While I may be a committed Christian Malaysian (and a big fan of Hillary and Obama), I cannot help but count my blessings that under Muslim-majority Malaysia, the country to which we belong, I’m truly able to see for myself the common values of all great religions and how they unite humans beyond boundaries of ethnicity and creed.

The success of Malaysia as a nation is largely the result of the wisdom of our founding fathers especially our Muslim founding fathers who include Onn Jaafar, Hussein Onn, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Ahmad Boestamam, Burhanuddin Helmi and, of course, Ahmad Badawi Abdullah and Muhammad Iskandar (who were far smarter men than their sons).

We have in our hands a constitution that is rooted in all the main religions in Malaysia and thus it is Islamic to the core.

But ever since the 1980s, Wahhabism has been taking over our religious departments slowly but surely. And the attacks against yoga are the latest in a long list of attacks on the true, moderate practice of Islam in Malaysia.

None of the nine wali of Kelantan ever would have envisioned this kind of fate to befall Islam. Neither did Tok Kenali (Muhammad Yusuf Ahmad), their heir in Kota Baru, the original centre of Islam in Malaysia.

Ever since Tunku Abdul Rahman the Father of Malaysia passed on, there has not been any credible force to speak up for Islam’s true form and substance, apart from the respected organisation Sisters In Islam and its like-minded allies Farish Noor, Shanon Shah and the late Toni Kassim.

It is true that there are many people inside the ruling party who speak up against extremism but the ruling party itself, including its ex-leaders and outgoing leaders and their children, have become far too associated with the Napoleonic style of governance meaning the marriage of Western liberal form and iron-fisted substance, a combination Noam Chomsky calls ‘secular theocracy’.

The only way forward is to get all Malaysians to participate in an Islamic discourse with due respect to the fact that Islam is the country’s official religion and the religion of their Royal Highnesses the Malay Rulers.

All Malaysians, especially the liberal and secular politicians on both sides of the political divide, should be made to talk about how Islam should look and be practised in modern society.

They should all ask themselves the question, is true Islam a horridly intolerant cult of doom as what is perpetrated by the extremists in both the ruling party, some opposition parties and the undemocratic and unaccountable religious departments and religious courts?

Or is Islam the essence of parliamentary democracy, inclusiveness, plurality, love, peace, tolerance, diversity, liberalism and all that actually civilised the barbaric West post-Renaissance?

Parliament should then come up with a standard of what Islamic interpretation is.