The continued protests in Afghanistan over the burning of the Quran reminded me of a minor flareup over religious tension that was getting coverage in Kuala Lumpur when I was traveling there recently, where the pleasant resolution of Christian-Muslim tension provides another illustration of how a truly moderate Muslim nation behaves.
The spark, in this case, was the confiscation of roughly 35,000 copies of Bibles in Port Klang and Kuching Port, all meant to be used by local Christians to proselytize to the population. Last week, the Malaysian government decided to release the Bibles back to the missionary groups involved and widely published a 10-point list detailing the rights protecting the missionaries and their books, including an olive branch to allow Christians to print the Bibles within Malaysia - something they were not previously able to do.
There is a small but significant Christian population in Malaysia (concentrated particularly in the state of Sarawak, where they are actually the majority of the population, followed closely by Sabah where they account for roughly 1/3rd) but the Muslim hierarchy is still the dominant force. Local tension has sometimes risen up thanks to government policies - in 2003, then Prime Minister Badawi revoked a ban on the Iban language Bible, used by missionaries to minister to Borneo's former headhunter tribes, after a backlash from the local Christian population.
In this case, the government seems to have responded in a thoroughly civilized manner, opening the door wider for the missionaries to go about their business. Now if only other Muslim countries would have such an attitude toward religious freedom - in Saudi Arabia, of course, this sort of thing remains very illegal.
