The ‘holier than thou’ contest is a futile gambit

 

From Terence Netto

Barely had Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim unwound from his lightning-fast sympathy trip to quake-devastated Turkey than the news emerged that PAS would send a team of MPs to the hapless country to commiserate with victims.

What else can PAS do but to express sympathy to whoever they know in that grieving nation?

Would it help to tell the four-member PAS team headed by deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man that it would be more useful to save the money the trip would incur and donate it to funds set up for the alleviation of the misery the disaster has caused?

It won’t because this charade of “holier than thou”, played by whichever party holds federal power in Malaysia and matched by whichever is in the opposition, has arrived at a compulsive stage that the contestants would rather rely on a reflex than an original idea anytime.

Of course, PAS could not do much except perhaps for individual members taking part in street demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur in protest against the recent burning of the Quran by a Swedish politician.

A pained prime minister Anwar’s reaction to the sacrilege was to order the printing at government expense of a million copies of the holy book for distribution, presumably, to those who are inclined to emulate the incendiary Swede.

Prior to the decision to print copies of the Quran, the Anwar administration was intent on saving whatever expense it could to help pare down the national debt, now at an astronomical RM1.5 trillion, entailing RM45 billion in annual interest payments alone.

But how constraining is that sum when the necessity of flagging your religious credentials overpowers all other considerations?

In competitive displays of religious rectitude, deference to financial and other constraints is regarded as a mark of insufficient piety.

The “holier than thou” compulsion, if indulged in a context of fostering unity among the country’s diverse peoples, is a self-deluding gambit.

This is because the demands of Malaysian democracy require a clear-eyed understanding that differences between ethnic groups and some religious sources of political polarisation are never going to be resolved.

Hence resorting to a “holier than thou” gambit is a flight from reality: it encourages pretension and distracts people from the contemplation needed to solve tough problems. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.