A Malaysian Hindu looks at an Islamic Stateby M.G.G. Pillai
The perception Malaysians have of an obscurantist PAS is a rabid reaction towards a perceived demonised organisation waiting around the corner to sever the limbs of thieves and robbers or hang those who want to leave the faith. But such political reactions is what we should expect in a contested environment: demonise your opponents first before the attack. If PAS is the political ogre we are told it is, how is it that it governed Kelantan for 28 of the past 40 years, when it formed the government there after the first general elections in 1959. The twelve-year gap, when the National Front governed, came when Kuala Lumpur forced it out after encouraging street demonstrations in 1978 of the variety it now abhors. Since PAS's return to office, with the Tok Guru as mentri besar, in 1990, its hold on the state looks set to continue. Recently, an apolitical friend, a Malay, with a pathological hatred for PAS, told me he took his staff on their annual outing this year to Kelantan. What he saw surprised him. He found the state in equilibrium, with rapport between government and people, more than he had seen elsewhere. Development did not mean huge, expensive, irrelevant structures meant to enter the record book but to develop a community that forges ahead to strengthen its cultural values at its own pace. There were no flashes of the overdevelopment one sees in Kuala Lumpur. And he reluctantly admitted the PAS administration concentrates on cultural and communal values than on what I would call, for want of a better word, "constructive development". We are told we ought to be proud of our physical structures built as monuments the world would be proud of. But we are terribly dissatisfied with our lives. Kelantan, alone amongst the states of Malaysia, took the low-key road to communal confidence, developing in the best way it can to benefit most of its people. I thought I would venture into a subject that gets a contested rabid airing these days - that of an Islamic state in Malaysia. I look at it from two angles disinterestedly, as a citizen, a minority within a minority, practising a faith to which about five per cent of Malaysians can claim to follow; and as a political commentator with a vested interest in how this country of ours develop. I am a Malayalee - an important subset of the minority Indian community, a Hindu with, I hope, a long term view of historical processes and political development to stray into an area which I suppose I should not tread on. I shall first make some generalisations which must be borne in mind, though few politicians in government and opposition, including PAS, do. PAS established a quick foothold, after independence in 1957, in the four northern states of West Malaysia - Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan, Trengganu, with strong pockets in northern Perak. There is a historical reason for this. Until the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1903, these four states were part of Siam, as Thailand was then known, a Buddhist nation with a strong Muslim minority in its southern provinces. Islam in these states, therefore, perservered the faith defensively, as it was and is in Aceh in Indonesia. Its survival in the four states defensively, is a communal response to Buddhist encroachments into their lives to preserve it. Islam grew thus in the Central Asian States: when Moscow forbade Quranic teachings a century-and-a-half ago, the Islamic clergy kept the faith by integrating the Quranic verses into its cultural reportoire. These defensive measures exist in any society fearful of losing its identity. In Malaysia, outside the four northern states, now view Islam defensively. So, there exists an inbuilt conflict between Islam as a way of life and Islam developing protectively. PAS, as many of you would - or should be aware - began as the religious wing of UMNO, but broke away around the time UMNO's founding president, Sir Onn Jaffar, did in 1951. Its success since is this brand of Islamic defensiveness that the mullahs under Thai governance did; now it looks upon Kuala Lumpur as the distant enemy. It is not without cause that Kelantan, like Aceh, is referred to as "serambi Makkah". PAS's political aim of capturing power on its own at the centre or in the states outside this northern belt is constrained by this cultural overview. My friends in PAS do not accept this view. But PAS's success is conditioned by this mental baggage. This makes it easy to damn it as political ogres, who ought to be destroyed for wanting to make Islamic law as the law of the land. The Malay and non-Malay take opposite views in a contested environment that does not consider if this view of PAS is valid. PAS does not help, taking every contrary view as an insult to its worldview to respond with even stronger heat. What results is an irrelevant debate in which the issues are put aside. The apostasy bill is one such. Since Malaysians would rather not discuss issues, the debate is viewed within a politically contested background that the baby, as it were, is thrown out with the bathwater. When you stop to reconsider, the National Front encouraged every march towards an obscurantist Islamic future. Why is it important, I ask you, that a religion as noble as Islam, the most perfect of the Abrahamaic religions, be conditioned by putting people to death for apostasy or severing limbs of thieves? But it is in this frame that PAS conducts its Islamic debate. Islam's initial territorial successes in its first two centuries ensures this cultural arrogance that comes down through the ages to the present day. Then it established its presence in Europe so dominantly that Pope Urban II in 1089 ordered the Crusades to pit Abrahamaic Judaeo-Christianity with Abrahamaic Islam. Christopher Colombus discovered America and Vasco da Gama came to Calicut in the late 15th century were accidental by-products of a Papal Bull to attack the dominent Islamic power in what is now known as the Middle East or the politically correct East Asia from its hindquarters. The Portuguese sacking of Malacca in 1500 was that much severe, as accounts of that period show, because they confronted an Islamic sultanate so far from its heartland. This general Judaeo-Christian hatred for Islam underpins what we now know as Western civilisation, especially after Martin Luther's reformation within the Roman church in the mid-16th century. This inbred hostility survived through the ages, remains the most dominant civilisational confrontation extant, strengthened by the Westernising of Christianity that Martin Luther ensured, with the Calvinist sub-set of the 19th century widening its attacks on all non-Christian religion within the context of colonial trade and domination. We have to understand this historial view to break out of this automatic fear when an Islamic state, as an option to the existing form, is discussed. But this cultural demonisation prevents Islam from being discussed rationally as a form of government. And made worse by the oil producing cartel of mostly Muslim members in the early 1970s. Besides, the geopolitical overview with both the Soviet Union and the United States blowing hot and cold, depending on whether Islam could be used as a weapon to destroy the other. The Western fear of the Taliban forces in Afghanisation reflects the frustration, especially in Washington, of the child it created now bites its hand. But the Talibans have a more consistent worldview than Washington, Moscow or anyone else gives it credit. The point I made earlier of Kelantan progressing at its own pace applies to Islam as well. Nowhere is this illuminated better than Islam in India. When Ghazi and his Islamic hordes marched through the plains of Punjab in the 11th century, Islam was forced to reconsider its role. Until then, Islam converted the peoples of the countries it conquered; so successful this was that the Spanish priest Torquemada refined his Inquisitional tortures to force Muslims to reconvert before their executions. But in Hindu India it met its match. India over the past four millennia absorbed new cultures or religion or dogma so thoroughly that they became part of the Indian countryside. Even Christianity, even if obesience was paid to Antioch, had a life of its own that it became thoroughly local. But when Islam came to India, this clash of cultures forced Hinduism and Islam to co-exist fitfully side-by-side for a thousand years, osmotically absorbing the other's values while remaining distinctly separate. The breakup of India into Bharat and Pakistan reflects this. Pakistan from the Muslim provinces of India is an admission of failure of both Hinduism and Islam. Islam could not convert the Hindus it conquered. Nor could Hinduism envelope Islam into its consciousness. Pakistan therefore is a monument of failure of both Hinduism and Islam. We now come back to the central theme: how do I, as a minority Hindu Indian, view the march to an Islamic state in Malaysia? Just as there is an increasingly important view of the Indian state to be overly Hindu, there is in Malaysia for an Islamic state. This is not a political statement but a cultural fact. The most important community in Malaysia is the Malay, rather than the Malaysian. One cannot run away from this, especially when the Chinese and Indian communities did not challenge UMNO's conversion, after the 1969 racial riots, of Malaysia to a Malay-dominated country. But the UMNO-led National Front lost its way, as we now discover. I take issue with PAS's insistence that Islam must remove those Malay cultural values that conflicts with an essentially Arabic Islam. Indeed, the biggest conflict Islam faces in Malaysia is how to come to terms with this pre-Islamic cultural baggage which gives the Malay his character now refined, not replaced, by Islam. Indonesia has managed this contradiction quite well, especially in Java. President Abdurrahman Wahid exemplifies this. The Javanese penchant for "musyawarah" (consultations) has its roots in its Hindu background, an essential component of Hinduism to ensure the diverse conflicting, contradictory sects and subsects accept the same set of values while going hammer and tongs with each other. The quarrels between the Vaishnavite and Saivite sects of Hinduism 1,200 years ago were more virulent than wars between Judaeo-Christianity and Islam ever was or is. So, this element of compromise, rooted in Hinduism, has rubbed off on the Javanese. Until this divide is resolved, Islam would be viewed within a confrontational political divide than as an official religion. Malaysia is not a religious state, as many believe. Islam is the official religion. It is the centre of governance, even in predominantly Christian Sabah. The current political confrontation over Islam is whether they be more or less Islam intruding into the administration and our lives. But because this is projected within the frame of the "good Islam" of the government in power and the "bad Islam" of PAS, the fundamental role of Islam in public and cultural life becomes necessarily blurred. PAS's over-reaction is understandable but misplaced. Its reaction is rooted in its defensive view of Islam, one which cannot be applied outside the northern states and northern Perak. But the powers of the Shariah administration is limited. Hadi's bill is, in one sense, to give the Shariah courts equal powers with that of the civil courts. Giving it the right to impose the death penalty would push it towards equality of status. The government, whichever hue it takes, would have to address this demand to expand the Shariah courts' scope regularly and relentless in this larger debate on the role of Islam in the country. Not now. But in time to come. What we now see is the shadow boxing and "wayang kulit" that clouds much of what happens in Malaysia these days. In any discussion of an Islamic state, the 45 per cent of non-Malays, with their knee-jerk hatred for Islamic laws without understanding what it is all about, provide an almost insurmountable barrier. Islamic law could only be the law of the land after PAS or another Islamic party comes to power on its own, and not as part of a governing coalition. The Islamic state in the public perception is what Iran now has. The bloody goriness of public executions inherent in any forcible takeover of power, which occurred in Iran, is unfairly pinned on Islam. Cuba, when it defeated the Batista dictatorship in 1959, behaved brutally and cruelly as Iran did. I may be prejudiced in this, but those who profess a stridently religious agenda turn out to be remarkable people. Hassan Adli, the only PAS candidate to be returned in the 1955 Legislative Council elections from Bagan Datoh took a lifelong interest in the orphans in his constituency, brought them up not as Muslims but in their parents' faiths. I know of one Indian doctor, practising in Kuala Lumpur, who remains a Hindu, a religious faith strengthened because a Muslim he did not know brought him up and educated him when his estate-worker parents died and insisted he remain a Hindu. Tok Guru comes from the same mould. His humanity, patent honesty, coupled with the simplicity of his personal life, makes him stand out. [Adapted from a keynote speech given by M.G.G. Pillai to mark the launch of the Kelantan Mentri Besar, Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat's collection of official speeches, 14 November 1999 in Kuala Lumpur. Opinions expressed here not necessarily those of Harakah. The Editors invite comments/feedback on this.] |
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