Catholic Bishop Dr Paul Tan Chee Ing hailed well-known Islamic preacher Asri Zainul Abidin’s latest remarks on Muslim-Christian relations as “balm for wounded Christian feelings rubbed raw by rabble rousers whom virtually nobody in authority is willing to quell.”

 

Reacting to the former Perlis mufti Asri’s opinion that warnings by some Muslim groups that Islam is under attack in Malaysia and Muslims under threat from creeping Christianisation served only to shame Islam, Bishop Paul Tan remarked:

 

“I have to pinch myself to believe that somebody of his stature is saying something as sensible and as bracing as that.”

 

The head of the Catholic Church in the Malacca-Johor diocese expatiated: “Malaysian Christians are way past the point where we could believe that someone of Asri’s stature and influence among Malaysian Muslims is willing to bring sanity and rationality to bear on this vexed issue of Christian-Muslim relations.”

 

The Jesuit-trained prelate said the history of these relations in Malaysia has not been bedeviled by such intractable factors as a contest for territory or resources as in other places in the world where Muslims and Christians live in close proximity.

 

“The relations here have only been troubled by the issue of conversions - and that, too, on a trivially small scale - and latterly by the matter of the exclusivity or not of a generic term,” explained the bishop.

 

“Unlike disputes over territory or resources, these are matters eminently susceptible to rational discourse which is why the tack espoused by Asri, which I would describe as sensible and bracing, casts a refreshing light on an otherwise dangerous situation,” he said.

 

Bishop Paul Tan ( left ) said that in recent years, Malaysian Christians have been unjustly accused by assorted Muslim groups of being so devious a threat to the country that even the communist terrorists of yesteryear were not as sinister a menace to national security.

 

“This is a monstrous situation brought about by the machinations of the insecure who become bolder and more inflammatory the minute they suspect that the authorities are in the mood to appease rather than abominate them.

 

“Thus bracing opinions such as the former mufti of Perlis has expressed comes as a refreshing sponge down the spine of this fraught debate so that Malaysian Christians can sit up and say, ‘Now here comes someone who’s talking sense,’ ” concluded the bishop.