In 2020, **** percent of the Malaysian population professed to be of the Islamic faith. The second-largest religion in Malaysia in that year was Buddhism, adhered to by **** percent of the population.

In 2025, **** percent of the Malaysian population were classified as Bumiputera, **** percent were classified as ethnic Chinese, and *** percent as ethnic Indians. Those who do not fall under these three main ethnic groups are classified as ‘Other.’ Malaysia is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society with three main ethnicities and language groups. Who are Malaysia’s Bumiputera? Bumiputera, meaning sons of the soil, is a term used to categorize the Malays, as well as the indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, also known as "orang asli", and the indigenous peoples of Sabah and Sarawak. As 2024, the Bumiputera share of the population in Sabah was ** percent, while that in Sarawak was **** percent. Thus, the incorporation of the states of Sabah and Sarawak during the formation of Malaysia ensured that the ethnic Malays were able to maintain a majority share of the Malaysian population. Bumiputera privileges and ethnic-based politics The rights and privileges of the Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak are enshrined in Article 153 of Malaysia’s constitution. This translated, in practice, to a policy of affirmative action to improve the economic situation of this particular group, through the New Economic Policy introduced in 1971. 50 years on, it is questionable whether the policy has achieved its aim. Bumiputeras still lag behind the other ethnic two major groups in terms of monthly household income. However, re-thinking this policy will certainly be met by opposition from those who have benefitted from it.

This statistic presents the results of a survey on perceived percentage of the Muslim population in Malaysia as of 2018. According to data published by Ipsos, Malaysian respondents slightly overestimated the proportion of Muslim population in their country. On average, the respondents thought that around ** out of every 100 people in Malaysia were Muslims, when the actual share of Muslim population was around ** percent in Malaysia.

Pew Research Center surveyed 13,122 adults across six countries in Asia about religious identity, beliefs, and practices, using nationally representative methods. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. They were conducted on mobile phones in Malaysia and Singapore. Local interviewers administered the survey from June to September 2022, in eight languages.

This survey is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, a broader effort by Pew Research Center to study religious change and its impact on societies around the world. The Center previously has conducted religion-focused surveys across sub-Saharan Africa; the Middle East-North Africa region and many countries with large Muslim populations; Latin America; Israel; Central and Eastern Europe; Western Europe; India; and the United States.

This survey includes three countries in which Buddhists make up a majority of the population (Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand); two countries with Muslim majorities (Malaysia and Indonesia); and one country that is religiously diverse, with no single group forming a majority (Singapore). We also are surveying five additional countries and territories in Asia, to be covered in a future report.

Pew Research Center has produced a supplemental syntax file containing SPSS code to generate common analytic variables in the survey's corresponding report and toplines. The ARDA has provided this syntax in a copyable PDF document as an additional download.

Introduction

The English-Malay Religion Domain Parallel Corpus is a high-quality bilingual dataset designed to support the development of religious and spiritual language models, machine translation systems, and NLP tools. With more than 50,000 carefully translated sentence pairs, this dataset provides rich linguistic variety and authentic domain relevance, making it ideal for cross-lingual understanding of religious content.

Dataset Content

Domain-Specific Content

To support broader applications, the dataset also includes relevant content from philosophy, ethics, spirituality, and comparative religion studies

Format and Structure

Use Cases and Applications

In 2023, the number of non-Muslim marriages registered in Malaysia was approximately ******. This was an increase compared to the previous year. Muslims make up the majority of the population in Malaysia, while other major religions in the country include Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

According to a survey on racial and religious harmony in Singapore, **** percent of Malay respondents claimed that they agreed with the statement that they liked meeting and getting to know people from other religious groups than their own. Singapore is one of the world's most religiously diverse societies, with *** officially recognized religions.

In 2023, it was estimated that approximately ** percent of the Indonesian population were Muslim, accounting for the highest share of Muslims in any Southeast Asian country. Indonesia also has the world's largest Muslim population, with an estimated *** million Muslims. Demographics of Indonesia The total population of Indonesia was estimated to reach around *** million in 2028. The median age of the population in the country was at an all-time high in 2020 and was projected to increase continuously until the end of the century. In 2020, the population density in Indonesia reached its highest value recorded at about ***** people per square kilometer. Shopping behavior during Ramadan in Indonesia Nearly all Muslims in Indonesia celebrated Ramadan in 2022. During the month of Ramadan, ** percent of Indonesian users utilized online applications to order food. Many Indonesians planned to shop online or offline during Ramadan, with around ** percent of online users planning to purchase fashion wear and accessories. Shopee was the most used app for shopping purposes during that period.

Abstract

The World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org) is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars, with the WVS association and secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The survey, which started in 1981, seeks to use the most rigorous, high-quality research designs in each country. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones. The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world. Thousands of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists have used these data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. These data have also been widely used by government officials, journalists and students, and groups at the World Bank have analyzed the linkages between cultural factors and economic development.

Geographic coverage

The Survey covers Malaysia.

Analysis unit

• Household
• Individual

Universe

The WVS for Malaysia covers national population aged 18 and over, for both sexes.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

1.Age group 1865 (96%) and 65 above (4%) 2.Malays (60%), Chinese (30%), Indian (10%)

The sampling was based on proportionate size of the population (1st stage). Then each stratum was derived based on the number of states in the country, i.e. 14 altogether (2nd stage). Then from each stratum, a cluster sampling was done based on the districts consisted of urban and suburban (3rd stage). Finally a random sampling was done on each cluster (4th stage).

Remarks about sampling: Stratification was based on the number of states in the country. In this case, there were 14 strata. Stratification was done on the 2nd stage.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

English, Malay, Mandarin Questionnaires. Field pre-testing was carried out in the state of Selangor, of the questionnaire. Twenty five (25) questionnaires were distributed to persons of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Cognitive interviews were carried out with the respondents after the questionnaires were answered, to determine questions in the survey that posed problems to them, in terms of interpretation, recalling and articulation of the required information V114 (The expression of Left-right self-placement for political party is not common in Malaysia); V165 (There is no Malay equivalent for Millennium Development Goals); V186 (Since Malaysia is a multi-religious country, the number of prayer times provided by WVS does not fit well); V206 (There is no Malay equivalent for euthanasia); V231-233 (It is not a norm for Malaysians to reveal the preference of political party in public or to stranger) V131, V146, V222, V256, V257 and V258 were altered to reflect Malaysias geographical location, linguistic, and demographic characteristics. Questions V114, V186, V231, V232, V233, and V233a . Question V186 was replaced by question V186a, as Malaysia is an Islamic society. Therefore, respondents were asked how frequently they pray. Questions V231 to V233 were excluded as they were too politically sensitive in nature and might dissuade respondents from participating in the survey. Questions V114 and V233a were irrelevant to the nature of Malaysias political parties alignment, which are aligned not according to liberal or conservative ideals, but according to ethnicity.

Response rate

Response rate: Total number of starting names/addresses (household): 1200

Remarks about non-response: We chose our respondents based on the household within the housing area (urban/suburban). The selection of houses was based on random selection

Sampling error estimates

+/- 2,9%

Abstract

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981 by its Founder and first President (1981-2013) Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan (USA) and his team, and since then has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. Extensive geographical and thematic scope, free availability of survey data and project findings for broad public turned the WVS into one of the most authoritative and widely-used cross-national surveys in the social sciences. At the moment, WVS is the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed.

The project’s overall aim is to analyze people’s values, beliefs and norms in a comparative cross-national and over-time perspective. To reach this aim, project covers a broad scope of topics from the field of Sociology, Political Science, International Relations, Economics, Public Health, Demography, Anthropology, Social Psychology and etc. In addition, WVS is the only academic study which covers the whole scope of global variations, from very poor to very rich societies in all world’s main cultural zones.

The WVS combines two institutional components. From one side, WVS is a scientific program and social research infrastructure that explores people’s values and beliefs. At the same time, WVS comprises an international network of social scientists and researchers from 120 world countries and societies. All national teams and individual researchers involved into the implementation of the WVS constitute the community of Principal Investigators (PIs). All PIs are members of the WVS.

The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world. Thousands of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists have used these data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. The WVS findings have proved to be valuable for policy makers seeking to build civil society and stable political institutions in developing countries. The WVS data is also frequently used by governments around the world, scholars, students, journalists and international organizations such as the World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Headquarters in New York (USA). The WVS data has been used in thousands of scholarly publications and the findings have been reported in leading media such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Economist, the World Development Report, the World Happiness Report and the UN Human Development Report.

The World Values Survey Association is governed by the Executive Committee, the Scientific Advisory Committee, and the General Assembly, under the terms of the Constitution.

Strategic goals for the 7th wave included:

Expansion of territorial coverage from 60 countries in WVS-6 to 80 in WVS-7; Deepening collaboration within the international development community; Deepening collaboration within NGOs, academic institutions and research foundations; Updating the WVS-7 questionnaire with new topics & items covering new social phenomena and emerging processes of value change; Expanding the 7th wave WVS with data useful for monitoring the SDGs; Expanding capacity and resources for survey fieldwork in developing countries. The 7th wave continued monitoring cultural values, attitudes and beliefs towards gender, family, and religion; attitudes and experience of poverty; education, health, and security; social tolerance and trust; attitudes towards multilateral institutions; cultural differences and similarities between regions and societies. In addition, the WVS-7 questionnaire has been elaborated with the inclusion of such new topics as the issues of justice, moral principles, corruption, accountability and risk, migration, national security and global governance.

For more information on the history of the WVSA, visit https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp ›Who we are › History of the WVSA.

Geographic coverage

Malaysia.

The WVS has just completed wave 7 data that comprises 64 surveys conducted in 2017-2022. With 64 countries and societies around the world and more than 80,000 respondents, this is the latest resource made available for the research community.

The WVS-7 survey was launched in January 2017 with Bolivia becoming the first country to conduct WVS-7. In the course of 2017 and 2018, WVS-7 has been conducted in the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Andorra, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Germany, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Iraq and over dozen of other world countries. Geographic coverage has also been expanded to several new countries included into the WVS for the first time, such as Bolivia, Greece, Macao SAR, Maldives, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan.

Analysis unit

Household, Individual

Sampling procedure

The sample type preferable for using in the World Values Survey is a full probability sample of the population aged 18 years and older. A detailed description of the sampling methodology is provided in the country specific sample design documentation available for download from WVS.

A detailed description of the sampling methodology is provided in the Malaysia 2018 sample design documentation available for download from WVS and also from the Downloads section of the metadata.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The survey was fielded in the following language(s): Malay, Chinese. The questionnaire is available for download from the WVS website.

In 2023/24, the market size for Islamic fintech in Malaysia amounted to around ** billion U.S. dollars, an increase of approximately *** billion U.S. dollars compared to the market size recorded in the previous year. The value of the Islamic fintech market in the country was forecasted to exceed*** billion U.S. dollars by 2028. Vast potential in Islamic banking Islam is the majority religion in Malaysia, with around **** percent of the population belonging to this religious group. The country also has a dual legal system, with Quranic-based Sharia law mainly governing the personal or family matters of the Malay Muslim population. Thus, there is a large market for Islamic finance in Malaysia. In 2022, the Southeast Asian country was the *****-leading country with the largest Islamic banking assets in the world, after Iran and Saudi Arabia. Call for innovation in Islamic finance Acknowledging the potential of Islamic fintech, the current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim pledged 100 million Malaysian ringgit in May 2024 to foster innovation in Islamic finance. This financing has the potential to stimulate further growth in the country’s Islamic fintech market. As of 2023, there were ** Islamic fintech companies in Malaysia. With support from the government, more Sharia-friendly fintech startups will likely flourish in the coming years.

As of June 2025, there were around 3.11 million ethnic Chinese residents in Singapore. Singapore is a multi-ethnic society, with residents categorized into four main racial groups: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. Each resident is assigned a racial category that follows the paternal side. This categorization would have an impact on both official as well as private matters. Modelling a peaceful, multi-ethnic society The racial categorization used in Singapore stemmed from its colonial past and continues to shape its social policies, from public housing quotas along the ethnic composition in the country to education policies pertaining second language, or ‘mother tongue’, instruction. Despite the emphasis on ethnicity and race, Singapore has managed to maintain a peaceful co-existence among its diverse population. Most Singaporeans across ethnic levels view the level of racial and religious harmony there to be moderately high. The level of acceptance and comfort with having people of other ethnicities in their social lives was also relatively high across the different ethnic groups. Are Singaporeans ready to move away from the CMIO model of ethnic classification? In recent times, however, there has been more open discussion on racism and the relevance of the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) ethnic model for Singaporean society. The global discourse on racism has brought to attention the latent discrimination felt by the minority ethnic groups in Singapore, such as in the workplace. In 2010, Singapore introduced the option of having a ‘double-barreled’ race classification, reflecting the increasingly diverse and complicated ethnic background of its population. More than a decade later, there have been calls to do away from such racial classifications altogether. However, with social identity and policy deeply entrenched along these lines, it would be a challenge to move beyond race in Singapore.

In 2023, the fertility rate for Bumiputera women between the ages of 15 to 49 years in Malaysia was around ***** per 1,000 women. By comparison, the fertility rate for Chinese women in that year was *** births per 1,000 women.

The Hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia is considered among the world’s largest human gatherings, with over **** million pilgrims in 2025. The Saudi government restricted Hajj to residents in Saudi Arabia only during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The number of Hajj pilgrims dropped to about **** thousand in 2021. Like other religious pilgrimages, Hajj is considered an annual rite of passage to renew one's moral and spiritual connection. Approximately a quarter of the human population identify themselves as Muslims. According to their faith of Islam, it is one of their five religious duties to perform the Hajj at least once in their lifetime. Who are the pilgrims? According to Islamic tradition, any Muslim who has reached maturity is due to perform the Hajj. During the last Hajj season before the COVID-19 pandemic, about two thirds of the pilgrims to Mecca came from outside of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom. The government of Saudi Arabia issues each years’ Hajj visas on a country quota system, based on the size of the Muslim population .     Financial aspects   One main condition for a mature Muslim to qualify to perform the Hajj is to be free of debt and other financial and social obligations. Many Muslims around the world spend a significant amount of their life-savings to be able to make this spiritual journey. As an example, the cost of performing Hajj for a Malaysian Muslim was calculated at about ***** thousand Malaysian ringgits. For first time Hajj pilgrims, the Malaysian government subsidizes more than half of that amount. Some Muslims who can’t afford the financial or physical challenges of the Hajj sometimes perform the smaller Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca called Umrah, which can be attempted all year round.