Maps are all perception

Re: “Polarisation makes attack on SE Asia ever more likely”, (Opinion, Jan 14).

As a seasoned journalist on Southeast Asia, Michael Vatikiotis should know fine well that “the map is not the territory it represents” as said by Alfred Korzybski, and which René Magritte explained as a process in which “perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves”.

In the case of religions, Professor Jonathan Z Smith of the University of Chicago in his “Map is not territory”, remarks that religions are about making sense and coping with life and are thus applied differently to deal with the local and present. Thus it is stretched and sensationalised journalism on the part of Vatikiotis to extend what is happening in Europe and the Middle East to Southeast Asia on the basis of a few instances here.

There are no rampant attacks on Buddhist shrines in Indonesia or on Myanmar nationals in Malaysia, while the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar is more about race than religion.

Even to label the southern Thai insurgency as “Muslim Malay” does not fit the bill; it is a local ethno-nationalist conflict and not jihadist and it does not concern the rest of the Thai Muslims of different ethnicities.

As for the rise of Muslim religious conservatism in Southeast Asia, this is not an exclusively Muslim event but a worldwide religious phenomenon coming in a variety of forms, a response to the complexities of modern living and globalisation to which religious conservatism offers a simpler but unfortunately merciless and uncompassionate answers.

IMTIYAZ YUSUF