analysis The young and intellectually vibrant Perlis Mufti Dr Mohd Asri Zainal Abidin has again come to the forefront to battle a popularly entrenched stereotype - this time, in championing the right of Chinese Muslims to build mosques and surau.

Central and fundamental to his argument is that Islam is an inclusive faith that is open to all human beings who are willing to embrace it, and that the religion is therefore not the exclusive preserve of Malay Muslims.

In a comment entitled 'It's the faith that matters, not race' (New Sunday Times, Feb 4), the mufti went further by suggesting that there is no need for non-Malay converts to change their name or those cultural practices that are not against the teachings of Islam.

For example, there is nothing wrong with Muslims using chopsticks or cutlery to eat, as long as the right hand is used and the food is religiously permissible or halal.

He observes that, while many Chinese Muslims are pious and faithful to the teachings of Islam, there are also Malays who identify themselves as Muslims but practise forms of syirik or idolatry.

To observers of religious affairs outside Malaysia, the mufti's argument is nothing new, as it has long been public knowledge that 1.3 billion Muslims around the world come from different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

For example, in West Asia and North Africa, the heartland of Islam, Muslims are not entirely Arabs. Turks, Iranians and Egyptians have preserved many elements of their pre-Islamic ethnicity, culture and language. Many Muslims in Central Asia are Mongolian in ethnic origin.

Use of language

In China, where Islam was first propagated as early as during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and there are now some 20 million Muslims, there are 30,000 mosques and thousands of halal restaurants and grocery shops.

The faith is preserved, transmitted and instructed in Mandarin and other languages of ethnic minorities alongside Arabic.

Mosques in China, some of which were built more than 1,000 years ago, are named in Mandarin, such as the 1,300-year-old Huaisheng Mosque at the Guangda Road in the original downtown of old Guangzhou City. Literally, Huaisheng means 'remembering the Sage'.

Indian Muslims are another globally well-known community of non-Malay Muslims. There are also Caucasian Muslims in Europe, especially in the Balkan states that were once a part of the Turkish-Muslim Ottoman Empire.

In Malaysia, where Islam has long been 'racialised' or made synonymous with the Malays either unconsciously through popular misunderstanding or consciously as a political programme to artificially construct a ruling ideology, many self-evident facts are still not that obvious in the minds of many.

The question of why Chinese Muslims are not allowed to build and maintain mosques has indeed opened up space for rational public discourse on delinking religion from ethnicity, culture and language.

The question will logically give rise to a more derivative point of debate: shouldn't the Malay language be delinked from Islam?

This could allow other faiths, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, to be freely propagated via scriptures and literatures published in Malay, the official language and major medium of instruction