Malaysia's future: A time for Malay renewal !

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A time for renewal, too

Ceritalah By KARIM RASLAN

The debate over Malay identity is fundamental to Malaysia’s future. Only when tensions within the Malay community itself are cooled will the resentment and grievances between Malaysia’s ethnic groups be resolved.

AS I reflect over the events of the fasting month – and indeed the past 12 months – I cannot help but conclude that Malaysian Malays are facing an existential crisis, which is primarily political in nature.

Moreover, because the Muslim/Malay community is dominant numerically; its tribulations will impact the rest of the nation.

In short, no one can be insulated from the community’s uncertainties.

Sadly, Malaysia’s communal peace has been further rocked by the Jais raid on the Damansara Utama Methodist Church (DUMC).

This has been accompanied by a steep increase in the number of claims of Christian proselytising amongst Muslims.

Such fears over murtad are nothing new.

They have been current for years, even decades, peaking in times of political uncertainty: witness the Maria Hertogh riots back in 1950.

However, we need to put things in perspective; 2011 is not 1950.

Malay/Muslims currently outnumber non-Muslims significantly. In short, demography favours the ummah. Moreover, the position of Islam is constitutionally-assured.

Nonetheless, the re-emergence of the murtad issue suggests a more deep-rooted anxiety among Malay-Muslims about the future.

Indeed, there are fundamental concerns about the Muslim response to both globalisation and modernity.

How do we maintain our faith and culture in an era when interaction with non-Muslims has become both a norm and a necessity?

The ummah has responded to such challenges differently and this reflects the Malay/Muslim community’s underlying heterogenity.

Contrary to Umno’s obsession with Malay unity, the community is by no means monolithic.

At the same time, political developments post-2008, have heightened and accentuated these shifts – lending them a partisan hue as PAS, Umno and PKR have weighed in on various issues.

As these differences of opinion surface, we are faced with a secondary challenge: how do we deal with disagreements over what it means to be Malay and Muslim?

Can we maintain our dignity, objectivity and calm when face-to-face with opposing views? How do we manage when our major political parties – PAS and Umno – assume conflicting positions?

Amid the debate, many are electing to withdraw, preferring isolation to engagement. Such a retreat makes dissent, however reasonable, even more complicated and potentially dangerous. To my mind, withdrawal is a disaster.

The Malay community has always possessed an outward-looking mindset. We cannot, and should not, abdicate from our engagement with the world. We have thrived by exchanging ideas and knowledge with others as traders, scholars and travellers. Indeed, the decline of the Muslim world came when we closed our hearts, minds and borders.



Still, I am not disputing the need for Muslims to maintain their faith, but the notion that the only way we can do this is by shunning non-Muslims and/or trampling on the rights of minorities is nonsensical.

Doing so will only reinforce the misperception that Islam is intolerant and regressive. It also hastens our own decline.

Given these concerns I’ve been heartened by Prime Minister Najib Razak’s recent attempts to recapture the centre ground.

His willingness to end censorship and reform the electoral system is most welcome.

It displays an openness (however belated) to listen to others. This is courageous given the narrow-mindedness of many of his fellow party members.

However, opening up in the midst of a debate is always tough. Will tentative changes be enough to satisfy an increasingly restive Malay (and Malaysian) public? Will it be too little and too late?

The debate about Malay identity is fundamental to Malaysia’s future.

It will become increasingly heated and painful. For example, Malay identity cannot be separate from the role of the Rulers. This bond has to be examined and questioned.

Given the depth and breadth of the upcoming debate we must ask whether Umno alone can manage this process? Indeed, has PAS’ greater moral authority sidelined the party of Merdeka?

The consequences of half-hearted reforms are obvious if we look across the Causeway to Singapore where the presidential elections have just been concluded.

While the PAP government deserves praise for allowing all four candidates to campaign openly – providing them with equal mainstream media coverage, there’s no doubt that many Singaporeans feel “shortchanged”.

Reforming from within rarely satisfies. Indeed, Dr Tony Tan’s incredibly slim margin of victory underlines the unhappiness of ordinary Singaporeans who expect much, much more from their politics.

Malaysians will be like their cousins across the Causeway. They won’t be willing to suffer timidity and half-hearted reforms.

Tentative steps will be swept away by a tide of popular resentment. Indeed, boldness will be the only solution.

At a time when the very core of Malay identity is being debated, piecemeal reform will not be enough. Reform will go nowhere unless the state loosens its grip.

The Najib administration must recognise that a mere shift in tactics will not be enough to win back Malaysia’s cynical and jaded electorate, especially the Malays.

The last three years have taught us that the Malay/Muslim community is becoming more complex and indeed, difficult to please.

As Umno and the Prime Minister discovered during the Bersih 2.0 debacle, it is no longer possible to succeed solely on emotive appeals for ethnic and religious unity.

Rather, Najib and his government must be willing to accept the diversity that now exists within Malay discourse, and tailor their policies accordingly.

Indeed, Umno no longer controls the debate.

For instance, economic policies need to champion the interests of middle- and working-class Malays, rather than expecting them to automatically back the ventures of the intra-ethnic elite.

Barisan has to keep asking themselves: what’s really in it for the people?

Furthermore, differing views over culture and faith must be allowed rather than repressed.

Indeed, one feels that such an approach may very well work among every race in Malaysia in general.

All the same, the resentment and grievances between Malaysia’s ethnic groups can only be resolved when tensions within the Malay community itself are cooled.

This Hari Raya must not only be a time of celebration for Malaysian Malays, but also renewal.

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Rage of the youth is growing !

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By Pankaj Mishra, Guardian News & Media Ltd

Even in the West there is little chance of stable jobs or affordable education. A secure and dignified life seems even more remote for most. Across the world, the rage will grow.

Image Credit: AP

• Supporters of Anna Hazare wave Indian flags and shout slogans during 12th day of Hazare's fast against corruption in New Delhi on Saturday.

In India, tens of thousands of middle-class people respond to a quasi-Gandhian activist's call for a second freedom struggle — this time, against the country's venal "brown masters", as one protester told the Wall Street Journal. Middle-class Israelis demanding "social justice" turn out for their country's first major demonstrations in years. In China, the state broadcaster CCTV unprecedentedly joins millions of cyber-critics in blaming a government that placed wealth creation above social welfare for the fatal high-speed train crash last month.

Add to this the uprisings against kleptocracies in Egypt and Tunisia, the street protests in Greece and Spain, and you are looking at a fresh political awakening. The grievances may be diversely phrased, but public anger derives from the same source: extreme and seemingly insurmountable inequality.

As Forbes magazine, that well-known socialist tool, describes it, protesters everywhere are driven by "the conviction that the power structure, corporate and government, work together to screw the broad middle class" (and the working class too, whose distress is not usually examined in Forbes).

For years now, the mantra of ‘econ-omic growth' justified government interventions on behalf of big business and investors with generous tax breaks (and, in the West, the rescue of criminally reckless speculators with massive bailouts). The fact that a few people get very rich while the majority remains poor seemed of little importance as long as the GDP figures looked impressive.



In heavily populated countries like India, even a small number of people moving into the middle class made for an awe-inspiring spectacle.

Helped by a ‘patriotic' corporate media, you could easily ignore the bad news — the suicides, for instance, of hundreds of thousands of farmers. However, the illusions of globalisation shattered when even its putative beneficiaries — the educated and aspiring classes — began to hurt from high inflation, decreasing access to education and other opportunities for upward mobility.

False promises

Economic growth is no defence against the frustration of the semi-empowered. The economies of both India and Israel have recorded dramatic growth in recent years. But inequality has also grown spectacularly. The Financial Times, which recently compared India's oligarchic business families to Russia's mafia-capitalists, pointed out two weeks ago that "the 10 largest business families in Israel own about 30 per cent of the stock market value" while one quarter of Israeli families live below the poverty line.

Last month the Indian supreme court blamed increasing social violence in the country on the "false promises of ever-increasing spirals of consumption leading to economic growth that will lift everyone".

Obviously it is not the supreme court's remit to define India's economic policies. Nor should Anna Hazare be entrusted with establishing the office of an anti-corruption ombudsman, a mission that amounts to nothing in a country littered with compromised and impotent institutions.

Still, they respond, however incoherently, to a crisis of legitimacy afflicting their country's highest institutions, and their supposed watchdog, the media.

In the last decade, billionaires, ‘billionaire-friendly' legislators and CEO-worshipping journalists have together constituted what the political economist Ha Joon Chang calls a "powerful propaganda machine, a financial-intellectual complex backed by money and power".

Nevertheless, the real facts about ‘economic growth' are getting through to those most vulnerable to it in both the east and the west: the young.

Denouncing "the corruption among politicians, businessmen and bankers" that leaves "us helpless, without a voice", the manifesto of the Spanish indignados could have been authored by the Indian supporters of Hazare.

Even as they export jobs and capital to Asia, economic globalisers in the West continue to preach the importance of upgrading skills at home. Yet the dead-end of globalisation looms clearly before Europe and America's youth: little chance of stable employment, or even affordable education.

The violence in European cities this year comes at the end of a long cycle of steady socio-economic growth. In postcolonial India and China this cycle had barely begun before it began to splutter. A secure and dignified life seems even more remote for most.

Worried by the prospect of social unrest, China's leaders frankly describe their nation's apparently booming economy as "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable".

The Chinese philosopher Zhang Junmai once wrote that an agrarian country has few ‘material demands' and can exist over a long period of time with ‘poverty but equality, scarcity but peace'. Returning to an austere age of wisely managed expectations is no longer possible — even if it was desirable. It remains to be seen what political forms this summer's unrest will take. But there is no doubt that many more people across a wide swathe of the world will awaken with rage to what Zhang warned against: "A condition of prosperity without equality, wealth without peace."

Pankaj Mishra's new book The Revenge of the East will be published next year

Making a Chinese dream come true

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CHINA DAILY By ZHU YUAN

BEIJING: Although Chinese People’s American Dream by Shui Guang was only published recently, it was written more than a decade ago when an increasing number of Chinese people who had left China to study abroad began to consider pursuing their career back home.

It made me wonder whether there is a Chinese dream. And if so, what is it?

Without a native religion in the sense of Christianity or Islam, Chinese people’s ethos is characterised by pragmatism.

There is a Peking Opera piece called Happi­ness from Heaven, its lyrics describe a world in which good weather guarantees a bumper harvest, clean and honest government does not impose heavy taxes, well-disciplined residents do not make unreasonable demands, and everyone lives in happiness and peace.
This would be the dream that the majority of Chinese people pursued in ancient times, when they knew little about science, demo­cracy and social institutions.

This dream was shattered when Western powers forced open China’s door and Western ideas of science and democracy entered the country.

Despite the fact that many ordinary residents still cherished the dream of leading a peaceful and comfortable life, characterised by having land to plough and enough food to feed their family, the ideal of creating a society of equality and fairness appealed to some Chinese intellectuals. Hence, the years of civil wars and the struggle for state power between two major political parties dominated the first half of the last century.



If Chinese people had a dream during that period, it was for nothing more than to live in peace.

The founding of People’s Republic of China was the start of a period in which collective consciousness left little room for people to pursue an individual dream. They were told that everyone would be able to get what he or she needs in a communist society, but people must first make sacrifices for its realisation and the common good.

It was not until the late 1970s when the reform and opening-up policy was implemented that Chinese residents as individuals started to pursue their own dreams again.

Market competition in a great variety of fields made it possible for individuals to be audacious enough to cherish a dream of prosperity and success that might be achieved through their own efforts.

After more than half a century of state employment, Chinese people could quit their job to start a business on their own, they could go abroad to study, they could even idle away their time if they had the means to support themselves. They could do anything as long as they did not break the law.

Yet, the dream of a better life is not as simple as it used to be. People used to be content with having enough to eat and wear and a place to live. With much higher living standards and more materialistic temptations, they now have much higher demands of life.

To be a true Chinese Dream, the opportunity should be there for all. However, the increasingly serious corruption among government officials and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots tilt the distribution of social resources and wealth in favour of those in power and those who can manipulate power with money and/or connections. This dampens ordinary residents’ enthusiasm to struggle for their dreams and encourages people to make their dream come true through irregular means.

Common prosperity once identified by Deng Xiaoping as the ultimate goal of economic reform and opening-up necessitates a political will to ensure that the distribution of social wealth is fair.
Image via Wikipedia
A Chinese dream, if there is one, should not be that different from its American counterpart – that life can be better, richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

But to achieve this, great efforts are needed on the part of the government and all residents to create an environment in which, as Confucius said, people can go confidently in the direction of their dreams and live the life they have imagined.