The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (34 page)

Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!
—
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
4:35

God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him: that is a straight path.
—
THE WORDS OF JESUS, THE QURAN, MARY
19:36

Juli Edo, fifty, popped a cassette tape into the deck of his shuddering Jeep. It was later in the afternoon of June 4, 2006,
than he wanted it to be—late to start on the hundred-mile drive north from the
gleaming capital of Kuala Lumpur to the jungle outside of Kampar, an old tin-mining boomtown. Edo is an anthropologist; he is also an aborigine, and a leading expert on the last 150,000 of his own indigenous kinsfolk, the Orang Asli, “original people.” That afternoon, Edo was headed to his wife’s family village for
a forest wedding and a long-awaited vacation, along with his wife, Lipah Anjang, his teenage daughter, two younger sons, a six-month-old Chinese baby named Monmon, and me. Rubber trees, which looked like white birches, and dwarf oil palms lined the multilane highway. For miles, each scarred trunk gave way to another of its kind, and another, and another, moving back from the road in perfect diagonals,
forming enormous plantations that seemed to have no end. Through the Jeep’s scratchy sound system, John Denver sang, “Life is old there, older than the trees.”

Edo cursed quietly. Take me home to where, exactly? The jungle in which his people lived was fast disappearing, and since most of the people had no deeds to their land, there was nothing they could do about it. Along the highway, we passed
a plantation billboard that read: “WE GREEN THE EARTH.”

“It’s a lie,” Edo snorted. Palm oil plantations, which yield an inexpensive, extra-fatty cooking oil used for deep-frying, are responsible for 80 percent of the deforestation here in the nation of Malaysia, which lies as little as twenty-five miles east of Indonesia, over the South China Sea. Malaysia and Indonesia are being stripped of
their jungles and rain forests faster than almost any other tropical countries in the world.
¹
Plantations like these are partly responsible. The trees by the roadside—alien species imported from South America—were at most a mere hundred years old. By contrast, Edo’s people were descended from Stone Age farmers who first migrated here four thousand years ago. They lived by the sea as fisher folk,
until the rise of Islamic sultanates during the fifteenth century. Then, rather than convert to Islam and become ethnic Malays, they fled inland to the jungle to retain their indigenous spiritual practices, based on honoring ancestors and the natural world. As polytheists—
mushrikun
—they were hunted by slave raiders until the 1920s. Now, once again, the dwindling jungle is threatening their survival.

Along with the disappearance of their land, new logging roads snaking through this wilderness are making them the target of Muslim and Christian missionaries, who now have fresh means to reach formerly unreachable
areas and communities. In remote jungles and riverine villages, the two are competing over who will convert the Orang Asli, in what one of Edo’s colleagues, a Malaysian anthropologist
named Colin Nicholas, had called “the race to save the last lost souls.”

“It’s cultural genocide,” Edo said. His brown eyes scanned the paved road as if disappointment lay ahead of us. Tired from a long semester of teaching anthropology at the University of Malaya, he had been looking forward to a week’s lazy vacation spent fishing and hunting wild boar when I showed up in his cramped university
office at the end of May. Colin Nicholas had sent me to find the Orang Asli anthropologist, since Edo was not only a member of the group but also the definitive authority on their spiritual practices. Pushing my way through a line of frantic students trying to photocopy their final exams, I asked Edo what he knew about this competition for converts among his people, and if I might travel with
him to meet the Orang Asli. He eyed me incredulously from between stacks of stapled papers. Their world is a closed one; the aborigines have persevered by keeping strangers out. The Malay government also bans foreigners from visiting their villages, one of many tactics meant to keep Christian missionaries at bay. This was the jungle, he reasoned. It could be dangerous. Was I sure I knew what I was
getting into? There would be no doctors and few vehicles, and I would have to eat and drink whatever the aborigines did. “Are you prone to illness?” he asked, squinting across the desk as if to scan my vulnerability to microbes. I tucked my fingernails into the lap of my dirty serge skirt and described the fault line along which I had been traveling. By May 2006, I’d journeyed through Nigeria, Sudan,
Indonesia, and the Philippines. Edo nodded sharply, and his weary brown eyes sparkled. At the end of the week, he was going to attend a family wedding at which the Orang Asli bride was marrying an outsider—a Muslim Malay man—and according to law, she would have to convert to Islam. Her father, irate at what he saw as his daughter’s desertion of their culture, was threatening to cancel the wedding.

Now, ten days later, all seven of us were squeezed into the Jeep, zipping toward Edo’s aunt’s home in Kampar and then on to the village. His sons poked at each other; Monmon, the baby, shrieked over the reedy John Denver bootleg. Shouting questions to Edo from the cramped backseat, I feared that I might be about to report on someone’s family vacation but had to make the best of it, so I opened
to the blank back page of
my notebook and taught the boys how to play hangman. Around us, the trees marched out in formation like soldiers staking their claim on a foreign land.

Kuala Lumpur is a glinting forest of steel and glass surrounding the Petronas Twin Towers, two spiky corncobs (taller than the World Trade Center towers) completed in 1998 and named for the state-owned oil and gas company.
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a vocal critic of the West who had served in his post for twenty years, commissioned the towers. The Malaysian government instructed the Argentinean architect César Pelli (who also designed terminals B and C at Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C.) to invoke the Muslim religion in the design. Pelli fashioned the towers using the sacred geometry of Islam’s eight-pointed
star. Beyond that, he was essentially constructing a national identity—as he has said, “flying blind.”
²

The towers are monuments to Islamic progress—and to wealth. Their interiors are very slick capitalist crypts. In October 2008, between the Prada and Chanel boutiques, the smoothie and wrap stands, I watched a logjam of global identities form. A woman robed and veiled in black followed her husband
through a group of chattering Buddhist monks in bright vestments—a cluster of persimmons. Despite the day’s monsoon heat, the consumer theme was Christmas.

Petronas has invested $1.45 billion in Sudan; after China, Malaysia is the nation’s largest foreign investor.
³
Since the African oil boom in the late nineties, Malaysia has provided military aid to Sudan. Over the past nine years, this relationship
has deepened. Khairy Jamaluddin, a thirty-four-year-old investment banker who was head of the youth wing of Malaysia’s largest political party and the son-in-law of the former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, told me that after the September 11 attacks, Malaysia focused its foreign investments in Iran and Sudan—Muslim countries the West considered pariah states. Malaysia now holds a
30 percent stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the oil consortium that operates in and around the town of Abyei. Malaysia also provides military aid to the Sudan Armed Forces, the soldiers who drove fifty thousand people off their oil-rich land around Abyei in May 2008, and who orchestrated many of the attacks in Darfur. According to Amnesty International, on February 17, 2004,
Malaysia and Sudan signed
a formal defense agreement allowing Malaysia to send military hardware to Khartoum. To quell international dissent, then prime minister Badawi visited Darfur on April 18, 2007. Later the same day he traveled on to Khartoum, where he reiterated Malaysia’s support for the regime of President Hassan Omar al-Bashir.
⁴
Unlike China, or the Western oil companies, Malaysia comes
under very little scrutiny for its practices in Sudan, partly because of its remoteness and its size, which, at 127,000 square miles, is smaller than Montana.

Malaysia is one of the most technologically sophisticated Muslim countries in the world. (Twenty-three million of its twenty-eight million citizens have cell phones.)
⁵
It is also, thanks to its oil and gas holdings, one of the most prosperous.
With proven oil reserves of 3 billion barrels, Malaysia sends abroad 753,700 barrels a day (nearly double Sudan’s output), which makes the country the twenty-seventh-largest oil exporter in the world. The true measure of a nation’s oil wealth, however, is not just in billions of barrels; it is in number of barrels per citizen.
⁶
By this measure, Malaysia has roughly ten times the energy assets
of Indonesia.

Nonetheless, Malaysia struggles to exist as a single, diverse nation, one in which religious differences create the greatest divisions and threaten, at times, to pull apart the modern state. Of one hundred Malaysians, sixty are Muslims, twenty are Buddhists, nine are Christians, six are Hindus, and the remaining four follow Chinese beliefs, such as Confucianism or Taoism, or practice
their indigenous, spirit-based religion, as do the Orang Asli. This heterogeneity dates back to the 1700s, when colonialists from Britain, which inherited Malaysia from the Portuguese and the Dutch, transported thousands of Indian and Chinese laborers to transform the vast jungles into rubber plantations and tin mines. The Indians worked on the rubber farms. The Chinese mined tin. The ethnic
Malay people, who, after the Orang Asli, had been the region’s first inhabitants, feared becoming a minority in their own homeland. To protect their interests, they began to coalesce around their shared religion: Islam. In 1946, the British government, bankrupted by World War II, announced that the Malay states would gain their independence and all citizens—regardless of race—would be granted equal
rights. The Malay people fought back by forming United Malays National Organisation—still, by a very narrow margin, the leading political party in Malaysia. Thanks to UMNO, when Malaysia gained its independence on August 31, 1957, the constitution enshrined the religious and ethnic superiority of the Malay people. To be
Malaysian meant to be Malay, to be Malay meant to be Muslim, and the Malays
were awarded the status of
bumiputra
, a Sanskrit word meaning “sons of the earth.”

In 1991, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad issued Vision 2020, a fifty-year plan to raise Malaysia’s status to that of the West. He modeled this plan for advancement not on the West, but on Islam. The West didn’t own prosperity, he argued, and it was time for Malaysia to make its own Great Leap Forward. Drawing on
the country’s prodigious oil wealth, he began by Islamizing its economic system so that banks, insurance companies, and pawnshops would be compliant with Sharia; usury—or collecting interest—was made illegal. He funded think tanks to wrestle with the question of Islam and development.
⁷
And in a move toward affirmative action, he made it compulsory for corporate boards to include set quotas of
ethnic Malays. Because Malaysia’s economy is dominated by Chinese interests, this measure was meant to ensure that the Malays would not lose out to the Chinese in their nation’s economic future. As Mahathir put it, “The negative view and attitude of the Muslims toward industry will not only be unprofitable for them, but will in fact be against Islam and its teachings.”
⁸
Islam didn’t just sanction
industrialization; it was now considered un-Islamic not to industrialize. In 2010, Malaysia is still bidding to become the world’s “Halal Hub.” This worldwide business of rendering food and other Muslim products religiously permissible—a $635 billion-per-year industry—would make Malaysia a prime location for manufacturing and sanctioning everything from cookies, to handbags, to vaccines.

In Malaysia,
for much of the past seven hundred years, Islam has been synonymous with progress. The religion once linked a backwater to a larger global system of trade and culture. Today, in both business and politics, the relationship between Islam and development is remarkably strong. Over the past decade, for instance, the Malaysian government has quietly set up a judicial unit within the state to
make sure all its laws are compliant with Islamic law. Many Malaysians fear that bringing religion to bear on secular law marks a step backward. But for those who support the move, this is neither conservative nor reactionary; it is about combating contemporary, secular life with an authentic and sacred moral code. Islamization, a lawyer who served in this Sharia unit told me, has changed in the twenty-first
century, and Malaysia must keep up with the times. “The impact of the Iranian Revolution isn’t the crucial factor anymore,”
Hassan Abu Bakar, a Malaysian government counsel, said. “Here, globalization—books from the U.S. and U.K., the Internet—brings Islam into our lives.”

Bringing Sharia into all aspects of the law, he and others believed, was the best way to protect Malay Muslims from the onslaught
of secular and Christian forces of globalization. Such external forces have made apostasy—the act of leaving Islam—such a pressing issue that conservatives recently outlawed it. The most notorious case was that of a forty-six-year-old woman named Lina Joy, who, in July 2007, was not legally allowed to convert from Islam to Christianity. “We view apostasy very seriously,” Khairy Jamaluddin,
the banker and politician who also holds a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, told me in 2006. “It is politically one of the biggest concerns and one of the worst forms of sacrilege.” For a modern politician to speak of sacrilege can be baffling to those of us in secular democratic societies, and Jamaluddin knew it. “Balancing Islam and the West is not easy, but
we live in a one hundred percent Muslim society, which is not easy to manage, either.”