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How The Islamic Tail Wags The Malaysian Dog

The National Front (BN) federal government is shocked into apoplexy at PAS-run Trengganu's enactment of syariah (sharia) law. But it did not respond except to taunt and threaten. It kept the non-Malay out of the discussion by restricting criticising only to the Malay and Muslim. The chief police officer in Trengganu however is clear what he would do: he would desert his constitutional role by not assisting the state to enforce it. The Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Norian Mai, agrees. A day later, the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is also home minister, concurs. It is living proof of how the tail wags the dog. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, who is never at a loss for words, is strangely silent. Dato' Seri Abdullah would rather not talk about it when he concurred with the police. The government has no position on it. Instead, an UMNO appartchik and lawyer challenges the constitutionality of the Kelantan hudud laws, passed a decade ago, in the Federal Court. If he succeeds, the government could ride on its back to remove the Trengganu move. But could this be sustained?

The imposition of hudud laws in Trengganu is more political than it appears. PAS throws a dare at UMNO which cannot accept it. Especially when Dr Mahathir insists Malaysia is an Islamic state. It is PAS's latest riposte to UMNO which denies the state the petroleum royalty payments it solemnly agreed to pay it. And uses that money to undermine the state. All it ensures is a continual estrangement between the state and the centre. PAS is out to irritate. The more extreme its move, the more embarrassed UMNO. The hudud laws has a personal element: BN, especially UMNO, high and mighty keep undergraduates from the two states as mistresses. These women live in shanties or in overcrowded rooms, have barely enough to exist, their families cannot help out, and are forced to such arrangements to survive; To discuss it, as one PAS member from Trengganu told me, "demeans us, and we suffer in silence." The hudud laws, he argues, is one way to bring this out into the open by arresting the bigwigs. "It may not succeed," he says, "and the fellow could move heaven and earth in the court to free him. It puts UMNO even more into theocratic misery." When policy is not for the common good, but for a communal, religious or personal vendetta, political capriciousness sets in, the national agenda is lost, and the state descends into anarchy.

This is where both PAS and UMNO shoot themselves in the foot. UMNO, knowing the background, must keep its silence. It is damned if it backs it or challenges it. What is not mentioned is that it is UMNO and BN which spearheaded the tightening of Islamic laws in the states they controlled. The Kelantan hudud laws amended one an UMNO-controlled BN administration had earlier enacted. The Federal constitution has since been amended to give judicial party to sharia and civl law. Since Islam is a state prerogative, it by constitutional extension allows the states to pass their own sharia laws. Islamic law until then was only Muslim personal laws, like inheritance, marriage and divorce. Now the sharia and hudud is allowed. It does not take much to amend the federal constitution at a future date to make sharia the only law in the land. It is the BN and UMNO that made this possible.

The BN's adoption of the sharia, like PAS's, is for a narrow political purpose of putting the non-Malay in his place. This is not admitted, but how the Trengganu government justifies the sharia and hudud law has this clearly in mind. It also takes UMNO to task. In other words, the sharia and hudud laws in Malaysia is adopted for a political, not theocratic, purpose: the continuing finetuning to ensure the non-Malay is always a second-class citizen. Add to this the Muslim silence when Islamic laws are discussed.

Dr Mahathir is as guilty of this as the Trengganu mentri besar, Dato' Seri Abdul Hadi Awang, and the Kelantan mentri besar, Dato' Seri Nik Aziz Nik Mat. Dr Mahathir goes one step further to insist Malaysia is a fundamentalist Islamic state at a time when the phrase evokes, in the non-Muslim mind, Islamic terror. The larger constitutional and political ideal of a multiracial, multireligious Malaysia is forgotten in this political tit-for-tat between two irreconciliable rivals for power by showing the Malay how efficiently he can shortchange the non-Malay. It is shortsighted but neither UMNO, which controls BN, nor PAS is bothered by it.

The non-Malay partners in BN would not challenge it either but accept whatever decision UMNO makes. And rise in high dudgeon now when it is not easy to reverse it. No serious discussion of issues is allowed, without the security and intelligence agencies harrassing those involved. Even private discussions are broken up with subtle and not-so-subtle threats. Add to this an inherent feudal heirarchy in which the leader is not to be challenged in public or private, changes are done at the whim and fancy of the feudal leader. Any response is regarded as an open confrontational challenge to be punished severely. If the feudal leader allowed open and critical discussion of issues in private, this would not have happened.

So, there is a link between this feudal prescription for its failings by forcing Malaysians to learn English after forcibly removing it from the curriculum a generation earlier and the PAS penchant for hudud. Fanciful explanations justify both. But punishment and inconvenience dominates both. The hudud laws is in keeping with an extreme form of Islam, the Wahabbi strain of Saudi Arabia. In this battening of the hatches against the infidels, especially in the anti-Islam frenzy after three commercial airlines slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington last September, the Muslims in Malaysia keeps the non-Muslim and non-Malay at bay, in law and practice.

Any challenge to English and hudud is shot down with equal ferocity. The non-Malays, we are told, have no right to question or challenge. We should know it is taken as read that non-Malays, who by extension are non-Muslims, are no more than dhimmis, living in an Islamic state under sufferance. They have no rights, so this argument goes, and for which I had an apoplexic taste in the flurry of emails after an earlier article which, in short, thought I deserved nothing better than being hanged, quartered and drawan as any non-Muslim ought to be for daring to discuss issues I should not. Malaysia declines slowly but surely into a divided nation of patricians who keep the plebians in place more as slaves than free men. Is this what Malaysia is all about? How does a non-Malay and a non-Muslim tell his children he has a bright future in the country of his grandfather? How does a Malay and a Muslim ensure the glory of what is Malaysia in this narrow, disputed view?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my