PM Hj Najib has failed the true test of 1 Malaysia

LETTER Let’s stop kidding ourselves for once. The RM 100 aid to schoolchildren, RM 500 aid to the poor, the RM 200 book vouchers, Kedai Rakyat, Klinik Malaysia and the like are just camouflaging the real issues.

1Malaysia will never work out in reality as long as Umno is in power. This corruption-riddled party thinks that the only way the country can punch above its weight in international affairs is to claim leadership of the Muslim World and Islam.

By the same warped sense of history, Umno thinks that it must move even heaven and hell itself to keep the non-Muslim and Muslim communities apart in order to claim the leadership of the Muslim world and Islam.

There’s such a great and seemingly unbridgeable gulf today, as a result, between non-Muslims and Muslims in Malaysia that we might as well let Sabah and Sarawak go free and partition Peninsular Malaysia into two nations – one non-Muslim (west coast) and another Muslim (north and east coast) – as what happened in India in 1947.

The alternative is for the entire nation to be one big loony bin from which people will be constantly seeking to escape. Malays, for example, now top the list of migrants to Australia and most of them reportedly either have non-Muslim spouses or wish to leave their faith. The true test of 1Malaysia surely will come when a Muslim can leave his faith either to think free or embrace another faith. Divine wisdom is not the monopoly of any one religion.

Whither 1Malaysia! 

The true test of 1Malaysia is when a non-Muslim can marry a Muslim without being forced to convert, very much against his or her will, to Islam.

No country in the world, including India and Indonesia, forces a non-Muslim to abandon his or her faith and embrace Islam just to get married. Indeed, such compulsion brings no credit to Islam or the Muslims themselves.

The result of this hare-brained policy on the part of the clerics in Umno is great social upheaval in non-Muslim communities and a rise in the number of apostates among the Muslim communities.

No self-respecting non-Muslim, after having been forced to convert to Islam and even change his name unnecessarily, can be expected to don his baju Melayu and songkok, daily before dinner, get on his little Honda Cub and head to the nearest mosque to have his brains washed in the politicization of Islam.

Not every non-Muslim marrying a Muslim converts to Islam. There are thousands living in sin and their children are being denied proper documentation. The authorities hope that they can adopt this extreme measure to force non-Muslims living in sin with Muslims to convert to Islam. No conversion to Islam, no documents is the motto of the Umno Government flogging the 1Malaysia lie.

This phenomenon should not be allowed to exist in a true 1Malaysia.

The true test of 1Malaysia will come when the Syariah Court is not allowed to subject non-Muslims to the Syariah by the backdoor and in defiance of our secular Constitution.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak should put his money where his mouth is and issue his own Fatwa that a non-Muslim can marry a Muslim without being forced to convert to Islam. It will not be difficult to secure such a Fatwa, given the practice in the rest of the world.

God, all right thinking people everywhere will concede, has no religion. All religions are convenient man-made vehicles for the exploitation of human beings through instilling fear of the unknown in the vulnerable – “what will happen to us when we die!” – and thereby manipulating them. The fact is that after death we are going wherever we were before we were born.

But religion is also being seen as a necessity, on another score, as a readily-available and cheap method of psychoanalysis and psychiatric care. It also probably helps to maintain social order by keeping the poor from murdering the rich. Isn’t it written in the Bible, also echoed in the Koran, that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven when he is rich! Hence, so much solace for the poor in religion.

The true test of 1Malaysia is when Muslim men are forbidden to take on more than one wife.

At present, the practice of Muslim men being allowed to have up to four wives at any one time causes havoc among all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and robs eligible men every generation of partners.

When a Muslim man has used up his quota of four wives at any one time, he will send a text message to the first wife to divorce her before lustfully marrying again. Marriage is all about women being sex objects for these men.

The first wife will join the ranks of the single mothers, the poorest group in Malaysia – even poorer than Sabah and Sarawak – and who go on to sell nasi lemak or kuih Melayu and Nonya kuih by the roadside to keep body and soul together. Generally, the male-dominated Syariah Court and the police force are blind to the plight of single Muslim mothers.

The Islamic authorities will go along with this polygamy charade “as long as the man can afford to have another wife”. What about robbing another man of his potential wife?

True the Prophet Mohamad had four wives but this was because so many men were killed during the wars that plagued the Islamic era that the high number of widows because a major source of public concern. The prophet’s solution was for his surviving warriors to marry the widowed wives of their fallen comrades.

The Islamic take on polygamy was not to be taken literally, not to be swallowed hook, line and sinker. The ratio between men and women, it must be stressed is 1 : 1 not 1 : 4. It’s statistically impossible for every Muslim male to aspire to have four wives at any one time.

Neither is it true, as Osma Bin Laden promised, that every suicide bomber will enjoy 72 fair-skinned virgins and flowing barrels of wine – not haram after death – in heaven after their martyrdom. Fair-skinned virgins? How racist! What about the dusky Arab girls?

The true test of 1Malaysia will come when non-Muslims are not excluded from holding the Governorships of the various states.

Similarly, the true test of 1Malaysia will come when non-Muslims are not excluded from holding the post of Menteri Besar in the sultanates.

Again, the true test of 1Malaysia will come when Umno or its poodles Perkasa and Jati do not twist and turn every issue in Malaysia into a religious and racial issue.

The list on the true test of 1Malaysia goes on and on.

Malaysia Chronicle