Moderate Malay Muslims Seek to Cool the Heat

By admin-s On Dec 12, 2014

(Asia Sentinel) – Malaysia has a political problem, not a religious one

The news earlier this week that 25 prominent Malay Muslims are seeking what they called “an informed and rational dialogue on the ways Islam is used as a source of law and policy” is a heartening development in a country where race relations have continued to deteriorate.to the point where neither the majority Malay Muslims nor the minority Chinese, who represent about 22 percent of the country, trust each other.

“Given the impact of such vitriolic rhetoric on race relations and political stability of this country, we feel it is incumbent on us to take a public position,” Noor Farida Ariffin, former Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands, said in a statement issued on behalf of the 25 signatories.

The 19-paragraph statement was signed by prominent people, including former secretaries-general, directors-general, ambassadors and individuals. Noor Farida, who once headed the Foreign Ministry’s Research, Treaties and International Law Department, said she and the others “are deeply concerned about the state of the debate on many issues of conflict on the position and application of Islamic laws in Malaysia.”

“It is high time moderate Malays and Muslims speak out. Extremist, immoderate and intolerant voices as represented by Perkasa and Isma do not speak in our name,” the statement said “Given the impact of such vitriolic rhetoric on race relations and political stability of this country, we feel it is incumbent on us to take a public position and urge for an informed and rational dialogue on the ways Islam is used as a source of public law and policy in Malaysia.”

The problem is actually not so much that Malaysia has a religious problem as it has a political problem, one that started as long ago as 2001, according to the late Barry Wain, writing in “Malaysian Maverick,” his authoritative biography of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. That was when the United Malays National Organization “abandoned its historically moderate position in the struggle with [the fundamentalist Islamic Parti Islam se-Malaysia] for Islamic legitimacy.”

Mahathir declared Malaysia an “Islamic state” directly after jihadists at the behest of the late Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden flew jets into the World Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing more than 3,000 people.

And, according to Wain, while Mahathir said publicly that Malaysia’s other races were comfortable with that decision, it actually “increased UMNO-PAS friction and made life more problematical for Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and other religious minorities, comprising 40 percent of Malaysia’s population.”

As UMNO has become more brittle and backward-looking, beset with corruption and cronyism, Wain’s assertion has taken on more and more weight. Religious tension has continued to grow, exploding in 2009, when UMNO sought to use religion to shore up its position with rural Malays but ended up losing its two-thirds majority in the parliament, for the first time in the country’s 50-year history, along with five of the country’s states, including several of its most prosperous.