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Southeast Asia’s mask has slipped, as the narrative goes. Until recent years, the region enjoyed a sympathetic image as home to peaceful Buddhists on a journey towards democracy and home to moderate Muslims who have seemingly succeeded in melding together democracy and the demands of religion. Ironically, with the coming of democracy, previously oppressed but now politically empowered majorities in countries like Myanmar and Indonesia have turned on minorities in their midst.
What else can explain Myanmar’s elite silence on—and the lack of popular rebuke of—the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people? What else can explain the hundreds of thousands of Islamists descending on the streets of Jakarta to demand that the non-Muslim, ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta be persecuted for blasphemy over a seemingly ‘misquoted’ verse of the Qur’an?
The slipped-mask narrative, however, fails to center on issues with which most Southeast Asians concern themselves. In Myanmar, democracy, a topic most foreigners tended to focus on until recently, has failed to resolve critical bread-and-butter concerns. Myanmar’s GDP per capita has not deviated much from its trend line and the same applies to the country’s life expectancy and educational attainment. Unsurprisingly, people in Myanmar must be bewildered as to how swiftly they have changed in the eyes of outsiders: from an oppressed people to one that is now oppressing others.
Religious intolerance is more visible now in Myanmar and Indonesia, but this is nothing new. Just ask the Christian minorities on Myanmar’s peripheries and they can testify to a long history of religious oppression that dates back to the foundation of the country. The slipped-mask narrative also ignores the historical back-and-forth of religion in politics. In Indonesia, Islamism competed against nationalism and communism to win the hearts of the newly independent people in the early years of the republic. To this day, politically engaged Muslims don’t agree on how their religion should relate to the country’s politics. Some say Islam should be pre-eminent, others say it should only be a primus inter pares.
As November 16 served as the International Day of Tolerance, Spotlight looks at the issue of religious tolerance in Southeast Asia. Our first article by New Straits Times news editor Ahmad Kushairi reminds us again that religious tolerance is pivotal to peaceful societies. Our second article, by S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) senior fellow Yang Razali Kassim, highlights the next step in how Islam and politics could interact in Muslim-majority countries of Southeast Asia.
