MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The vigilante bigots

THE SANGKANCIL INTERNET FORUM, which I run with Bala Pillai, is held hostage to Islamic vigilantes, who would divert into an irrelevant mud-slinging whenever Islam is mentioned in however innocuous a context, so that their “noise" drives out all but the daring to dip their toes in. It is difficult enough to persuade Malaysians to speak their thoughts – the walls have ears, the Special Branch listens in, our jobs and our families would be in danger, I am told, that if they agree to what is "officially" disapproved. No matter what the topic, few would dare express an opinion. Bala in Sydney and I in Kuala Lumpur decided from the start it would be unmoderated. And so it is in the eight years it has been around. More than 2,000 members are on it, but debate is all but non-existent.

Sangkancil discussed and commented on issues with a vigor until after the 1999 general election, when the Barisan Nasional (BN) won with non-Malay support. The non-Malay, the intellectual, the moderate, the non-theocratic Muslim were set upon by these religious vigilantes, so powerful that no one would challenge them. They hold every government department to ransom that senior officers have to comply or find their careers cut short. The non-Malay is kept in his place, and told, often enough, he ought to return from whence he came. We had an armed forces chief who encouraged this fanaticism in the forces. The BN government is held hostage, too, and unwilling to confront these bigots and vigilantes.

I am attacked in the past fortnight by a young obviously well-educated Malay lady who insists that I, as a 'pendatang' (immigrant, which I am not), should not roil the Malay peace by raising issues that would. She hopes all pendatang would leave, for they are a nuisance. I asked her what would happen if the pendatang left, especially since every one of our five prime ministers were pendatang or had pendatang blood: Tengku Abdul Rahman (Thai), Abdul Razak Hussein (Bugis), Hussein Onn (Circassian-English), Dr Mahathir Mohamad (Indian), Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Sino-Indian). But her objection to me is that I am a non-Muslim pendatang.

Why forum is quiet

The eerie silence in Sangkancil today is but a reflection on Malaysian society. When a young Australian-based Malay researcher found evidence of a civilisation in the rain forested jungles of Kota Tinggi in Johor that could push Malaysia's history back to its Hindu past in the first millennium, his find was lauded for a few days, and then ignored. Those who lauded him soon found excuses not to. The weight of the bigots and vigilantes made that certain. They do not want a history of Malaysia beyond the 15th century when Islam first came to Malaysia. All history before that is verboten. Their single-minded obsession holds even Malay culture and Islam to ransom. If Islam conflicts with this view, then Islam should be sidelined. So Islam is not a representative in the interfaith commission. Even if it wanted to, it would not be allowed to.

It reflects in other ways. The utter Umno hostility to Chin Peng's return to Malaysia – though I believe it is the Koumintang-based MCA that eggs Umno on – has taken a racial tinge. The arguments do not hold, but does that matter? The British killed Malaysians – Batang Kali massacre, for instance –, the Japanese committed untold atrocities, as the Indonesians during confrontation. All of them are welcomed with open arms, the current difficulty with Indonesia has to do with our own mishandling of it as much as theirs. But my view holds. This invisible group has laid the line that none would cross the line. I know for a fact that several senior officials, in the police and armed forces, who expressed goodwill and hoped bygones be bygones when the peace agreement with the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) is signed, today would not even discuss it. The walls have ears syndrome now dominates Malaysian civil society.

The menu at the Buttery coffee shop of the Lake Club in Kuala Lumpur is now designed that any dish that is not Malay or Western is slowly dropped. The non-Malay must adapt. He has no choice. He must accept the Malay view of what he should eat. The dress code is the Malay dress code. A mosque and temple or church may have existed side by side for decades, but now the pressure is on for the temple or church to move. Shah Alam in Selangor, built as a Malay dominated city, had earmarked for a church, but decades of patient negotiations later, there is still none.

This has nothing to do with religion or culture. It is part of a reaction to social change, a sort of Malay-Muslim counter-reformation of sorts against the way society around him evolves. We see evidence of this elsewhere: the Hindus fighting for religious purity against a fast evolving and increasingly secular India; the rise of Al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist creeds that wants to keep the faithful within. This cannot, indeed should not, be dismissed as the work of errant religionists, for it is fueled from its heartland. Underlying it is a genuine fear that all religions, even Christianity, are losing out to "Western values". The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which President George W Bush espouses, is in one sense no different than the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Malaysia: both reject Western secular values, and fear their faith would be swamped.

The same aim

What drives them on and indeed is at the core of this puritanism is this nostalgia for an imaginary glorious past. The Hindus seek the mythical Rama Rajya (the Kingdom of Ram) as Muslims the "ummah" of the Prophet Muhammad's age. How they go about it is as different as chalk and cheese, but the aim is the same. When the modern world slips away from them and seemingly makes religion and culture irrelevant, they find solace in the comfortable myths and religious beliefs of the past.

But the time to fear is when this hankering of the mythical past is the only acceptable worldview. The BN government, caught up in its byzantine irrelevancies, cannot counter it, and all but adopts it when it suits them but under no circumstances would decry it. It would often, as in the Chin Peng saga, be driven by other than racial or religious reasons but to keep a coalition partner in good spirits. Islam or culture does not intrude.

When Umno angled its policies to Islam and rejected Malay culture as its worldview, it was not with the intention of turning Malaysia into a theocracy but to circumvent the loss of Malay support with a policy it thought the Malay wanted. It realised, I think wrongly, that it would then be acceptable to the Malay who leans to Pas. But having made the change, it would not allow others to fill the breach, which accounts for its hostility of Parti Keadilan Negara's adoption of the cultural Malay as its central plank. But the Islam Umno adopts is not Islam the religion; the Islam is the political philosophy that often rejects the tenets of the faith. How else could one explain the gross policy debacles that conflict with Islam?

But these issues sit lightly with the bigots and vigilantes. They are not interested in the Islamic faith per se. They want to use it to dominate, and drive out any who would challenge their worldview. They are no different from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in India, the White Supremacists in South Africa, the Nazis in Germany, the Opus Dei of the Roman Catholic Church. There is no force yet like the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela in South Africa to challenge this coming strangulation of Malaysian society. Until then, it can only worsen before reason and confidence rise to thwart this march of the vigilante bigots.

[This is my Chiaroscuro column today, 10 March 2005, in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com).]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com