Tuesday, May 10, 2016

My Encounter with Missionaries

Circa 2010, when I was staying in Sunway Ceria, something out of ordinary happened to me.

After packing my lunch and parking my bike, I was approached by two young individuals. A man and a woman. They looked different from our local Chinese...I guessed they were of Korean's origin.

Upon approaching me, they asked me whether I have a minute for them. Their first question was, of what religion am I? They later inquired about the composition of my apartment's dwellers, of what religions are they.

It was then when I started to realize that they were indeed Christian missionaries.

'I am a Muslim' was my short answer. I further explained that the majority of Sunway Ceria's inhabitants were Chinese, who were practising Buddha or Christian as their faith.

They later indirectly confessed that they were in fact missionaries trying to introduce Christian to non-believers. From their demeanour and weak command of English, I think they were an upstart with no real experience in preaching.

They were free to preach Christianity, as long as it was not towards Muslim, was my short explanation to them. This was in line with our constitution, because in Malaysia, it is forbidden to preach another religion other than Islam to Muslims.  

This law explains why television programmes such as al-Kuliyyah, Forum Perdana Ehwal Islam, and a host others are permitted to be aired over our national TV channels whereas no such privilege is enjoyed by other religions, although we are accorded with freedom of religion as enshrined in our federal law.

So it boggles me when someone who was trained in law, such as Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, to openly question why other religions were not permitted to be preached in Malaysia (this was his retort towards his disagreement with influential speaker Dr Zakir Naik's programmes in Malaysia). 

That's why I am not a fan of lawyers. They tend to manipulate the law for their own good. The law must serve them, not the other way round.

Those two polite missionaries readily accepted my explanation and proceeded to find another person to preach. For all I remember, that was the first and last time I ever encountered missionaries.