AUG 26 — The Mufti of Perak, Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria, is reported as insisting “that the Umno president must find a way to unite the Malays” (“Perak mufti says Malays must defend race”, Syed Mu’az Syed Putra, The Malaysian Insider, 25 August 2011).
“We must defend our race and Najib must find a way to reunite Malays,” Harussani is quoted as saying.
On this matter, it is timely to make four points.
First, it is more than time for political actors and commentators in Malaysia to be careful in their use of words, including technical terms.
Specifically, the day is long overdue for all Malaysians to begin to differentiate, fastidiously and consistently, in all contexts — when they render into English the Malay word “bangsa”, with its very broad range of meanings and denotations — between “race”, on the one hand, and “people”, “nation”, “stock”, “descent” and “kind”, to note but a few of its various referents, on the other.
Any inability to recognise the differences between these perhaps related yet quite distinct notions would be a routine cause of failure in the introductory social science courses (including anthropology, sociology and political science) in any internationally reputable university.
It remains an anomaly, and one about whose origins and persistence one may speculate, that — for all its great work in linguistic engineering and technical lexicographic innovation over half a century — the Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka has never focused its attention upon the clarification, in Malay usage, of the semantic overlap and confusion that characterize this one very general, all-purpose term “bangsa”.
Second, why must Malays, the entire Malay people of the peninsula and Malaysia as a whole, be “united”?
That they should be united, the idea that the unity of “the Malays” is a natural condition that has been disrupted and now needs to be restored, is the implicit underlying presupposition of the call recently made by the Tan Sri Harussani, and so often voiced by other leading political and public personalities on the national stage.
Is the call for “the Malays” to be united politically any more reasonable and acceptable, one must ask — and constructive, in the national interest — than a call for all Chinese or Indians or non-Malays generally to be united politically?
Where does such an approach inescapably lead? That does not bear thinking about. Yet it is a matter that must be recognized and addressed, urgently.
It leads not to the formation of a united Malaysian nation but, headlong, to inter-ethnic antagonism and communalistic Armageddon.
Is that a desirable future, a scenario that is in the interest of either the vast majority of Malays and non-Malays alike?
Third, why must people speak in these contexts of “the Malays”? Where does the word “the” come from here, and how is its use justified?
To use that word “the” (the so-called “definite article”) is to suggest that what follows, whatever it is that this “the” refers to, is a unified and undifferentiated entity.
So its use here simply begs the entire question that has to be carefully considered. The very terms in which the question is posed, using this homogenising “the”, presupposes a certain answer.
It smuggles its own conclusion into the posing of question. It “builds in” from the start the notion of Malay unity, as a normal and established fact, as a desirable and supposedly natural state of affairs.
In this way “Malay unity” is normalised, and any departure from it is, by implication, rendered pathological, an undesirable departure from healthy normality.
Fourth, and most important, why are “the Malays” of Malaysia not united? This is the situation that so troubles the mufti of Perak and those who think along similar lines.
The historic reason for the present lack of Malay unity is clear. The Malays of Malaysia are now irreversibly divided, as they never were in the past, by the NEP.
Not by current debates about the NEP — whether it is good or bad, whether it should be extended or phased out, whether it should give way to reward on the basis of merit and proven achievement — but by the long accumulating effects of the NEP over the last 40 years.
What the NEP sought to do, and succeeded triumphantly in doing, was to promote a rapid and far-reaching diversification of the Malay people of Malaysia: economically, socially, culturally and intellectually, in their orienting everyday attitudes and personalities.
The reason why Malay unity has become so elusive, even impossible to achieve in these present times, is simply the NEP. And the NEP was the project, and what it accomplished has been the much-vaunted result, of nobody other than the Umno.
So it is strange indeed to hear the Umno, or those who profess themselves concerned for its future and fate, bemoaning and denouncing the contemporary lack of Malay unity.
Today’s irrepressible and advancing Malay diversity is nothing other than one of the finest achievements, in its best years, of one of Umno’s finest, most favoured policies.
It is a triumphantly accomplished fact.
So when those who would seek to rescue and redeem the Umno place blame for the Umno’s new vulnerabilities on a lack of Malay unity, they are doing nothing other than regretting and disowning the Umno’s own very best work, its greatest success.
It is simply silly, the product of a lack of historical sensibility, for Malay, and especially Umno-inclined, politicians and public personalities to rail against this fact.
Of course, the diversification of Malay society that the NEP produced in Malaysia, especially peninsular Malay society, was not an unmixed blessing for the Umno. It also produced its own problematic consequences.
The economic, social and cultural diversification of the Malay population of Malaysia that, through the NEP, the Umno unleashed also entailed something else.
Diversification within those key basic dimensions of social existence could not be quarantined. Political attitudes and life could not be insulated from the effects of that multidimensional diversification process.
So diversification, and marked divergences, of political outlook and orientation, of sensibilities and inclinations, and ultimately of allegiances and action were also inescapably entailed.
The political effects or fall-out of the NEP were an integral part of what the policy yielded. Yet, for many in the Umno, those “secondary” effects would prove a strange, even unwelcome, harvest.
What has been the reaction of many Malays in Malaysia to these developments?
Some have benefited from, embraced and enjoyed the fruits of that diversification. They see that diversification as creating the basis of a new kind of Malay society in Malaysia, and with it of a new Malaysia.
Others feel frightened, threatened and unhappy.
Their response has been to wonder, often in panic, how the politically fragmenting effects of that process of social, economic, and cultural diversification that the NEP delivered can be, if not countered and reversed, then at least contained.
Can any reverse centripetal force be found to counter the diversifying, centrifugal social and cultural effects of the NEP?
So they look to religion. To a certain traditional understanding of Islam or to a conventional approach to managing its interests in Malaysian public life, to try to counter the fragmenting effects of cultural diversification ---- in an attempt to preserve, re-fashion and promote their ever-receding ideal of Malay unity.
Unable to recognise this process of diversification for what it is, as the natural and normal consequence of the NEP, they instead denounce it and condemn it as evidence of moral decline.
It is no surprise, then, that calls to restore the long-lost and now largely irretrievable, indeed chimerical, political unity of “the Malays” are now voiced by leading religious personalities and officials, no less than by the prominent, mainstream political leaders of the Umno.
* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He offers this commentary as his birthday present to the people and nation of Malaysia, as they prepare to commemorate Merdeka Day 2011.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
