Malaysia is a Muslim-majority nation struggling to accommodate people of differing religious faiths. While Islam is the state religion, the country’s constitution guarantees religious freedom. Malaysia, like Turkey and Indonesia, at least attempts to function, in many areas, as what we in the West might recognize as a secular state.
Perspective is important. Malaysia as a nation is barely 50 years old. When the United States was 50 years old, it gave birth to 
the “Know Nothings,” politically powerful Anglo-Saxon Protestants who sought to disenfranchise and expel the country’s Catholics. When England was 224 years old, it rounded up all its Jews, stole all their money, and then shipped them to the Continent.
Even when non-Muslims get a little sneaky, in attempting to bypass the country’s prohibition against pros-elytizing to Muslims, Malaysian authorities may decide in their favor. As I noted here, on December 31 of last year the Malaysian High Court ruled in favor of the Catholic Herald, a paper serving the country’s small Catholic population, and which had insisted upon the right to use the word “Allah” to refer to its version of the Abrahamic deity.
And now Muslims who last summer took to the streets to make mischief—publicly abusing a cow’s head in protest of the construction of a Hindu temple—have been told to knock it off by a Malaysian judge, who admonished and fined them, and sent one of them to jail.
Last year on August 28 scores of Muslims seized up a bloody cow’s head and marched from a mosque to the office of the chief minister of Selangor state. Once there, they stomped on the head, spit at it, and verbally slagged Hindus, to whom the cow is a sacred animal. These people were riled that a Hindu temple was to be built in a predominately Muslim neighborhood.
The site of the temple was eventually relocated, and 12 of the cow-abusers were arrested and charged with various offenses, including sedition, which in Malaysia can be defined as promoting hostility between races. Last Tuesday all 12 men pled guilty to “illegal assembly,” and the two men responsible for hauling the cow’s head to the demonstration were convicted of sedition. All of them were fined, and one of the men, who had used the head as a trampoline, was ordered to spend a week in jail.
Not everybody is real happy about this outcome. Some Muslims believe there shouldn’t even be any cattle aficionados in their country. On the other hand, A. Vaithilingam, a Malaysian Hindu religious leader, complained that “the sentences seem to be very light after the huge commotion and the insult.”
Writing in Malaysiakini, Charles Santiago, an opposition member of the Malaysian parliament, groused as follows:
Wear a black T-shirt in Malaysia and you could be arrested for being a dissident. Hold a candle light vigil calling for freedom of expression and you could get doused with chemical water, followed by hundreds of baton-wielding anti-riot police beating the hell out of you.
But four men who paraded with a bloodied cow head, stomped on it and pleaded guilty to doing so with the intent to incite racial tension had the sedition charges against them dropped. Instead they were fined a mere RM3,000 and sentenced to one week jail.
Malaysiakini, as I noted here, is currently involved in litigation with the government over the suppression of a pair of 
political comic books. The website presented a page containing the venting of its readers on the cow-head sentences. As I read through these impassioned screeds, my vision started to blur a little, and I was transported to a different place. Though the names and the issues were different, the fervent tone and doomish conclusions were not—for a dizzying moment I thought I was over at Daily Kos, scrolling through the latest outbursts from some of the folks over there, forever screeching and rending their garments that the Obama administration is hell-bent on enabling the End Of Civilization As We Know It.
It really is, one world.
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