I can see your impassionate plee not to persuade Malays who are born Muslims to become Christians.

I would say that this does not happen all the time. In fact rarely.

1. There is always a certain restraint on speaking to Malay-Muslims about Christianity in countries such as Malaysia or even Singapore.
2. Most of the time, the Malays that embrace Christianity are those who have been on their own personal spiritual journey such as mine. Nobody preached to me or evangelized to me. But it was my own personal decision. And this would be the usual course of a Malay embracing Christianity.

I do understand that this is an extremely sensitive topic, but i hope i can clarify and bring to light some misconceptions and misunderstandings that we have.

Being Malay does not mean this… Malay=Muslim.
So for example if i put this logic, then… Chinese=Buddhist, Indians=Hindu, Caucasians=Christians?… What about Africans then?

We also know for a fact that we have friends who are Muslims but they are Indians, Chinese, Caucasians and even Africans.

So would the definition of race equates faith?

So, maybe let me begin first with defining what is it really being Malay as a race, not ethinic group(ethnicity is influenced by culture).

This excerpt from Wikipedia sums it up quite well,

“Malays (Malay: Melayu) are an ethnic group of Austronesian peoples predominantly inhabiting the Malay Peninsula and parts of Sumatra and Borneo. The Malay ethnic group is distinct from the concept of a Malay race, which encompasses a wider group of people, including most of Indonesia and the Philippines. The Malay language is a member of the Austronesian family of languages.”

As we can see, the Malay race are a people of Austronesian descent. Meaning we have Malay brothers and sisters right across the South-East Asian peninsula. In the Philippines, most of the brown-skinned, tanned Filipinos are Malays by race, but what about faith? They are Catholics most of them. We also have our Malay brothers and sisters in Indonesia, and in some islands there, they are Hindu.

So what we have here is basically a minor misconception of the definition of race and faith. But extrapolating this misconception, leads to BIG misunderstanding spanning decades of confusion. Even back home here in SG, we still encounter many non-Malay Singaporeans simply assuming that all Malays are Muslims. Not their fault actually, because like i mentioned this misconception has spanned quite a long while in our history.

As to the definition of what is Islam and what is Christianity, that is widely available in any resource centres, ie, bookshops, libraries, even the internet.

God made the world so beautiful and unique to have so many peoples of colours and creeds and we appreciate that He left His open arms of Grace for anyone, any of His peoples to come back home.

Much love to you Brother Shah.

Shalom and be Greatly Blessed!

Emmanuel.