Global News Journal

Is Malaysia’s net clampdown at odds with knowledge economy?

The opposition wants to cut the sale of alcohol in a state that it rules and now the government wants to restrict Internet access .

Malaysia is a multicultural country of 27 million people in Southeast Asia. It has a majority Muslim population that of course is not allowed to drink by religion. Yet clearly some do as shown by the sentencing to caning for a young woman handed down recently

(Photo: Prime Minister Najib Razak leaving the National Mosque as he prepared to mark his first 100 days in office in July. Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad)

Proposals by the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party, which wants an Islamic state, could effectively end the sale of alcohol in the country’s richest state, Selangor, which is next to the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Its rules would penalise not only Muslims that consumed alcohol, but also for example Muslim shop assistants in say Tesco’s who could be fined if they sold alcohol.

This is coming from a country whose most celebrated film maker, PJ Ramlee, made movies featuring alcohol, smoking and night clubs as well as cross-racial relationships and whose first premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Muslim of course and a member of one of Malaysia’s royal families, was fond of  whisky. 

And the Internet? If you want to find out anything in Malaysia, you need to read the net. The country’s newspapers, largely owned by the political parties that have run this country for 51 years and which need to be licensed annually, feed their readers a steady diet of pro-government propaganda.

Sex, drugs and toxic shrubs: the best reads of March

Cubans indulge baseball mania at Havana’s “Hot Corner”

For all the shouting and nose-to-nose confrontations, visitors to Havana’s Parque Central might think they had walked into a brawl or counter-revolution … but here in the park’s Hot Corner,  the topic almost always under discussion is baseball, Cuba’s national obsession.

Iraq’s orphans battle to outgrow abuse

At night, Salah Abbas Hisham wakes up screaming. Sometimes, in the dark, he silently attacks the boy next to him in a tiny Baghdad orphanage where 33 boys sleep on cots or on the floor. Salah, who saw both his parents blown apart in a car bomb, can never be left alone at night.

Colombian soccer club tries to forget cocaine past

Colombian soccer champions America de Cali are first to admit cocaine dollars had a hand in their sporting heyday. But after years of paying the price, they’re trying to wipe the slate clean … Cali’s mayor is leading a campaign to have the team removed from a U.S. anti-drugs blacklist.

Best reads of February

Exotic animals trapped in net of Mexican drug trade - From the live snakes that smugglers stuff with packets of cocaine to the white tigers drug lords keep as exotic pets, rare animals are being increasingly sucked into Mexico’s deadly narcotics trade.

End of an era for the Amazon’s turbulent priests - They avoid taking buses, make sure friends know their schedules, and rarely go out when it’s dark. For the three foreign-born Roman Catholic bishops under death threat in Brazil’s northeastern state of Para, speaking out against social ills that plague this often-lawless area at the Amazon River’s mouth has come at a price.

West risks repeating Soviet mistakes in Afghanistan - The foreign warplanes swooped in just as the Afghan village of Ali Mardan was celebrating a wedding. Bombs slammed into the crowded village square, killing 30 men, women and children. After the smoke cleared and the dead were buried, all the able-bodied men left alive took up arms against the invaders. That was 1982…

Poland fetes Dalai Lama

  Forget the economic crisis, forget climate change — images of an elderly, bespectacled Buddhist monk in a maroon robe have dominated Polish newspapers and television screens all week.

  The Dalai Lama has come to town and it seems everybody, from the president and prime minister to college students and housewives in this still-staunchly Roman Catholic country, want to meet and hear Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

    Of course, the charismatic septuagenerian can bring out the crowds in many countries and counts among his worldwide fans heads of state and Hollywood stars. But he has struck a special chord in Poland, where some see in his decades-old campaign for Tibetan self-determination echoes of their own struggle against an atheistic communist government back in the 1980s.

    Not by accident, the Buddhist leader kicked off his six-day tour of Poland in Gdansk at a party for another modern icon — Lech Walesa, leader of the pro-democracy Solidarity trade union which helped topple communist rule in Poland in 1989, the year the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Although other Nobel laureates and European statesmen such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy were also in Gdansk for the celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of Walesa winning the Nobel Prize, the loudest applause was reserved for the Dalai Lama. Newspapers carried pictures of him and his old friend Walesa hugging and laughing together.

    The Dalai Lama, who fled to exile in India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Beijing’s rule, told Poles how much he had been inspired by the example of Solidarity, a movement rooted in religious — Catholic — faith and like him opposed to the use of violence.

    The Poles returned the compliment by turning out in their thousands in Gdansk, Krakow, Wroclaw and Warsaw to hear the Dalai speak about Buddhist philosophy and about the Tibetan people’s experience of Chinese communist rule.

from FaithWorld:

Exercised over yoga in Malaysia

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia's prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia's National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council's rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet's next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution -- the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul's fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia's king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia's Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the "sun salutation" so long as they don't start chanting.