Mediaboss Marketing

October 27, 2014

by Thomas Fuller@www.nytimes.com

When he organized a get-together for dog lovers and their canine-averse neighbors, Syed Azmi Alhabshi thought he was doing a public service.

But after hundreds of people showed up to the event, billed as I Want to Touch a Dog on Facebook, and when pictures started circulating on the Internet of Muslim women in head scarves happily hugging dogs, Mr. Syed Azmi became an unwitting protagonist in the latest chapter of Malaysias culture wars.

In the week since the event, Mr. Syed Azmi, a pharmacist, has received more than 3,000 messages on his phone, many of them hateful and a dozen of them threatening physical harm. The police advised him to stay at home.

Malaysias Muslim leaders, who cite Islamic scriptures stating that dogs are unclean, lashed out at him in the news media. I feel the anger, and it is real, he said in an interview.

Over the past two weeks, Muslim leaders in Malaysia have denounced Halloween as a planned attack on Islam and Oktoberfest parties as a public vice the same as mass-promoted adultery.

The culture wars have waxed and waned in multicultural Malaysia in recent years as conservative Muslim groups have pushed back against what they describe as libidinous and ungodly Western influences in a country that has rapidly modernized and become more cosmopolitan.

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