Why Muslim unity is detrimental to Malay community

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”

- Yevgeny Zamyatin

Unity is overrated. Unity, like patriotism, is the lexicon of the pusillanimous. As Malaysians we should always question the use of the word, especially in the context of 1Malaysia or Bangsa Malaysia propaganda that craven political operatives use to shore up support for agendas which have very little to do with the average Malaysian but is merely part of the long con that unfortunately is the democratic process.

When it comes to racial politics in Malaysia, the word becomes even more dangerous, a barbiturate that anesthetises an already partisan electorate obscuring the very real divisions in the country that fuels the political apparatus of the establishment and the opposition.

Global Movement of Moderates (GMM) chief executive officer Nasharudin Mat Isa’s warning of a compromised Muslim unity weakening Islam is exactly the kind of wrongheaded rhetoric that enables the kind of extremism that Muslim communities are prone to. Furthermore, it is evidence of the hegemonic agenda that Umno has on the Malay polity.

A couple of points he makes that are worth discussing.

1. He claimed that, "Indeed, it is everybody's right to create new political parties in any democratic system but we (need) to ask its significance to the country because such an action will only lead to disunity among the Muslims."

Having diversity of choice in the democratic process does not create opportunities for extremism. Not having a choice is the conduit in which extreme elements infiltrate and subvert the democratic process most often in the name of religion.

Furthermore, the choice must be meaningful. If every party is shovelling the same manure with a different shovel, then chances are that angry disenfranchised youths will turn to seductive religious voices in the belief that some meaning will be given to their lives and a solution to their economic and social estrangement.

As I wrote in another piece, “I have no idea if the Malay community will not remain pawns to the alternative political parties and their mendacious schemes that pay homage to old corrupt ideologies in their quest to seek power, but I do know there is great comfort in voting corrupt potentates out of office when we still have the chance.”

2. Nasharudin also said, “The Malaysian Muslims should learn from what happened in the Arab world where disunity among its people caused their young men to become terrorists and subsequently, destroyed their own countries.”

This is not a lesson for Muslim Malaysians but rather a lesson for Muslim Malaysian politicians. Arab regimes fall because they are mired in corruption propped up by corrupt Western interests and oppress their population through violence normally sanctioned by Islam.

They fall because their rulers use Islam as a weapon against their populations repressing them while the elites of these regimes lead decadent lifestyles and live in a world far removed from the poverty of their brethren. These regimes fall because they failed to embrace secular democratic principles and brainwashed their populations into believing that Islam was the panacea for all that ailed them.

This is old ground for me. Consider what I wrote in an article about current prime minster Najib Razak – “The destruction of the Malay left, the decimation of the civil service, the erosion of secular values in public education, the propaganda of government agencies like Biro Tatanegara (BTN) and mainstream Umno propaganda media outlets, have created classes within the Malay/Muslim community, with elites having free reign and the average Malay subjected to the harsh glare of Arab-influenced Islam.”

3. And lastly, “Nasharuddin said studies revealed that young people who think they are righteous and without friends could easily be influenced with radical ideology.”

From my ‘Merchants of hate’ piece, “For years, the BTN courses told Malays that they were under siege. This is not a defensive posture. In reality, this is exactly what extremist groups like IS need. They need young, foolish men filled with a sense of superiority fuelled by unearned self-righteousness to carry out barbaric acts in the name of promulgating their scared religious beliefs. This, coupled with the rampant corruption and all-consuming hypocrisy, is fertile ground for groups like IS.”

Devoid of alternatives

We are not talking about friendless youths here. We are talking about a system predicated on maintaining hegemony and using methods that are conducive to the genocidal tendencies of Islamic extremists attempting to subvert so-called democratic Muslims regimes for their own apocalyptical desires.

Furthermore, the mainstream Muslim political landscape is devoid of any secular alternatives. In lieu of policies or discourse that enables the Malays, polity to discover sources other than their holy book or explore their spiritual impulses without sanctions from the state, all the community has is an Islam that restricts their intellectual growth and encourages conformity through Umno racial ideology and state-sponsored religion.

The opposition meanwhile does nothing to counter this but reacts to the establishment’s dirty tricks to gain political mileage from their own racial bases that further erodes any sense of solidarity between the races. There is a big difference between solidarity and unity.

Three years ago I wrote of how Umno was slowly waking up to the reality that their ideology had caused serious class divisions in the Malay polity using the so-called “12 percent discount for Umno members” as an example of appropriateness of the term Umnoputra - “Malays who for whatever reason are unwelcome on the Umno gravy train for years have been complaining that they have been marginalised under the Umno watch, much like their fellow non-Malay citizens but the sad reality is that the discourse is constructed in such a way that racialists have a field day extending the Umnoputra stereotype to every Malay.”

So while the opposition and establishment wrestles with ideas that seem alien only because it invites dissent in the Malay community, what we have to do is take heed of words written by the likes of Malaysiakini columnist Faisal Tehrani in his piece ‘Aku, liberalis’, where he writes – “Memandangkan ia telah menjadi ideologi kebangsaan dan falsafah Malaysia selama 44 tahun, tidak keterlaluan jika aku katakan, barang siapa yang enggan menerima fahaman liberalisme, maka eloklah mereka mencari negara selain Malaysia.

“Kita tidak mahu sama sekali rakyat yang enggan menerima faham liberalisme dan memilih untuk menerima ekstrimisme agama yang memudaratkan dalam kehidupan seharian mereka.

“Jika mereka enggan, sebagai sebuah negara yang berdaulat, Malaysia perlu memohon mereka secara terhormat memilih negara yang sesuai dengan kehendak mereka. Ada banyak negara di dunia ini yang menolak fahaman liberalisme.

“Mereka boleh berhijrah ke sana. Malaysia sudah 44 tahun meraikan ‘cara liberal’ dan kita perlu meneruskannya.”

There is no better way than that to end this article.

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S THAYAPARAN is commander (rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. - Mkini