Islam is Malaysia's official religion and the faith of about 63.5 per cent of the population, according to the 2020 census. The rest are mostly Buddhists (about 18.7 per cent), Christians (about 9.1 per cent) and Hindus (about 6.1 per cent), with smaller numbers following Chinese folk religion, Taoism, Sikhism, Indigenous beliefs or no religion. Religion in Malaysia closely follows ethnicity: nearly all ethnic Malays are Muslim by constitutional definition, most Chinese Malaysians are Buddhist or follow Chinese traditions, most Indian Malaysians are Hindu, and many Indigenous people of Sabah and Sarawak are Christian. The constitution makes Islam the religion of the federation while allowing other religions to be practised "in peace and harmony".
A Constitution That Ties Religion to Race
Three articles of the Federal Constitution shape religious life. Article 3 declares Islam the religion of the federation. Article 11 guarantees freedom of religion but lets state governments restrict the preaching of other religions to Muslims. Article 160 defines a Malay as a person who habitually speaks Malay, follows Malay custom and professes Islam. Being Malay and being Muslim are therefore legally tied: a Malay who left Islam would, in law, no longer count as Malay, with consequences for the special privileges Malays hold.
That is why leaving Islam is so difficult. In the best-known case, Lina Joy, a Malay woman who converted to Christianity, asked the civil courts to remove "Islam" from her identity card. In 2007 the Federal Court ruled that only the Islamic courts could decide whether she had left the faith, and those courts rarely allow it.
Malaysia runs two parallel legal systems. Civil courts handle most law for everyone, while Syariah courts in each state handle family law, inheritance and religious offences for Muslims. The boundary between them is regularly tested. In February 2024 the Federal Court struck down sixteen provisions of Kelantan's Syariah criminal law, ruling that the state had legislated in areas that belong to Parliament.
Terengganu and Malacca: How Islam Arrived
The oldest evidence of Islam in the Malay world is a stone. The Terengganu Inscription Stone, found in 1887 near Kuala Berang, carries a proclamation of Islamic law written in Malay in Arabic script, the Jawi alphabet, and it is dated to the early fourteenth century, about 1303. Islam had arrived with Muslim traders from Arabia, India and the wider archipelago along the sea routes between the Indian Ocean and China.
The decisive conversion came in Malacca. Its founding ruler, Parameswara, who established the port around 1400, is said to have converted to Islam, and within a generation its rulers were sultans, and Malacca became a great Muslim trading city and a centre from which Islam spread along the coasts of the peninsula and Sumatra. When the Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, they brought Catholicism. Their church on St Paul's Hill still stands as a ruin above the town, and Malacca's Dutch-era Christ Church, completed in 1753, is still in use. Malacca also has the Cheng Hoon Teng, founded in the seventeenth century, the oldest functioning Chinese temple in Malaysia. Together with George Town in Penang, the old city is a World Heritage Site.
The Sultans as Heads of Islam
Malaysia's nine hereditary Malay rulers are the heads of Islam in their own states, and the king, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, chosen from among them in rotation, is head of Islam in the federal territories and in the four states without a sultan: Penang, Malacca, Sabah and Sarawak. Religious affairs, including mosques, Syariah courts and the regulation of Islamic teaching, are largely run by the states. At federal level, the Department of Islamic Development, JAKIM, coordinates policy and runs the country's halal certification, which is recognised across much of the Muslim world. The pink-domed Putra Mosque in Putrajaya, the federal administrative capital, is one of the country's best-known modern mosques.
Kelantan and Terengganu: The Conservative North-East
Religious practice is not uniform across the peninsula. The north-eastern states of Kelantan and Terengganu, which are overwhelmingly Malay, are the heartland of the Islamic party PAS, which has governed Kelantan almost continuously since 1990. There, public life follows stricter rules, with separate checkout queues for men and women in some supermarkets and controls on entertainment. Kelantan's attempts to introduce the full Islamic criminal code, hudud, have been blocked by the limits of state power under the federal constitution.
Penang and Selangor: Temples, Churches and Mosques
The west coast, where Chinese and Indian communities settled during British rule, shows Malaysia's religious diversity most clearly. In George Town, Penang, one street, Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling, is nicknamed the Street of Harmony. Along it stand an Anglican church, St George's, a Chinese temple to the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, the Sri Mahamariamman Hindu temple and the Kapitan Keling Mosque. On a hill above Penang stands Kek Lok Si, the largest Buddhist temple complex in Malaysia.
North of Kuala Lumpur, the limestone Batu Caves hold one of the most important Hindu shrines outside India. A golden statue of the god Murugan, about 43 m tall, stands at the foot of 272 steps that lead up to a temple in the main cave. During the festival of Thaipusam each January or February, a very large crowd, often estimated at over a million people, gathers there. Some devotees carry kavadi, elaborate frames, and pierce their skin with hooks and skewers as acts of penance.
Clan Houses and Hungry Ghosts: Chinese Malaysian Religion
The census counts most Chinese Malaysians as Buddhist, but their religious life is usually a blend. Mahayana Buddhism, Taoist deities and Confucian respect for ancestors are practised together, often in the same temple and the same household. The clan associations, or kongsi, that early Chinese immigrants founded for people of the same surname built elaborate ancestral halls. The Khoo Kongsi in George Town, with its carved and gilded clan temple, is the most famous. During the seventh lunar month, the Hungry Ghost Festival fills streets with offerings, paper money burned for the dead and open-air Chinese opera. In the ninth lunar month, the Nine Emperor Gods festival draws devotees dressed in white to temples in Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia also has Theravada Buddhist communities: the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Kuala Lumpur, founded by Sri Lankan Buddhists in 1894, leads the city's main Wesak procession.
Indian Malaysians, Sikhs and the Orang Asli
Indian Malaysians, about 7 per cent of the population, are mostly Tamil Hindus whose ancestors came to work on rubber plantations and railways under British rule, but the community also includes Indian Muslims, known for the mamak restaurants found across the country, and Christians. Malaysia also has a Sikh community of around 100,000 people, many descended from men recruited into the police and security forces of British Malaya. Gurdwaras stand in most large towns.
The Orang Asli, the Indigenous peoples of the peninsula, number around 200,000. Many still follow traditional animist beliefs connected with the forest, while others have become Muslim or Christian. Their religious choices have sometimes been politically sensitive, because Islamic missionary efforts among them are supported by state agencies.
Sabah and Sarawak: The Christian East
Malaysian Borneo has a very different religious map. In Sarawak, about half the population is Christian, making it the only Malaysian state without a Muslim majority, and in Sabah Christians are a large minority. Most are Indigenous peoples such as the Iban, Bidayuh and Kadazan-Dusun, converted by Anglican, Catholic and evangelical missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Sabah and Sarawak joined Malaysia in 1963, their agreements included guarantees on religious freedom, and Sarawak still has no official state religion.
Older beliefs survive in the harvest festivals: Gawai in Sarawak, on 1 June, and Kaamatan in Sabah, in May, which honour the rice spirit and are public holidays in their states. Borneo's Christians have also been at the centre of Malaysia's most famous religious dispute, over the word "Allah". Malay-speaking Christians in Borneo have always used it for God in their Bibles and prayers, but the federal government banned its use in a Catholic newspaper in 2009. After years of litigation, a High Court ruling in 2021 allowed Christians to use it in religious materials.
A Calendar Shared by Every Faith
Malaysia's public holidays reflect every major community: Hari Raya Aidilfitri at the end of Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Wesak, Deepavali and Christmas. The tradition of the "open house", in which families invite neighbours and friends of every faith to visit and eat on their festival days, is widely followed, and political leaders hold large public open houses of their own. Religion even shapes the working week. In Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday, so that Friday prayers fall on a day off, while the rest of the country rests on Saturday and Sunday. Johor, which switched to a Friday weekend in 2014, moved back in 2025. During Ramadan, evening bazaars selling food for breaking the fast appear in towns across the country. The pattern of faith and ethnicity is similar across the causeway, as our overview of religion in Singapore shows, and the Muslim world of the neighbouring islands is described in religion in Indonesia.