MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Islamic policies as an antidote to political failures

WHEN MUSLIMS ARE AT prayer, five times a day, all entertainment at those times – on radio, television, on stage, in night clubs, restaurants and elsewhere – must stop. Men and women at these places must be segregated at all times. The deputy minister in the prime minister's department, Dr Abdullah Mohamed Zin, says the Islamic development department's new rules demands it. It does not matter if they are Muslims or non-Muslims, or if no Muslims are in the audience. It is a blanket rule all must agree, or face the consequences. The non-Malay and non-Muslim parties in the National Front (BN) did not object; the head of non-Muslim religions were not consulted. It sets religious freedom a step backward. The non-Malay parties in BN and non-Muslim religious heads and bodies kept a shocking silence.

News of it disappeared from the BN-controlled newspapers, radio, television after a brief mention of it. No one talks of it now; as BN parties and others do when Islam is mentioned in any form. Their leaders do not question for fear of being labeled anti-Malay, anti-Muslim or worse. UMNO does not, as a rule, discuss its plans for Islam with its coalition partners or more importantly with leaders of other religious faiths. Frighteningly, none dare stand up and ask the questions that must be asked, and why these rules are needed. The MCA, MIC and Gerakan, quick off the mark when the issue at stake is irrelevant, lost its voice as usual and are silent as one now expect them to be when issues of such importance are at stake. Their most charitable explanation is that the UMNO divisional elections are around the corner, and statements like these at these times must be ignored.

This might be so. No senior BN leader has commented publicly on this. But it does not mean this is not the intention. The constitutional crisis in 1983 which attempted to curtail the power of the rulers failed because the conference of rulers refused to approve it. But that did not stop the BN government to force it through. The law was passed, it is on the books, but it is an unconstitutional law. The rulers are forced to accept it. If the BN ignored constitutional niceties to keep the rulers in check, why should it not insist upon the primacy of Islam by word and deed? Islam already has pride of place in Malaysian life, but as BN loses ground, culturally and politically, it clings to Islam to hold on to the power it has had since UMNO's founding in 1946.

This unilateral official rewriting of Islam and its place in Malaysian society has nothing to do with Islam; it has all to do with a BN government caught in a squeeze between a failure of its governance and a Malay ground which finds its place in Malaysian society has declined despite constitutional protection and massive government policies meant for their sole benefit. Thirty-five years after, the Malay is as disadvantaged now as at the start of the New Economic Policy in 1970. The establishment hijacked the NEP in time, especially in the past two decades when the then prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, rewrote the rules to concentrate Malay wealth in a few favoured hands, who took that as a sign to rape and pillage at leisure. The beneficiaries were limited to a narrow band of UMNOputras, cronies of the establishment and hangers-on, their familes and those around them.

To keeps the great unwashed happy and contended, the BN government initiated policies which kept them from rebellion: mindless education, universities by the score, foreign education on scholarship and bursaries, promises of Valhalla in the end. A political policy to cover up the rise of a well-educated UMNO aristocracy was put in place with no aim than to keep the great unwashed Malays in check. The non-UMNO political parties in BN did not have a say, not since the NEP, nor did they insist the dangers of this policy in the coming years. In any case, UMNO would not listen to them. If a non-UMNO leader in BN insisted on being heard, he would be warned gently of UMNO leaders who found their careers checked when they were near the top. The names of the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, and the late Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Harun Idris, is brought out to remind them of their fates; if they persisted, it would be theirs too. They buckled under without further persuasion.

But while the Malay ground got the crumbs of the official policies, mostly in the form of educated graduates in the remotest villages, it felt left out of the development process. In 1999, the BN lost Trengganu to PAS because the state had 2,000 unemployed graduates whom the principal opposition parties there, PAS and Semangat '46' presciently recruited to campaign for them. The public and private universities churn out useless and unemployable graduates. Today, officials admit to 80,000 unemployed graduates nationwide (the number is probably more), with at least 10,000 added every year, as the education system churns out useless graduates from the profusion and proliferation of public and private universities. If this is not a serious problem, plans are afoot for an Univesiti UMNO, for no reason than that MCA and MIC have their own universities. The official reason the private sector would not employ them is their refusal to speak English; it is more than that. The largely Malay graduates have come to believe the world owes them a living, and any who employs them must be beholden to them. The UMNO-led BN must take responsibility for this mess in education: their leaders routinely send their children for expensive education overseas for they do not trust the policies they initiated and implement.

Contrast that with the Chinese and Indians. They are cut off the education mainstream, and survive on their wits. Their children are educated at their expense, and those who graduate know they have to cut their own path. The biggest employer in Malaysia – the public service, the armed forces, the police, statutory bodies and government-linked companies, amongst others – employ only Malays, the occasional non-Malay employed for decoration. So the Chinese cut their own path, survive with a panache, and all but find their place in the private sector. The Indian fares even worse than the Malay because he survives at the mercy of the MIC leader, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, and he is not interested in them unless they owe total allegiance to him and MIC.

What frightens the BN government is an understated ground revolt amongst the young Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazans, Dayaks and others. The grandchildren of the independent generation, they have to survive on their wits. The golden ladle their fathers got is not available to them. They find the political establishment has betrayed them, and find solace in religion. The fundamentalist trend in religion in Malaysia is not confined to the Muslims; the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Christians are too. They believe the political promises are not kept, so they look to religion for hope. With religion as their anchor, they demand answers of BN leaders who react by calling them ungrateful and worse. They justify every complaint with meaningless official statistics to insist all is well. To the charge of widespread unemployment, for instance, the government insists it is only 2.5 per cent, not the 10-12 per cent that looks, on anecdotal evidence, more likely. But this 2.5 per cent is from the government's employment exchange, which employers routinely overlook when they need workers.

A steady stream of Muslims and Malays join PAS, either deserters from UMNO or new members, which frightens UMNO and BN. UMNO then reacted to embrace Islam as its political vehicle for no reason than to deny PAS its recruits and its Islamic credentials. It did not succeed. To Islamisation as official policy is added Islam Hadhari, the hare-brained concept of civilisational Islam, which is now toted as what Islam should be for no reason than to build the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, as the progenitor and leader of this wave. But it falls by the wayside, for few, if any, know what it is. Expensive two-day courses are conducted for all and sundry to understand it, yet no one know what it is. It has become a convenient shorthand to counter PAS's fundementalist Islamic creed. When UMNO and BN find that tough going, it tries to outdo PAS by official rules as what Dr Abdullah Mohamed Zin announced on 17 May 2005.

The government is forced to defend its Malay and Islamic policies no matter what the issue. A Universiti Malaya lecturer offered a post in the United Nations is denied leave of absence and resigns. In the furore that followed, the authorities lamely said he is denied permission because he is needed at the university. All it got out of this is ill-will amongst Malaysians in this case of official academic sour grapes. With each misstep in official policy, the UMNO-led BN recedes into ill-thought-out Islamic policies. It cannot explain why, nor how, it would ensure cultural and religious confidence amongst Malaysians of all races and creeds. And it boils down to one frightening product of BN policies thirty five years after the NEP: the Malays are losing out in all spheres, unable to comprehend the wider world. The BN has no answer but to lurch into meaningless Islamic slogans and crack the whip.

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