Politics of Division

By admin-s On Jul 1, 2014

To arrest the decline in Malay support, UMNO has decided that the best approach to win back the Malays, and to punish the non-Malays for not supporting it.

James Chin, The Mark News

As the Malaysian government bans Christians from using the term “Allah” in their publications, analyst James Chin argues that the state is again using religion as a wedge issue to divide the electorate.

Last week, the highest court in Malaysia ruled that the Catholic Church cannot use the word “Allah” in its publication The Herald. The government argued that the word “Allah” is unique to Islam, and restricted its use to Muslims. This goes against the established fact that non-Muslims have used the word “Allah” since time immemorial in the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world.

Few were surprised by the ruling. Christians and other minorities in Malaysia knew that the issue was not really about the usage of the word “Allah,” but rather a show of political force about who really rules the country.

IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, THE RADICAL SEGMENT OF MALAYSIA’S MUSLIM POPULATION WILL FEEL EMPOWERED BY THE GOVERN- MENT’S OPEN SUPPORT.

Malaysia is a multiracial, multireligious country where about 60 percent of the population is Muslim. This normally does not represent a political problem, but in Malaysia, a Muslim identity is constitutionally defined as someone who is ethnic Malay. Hence, in Malaysia, Malays are Muslim and Muslims are Malay.

This is complicated by a huge Islamic bureaucracy whose job is to “protect” and “defend” Islam by making it legally impossible to leave Islam. The Islamic bureaucracy runs a scare campaign claiming that Christians are the enemy, and that they want to use the word “Allah” to convert Malays to Christianity. Some even claim the Jews are behind the campaign.

Running parallel to the religious tensions is ethnic competition between the Malays and non-Malays (mostly Chinese and Indians). Blaming the racial riots in 1969 on economic imbalance between the Malays and non-Malays, the government instituted a massive affirmative action plan favoring the former.

Unlike affirmative action plans in other countries, this plan – the New Economic Policy (NEP) – had a clear political objective of cementing Malay control over the political system. Discriminatory policies in all social, public, and economic spheres openly favored the Malay/Muslim community and positioned non-Malays as second-class citizens.

The rationale given was that non-Malays had “agreed” to the “special rights” of Malays in return for citizenship when the country became independent in 1957.

For more than three decades, many non-Malays saw the policy as the political price to pay for communal peace, and the majority of the economically dominant Chinese community accepted it as the price of doing business in Malaysia.

Unfortunately, Malay political leaders in the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) saw the NEP as a free ticket to instant wealth. Using their political power, they secured massive rent in the name of affirmative action through government contracts and licensing systems.

By the new millennium, it had become increasingly difficult for UMNO to justify the NEP when its widespread corruption and abuse were clear as daylight, especially to the lower-income segment of the Malay population. Younger Malays were better educated and saw political Islam as an alternative to the established order under UMNO.