Symbols Of Religious Literacy

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The website of the National Security Council – a federal agency under the Prime Minister’s Department – contains an infographic that summarises the elements of the Malaysian flag, the Jalur Gemilang.
According to the website, the crescent moon, or hilal, in the Jalur Gemilang symbolises “the religion of Islam as the official religion of the federation and the nation”.
The crescent, often paired with a star, also appears on the flags of several other nations – including Algeria, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Turkiye – which, like Malaysia, are countries with Muslim majority populations.
In the field of international humanitarian aid, we even have the International Red Cross Movement for historically Christian territories and the Red Crescent for Muslim territories.
ADSThere are Muslims who reject the crescent as an Islamic symbol. One theory is that it was actually a symbol of the pre-Islamic – and, for that matter, pre-Christian – city of Byzantium.
Byzantium was later renamed Constantinople when it was Christianised in 324 CE, and then Istanbul by the Turkish republic in 1930.
When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 CE, they adopted the crescent and star as the symbol of their dynasty, which expanded into a transcontinental empire a century later under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566 CE). This is a fascinating story of how a local symbol came to represent what we now commonly think of as the “Muslim world”.
Still, regardless of what the National Security Council website says, the status of the crescent as an Islamic symbol is contested. But what about the full moon, you might ask, such as it appears in the PAS party flag? Is that a proper Islamic symbol? The answer also seems to be no.
These are not mischievous questions – they reveal the complex and fluid nature of what are commonly taken to be religious symbols. And this is one important reason why Malaysians should continue reflecting critically on the Islamic Development Department (Jakim)’s new “guidelines” for Muslims attending events at other houses of worship, first announced on Feb 5. It is a mark of sanity that, only two days afterwards, the cabinet intervened to decide they were not needed.
Yet, advocates of these guidelines continue to make a case for them. Today, the Terengganu mufti of Terengganu insisted that Jakim’s guidelines were needed to “safeguard national harmony”. If this debate is to continue, it needs to proceed on sounder intellectual ground.
Among the items Jakim’s proposed guidelines intended to regulate was the presence of “religious symbols” at “non-Muslim” events with Muslims as guests. But this is nothing new – the existing National Fatwa Council guidelines also forbid the display of “religious symbols” at “non-Muslim celebrations” which have Muslims in attendance.
Human capacity for symbolism
The human species is defined by its capacity to communicate through symbols – from the earliest cave paintings to today’s most abstract mathematical equations.
A symbol is basically something that stands for something else. Language is an example of the human capacity for symbolic thinking and communication par excellence.
How else would we describe the ordered and patterned series of sounds, visual marks, tactile dots (Braille for visually impaired people), or manual movements (sign language for hearing impaired people) we use to represent our innermost feelings and thoughts to each other? The ordered patterning of sound is incidentally one way to describe music, too.
BrailleFor language to work, however, it needs to be based on a shared agreement and understanding of what words mean. No matter how eloquent I consider the words issuing forth from my mouth or my fingertips, they are meaningless unless they are intelligible to the person I am addressing.
ADSLuckily, even when vastly different languages have evolved, humans have learned to acquire more than one language and to learn the art of translation.
It is sometimes difficult to translate specific concepts or expressions from one language to another, but by and large, it is possible to convey the gist of what is being said. This human ingenuity of sharing and translating symbols is what ultimately allows us to not only live but flourish together in the same world.
Things get tricky when it comes to religious symbols. Unlike supposedly ordinary symbols, these acquire the aura of something exalted that stands for something else that is exalted, and this exaltation is often linked to what a religious tradition takes to be its ultimate concern.
Take the cross, for example, which is now regarded as the universal symbol of Christianity, representing the saving power of Jesus Christ for humanity through his death and resurrection.
When a believer holds a piece of jewellery with a crucifix as its pendant or a small wooden cross, these are not merely objects in their hands. Very likely, these are sacred symbols that represent their ultimate concern – eternal salvation through Jesus Christ as their saviour.
Yet the cross was also contested as a religious symbol for the first three centuries of Christian history. Historically, many early Christians preferred the ichthys – a stylised fish – perhaps because its Koine Greek spelling was an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour”.
Fish are also mentioned repeatedly and symbolically in the Gospels – many of Jesus’s disciples were fisherfolk, and he commissioned them by making them “fishers of men” (Mark 1: 16-18). In Luke’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus is given grilled fish to eat.
What would happen, I wonder, if the church organisers of a Christian celebration in Malaysia studiously avoided the display of the crucifix but served their Muslim guests ikan bakar (grilled fish)? Again, this is not a cheeky question, because what is religious symbolism without food?
Blurred boundaries
Furthermore, the boundary between religion and culture is often blurred, or people have different ideas about the relationship between beliefs, practices, and cultural norms.
Take, for example, the eating of symbolic foods during Chinese New Year. Is this a cultural practice or is it symbolism related to an ultimate concern? It’s hard to say.
This year, the Year of the Snake, people are encouraged to eat more fish (for increased prosperity), sweet rice balls (for family togetherness), glutinous rice cakes (for a promotion or a raise), and noodles (for happiness and longevity).
Among Hokkien speakers, pineapple jam tarts are the star of every Chinese New Year, because the Hokkien words for pineapple (ong lai) are pronounced the same way as the words for “prosperity comes”. Who is to say whether serving and consuming these foods are sacred acts, the mundane practices of the food-obsessed, or both?
So, what would happen, I wonder, to a Chinese New Year celebration that eschews the lion or dragon dance but serves its Muslim guests pineapple jam tarts and fried noodles?
This, I repeat, is not an attempt to be tedious. Instead, when such religious guidelines are formulated in a spirit of safeguarding the “sensitivities” of Muslims in a country where Islam is a source of political power and privilege, everybody gets put on edge and people will be driven to ask endless panicky “what if” questions.
Because what the guidelines are quite pointedly suggesting is that although Malaysia is a diverse country, and we might tell the world that we are proud of this diversity, all this muhibbah-ness means nothing because, really, we do not and cannot share the same world.
The “national harmony” that its advocates keep espousing thus feels like a euphemism for soft religious apartheid.
This is a depressingly illiterate view of what religious symbols mean and how they evolve over time. It also ignores the fact that sometimes, like language or music, religious symbols are shared and improvised.
The human-palm-shaped amulet known as the Hand of Fatima to Muslims is also known as the Hand of Miriam to Jews and the Hand of Mary to Christians. It originated neither in Islam, Christianity, nor Judaism, however.
Some of the mythology surrounding it invokes the ancient Sumerian cult of Inanna and the Assyrian-Babylonian cult of Ishtar – goddesses of love, fertility, and beauty.
But the combination of love, fertility, and beauty – not to mention sacred feminine power – is probably banned by Jakim and the National Fatwa Council anyway. -Mkini
SHANON SHAH is a visiting research fellow at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, and tutor in the Study of Islam at the University of London Worldwide’s Divinity programme.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.

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