now to call jihadists as terrorists is either reflective of …lack of understanding of Islam, or it is I must say an intended misuse, which again is unfortunate,” General Ehsan Ul Haq, former chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff, told the annual conference of the EastWest Institute think-tank. “It might have been somewhat excusable in the trauma post-9/11 but I don’t think it is any more.”

Raphael Perl, head of the Action against Terrorism Unit at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the failure to agree on a shared terminology in the wake of the September 11 attacks was “a major mistake on our part.”

Read the whole article here. And then let us know if you think that the way these terms are used muddles our understanding of what is going on.

UPDATE: The trial ended in stalemate on Feb. 29 and a retrial is due in a few months. Murphy-O’Connor was not called to testify.

The British papers are all over the story of the libel suit brought by former spokesman for London’s Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor against the Daily Mail. The tabloid wrote in 2006 that Austen Ivereigh, 41, had pressured one former girlfriend into having an abortion and wanted another to abort twins she was carrying (she later miscarried). He flatly denies the charges and accuses the Daily Mail of making him lose his job and his reputation. The story broke at a time when Ivereigh was an active Church campaigner against abortion.

The case opened in court on Monday and Ivereigh has been on the stand giving his side of the story. He admitted he did not always live up to Church teaching (on sex before marriage, for example) but strongly denied that he proposed abortion and insisted that he, as a practising Catholic, opposed it.

The story has all the elements for lurid headlines and snap judgments — sex, abortion, the Catholic Church, charges of hypocrisy, “he said/she said” accusations, libel and the link to a “prince of the Church.” The second woman in the case is referred to only as “Madame X.” The cardinal is due to take the stand next week and the press section is sure to be packed. It’s not often that such a senior Catholic prelate gives testimony in court.

The lawyers for both sides came out swinging. Ivereigh’s lawyer told the court that his client was “threatened and baited like an animal” by “journalism at its most personally destructive and vicious.” The lawyer for the Daily Mail told Ivereigh: “You were behaving hypocritically, contrary to the beliefs of your church and in a callous and cruel way to both these women.”

Full disclosure: like many other journalists covering religion in Europe, I dealt with Ivereigh when he worked for the cardinal and found him to be an intelligent and informative spokesman. I have no special insight into this case and have no idea how the court will finally call it.

That said, this trial comes against a background of years of highly publicised cases regarding Catholic priests abusing young boys. This one is different because it’s about adult heterosexual lay people. Still, the Catholic connection is strong. Do you think this case will be just as damaging for the Church?

The Episcopal Church, at the centre of internal struggles likely to re-shape the worldwide Anglican Communion’s future, is taking time to look at the past. A new permanent on-line exhibit journeys through the history of racism in America, exploring a past the church shared with much of U.S. society from the days of slavery onward.

Bringing back painful memories is deliberate. The Episcopal News Service noted in announcing the exhibit that the church’s General Convention of 1991 urged Episcopalians to conduct “a wide-ranging examination of persistent institutional racism and patterns of forgetting that had overtaken the legacy of the post civil rights period in church and society.”

“The Episcopal Church treated African Americans as a problem: Culturally and socially separated and inferior but by baptism, full and equal members of the community. The Church tried to mend this breach by ministering to black Americans separately, consecrating bishops for ‘colored work,’ funding black colleges, establishing black congregations and operating a special office for ‘Negro work.’ In short, the Episcopal church fully embraced the American ’separate but equal’ construct of race relations..,” the exhibit states.

But if some churches were also a silent partner in perpetuating racism, they also became the fulcrum for change, igniting fires for freedom in the black churches in the South during the 1960s. The new exhibit tells that story as well.

It’s been less than a month since an underground movement of gay Orthodox Jews in Israel went online and already tens of thousands of people have visited their Web site.

The site is called HOD (for Homo’eem Dateem or Religious Homosexuals), a play on the Hebrew word hod for glory. It’s the first to cater to gay men living in Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish minority, where homosexuality is viewed as a sin and people are often scared to admit publicly they are gay, fearing harassment or banishment.

Of course, not all of the online visitors fit into that category, said Rabbi Ron, one of the site’s creators. The site was flooded after local media reported on its inception and Ron, a gay Orthodox rabbi who asked that his last name not be mentioned, was interviewed on Israeli radio.

The Web site, written mostly in Hebrew but with pages in English as well, was the first of its kind and broke the taboo of discussing homosexuality from within the ultra-orthodox sector.

“Our main goal is to bring the religious gay community, as well as rabbis and leaders of the religious communities, relevant information and articles concerning our issue,” HOD says in its English-language section. “This way, we hope to reduce the hate towards homosexuals in the religious society. Moreover, HOD is your place to publish your opinions, stories and anything else you wrote related to this issue.”

Rabbi Ron told the Jerusalem Post the site aimed to break down stereotypes and foster dialogue: “We want religious people to know that we want to adhere to Halacha. But we also want them to understand that a homosexual is born the way he is and has no choice … Judaism’s main emphasis is on actions. We understand that, and we are not asking rabbis to permit anal sex or to make any changes in Halacha. We just want basic understanding.”

HOD is not the first website aimed at religious gays, Itay, one of the founders of the site, explained to Ynet : “Up to now the only website catering to the religious gay community was Atzat-Nefesh (here in Hebrew and English ), which was basically run by straight people that publicly stated that a religious person cannot be gay. They tried to ‘turn’ gay religious people straight, which is something that we know cannot be done. We try to help people reconcile their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation.”

This month, Israel’s attorney general ruled that same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children that are not biologically connected to either parent. The decision expanded the legal rights of gays and lesbian couples in Israel, where the Rabbinic Court has jurisdiction over marriage. Haaretz quoted a religious cabinet minister as calling the ruling “shocking and disgusting”.

The creators of HOD take a pragmatic approach in their attempt to gain acceptance from ultra-conservative religious leaders. By breaking taboo, they hope to gain awareness, which is the first step towards acceptance, Rabbi Ron said. Once that is done, maybe they can tackle the issue of making orthodox Jewish law less stringent, he said. The Web site declares: “You cannot ignore us any longer.”

The Rev. Samuel Kobia has informed the World Council of Churches (WCC) Central Committee that he won’t seek a second five-year term after all. The WCC has just put out a statement that “buries the lead,” as we say, by starting off saying it has appointed a search committee for a new head, to be elected in September. It then says Kobia had informed the Central Committee of his decision, citing personal reasons for not running again. His term ends in December.

“The central committee received this news with regret but accepts the decision of the general secretary. We want to respect his decision and privacy,” WCC Central Committee moderator Rev. Dr. Walter Altmann said Monday night, according to the statement. “We want to express the deep gratitude of the World Council of Churches for the dedicated services he has given to the council since becoming general secretary in January 2004.”