Malaysia's racial politics

Malaysia's identification of the Malay race with the Muslim religion is exacerbating strains within Malaysian society - between Malays and non- Malays and within the Malay community - as both Malay and Muslim identities compete for the majority's political attention.

Nor is this helpful to Malaysia with its 60 percent Muslim population, which in contitution is committed to a secular, plural polity embracing its Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities.

In Malaysia, however, where political organization has long been largely on racial lines, Islam has at times become a device for use in racial politics, a yardstick for measuring the commitment of competing parties to Malay racial advancement.

Currently attention in Malaysia is focused on a high-profile case, now before the Appeals Court, as to whether a person has the right to cease to be a Muslim and (in this case) become a Christian and hence no longer subject to the Shariah courts. At the most obvious level it is a clash between a secular Constitution that guarantees freedom of religion and the notion of apostasy - that a Muslim must remain Muslim - in a country where Islam has a privileged position.

The identification of race and religion was understandable when the Malay sultanates had to stand up to the impact of British colonialism and the Chinese and Indian immigration that the British fostered. The Malay privileges were created in the first instance to protect Malay political dominance and advance economic equality at a time when the Malays were poor relations to the other races in their own land. But Malaysia is now not only an independent multiracial country but also includes two states on the island of Borneo, Sabah and Sarawak, where Muslims are a minority among the indigenous population.

The economic privileges have since become as much a form of patronage for the elite and of job creation for the less educated. Many Malays believe that it is time to start phasing them out, given the Malays' economic advances and political stranglehold.

The closer the economic privileges become entwined with the identification of Malays as Muslims, however, the harder it is to change. The UMNO elite needs to be seen to support Islamic privileges into order to protect economic privileges that benefit itself more than lower-income Malays. The non- Malay elites complain but are currently too reluctant to break with UMNO and race-based politics.

It is possible that the nominally multiracial party formed by the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim might act as a catalyst for forces that want to move away from race-based politics and privileges. But its acceptability to the Malay majority is in doubt, as is Anwar's commitment to reform for its own sake rather than as a slogan that will help him return to the UMNO fold and give him a chance of becoming prime minister.

Closer to home the Malay elite could learn from Sabah and Sarawak, where ethnic diversity is greater and there is less identification of race with religion. For example, the Kadazans, the largest indigenous group in Sabah, are mainly Christian but a large minority are Muslim. Society in both states is visibly less divided by race and religion than on the peninsula.

modified from: Philip Bowring
IHT