The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (35 page)

In Malaysia, there are other codes that protect Islam’s primacy. Christians are not allowed to proselytize to Muslims. And in 2009, the Malaysian government reinstated a much-disputed ban on the use of the word for God,
Allah
, by Christians. (In December 2009, when the High Court reversed the ban once again,
at least nine churches were burned in reaction.)
⁹
The Malaysian home minister, Syed Hamid Albar, said the government wanted to avoid “confusing” Muslims or allowing clandestine attempts to convert them. In response Malaysian Catholic leaders argued that they have been using the word
Allah
for hundreds of years, and that this was just the latest government attempt to stifle the free exercise of
religion in an ever more restrictive society. Moreover, they added, there is no other word for God in the Malay language. In a 2008 editorial in Malaysia’s Catholic newspaper,
The Herald
, the editor, Father Lawrence Andrew, asked, “Can’t we Christians ask our fellow Christians to pray?”

In this religious struggle over Malaysian identity, the Orang Asli are most often caught in the middle. Since
most Orang Asli are neither Christian nor Muslim, but follow their own ancient cosmology, the pressure to convert them—and to usher them into one or the other rival worldview—is fierce. Since the 1970s, as part of a controversial, long-secret program, the Malaysian government has sponsored Islamic teachers to go live in
Orang Asli villages, has built almost three hundred prayer halls (some in
villages with few or no Muslims),
¹⁰
and has paid Malay Muslims (up to $3,000)
¹¹
to marry Orang Asli women. All of these efforts to do
da’wa
—to proselytize—are intended to ensure the aborigines’ conversion to Islam and introduce them to life as modern Malays. The government also grants Orang Asli who convert to Islam better health care, education, housing, and jobs than those who do not.
¹²
Despite
these incentives, the government has had only negligible success among the Orang Asli, who have resisted Islamization for centuries. (In the past thirty years, by unofficial estimates, roughly twenty-five in one hundred have become Muslim; and fifteen of one hundred are now Christian.) “If we go into Islamization, they get a bit sensitive,” said Razak Kechik, M.D., a member of ABIM, an Islamic
organization founded in 1971 and committed to proselytizing. Kechik worked among the Orang Asli for two decades, not only as a medical doctor preventing malaria but also in supporting income-generating projects, such as sewing collectives. He sees Islam as the only way forward for the aborigines; as he put it, “We teach the ones who want to know about Islam. Of course they need to change.”

Much
to the government’s dismay, Christian missionaries—ranging from local Catholics and Methodists to South Korean Presbyterians—also evangelize the Orang Asli. Many argue that, unlike Islam, which transforms the Orang Asli into Malays, and thus erases their identity, Christianity allows the indigenous people to retain their way of life—to eat what they wish, pray as they like, and marry whom they
want—while at the same time facing the reality that a traditional way of life in the jungle is coming to an end, by choice or force of change.

Our cramped band reached Kampar, the colonial tin-mining town, in time for afternoon tea. Its cluttered streets teemed with Chinese food stalls—vats of boiling mee noodles, stir-fried prawns, and chicken biscuits. Wall-eyed river fish dangled from wet
twine. Kampar is inhabited mostly by ethnic Chinese, descendants of those whom the British relocated from China to work in the mines more than two hundred years ago. I followed Edo as he fought his way through the market’s screaming crowd to play the Chinese lottery, one of his favorite pastimes (we lost), then bought pastries for Edo’s auntie, who lived at the edge of Kampar. Before continuing on
to the darkening forest, we were going to pay her a visit.

Aunt Sakyah lived alone in a narrow two-story house covered in weathered shingles; hers was the largest to be found among the three hilly streets of macadam that made up a single Orang Asli community. Anyone could see that this paved hummock was not desirable land. Forty years earlier, the Malay government had forcibly resettled the Orang
Asli in this concrete version of a village, Edo told me. A Communist rebellion raged in the jungle from 1948 to 1960, and in order to isolate the Orang Asli from the rebels, the British and the Malays trucked tens of thousands of them to internment camps fenced in barbed wire. The move was disastrous. Thousands died.

Sakyah, who looked to be in her sixties, had tea waiting for us on a white tin
tray. She opened the greasy white box of our pastries and set them on the linoleum floor among the cups and spoons. We sat on the ground with our backs against a pristine couch and a couple of upholstered chairs that looked like they were rarely used. Monmon, the Chinese baby, crawled around us, and Edo’s wife, who told me to call her
Amé
, “Mother,” reached for her, clucking absently. It turned
out she was babysitting the child as a favor to a neighbor.

“Mostly women work; the men are hopeless drunks,” Edo said, explaining that his auntie held down several jobs. She disappeared for a moment, returned with a paper bag, and pulled from it intricately woven squares, which she unfurled against the linoleum. She made them for tourists who used them as placemats. They took a long time to
make, she said, squatting and touching their woven edges with an artist’s tenderness and frustration.

With Edo’s Jeep parked outside, word of his arrival buzzed through the concrete village. Soon two men slouched into the house. One was tall, spare, and serene; the other, elfin and grouchy. The former was the village headman, or chief, named Sam. Being headman was a difficult job, and although
Sam was only in his late thirties, he looked closer to fifty. The latter, named Bah Selamat—or “tranquillity”—seemed neither calm nor happy. The father of the bride, he had come to Kampar from the jungle to do some shopping for his daughter’s impending nuptials. He wanted to stop the wedding, he said, collapsing at last into one of the scratchy chairs. The issue, he told me, putting his hands on
his knees, was Islam.

Paradoxically, the aggressive government proselytizing had pushed him in the other direction. About a decade earlier, with the help of a local Orang Asli minister, he had been baptized as a Methodist. For him, Christianity
was a form of common defense, because it allowed him to change as little as possible.

“I converted for freedom,” he said. “If you convert to Christianity,
it’s not a big deal. You’re still Orang Asli. But when you convert to Islam, you are Malay.” His daughter, Sorya, by contrast, was marrying a Malay man, which meant, legally, she had to become a Muslim. “We didn’t want our children converting to Islam. One converts and they all convert.” The government push did not target women such as Sorya, he explained, but their children. This was about
making the next generation Malay, about using religion to bulk up their numbers, and their claim to the dwindling forest resources.

A car drew up alongside the house and stopped. Edo’s auntie crept to the window and peeked out from behind the curtain.

“Missionaries,” she said. Next door, two Chinese Christians were visiting some new converts. She let the curtain fall back across the window and
sat down to finish her tea.

“Oh, they come here,” she said. “I tell them my heart’s not open to Christianity. They tell me it’s the right path; it’s the right thing to do.” She bent to refill the cups, but the men were finished with tea.

The faiths compete for converts, Sam, the lanky village head, explained. The men switched to sipping whiskey. We went outside by the laundry line, so Sam could
smoke a cigarette. The missionaries’ sedan was gone. The Christians were savvier about converting people, because they were subtler about their intentions. “They don’t ask us to convert—they give us services, look out for our welfare,” Sam said. The Muslims were more direct. “Every Friday, they curse infidels from the mosque.” He gestured up the hill to a whitewashed box with a loudspeaker. Community
development officers ventured from house to house to persuade people to convert, and the government assigned missionaries to come stay with people in the village.

“The missionaries say, ‘We want to give you good values,’ but we have better values than they do,” Sam said. “If we lose our land, our customs will be lost. If we lose our customs and choose other religions, then we’ve lost everything.”

_____

It was almost 10:00 p.m. when we turned off the paved road beyond Kampar and onto the muddy track that led to the village where we were to sleep. Through the Jeep’s open window, the ground looked littered with stars where ponds—abandoned tin mines filled with foul water—reflected the obsidian sky. The rough road jostled the Jeep and roused the dozing children. Through the trees ahead, I
could see strips of woven light, like huge twig lanterns hanging above the forest floor. Closer, I could see the light was coming through chinks in the bamboo walls of roughly two dozen tree houses, which were standing about five feet off the ground in a leafy clearing. Edo stopped the Jeep, and we climbed the wooden ladder into the tiny, sooty hut where his sister-in-law was stir-frying wild boar
in an iron wok on a camp stove on the floor. Sweet smoke from the roasting flesh blew through the open walls, over a bunk bed, a refrigerator, and a computer—only for playing games. Twenty-two of us would be sleeping in a space about the size of three office cubicles.

“Oh, we won’t sleep. We’ll stay up for the next three days straight,” a slight woman with a pageboy haircut and an accent from
London’s East End said. She had climbed the five-foot wooden ladder into the hut behind me, and stunned me for a second—the hair, the tone, the baby tee—but Lian, who looked to be about forty, was Orang Asli. Another of Edo’s sisters-in-law, she had left the village to emigrate to the United Kingdom years earlier, and was currently working in London. She had married a Londoner, and for his sake—and
to my relief—the family had installed a porcelain toilet in the outhouse next door.

Blue light flickered over the hut’s uneven floorboards, and a pack of feral-looking children, their legs scratched and their hair matted with twigs, sat six inches from a TV screen, entranced by
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. At that instant, Renée Zellweger was running down the street in leopard-spotted underpants, but
the children did not laugh. Their eyes were dark and glossy—they seemed stoned by the screen’s soft light. Next to the TV, a refrigerator hummed; its shelves were lined with beer.

One child stood out from the others. Her brushed hair was braided tightly down her back, and when she turned her head, the TV’s light glinted off her braces. Ten years old, L.V. lived in London with her aunt Lian. L.V.’s
biological mother, who was cooking boar, could not afford to keep her here. Both women called her “daughter.” L.V. had not been back to the village since she was a baby, and remembered nothing of the jungle or its life. In front of the TV, she looked uncomfortable—itchy and glum—though
the world the children were watching, the London world of Bridget Jones, was one only she, among the children,
had seen firsthand. When the other children whispered in their language, L.V. threw a tantrum because she could not understand.

As L.V.’s biological mother doled out the boar meat, she tried to quiet L.V. Although they were strangers, each watched the other with a kind of longing—as if on opposite sides of shatterproof glass. “I will tell you the story of the mosquito princess,” her village mother
said, in hesitant English. Like so many other Orang Asli traditions, their fables were disappearing. “Turn off the TV,” she called to the rest of the children, who paid no attention. As L.V. drew close to her, she began:

A mosquito fell in love with a human man. He stayed in a farm near the jungle. He owned a cow and a goat. He was a strong man, and the mosquitoes liked to hover above him
and watch him work. One day when the mosquito princess grew up, her father told her to bite him. “Maybe he has good blood.” When she went to do her father’s bidding, she saw the human’s face and felt something in her heart: “I like you,” she told him, but he didn’t understand, and tried to swat her away. So the princess asked her father if she could become a human. Her father was sad. He knew he would
lose his daughter.

He was a good man, though, so he sent her to a powerful shaman. “Yes, you can be a human, but only during the daylight,” the shaman told her. “At night you’ll turn back into a mosquito. Your whole life must be a secret.” The mosquito princess married the human. Everything went fine, until her mosquito parents wanted to meet her husband. One night, when the mosquitoes surrounded
him, he did not understand their language, and thought that they were there to bite him. He became so angry, he killed them all.

To my ear, this story seemed to reflect the dangers of overreaching, the hazards of wishing to be someone other than who you are. Later, however, Robert Dentan, an American anthropologist who lived with the Orang Asli for years, told me that although such stories do
contain a warning against assimilation,
¹³
this is only a small part of their significance. Hunted for centuries, and persecuted nearly to the edge of extinction, the Orang Asli also teach their children about the power of collective, familial love, and about the risk of standing outside of that love, which can destroy them.
For the mosquito princess, transforming herself (as when converting to
Islam) and marrying a powerful outsider (such as a Malay man) meant destroying her whole family. What good was love like that?

After the story, I went outside to find Edo, but he had disappeared on an all-night boar hunt. The rest of us settled in for a few hours of sleep. I was granted the place of honor: the top bunk. In the night, I awoke urgently needing to pee. Still dozing, I muddled over
a floor of prone bodies. Reaching the door hatch, I stepped out into thin air, having forgotten we were five feet off the ground. When I hit the moldering loam with a thud, the house above me erupted in good-natured laughter. For a moment, it sounded like the trees were laughing. Relieved I hadn’t broken any bones, I returned to the bunk and waited for Edo, who appeared at dawn, empty-handed, his
face pale and his T-shirt filthy. By the time I dared to climb down the ladder, he was sitting outside on a log drinking a beer, watching the children concoct a wild game of badminton. It was difficult to catch him alone and at rest, so I buttonholed the professor there and then. Poor man, I thought, as I took him a cookie from the greasy hotel tin I had brought as a hostess gift.