I am writing in response to Jamil Spatafore Abdullah's letter on Islamisation and democracy.

Jamil claims to come originally from America, but appears to be quite ignorant of the nature of American democracy when attempting to draw a parallel between religious practice in his country of birth and Malaysia.

The primary source of distinction lies in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights that is enshrined in the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

Contrast this with the provisions in the third article of the Malaysian Constitution, which clearly establishes Islam as the official state religion.

It is precisely this principle of separation of state and church which resulted in the sacking of an Alabama chief justice (Alabama being one of the states in the Bible belt) after he disobeyed a legal order to move a Ten Commandments monument from a court building. It is also this principle that allowed the Massachusetts Supreme Court to pass its recent controversial ruling on gay marriage that is currently igniting an intense cultural debate throughout the US.

Jamil's analogy of the numerical dominance of Christian churches in the Bible Belt with an apparently similar dominance of mosques in Malaysia is facile at best. Churches in the US are not built with state funds, unlike the situation in Malaysia. Furthermore, city councils in the US generally provide permission for registered religious bodies to construct their respective places of worship.

Perhaps Jamil (if he has been resident in Malaysia for long enough) may be acquainted with complaints from various non-Muslim religious bodies that approval from the various state departments for the building of churches or temples have been notoriously difficult to obtain in certain areas.

A more likely reason for the wide disparity between Christian and non-Christian places of worship in the Bible Belt is that subtle discrimination against non-Whites or non-Christians may be more prevalent in that area, particularly in employment opportunities. The resulting financial incapacitation of the religious minorities would thus affect their ability to muster sufficient resources to construct places of worship for their own communities.

Another possibility which Jamil fails to take into account is that Christians in that region are considerably more fervent in the expression of their religious sensibilities in comparison with other religious minorities.

While it cannot be denied that the large majority of Americans are very religious, I strongly disagree with Jamil's 'Christian nation' notion of the US in any manner that might be contextually similar to Malaysia's Islamic nation status.

Of course, I stand to be corrected in the event that US President George Bush (or some future US president) explicitly proclaims the Christian status of the US in the similar manner that our ex-PM has done for Islam and Malaysia, and makes the appropriate constitutional amendments to reflect that status.

The point of my letter however is not meant to advocate the notion that the church-state separation of the US is somehow superior or more desirable to the Islamic nation status of Malaysia. Rather, it is to demonstrate that any comparisons between the US and Malaysia as far as religious practice is concerned is bound to be erroneous because of the wide disparity between the constitutional recognition of the status of religion in these two countries.

Jamil provides a definition for democracy in his letter from the Oxford dictionary, which includes the phrase 'equality of rights in society'. At the end of his example about Christian churches in the Bible belt, he apparently contradicts this definition by stating: 'Is it fair? Definitely not, but that is democracy'. Surely fairness encompasses equality of rights, does it not?

In the ending of his letter, he repeats this theme by intimating that a democracy is really about the majority pushing its opinions onto the minorities, with the only recourse for these minorities being to increase their relative percentage in the population. Perhaps Jamil should repeat this piece of advice to bodies such as the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), so that instead of monitoring discrimination against American Muslims or lobbying for the protection of their rights, their efforts would be better channelled towards actively promoting procreation amongst the Muslim community.

I believe that groups such as CAIR would remind him that one of the measures of a good democracy is the space that it provides for the rights and the freedom of speech of minorities to be protected. They might even remind him of a great American civil rights leader (which hopefully Jamil might be acquainted with) who once said: An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.