I’ve been thinking about Noor Deros, not so much about what he demanded, but why he felt the need to demand it. Once a familiar figure in Singapore’s religious circles, now a lecturer in Malaysia, Noor Deros still speaks as if he never really left.
His words travel easily across the Causeway, finding an audience among young madrasah graduates who couldn’t go to Al-Azhar but found new teachers, and new convictions, in Malaysia. His story is almost archetypal the preacher who lost his pulpit but refused to disappear.
In a way, Noor Deros is saying: “You may have shut me out, but I still have followers, and my words still matter to your community.” There’s a sadness in that sentence if you listen closely. Beneath the bravado lies a human need the need to belong, to matter, to still be part of the story.
The Displaced Preacher
Noor Deros was born and raised in Singapore, educated at Al-Azhar, and now lectures in Malaysia. While it’s unclear whether he has taken up Malaysian citizenship, his presence there feels unsurprising. Malaysia has long welcomed religious scholars who fit a certain mould articulate, credentialed, and conservative in outlook. For a country that often views Singapore’s secular model and its tolerance of religious freedom, including the right to renounce faith, as a potential ideological threat, Noor Deros embodies the reverse narrative: the educated Muslim who left the secular city-state to reassert a purer vision of Islam.
And as I see it, Malaysia’s environment suits him. In Malaysia, almost everything runs along racial and religious lines. There, religion isn’t just personal: it’s administrative. I remember once trying to evacuate my sickly brother from a private hospital in Johor Bahru back to Singapore, and was asked in the ambulance by a medical personnel about my race. It puzzled me, so I asked, “Why is my race so important?” She replied, almost casually, “Oh, if you’re Malay, you can get a discount.” As a former medical professional myself, I was horrified. That moment, though brief, showed how deeply entrenched this mindset is, where even compassion is filtered through the lens of ethnicity and religion.
For someone like Noor Deros, that same system offers both legitimacy and belonging. It rewards his identity in ways Singapore never could. Still, even in Malaysia, not everyone welcomes him. I’ve met Malaysian Malays who spoke about Noor Deros with visible contempt, saying, “He should just go back to Singapore.” For a moment, I felt sad for him.
It reminded me that even in a society where religion is deeply embedded in public life, not every believer wants faith to become politics. In that sense, Noor Deros shares a certain irony with Zakir Naik both men found refuge in Malaysia’s religious environment, yet neither truly found acceptance. It seems that belonging, once fractured, never fully heals, no matter which side of the border one crosses. He crossed a border, but his audience didn’t.
The Madrasah Generation and the Silent Drift
For years, many young Singaporean Muslims have gone to Malaysia for further studies when Al-Azhar or other Middle Eastern paths proved inaccessible. These students find themselves in a religious environment where Islamic expression is far more public, political, and self-assured than in Singapore. They are exposed to a discourse that intertwines religion, nationhood, and moral struggle.
When they return, they often carry fragments of that worldview, a subtle shift in tone, a yearning for authenticity, a feeling that religion should not always be so “managed.” To this group, Noor Deros represents something familiar: a teacher who speaks their language and shares their discontent. He embodies what they quietly wish they could be : outspoken, unfiltered, and unafraid.
The Need to Belong: Faith, Alienation, and Voice
From a humanist perspective, Noor Deros’s story isn’t just political it’s profoundly human. When institutions exclude or silence a voice, that voice often grows louder outside the system. Rejection breeds defiance. For someone who once had influence within Singapore’s religious landscape, losing that platform must have been disorienting. His demands : for MUIS independence, the election of religious leaders, moral reforms, and even foreign policy shifts, might look excessive or naive. But beneath them lies a deep need to reclaim authority, to prove that he still speaks for a community that values him. He isn’t only shouting to be heard. He’s shouting not to disappear.
The Man Behind the MicI’ve had brief exchanges with Noor Deros before online, in a Facebook group I once managed for Malaysian & Singapore atheists. He was curious, never hostile. His first message to me was to recommend his video on The Kalam Analogy, a classical argument for the existence of God. Later, when we crossed paths again, he asked for my thoughts on a moral question: what if two adult siblings consented to sex, used protection, and no child was conceived would it still be wrong, and where would morality come from?
Our conversations never turned into debates, but they revealed something about him, an educated man genuinely intrigued by ideas beyond his own worldview, yet unwavering in his conviction that divine morality must anchor human behaviour. I first noticed him during the Wear White movement, a campaign opposing LGBTQ advocacy in Singapore. Since then, I’ve watched his voice evolve still passionate, still certain, perhaps more defiant now.
And though I disagree with his positions, part of me understands the impulse. He is, in his own way, doing what a good Muslim is expected to do: defend what he believes to be right, guide his community back to what he sees as the proper path. That’s why I don’t wish for him to be silenced. Let him speak. Let him show us what lies beneath the rhetoric. When we listen even critically, we begin to understand the architecture of belief that shapes minds like his.
The Dangerous Allure of Identity Politics
Yet this is where belonging turns dangerous. When religion becomes a rallying cry, it can harden into identity politics, a language of separation rather than connection. Noor Deros’s demands touch genuine anxieties within the Malay-Muslim community: fears of moral erosion, loss of control, and the sense that their voice is sidelined in national policy.
But in channelling these emotions into political confrontation, he risks weaponising faith. Demands for independence and purity often end up building walls, not bridges. Faith, when politicised, stops liberating the soul and starts recruiting it. In a plural society like Singapore, that path leads not to empowerment but to estrangement from others, and eventually, from oneself.
The Digital Pulpit and the Performance of Conviction
In the age of social media, the pulpit is no longer confined to the mosque. It’s on YouTube, TikTok, and Telegram. The internet rewards drama and defiance not nuance or quiet reflection. Noor Deros understands this. Each demand becomes a declaration, each post a sermon designed for virality. He performs conviction, and conviction performs for him. It is a mutually sustaining cycle: his followers see courage his critics see provocation and he, caught between both, becomes a symbol, a preacher without a country, but not without a cause.
A Humanist Reading: Beyond Anger, Toward UnderstandingFrom a humanist lens, Noor Deros’s defiance is less about theology and more about belonging unmet. His rhetoric may be sharp, his demands unreasonable, but at its root lies a very human condition: the pain of exclusion and the longing to be significant again. When people stop feeling heard within the system, they will always find a stage outside it. And the louder that stage becomes, the more it reveals the silence that created it. Noor Deros may be testing boundaries, but he is also testing us our ability to respond not with fear or dismissal, but with understanding.
To see beyond the noise and recognise the wound that gives rise to it. Because ultimately, behind every defiant preacher is a human being trying to matter again. And perhaps that’s why, when I see Noor Deros, it sometimes feels like looking into a mirror, not because we believe the same things, but because we share the same restless hunger to make sense of a world that doesn’t always make room for us.
