‘Upholding Malay unity’ … or ‘deconstructing’ a tired cliché?

Specifically, the day is long overdue for all Malaysians to begin to differentiate, fastidiously and consistently, in all contexts — when they render into English the Malay word “bangsa”, with its very broad range of meanings and denotations — between “race”, on the one hand, and “people”, “nation”, “stock”, “descent” and “kind”, to note but a few of its various referents, on the other.



Clive Kessler, The Malaysian Insider 




The Mufti of Perak, Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria, is reported as insisting “that the Umno president must find a way to unite the Malays” (“Perak mufti says Malays must defend race”, Syed Mu’az Syed Putra, The Malaysian Insider, 25 August 2011).



“We must defend our race and Najib must find a way to reunite Malays,” Harussani is quoted as saying.



On this matter, it is timely to make four points.



First, it is more than time for political actors and commentators in Malaysia to be careful in their use of words, including technical terms.



Specifically, the day is long overdue for all Malaysians to begin to differentiate, fastidiously and consistently, in all contexts — when they render into English the Malay word “bangsa”, with its very broad range of meanings and denotations — between “race”, on the one hand, and “people”, “nation”, “stock”, “descent” and “kind”, to note but a few of its various referents, on the other.



Any inability to recognise the differences between these perhaps related yet quite distinct notions would be a routine cause of failure in the introductory social science courses (including anthropology, sociology and political science) in any internationally reputable university.



It remains an anomaly, and one about whose origins and persistence one may speculate, that — for all its great work in linguistic engineering and technical lexicographic innovation over half a century — the Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka has never focused its attention upon the clarification, in Malay usage, of the semantic overlap and confusion that characterize this one very general, all-purpose term “bangsa”.



Second, why must Malays, the entire Malay people of the peninsula and Malaysia as a whole, be “united”?



That they should be united, the idea that the unity of “the Malays” is a natural condition that has been disrupted and now needs to be restored, is the implicit underlying presupposition of the call recently made by the Tan Sri Harussani, and so often voiced by other leading political and public personalities on the national stage.



Is the call for “the Malays” to be united politically any more reasonable and acceptable, one must ask — and constructive, in the national interest — than a call for all Chinese or Indians or non-Malays generally to be united politically?



Where does such an approach inescapably lead? That does not bear thinking about. Yet it is a matter that must be recognized and addressed, urgently.



It leads not to the formation of a united Malaysian nation but, headlong, to inter-ethnic antagonism and communalistic Armageddon.



Is that a desirable future, a scenario that is in the interest of either the vast majority of Malays and non-Malays alike? 
Third, why must people speak in these contexts of “the Malays”? Where does the word “the” come from here, and how is its use justified?



To use that word “the” (the so-called “definite article”) is to suggest that what follows, whatever it is that this “the” refers to, is a unified and undifferentiated entity.



So its use here simply begs the entire question that has to be carefully considered. The very terms in which the question is posed, using this homogenising “the”, presupposes a certain answer.



It smuggles its own conclusion into the posing of question. It “builds in” from the start the notion of Malay unity, as a normal and established fact, as a desirable and supposedly natural state of affairs.



In this way “Malay unity” is normalised, and any departure from it is, by implication, rendered pathological, an undesirable departure from healthy normality.



Fourth, and most important, why are “the Malays” of Malaysia not united? This is the situation that so troubles the mufti of Perak and those who think along similar lines.



The historic reason for the present lack of Malay unity is clear. The Malays of Malaysia are now irreversibly divided, as they never were in the past, by the NEP.



Not by current debates about the NEP — whether it is good or bad, whether it should be extended or phased out, whether it should give way to reward on the basis of merit and proven achievement — but by the long accumulating effects of the NEP over the last 40 years.



What the NEP sought to do, and succeeded triumphantly in doing, was to promote a rapid and far-reaching diversification of the Malay people of Malaysia: economically, socially, culturally and intellectually, in their orienting everyday attitudes and personalities.

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