A teacher told non-Muslim students in Malaysia to drink their own urine. The school was firebombed.

While Muslim minorities in the West are taking the opportunity of Ramadan to reach out to other communities, non-Muslims in some Muslim majority countries are facing pressure to help their Muslim countrymen fast.

In Malaysia, where about 60 percent of the population is Muslim, one such incident led to a Molotov cocktail attack against a public school on Wednesday.

It began with a "joke." A senior Muslim teacher in an elementary school in the northern state of Kedah reportedly told students not to drink water in class during Ramadan but to do so in the washroom. Then he added that if the students had no water, they could drink the tap water — or their own urine.

Several disgruntled parents filed complaints to the education authority and lodged reports against the teacher with the police. Malaysian Deputy Education Minister P. Kamalanathan reprimanded the teacher but also explained that the remark was a joke.

Another deputy education minister, Mary Yap, who is a non-Muslim, publicly urged non-Muslim students to avoid eating and drinking in front of Muslim schoolmates during the fasting month. The incident sparked a debate within Malaysian cyberspace whether limitations should be imposed on non-Muslims to facilitate the fasting of Muslims. The police have arrested two suspects in the attack, which damaged the security booth of the school.

Many cafeterias in Malaysian public institutions, including some public schools and universities, are closed during the month of Ramadan, even though there are significant numbers of non-Muslim students.

During the holy month last year, the authority faced a public uproar after a parent uploaded photographs on social media showing that her daughter and other non-Muslims students were made to eat in a shower room because the school cafeteria was closed. The school and authority later claimed that the cafeteria was under renovation but reporters found no sign this was true.

Malaysia often brands itself as a moderate and progressive Muslim nation, but Islamic conservatism has been on the rise in recent years. The government has banned Christians from using the word “Allah” to refer to God, though Christians in Malaysia have been using the term as a direct translation for God for centuries.