Introduction

When politics consumes almost everything in its path, our inner landscape becomes thoroughly de-territorialised. We lose the capacity for subtle perception, become increasingly isolated from one another, and find ourselves divided into rigid ideological camps.

What, then, can awaken this barren landscape?

Perhaps it is time for culture to re-territorialise a collective mind that has become hardened by excessive politicisation. By recovering our shared arts, histories and traditions, we can soften the boundaries that divide us, breathe new life into our common spaces, and rebuild a richer and more humane world of consciousness.

The controversy surrounding the planned concert by American gospel singer Israel Houghton in Kota Kinabalu offers a timely occasion to reflect on precisely this question.
1. Political Witch-Hunts and De-territorialisation: A Spiritual World Reduced to Labels

The proposed Kota Kinabalu concert by gospel singer Israel Houghton has, unfortunately, become the latest casualty of the expanding reach of contemporary political thinking into spaces that were once considered cultural, spiritual and personal.

The controversy is troubling precisely because the objections appear to rest, at least in part, on a remarkably reductive logic: the singer's given name is Israel, and he has previously expressed personal views on the conflict in the Middle East on social media.

From there, a gospel music event has been transformed, almost overnight, into a perceived political provocation.

When a person's name becomes evidence against him, and when past personal opinions become a measure for determining whether he should be allowed to perform, something important is lost. The cultural and spiritual space in which people encounter music, beauty, faith and transcendence is reduced to political symbolism.

This is what de-territorialisation looks like at its most troubling.

Its consequence is not merely the cancellation or restriction of a concert. It is the erosion of cultural sensitivity itself.

Music disappears. The comfort of gospel disappears. The artist's creative contribution disappears. What remains are political labels, suspicions and calculations.

People no longer encounter one another as fellow human beings. Instead, they are sorted into ideological camps.

A public space that was once capable of accommodating difference is gradually transformed into a barren landscape of distrust.
2. Music as Living History: The Cultural Place of CCM in East Malaysia

To understand why the proposed concert should not be consumed by political controversy, we must first understand the cultural and historical place of contemporary Christian music (CCM) in the Christian communities of East Malaysia.

For many indigenous communities in Sabah and Sarawak — including the Kadazan-Dusun, Bajau and Murut peoples, among others — CCM is not simply a Western cultural import or a commercial form of popular entertainment.

It has become part of a living local tradition.

Since the middle of the 20th century, Christianity has been closely connected with processes of modernisation, literacy, education and social transformation among many indigenous communities in East Malaysia.

The arrival and development of contemporary Christian music created another layer of cultural exchange. Traditional musical sensibilities — including gong-based rhythms, communal singing and indigenous approaches to harmony — encountered modern Christian and popular musical forms and were gradually woven together in new ways.

Across countless Sunday services, harvest celebrations, community gatherings and informal church activities, music has provided a language through which people express emotion, strengthen community bonds and seek spiritual reconciliation.

In this sense, music itself becomes a powerful form of re-territorialisation.

It gives collective anxieties and hopes a place to dwell. It allows communities experiencing rapid social change to reconnect with memory, faith and belonging through sound.

For many churches and independent Christian musicians in East Malaysia, the music of Israel Houghton and Israel & New Breed has been part of this cultural experience for years. Their songs have been sung, adapted and reinterpreted by local congregations and musicians.

To dismiss the concert simply through a political lens risks dismissing a much longer cultural history.

It reduces decades of lived religious and musical practice in East Malaysia to an extension of somebody else's geopolitical argument.

That would be a profound cultural loss.
3. Defending the Founding Compact: Religious Freedom Is Not a Favour

There is an even more fundamental issue at stake.

The controversy touches upon the historical and constitutional foundations of Malaysia itself.

History should not be forgotten: religious freedom was part of the understanding under which Sabah and Sarawak agreed to form Malaysia.

The 20-Point Agreement, negotiated in the context of the formation of Malaysia, included among its key provisions the principle that there should be no state religion in Sabah and that religious freedom should be guaranteed.

This historical understanding has long formed part of the political memory of East Malaysia and its tradition of plural coexistence.

This is why the issue should not be dismissed as merely a question about one concert or one singer.

It concerns a broader principle: whether East Malaysia should continue to define its own cultural and religious space according to its historical experience, or whether increasingly conservative currents from elsewhere should determine the boundaries of that space.

Religious freedom should not remain merely a phrase in constitutional or historical documents.

It must have meaning in everyday cultural life.

That includes the freedom of religious communities to invite international musicians to perform, worship, celebrate and express their faith through music — subject, of course, to the ordinary requirements of public safety and the law.

Allowing Israel Houghton to perform would therefore represent more than permission for a concert.

It would affirm Sabah's confidence in its own plural social character.

The role of the authorities and the police should be to manage legitimate risks and protect the public, not to allow fear, intimidation or political pressure to determine whether a peaceful cultural and religious gathering may take place.

A mature society does not protect freedom by eliminating difference.

It protects freedom by learning how to live with difference.
4. Conclusion: Rebuilding a Richer and More Humane World of Consciousness

If we allow political polarisation to consume this concert, what we lose will not simply be one evening of music.

We risk losing another small piece of the free cultural space in which people are able to breathe, worship, create and encounter one another without first asking which political camp they belong to.

More seriously, we risk normalising a way of thinking in which everything — a name, a song, an artist, a religious gathering or a cultural event — must first pass through a political test.

Once that becomes normal, collective imagination begins to wither.

Supporting Israel Houghton's right to perform in Kota Kinabalu is therefore not simply about supporting a particular singer or a particular concert.

It is about defending a cultural space against political reductionism.

It is also about East Malaysia asserting its own social and cultural agency.

Through music, and through a cultural event that crosses national, ethnic and geographical boundaries, we can affirm something larger: human consciousness should never be reduced to a political slogan, and history's promises should not be distorted by the populist anxieties of the present.

Cultural re-territorialisation offers one possible antidote.

It means watering the dry ground of a politically fractured society with history, memory, art and tradition. It means allowing cultural differences to become sources of connection rather than reasons for exclusion. It means restoring life to boundaries that have become rigid and hostile.

In an age of relentless political noise, the independence of culture and the arts is therefore not a luxury.

It is a social necessity.

Only by protecting spaces where music, faith, creativity and human encounter can exist beyond political tribalism can we preserve a world of consciousness that is richer, more inclusive, more emotionally alive — and, ultimately, more human.