Malaysia: Making minorities count

---The Nut Graph, Malaysia

Making minorities count
2 Oct 09 : 8.00AM

By Shanon Shah
shanonshah at thenutgraph dot com

“PAS for all” was an enchanting slogan indeed during the March 2008 general election. It was a sentiment that allowed for a warm partnership to develop between PAS and its eventual Pakatan Rakyat (PR) partners, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and DAP. It was also what convinced Malaysians of all races to vote for PAS candidates even in non-Muslim majority constituencies. A case in point is PAS central working committee member Dr Siti Mariah Mahmud’s landslide victory in the 51% non-Muslim Kota Raja parliamentary seat.

But post-March 2008, there seem to have been some caveats to this inclusive slogan. For one thing, there has been an ongoing tussle in Selangor regarding the status of the Ahmadiyah community in Selayang. And the Selangor religious exco from PAS, Datuk Dr Hasan Ali, has been instrumental in efforts to restrict religious worship among Ahmadiyah.


Granted, Ahmadiyah are but a tiny minority in Malaysia. Ahmadiyah probably make up 0.007% of the entire Malaysian population. Still, the slogan would not be as sexy if it were to say “PAS for 99.993%”, so this is probably why “PAS for all” remains the preferred brand strategy.

But PAS is not alone in having such contradictions between speaking for an inclusive Malaysia, and yet trying to clamp down on those it disagrees with. Just look at Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s much-praised as well as lampooned 1Malaysia slogan. And yet, someone in his administration is guilty of perpetuating, or at the minimum excusing, intimidation of minorities. We just need to recall Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein’s defence of protesters who brandished a severed cow-head as a means of protesting the relocation of a Hindu temple.

Context matters

The question then is not just about how people deal with diversity and disagreement. It is also about how the many treat the few, and how the powerful treat the weak. It is something humanity has had to grapple with in witnessing the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, the 1994 butchering of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates by Hutus in Rwanda, and the systematic suffocation of indigenous communities in democracies such as the US and Australia.

Perhaps some of these examples are exaggerated in the case of Malaysia. Have we witnessed the gassing of entire communities here? Have we seen an ethnic majority bringing machetes and axes to systematically annihilate a particular ethnic minority? After all, the Selangor authorities are not bringing machetes or axes to the Ahmadiyah compound in Selayang — they are “merely” stopping them from worshipping. Is this cause for worry?

The situation is complicated. Sure, there may only be approximately 2,000 Ahmadiyah in Malaysia, but there are an estimated 200 million worldwide. And of this 200 million, many have settled in countries such as Canada and the UK, where they enjoy the support and protection of secular governments there. In fact, Ahmadiyah communities in these countries are able to lobby government ministers to put pressure on Muslim countries that persecute Ahmadiyah.

Ironically, it’s not that different being a “mainstream” Muslim in certain situations. Plant yourself in the US and you become the target of racial profiling, harassment and torture. Move to, for example, Pakistan and you are suddenly all-powerful. In practise, you could then profile, harass or abuse Christian, Hindu and Ahmadiyah communities and very likely get away with it.

A numbers game?

Furthermore, there are minorities and then there are minorities. On some levels, it is a numbers game after all. For example, Indian Malaysians are an ethnic minority, and have been the butt of racist jokes and not-so-helpful policies. But this minority group, spearheaded by Hindraf, managed to summon 30,000 from its ranks to march the streets of Kuala Lumpur in November 2007, demanding reparations and better treatment.


The Indian Malaysian vote also went squarely against the Barisan Nasional (BN) in March 2008, and this inflicted a painful enough blow to the ruling coalition. And so, policies towards Indian Malaysians, especially in terms of education, have changed since then. Is this what it takes for a minority to assert itself? To demonstrate, “Hey, we have the numbers too, and we can inflict some real damage.”

There are various minorities in Malaysia. There are the tiny, often invisible, communities — indigenous people, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, and “deviant” Muslim groups. There are minorities of circumstance — those with HIV/AIDS, migrant workers, refugees, underprivileged urban settlers, and so on. And then there are the “bigger” minorities — Chinese and Indian Malaysians, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, and so on.

Sometimes different categories of “minority” intersect. A Christian Indian Malaysian would already be a minority. But what if this person was also lesbian, poor and HIV positive? What would we do with her then? Were the 30,000 Hindraf protesters thinking of her when they took to the streets in 2007?

Hunting season

Would it be easier if we just did not have to deal with minorities? Either by doing away with them, or by making them comply with what the majority dictates? Anti-Ahmadiyah quarters might use this argument — in a democracy, we must accept the will of the majority. But what if the will of the majority, as in Rwanda, is that minorities must be killed? If that were the case, then there is not much difference being an Ahmadiyah in Pakistan, a “mainstream” Muslim in the US, a gay teenager in Iran, or a refugee in Australia. You just have to look out for when “hunting season” begins, and when it ends.

And yet, it’s not like societies have not learnt to deal with minorities before. In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to the country’s indigenous population for wrongdoings caused by successive administrations. Germany openly grapples with its anti-Jewish Nazi past. The staunchly Catholic Ireland ultimately decriminalised homosexuality in 1993.

But getting back to Malaysia, what direction then is the BN government going to take with 1Malaysia? Where is PAS going to take “PAS for all“? Or are these merely the soundtrack to a prolonged hunting season?

The misguided majority-rule argument fails to acknowledge that democracy isn’t just about the will of the majority; it also entails that the majority government recognises the legitimate rights and freedom of the minority. For if it were merely the former, democracy is no more than giving the majority the right to tyrannise over the minority.

See Also:

• The non-Muslim Muslims
• A day with the “deviants”
• Living with the Ahmadiyah
  

URL: www.thenutgraph.com/making-minorities-count

Malaysia: Living with the Ahmadiyah

---The Nut Graph, Malaysia

Living with the Ahmadiyah
29 Sep 09 : 8.00AM

By Shanon Shah
shanonshah at thenutgraph dot com

“WE have to live with those who do not accept Islam,” Emeritus Prof Datuk Dr Osman Bakar tells The Nut Graph in a phone interview. Osman, who is deputy chief executive officer of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) Malaysia, says this applies to how Muslims treat Ahmadiyah as well.

“The theological aspect is clear, based on the 1975 fatwa that declares them to be outside the fold of Islam,” he says. “But what should Muslims do to those who accept the Ahmadiyah founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a prophet? Should they go about discriminating against these people?”

It is a timely question. The Ahmadiyah community in Selangor has been targeted over the past year by the Selangor Islamic authorities, led by Selangor’s religious exco Datuk Dr Hasan Ali. In fact, in April 2009, the Selangor Islamic Religious Council forbade Ahmadiyah in Selangor from worshipping in their own headquarters in Batu Caves on Fridays. In December 2008, the Selayang Municipal Council tried to make them remove the kalimah syahadat, or Islamic creed — “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God” — from their headquarters.

The question of why the Islamic authorities are training their sights on Ahmadiyah is interesting, given that the 1975 fatwa explicitly declares them not Muslim. “If they are to be treated as non-Muslims, then we should not treat them differently from other non-Muslims in Malaysia,” says Osman.

What seems to complicate matters is that Ahmadiyah not only preserve most of the prayer rituals that make them indistinguishable from Sunni Muslims in Malaysia. They are also mostly Malay Malaysians in this country. In other words, one cannot tell if a Malay Malaysian is an Ahmadiyah just by looking at him or her. Perhaps this is why the 1975 fatwa also asks for the state to strip Ahmadiyah of special Malay privileges.

And that’s not the end of it — even though Ahmadiyah are considered non-Muslim according to the 1975 fatwa, Ahmadiyah children have to attend Islamic Studies classes in primary and secondary school. Their identity cards list “Islam” as their religion.
This, then, is the quandary that Ahmadiyah in Malaysia face. Osman says, however, that the formulators of the 1975 fatwa would have taken these complexities into account.

“You see, there are two schools of thought in the Ahmadiyah movement. In the Indian subcontinent, they have distinguished between these two groups. The group that views the movement’s founder more as a saint, who urged spiritual renewal, is not considered to have fallen out of Islam,” says Osman.

This group is the Lahore Ahmadiyah Movement, but it is not the sect that exists in Malaysia. In Malaysia, Ahmadiyah believe that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a prophet, only not a law-giving prophet as Muhammad was. But according to Osman, “The word for prophet in Arabic, ‘nabi’, is very technical and cannot be taken lightly.”

Even so, Ahmadiyah in Malaysia are but a tiny minority. They number only 2,000 at the most — that’s a mere 0.007% of a population of 28.3 million. Assuming roughly that Muslims form 60% of the Malaysian population, Ahmadiyah would only form 0.012% of all Muslims. That is, if they are considered Muslims at all.

Seeing the humanity

Zaid Kamaruddin, president of Muslim non-governmental organisation Jamaah Islah Malaysia (JIM), tells The Nut Graph that it is important to just see the humanity in everyone.

“Somebody who was born into that sect only knows that as their religion, and we have to see this person as a human being. Only knowledge can alleviate matters,” he says in a telephone interview.

“Nobody should take the law into their own hands,” he says. “We don’t want violence towards them the way it happens in Indonesia.

“But as far as the fatwa goes, it is up to the Islamic council to decide. After all, those sitting on the religious councils are appointed by the sultans. It is not the purview of the state exco to implement the fatwa,” he says.

Osman agrees. “It is true, there are claims that Ahmadiyah in Malaysia try to propagate their religion even to Malay [Malaysians]. But the authorities have to act wisely, and not let people take matters into their own hands. We have seen what has happened to Ahmadiyah in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia.”

In Pakistan in 1974, the constitution under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s administration was amended to effectively render Ahmadiyah as non-Muslims. After Zia-ul-Haq seized power from Bhutto in 1977, the persecution of Ahmadiyah intensified under his Islamisation project.

In Indonesia in 2005, the Indonesian Ulama Council issued a fatwa calling for the government to ban Ahmadiyah. This opened a floodgate of violence against Ahmadiyah by Muslim groups which persists to this day.

Thus, Ahmadiyah in Malaysia are afraid for their safety. However, they remain transparent and upfront about their beliefs and do not attempt to disguise or hide their headquarters. In fact, they say they have called for several public dialogues with the religious authorities, including the Selangor Islamic Affairs Department and religious exco Hassan. However, they say their requests have yet to be entertained. The Nut Graph’s attempts to reach Hasan also proved futile.

“The Ahmadiyah community here should have their own private engagement first with the authorities,” says Zaid. “Only if there are people taking the law into their own hands should the Ahmadiyah here press for a public dialogue.”

But with or without private or public dialogue, the fate of the Ahmadiyah at the hands of the state doesn’t look all that promising. From being declared non-Muslims to being persecuted as “deviant” Muslims, it is obvious that the state is unlikely to provide protection for the rights of this minority group of believers.

URL: www.thenutgraph.com/living-with-the-ahmadiyah