Contextualizing Religious Pluralism in Malaysia: Responses from Christians and Muslims

The term ‘religious pluralism’ has been emerged as a result of interconnection and intersection between various ideologies, cultures, and religious affiliations among humankind. It is a theological concept that celebrates plurality, diversity, and coexistence of religions in which responses towards the Ultimate Divine reality with various conflicting truth-claims made by the followers of religions. Muslims and Christians scholars’ and academicians’ has put extensive efforts in discussing this concept and relate them with the notion of religious plurality. However, some indicate the striking difference between both terms while others are maintaining the similarity between them. Taking Malaysia as a context, this kind of idea which is alien to its people has brought confusion between the adherents of different faiths. Therefore, this study is an attempt to focus on the different understanding of these two terms from Muslims and Christians scholars’ perspectives. Thus, it tackled the way scholars relate their understanding of religious pluralism and religious plurality with two significant provisions of Islam as the religion of the federation and freedom of religion and the controversial issue of the use of the word ‘Allah’ in the Malay Bible. The current study was conducted through a descriptive and qualitative method. The structured interviews and textual analysis approach have been used in analyzing the primary and secondary materials for the research. By considering these three significant issues discussed in this study, it leads to the proper understanding of the way one should handle when dealing with the issues related to the inter-religious and inter-cultural matters socially, politically, and historically.