Malaysia

Islam arrived in the Malay world through trade, and the conversion of the ruler of Malacca in the fifteenth century turned a port into the model for what followed: a Malay sultanate in which Islam, custom and kingship were fused, so that a sultan was head of religion in his state as well as its ruler. That model survived Portuguese, Dutch and British rule and was written into the constitution of the independent federation, which is why nine of the thirteen states still have a sultan who is the head of Islam there, and why the Yang di-Pertuan Agong is head of Islam in the remaining states. British administration governed the peninsula through indirect rule that reserved religion and Malay custom to the rulers while it managed everything else, and it imported Chinese and Indian labour on a scale that made the country permanently plural.

Chinese Malaysians brought Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese folk practice, Indian Malaysians brought Hinduism, and the Thaipusam procession to the Batu Caves is now among the largest Hindu gatherings outside India. Christianity is strongest in Sabah and Sarawak, which joined in 1963 with constitutional guarantees on religion that are frequently invoked, and where indigenous communities converted in large numbers in the twentieth century.

Malaysia runs civil and Sharia courts in parallel, and the friction between them produces the country's hardest religious cases. Article 121(1A), added in 1988, bars civil courts from matters within Sharia jurisdiction, which sounds like a clean division until a case has a Muslim and a non Muslim on either side. Lina Joy, born Muslim, sought to have Islam removed from her identity card in order to marry a Christian; the Federal Court held in 2007 that the question was for the Sharia court, which meant a person could not leave Islam through the civil system and would have to apply to a religious one that does not generally grant it. In conversion cases involving children, a parent who converts to Islam has at times been able to convert the children unilaterally and litigate custody in a forum the other parent cannot enter, a pattern the Federal Court limited in Indira Gandhi in 2018 by holding that the consent of both parents is required.

Two further disputes recur. The word Allah, used by Malay speaking Christians in Sabah and Sarawak for centuries and in the Malay Bible, was prohibited to non Muslims in a 2013 Court of Appeal ruling that was itself set aside for a Christian applicant in 2021, leaving the position unsettled. And the state Islamic authorities' powers over Muslims, including detention for religious rehabilitation and prosecution for offences that have no civil equivalent, apply to a category a person cannot in practice leave.