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Most diplomatic dinners stick to safe ground.
This one didn’t.
When Minister of Religious Affairs, Senator Zulkifli Hasan, rose to speak at the Grand Iftar for Humanity on Tuesday evening (3 March), he said something that does not often come from an Islamic affairs minister — that Islam and Confucianism, at their core, are not so different.
“I must admit that there are numerous similarities between Islam and Confucianism,” Zulkifli told the room, which included Chinese Ambassador Ouyang Yujing seated among more than 1,000 guests at Darul Quran JAKIM in Kuala Kubu Bharu, Selangor.
It was not an offhand remark.
The Minister cited his attendance at a dedicated conference on Islam and Confucianism in June last year, and backed his point with a Hadith — a saying of the Prophet Muhammad — on compassion and mercy.
Islam is mercy to mankind. And Confucianism also promotes love and peace among human beings all over the world.
A Shared Moral Language
Confucianism is not a religion in the conventional sense.
It is a system of ethics and social philosophy built around values like benevolence, respect, loyalty and harmony — principles that have shaped Chinese civilisation for more than two thousand years.
For a minister whose portfolio is explicitly Islamic governance to stand before China’s Ambassador and draw a direct philosophical line between the two traditions is a notable move.
It reframes the Malaysia-China relationship in a way that trade statistics and bilateral agreements simply cannot — as a partnership grounded in compatible human values, not just compatible economies.
It also reflects a broader, quieter shift in Malaysia’s approach to its relationship with Beijing.
Under the Malaysia Madani framework, the government has been deliberate about anchoring its foreign engagements in ethics and shared humanity — and Tuesday’s iftar was a textbook example of that approach in action.
The warm tone carries quiet weight — Malaysia has long walked a careful line on China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims, making Tuesday’s message of shared values both more ambitious and more delicate.
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An Unusual Setting for an Unusual Message
The venue itself added weight to the moment.
Darul Quran JAKIM is not a conference hall or a hotel ballroom.
It is one of Malaysia’s most respected institutions for Quranic memorisation and Islamic learning — a Tahfiz centre.
Delivering a message of common ground between Islam and Confucianism from within those walls, to an audience that included 300 low-income families and hundreds of Quran students alongside foreign diplomats, gave the words a credibility that a formal diplomatic setting could not have provided.
Zulkifli, a former Dean of the Faculty of Syariah and Law at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), was not speaking from a podium as a politician.
He was speaking as a host, in a house of worship, at a shared table.
That, perhaps, is exactly the point.
(@gpmmalaysia)The Grand Iftar for Humanity was organised by Global Peace Mission Malaysia (GPM) in collaboration with the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Malaysia.
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