It was about race, not religion.
That much was clear from the insults hurled at participants during the open forum on the “Conversion to Islam”. For the religion to have been hijacked is pretty sad, but that’s what you get in communitarian Malaysia, especially when the idea of race is so inextricably entwined with being Muslim in Malaysia. I’ve blogged before where I wondered if the increasingly uncomfortable notion of ‘islamization’ isn’t somehow connected with the notion of Malays in Malaysia still searching for their footing in a world that now has been populated by strangers.
One’s religion becomes the easiest - and most convenient fall-back - when tossed in a sea of change. Everything from the loss of one’s place in a rapidly modernizing world to the next step into a globalized world; in more ways than one, I find myself sympathizing with Malaysians who can hardly keep up with the way we’ve been rushed through the door without the benefit of an Enlightenment or an Industrial Revolution - what time has anyone had to adapt?
When in a strange land, stick to your own, I suppose. And sticking to your own, sticking to the community, means finding a common denominator, a locus of identity. Religion is convenient, no doubt. Couple this to the sudden, global scrutiny on Islam as a religion, and the boundaries between us and them grow ever more constricted.
It doesn’t help when throw-backs to your past in traditions like the wayang kulit are banned and deemed unIslamic - here, religion is allowed by the government to consume all other points of identity; it all feels like a reductionist exercise in an attempt to adhere to the ‘purest principles’ of Islam, while killing off every other cultural waypoint guided by the overarching logic of an exclusivist religion.
I find it sad, therefore, when you have a resurgence of hard-line talk backed by a small, but vocal group purporting to safeguard the sanctity of a system of belief. Worse, because this system of belief has become entangled in the question of one’s communal identity. The phrases “Balik Cina” or “Balik India” reinforces the lines that separate the various races, and underpins a strain of opinion that maintains that there is a relevant difference between the Malay Malaysian in comparison to the others.
It is therefore tragic when religion plays second fiddle to the machinations of racists.
Comment (1)
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Hello.
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