Once regarded as the locus classicus of a South-East Asian plural society, the nation of Malaysia has long been renowned for its ethnoreligious diversity. Today some 64 per cent of the population is Muslim; 18.7 per cent is Buddhist; 9.1 per cent is Christian; and 6.1 percent are Hindu. There are also small numbers of Bahai, Jains and Sikhs, as well a smattering of indigenous peoples professing ancestral faiths. The largest of the country’s ethnic groups, Malays, comprise a full 51 per cent of the national population; by law and cultural precedent Malays are also required to be Muslim. Chinese-Malaysians make up 23 per cent of the population; and Indian-Malaysians are 6.7 per cent. Some 10 per cent of the country’s population is classified as ‘indigenous’ (bumiputera) but non-Malay. When the western peninsular portion of what is today the Federation of Malaysia achieved independence from the British in August 1957, Islam was declared the religion of state. However, the constitution also specified that the Malaysian state is officially secular. The Borneo-based states of Sabah and Sarawak joined the federation in 1963, and their substantial Christian populations (26.6 per cent of the population in Sabah, 42.6 per cent in Sarawak) boosted the country’s total Christian population significantly.

From the late 1970s onward, Muslim society in Malaysia experienced an unprecedented resurgence in Islamic observance. In Malay circles, the resurgence coincided with a growing sense of ‘lordship’ or ketuanan vis-à-vis non-Muslims. The ketuanan discourse stipulates that Malays are the ‘original’ (asli) inhabitants of the peninsular states, and, as such, they should enjoy special privileges in matters of national politics, government employment, university enrollments and business contracts. Coincident with this growing sense of political entitlement, major currents within the Islamic resurgence also assumed a racialised and socially conservative mien.

Although during the early years of independence the country’s dominant political party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), championed secular governance, the party responded to the growing influence of the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) by sponsoring state-supported Islamisation programmes of its own. Some government bureaux also made it more difficult for non-Muslims to get permits to build non-Muslim houses of worship or to host missionaries from foreign nations. Contrary to the Malay leaders of the early independence period, prime ministers like Mahathir Mohamad (r. 1981–2003 and 2018–20) also began to speak of Malaysia as an ‘Islamic state’. That discourse made many among the country’s non-Muslims feel that they risked being turned into second-class citizens.

This evolving national context forms the background to Pui Yee Choong’s richly detailed political history of Christian mobilisation in Malaysia from the 1980s to the early 2020s. Choong’s book is based on a dissertation she wrote at the Monash University Malaysia, under the supervision of Australia-based scholars. Although the book retains the detail and theoretical density of a good PhD dissertation, it is presented in an engaging manner that aptly conveys the political significance and emotional drama of the Christian minority in Malaysia. The result is a book that succeeds in serving as a comprehensive reference book on Christianity and politics in Malaysia while also providing a gripping account of religious repression and mobilisation in a plural Asian society. The book is well suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Asian history, Christianity and social science, as well as the general reader curious about religious politics in one of south-east Asia’s ascendant ‘little tigers’.

The author divides her book into eight chapters. The first chapter provides the historical and theoretical background to the study, highlighting the ‘repression-mobilisation nexus’ that she places at the theoretical centre of her account. Choong rightly emphasises that most studies of religious politics in Malaysia have focused on the growing influence of Islamism, and the challenge this has posed to the UMNO-dominated government. ‘Little attention has been dedicated’, she notes, ‘to examining how Islam’s primacy and politicization has an impact on religious minorities’ (p. 14). The author provides just such an account for Malaysia’s Christians, balancing her coverage between the Christian minority in peninsular Malaysia and the proportionately larger Christian communities in Sabah and Sarawak in the northern portion of the island of Borneo. A central finding from Choong’s research is that the Christian mobilisation in all three regions moved through four distinct phases or a ‘repertoire of contention’ (p. 23), spurred on by the federal government’s commitment to far-reaching programmes of state-sponsored Islamisation.

In chapter ii, Choong examines the early history of Christianity in Malaysia, which became extensive only after the arrival of British missions, schools and hospitals in the late eighteenth century. One legacy of the colonial era is that the British bequeathed a dual court system to the country. Under the terms of this arrangement, shariah courts have jurisdiction over Muslim family and domestic affairs while civil courts deal with matters of criminal law and public affairs. Since the 1990s, the jurisdiction of the shariah courts has undergone a considerable expansion, not least with regards to matters of religious conversion.

Although divided by ethnicity as well as doctrinal differences between Catholics, mainline Protestants and Pentecostals, the Christian community as a whole is ‘highly organized’ (p. 47). No less than 90 per cent of all Christians are represented by the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM, established in 1985). Since the 1990s, the country has also witnessed the ascent of a variety of civil society organisations. However, while Christian NGOs have typically worked to promote civic equality, many with roots in the Malay community use their associational networks to foreground Muslim and Malay supremacism. One key ambition of conservative Malay NGOs and their government supporters has been to ban Christian use of thirty-six ‘Islamic’ words, foremost of which is the term ‘Allah’. Notwithstanding conservative Muslim claims to the contrary, the latter term has been used for centuries by Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as in broad swathes of the Middle East and South Asia.

Chapter iii highlights how through the early 1990s Christian disunity and the ‘absence of systematic enforcement of repressive [state] policies’ (p. 179) left most of the Christian leadership quietist with regards to national politics. Chapter iv shows that in the 1990s intensified state support for Islamisation campaigns pushed Christian leaders away from their longstanding strategy of behind-the-scenes appeals toward a measured public activism, albeit one always careful not to present itself as in formal opposition to the government. Chapter v shows that from 2003 to 2007 the Christian community saw a diversification of tactics of resistance as broad swathes of the Christian community came to lose their confidence in the government. Chapter vi shows that, in the period from 2008 to 2015 (the original historical terminus of the author’s dissertation research), the Christian repertoire of contention moved beyond the protocol of established Church leaders and came to include grassroots appeals and overt political mobilisation. Although a decade earlier the Catholic hierarchy had already begun to make open electoral appeals, now for the first time many Protestant pastors joined Catholics in providing political advice from the pulpit, as was illustrated in the CFM’s ‘Vote Wisely’ campaign (p. 147). There was also a notable uptick in Christian-oriented political publications, as well as podcasts and blogs in online social media. In short, ‘strategic litigation and criticism … grew more common’, and ‘the act of defending religious rights segued into opposing the government’ (p. 155).

The book’s penultimate chapter, chapter vii, provides a summary history of state-sponsored Islamisation and the Christian mobilisational response in the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. Although in Sabah certain federal bureaux have used welfare assistance and monetary gifts to promote Islamic conversion among ethnic minorities, state officials have in general adopted a more accommodating policy toward local Christians. Although a Muslim, one of Sarawak’s chief ministers won support among Christians for his uncompromising support for his state’s autonomy, even declaring that ‘non-Muslims in Sarawak could use the word “Allah” despite the ban in Peninsular Malaysia’ (p. 172).

The book concludes with a concise but clear review of its key findings, as well a five-page summary of political developments since 2015. A financial scandal involving the prime minister, Najib Razak, rocked Malaysian politics after 2015. It also gave rise to an ‘increasingly formidable opposition coalition’ (p. 180) in which Christians and urban Chinese came to figure prominently. In the 2022 elections, Christians rallied to the ideal of a plural and civic Malaysian nationalism. However, some in the Malay establishment again presented the Christian minority as ‘a threat to the Malays’ (p. 183) and warned loudly of the dangers of ‘Christianisation’.

The ‘Hope Alliance’ (Pakatan Harapan) that was swept to power under the leadership of the long-suffering Muslim democrat, Anwar Ibrahim (now the country’s prime minister), has offered the hope that Malaysia has turned a corner in religious politics. But old-guard Malay supremacists remain a ‘formidable opponent’ (p. 184). More generally, Choong concludes (I think with good reason) that ‘the Christian community has accepted its peripheral, minority status in the context of a racialized discourse of “Malay” and “Islamic supremacy”’ (p. 185). The dream of a truly egalitarian Malaysian nation remains a distant one. However, as Choong shows so well in this important book, Christians are likely to continue to join with fellow Malaysians, including Muslim democrats, in a continuing if circumscribed effort to advance religious freedoms ‘without offending [conservative] Muslim sensitivities’ (p. 189).