In search of the perfect Malaysian

"the Malaysian model is based on managing and preserving rather than
completely eliminating racial divisions, which is handy in situations
where assimilation is an unrealistic immediate possibility.
.......
Malaysia is therefore at best a successful and enduring accommodation of
divergent interest groups, not the harmonious blending that the "Malaysia
Truly Asia" commercials on the Cable News Network soothingly portray"

Asia Times
24 Feb 2007

In search of the perfect Malaysian
By Michael Vatikiotis

SINGAPORE - The history of the Malay Peninsula, with its ethnic
commercial enclaves at both ends and torpid factional personality
politics in between, has long been subject to emotional study
revolving around race and religion. This is the burden of the rather
distinct mathematics of ethnic pluralism and the legacy of colonial
immigrant labor policies.

The principal tension is between those seeking an ideal harmonious
balance among the races - Malay, Chinese and Indian - and those
fighting to preserve the special rights and privileges as well as
political supremacy of the Malays. Not surprisingly, the minority
Chinese and Indians (together more than 30% of the population)
champion the former, the majority Malays the latter.

Fortunately, rather than confrontation between these two views, a kind
of antagonistic harmony reigns, similar to the way that muscles of the
forearm work - opposite forces of contraction and expansion producing
a single forward movement. It works like this: members of the Chinese
and Indian minorities are supportive of Malay figures who are liberal
and tolerant - that is, secular in outlook - and open to collaboration
and cooperation with non-Malays.

Meanwhile, the Malays seek to stock their pantheon of heroes with
personalities who stoutly defend cultural and religious values, and
tend to look askance at those who might otherwise be considered urbane
and liberal. It should be recalled that when Jafar Onn, the founder of
the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO), sought to open
the fledgling party to non-Malay membership, he was virtually
expelled.

In many ways, this existential struggle over what constitutes
exemplary Malay leadership mirrors the contemporary East-West divide
on Islam. The non-Muslim Western world considers the moderate,
tolerant Muslim the ideal, while many Muslims reserve respect for
those who have struggled and sacrificed their lives for principle and
dogma. As Malaysia approaches its first half-century of existence, so
the debate has begun about who the nation's exemplars should be.

A recently published memoir of the late Tun Dr Ismail, The Reluctant
Politician [1] by Ooi Kee Beng, a Malaysian from Penang, sits firmly
in the minority camp. The former deputy prime minister and one of the
founders of modern Malaysia was known in Malay political circles for
his uncompromising stance against corruption and toughness on national
security issues. He was greatly feared, if not loved.

Among non-Malays he is fondly remembered as someone who embodied the
values of fair play and moderation. In the words of Singaporean
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, who was interviewed for the book, Ismail
was "a source of moderation and common sense, a stable man not given
to extreme views". The key words here - "moderate", "stable" and
"extreme" - reflect the minority's instinctive fear of untrammeled
Malay nationalism.

Implied in the biographical work that has been undertaken on
pioneering Malaysian leaders such as Tunku Abdurrahman (or Abdul
Rahman; 1903-90) and Tun Dr Ismail is the deep respect afforded them
by non-Malays because they generally stood for fair play and equality
among Malaysia's constituent races. The Tunku's political demise was
at the hands of the so-called "ultras" in the ruling UMNO, those who
criticized the country's founding father for being too generous in
political terms to non-Malays.

The trouble is that many Malays regarded these pluralist qualities to
be a political weakness precisely because they threatened Malay
privilege and supremacy. Both the Tunku and Tun Dr Ismail found
themselves at odds with younger Malay leaders such as Mahathir
Mohamad, who saw patronage and privilege as the path to securing power
for himself and the Malays. "I am confident with the passage of time,
the Malays will be quite capable of meeting the non-Malays in normal
competition, without the special position," Tun Dr Ismail said in a
media interview back in 1969.

Enduring racial politics
Half a century after independence, these issues remain just as
relevant. Racial identity continues to be the dominant leitmotif of
Malaysian politics. The predominant political parties remain racially
defined. The coalition of racial parties and the special economic
privileges for Malays that people like Tun Dr Ismail considered a
temporary fix while a more mature multiracial Malaysia developed are
still firmly entrenched.

The major obstacle preventing the development of a full-blooded
multi-racial Malaysian society, in which all component races have
equal opportunities, is the enduring special status of Malays and the
racial character of political parties. The central role played by
Islam in Malay identity has reinforced rather than loosened ethnic
boundaries, while there continues to be staunch resistance to the
membership of non-Malays in UMNO. It amounts to what non-Muslim
Malaysian scholar Eddin Khoo has described as the creation of a
"political racial identity".

So why then is modern Malaysia often cited as a model multi-racial
society? Its constitution was considered a model for South Africa as
it emerged from years of apartheid. More recently, Iraq's wobbly
government has expressed interest in the so-called Malaysian model as
a possible path to national reconciliation. Perhaps this is because
the Malaysian model is based on managing and preserving rather than
completely eliminating racial divisions, which is handy in situations
where assimilation is an unrealistic immediate possibility.

For Malaysia, the preservation of racial boundaries has proved a
successful means of maintaining power for the ruling Barisan Nasional
(National Front) coalition led by UMNO. Malaysia is therefore at best
a successful and enduring accommodation of divergent interest groups,
not the harmonious blending that the "Malaysia Truly Asia" commercials
on the Cable News Network soothingly portray. Malaysian politicians
today have to work just as hard as they did in Tun Dr Ismail's day to
prevent friction and maintain the ethnic status quo.

There are perpetual and often insistent demands from the religious
right to strengthen Islam as the core of Malay identity, which
deeply offends Indian- and Chinese-Malaysians. Why after all these
years are there still quarrels over church building and temple
erection, and why do Malaysia's religious minorities still feel so
threatened? Then there are the concurrent demands from the minorities
to do away with the National Economic Policy (NEP), which mandates
special treatment for the Malays but irks the Malay mainstream.

It's a delicate balancing act and one that Prime Minister Abdullah
Badawi struggles to achieve - just as his predecessor Mahathir Mohamad
did. In his Lunar New Year message, Abdullah reminded Malaysians of
the need to preserve racial harmony and also hinted that the NEP would
not be around forever. Yet at the UMNO assembly late last year,
leaders of the party's youth wing brandished a Malay dagger and swore
to uphold the special privileges of the Malays in a way that provoked
fear and anger in the ethnic-minority communities.

Cultural culpability
Culture is also partly to blame. It is hard in the Malay language to
talk about tolerance and moderation without imparting a sense of
weakness. Malay political culture places great stress on the struggle
for purity of ideals and loyalty to race and religion.

The Tunku, therefore, for all his great charms, comes off as something
of a flawed role model for Malays. He gambled and drank liquor. He was
affable and rather Western in his outlook. The same went for Tun Dr
Ismail, who loved to play golf and drank in moderation. There's a
whole generation of rather clubbable, golf-playing, English-speaking
civil servants who tended to grow up playing with their Chinese or
Indian neighbors and are lionized in pluralist circles.

Mahathir was a famous UMNO ultra, but he comes across rather better
because even though he worked hard to cultivate an image of himself
struggling for the Malays, defending their culture and religion, in
his personal life and actual family background he was less than an
archetypal perfect Malay gentleman. The non-Malays liked him because
he projected a secular image. He went up against the Islamic party PAS
(Parti Islam SeMalaysia) - and lost two states in electoral battles to
Islamic rule - and because he was impatient and wanted fast results,
he dished out patronage to Malays and non-Malays alike.

Yet under Mahathir's tenure the halls of the Putra World Trade Center,
where UMNO holds its annual convention, were decorated with colorful
murals of Mahathir and other Malay leaders in traditional dress, some
brandishing daggers and charging forward as if into battle. Against
whom it isn't certain, but they are certainly not pictured arm-in-arm
with their non-Malay fellow Malaysians. And there is no celebration of
pluralism in the art.

In the end it's hard to find an ideal Malaysian profile that satisfies
both Malay and non-Malay constituencies. Prime Minister Abdullah
appears to come close by combining the qualities of racial fair play
and tolerance with an Islamic outlook on life. Together with Anwar
Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister and current opposition
politician, Abdullah represents the kind of Malay who has tried to
harness religion and culture to project a moderate image, rather than
embracing Islam as a weapon to shore up Malay identity.

The two men in fact share a mixed heritage - both claim descent from
the southern Malay provinces of present-day Thailand. They appeal to
the Malays because of their non-secular image and are both secure
about their Malay identity, something that many of the ultras were
not. The trouble is that it is hard to imagine Chinese- and
Indian-Malaysians ever really trusting Malays who try to project
modern values of tolerance and pluralism using Islam as a vehicle.

Abdullah's Islam Hadhari, or civilizational Islam, is a brave effort,
as was Anwar's modernist "Asian Renaissance" rhetoric of the
mid-1990s. Sadly, there is too long a history of mistrust and uneasy
co-existence among the races and their religions, and there is far too
little co-mingling in terms of intermarriage and conversion from one
religion to another.

Blame a successfully managed brand of political pluralism on both
sides of the causeway for this - keeping the races apart and
respecting boundaries rather than breaking them down. And therefore
expect continued nostalgia for a generation of Malays like Tun Dr
Ismail who, even though they were nationalist pioneers, were in the
end mostly products of the long-gone colonial milieu.

Note
1. The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time by Ooi Kee
Beng is published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in
Singapore. The full name of Tun Dr Ismail (1915-73) was Ismail Abdul
Rahman; Tun is a Malay honorific for a senior official.

Michael Vatikiotis is the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently regional representative to the Center for
Humanitarian Dialogue based in Singapore.

----------------------------------------------------------------
This e-mail has been sent via JARING webmail at http://www.jaring.my