In May this year UTUSAN MALAYSIA reported about a secret pact among the opposition party and pastors at a hotel in Penang on WednesdayAnother dominoes has fallen right there..
As always in life, there’s always a good news and bad news about it. The good news is, there’s still hope to stop this crisis from spiraling out of control, the bad news is we probably have less than 12 months to do it.
So every self-proclaimed liberals in Malaysia are now demanding that few heads from Utusan Malaysia rolls. “Unethical and dangerous!” they said when commenting what Utusan had done.
Unethical? Maybe Yes…
Dangerous? I guess so, Yes..
False? Ha Ha.. Nope..
The Catholic and Evangelical movements in Malaysia is one of the finest example of Malaysia’s “Open Secret Movement”. Probably no one knew this better than the people of Sabah and since I was born, raised and currently typing this article from that beautiful State, then I am also guilty for knowing such things since I was in primary school.
It’s not that big secret in Sabah you know. Bearing in mind that Sabah was once ruled by Christians State Government (the PBS), the people of Sabah are already immune to the sight of Christian Missionaries wandering around from town to town. If fact, if you ever visited Sabah, don’t be surprised to see a bunch of white people on bicycle cycling towards the rural area. They’re Christian missionaries and they have been quite successful in their overall mission.Not that I don’t feel threatened by their presence, I’m simply pointing out that we in Sabah had known about the Christians ambition to spread Christianity in Sabah since the 70’s and when I was studying in local university I also knew about their attempts (albeit more secretly) to do the same in Peninsular.
So my message to all those high ranking priests who vehemently denies this in the newspaper.. stop the pretense lah. We all know you all want to convert each and every one of us into Christianity as much as we want to convert each and every one of you into Islam.
In Sabah, the Muslims here pretty much tolerate the presence of these missionaries. These missionaries are free to roam the whole state of Sabah and no one bothers them. Of course this tolerance came with one silent condition. One head village from a rural town in Sabah told me about it which pretty much simplified the Sabahan’s cardinal rule : “asalkan jangan kacau kita bah” (translation: “as long as they don’t bother us”)
What the head village means (as I understand it) is this;
The presence of missionaries are tolerated provided that these missionaries didn’t try anything funky or funny towards the Muslims. This cardinal rule can be branched into several sub-rules such as
(a) don’t do your business in our kampung
(b) don’t even think about doing your business to our children
(c) don’t say a single word about how we run our kampung
(d) don’t bad mouth our religion
(e) don’t enter our politics.
The missionaries in Sabah had understand the cardinal rules pretty well. They strictly limits their physical presence to areas predominantly Christians and never even bother to enter any predominantly Muslims village. They understand very well that entering any predominantly Muslims village with breach of social contract in mind could led to their unexplained disappearance.
The cardinal rule had been very effective in ensuring the tolerance of religion in Sabah. If you travel on land in Sabah, you could see churches co-exists in such numbers in Sabah that it would be normal to see a church standing practically side by side with surau and mosques (with only the road dividing them apart). In Sabah, you could see a very big blue board displaying churches name every 2 or 10 kilometers all the way from Kota Kinabalu to Tawau. Who funded all these churches I have no idea yet.I think at some point, the tolerance in religion in Malaysia also based on the same rule. As long as the Christians didn’t “kacau” us then the status quo since 1957 can remain undisturbed.
Therefore as long as the majority of Muslims in this country can feel safe that the Christians won’t be knocking their front doors with bible in hands in near future, than everything can remain sweet and peachy with sugar on top. Of course the only way to do that is by ensuring that country will forever be govern by Muslims or at least by a predominantly Muslims political party. Otherwise if the Muslims began to worry that one of these days their Prime Minister could be a Racist Christian Chinese from Penang with no sense of respect to the long standing social contract, then any sane Malays will start feeling that the cardinal rule had been breached.
If it come to the day when 64% of Malays in this country began to realized that the cardinal rule indeed had been smashed into thousand of pieces.. the consequences would be unimaginable in Peninsular. Luckily for me then that I’m in Sabah :-PThe thing about the Malays is, I think we’re biologically programmed to be very defensive about two things namely (a) religion (b) race. In a way we share the same program with the Arabs. In contrast, in the west a white man can either be a Jew or a Christian or Atheist. Similarly in Malaysia the Chinese are synonymous as either a Christian or a Buddhist or Taoist. These characteristics shared between the Chinese and the white men is the reason why they accepted pluralism in religion so well. In the west you could be a Christian, a Buddhist, an atheist or satanic worshipers and it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re a white man. Similarly in Malaysia a Chinese could be a Christian or Buddhist or whatever and it also didn’t matter as long as he is Chinese.
This is not the case with the Malays. For Malays race and religion is socially non-negotiable. A person could be eating dirt due to poverty but it's still okay to him long as he remains a Malay and Muslim. Therefore like the Arabs, we don't mind if our economy was sucked by foreigners or non-Malays as long as our race and religion remains safe and intact.
Unfortunately today, these two issues are being hijack by DAP (which unfortunately a predominantly Chinese party) as vehicle to power. It is true though that DAP had been playing these cards since its inception. But the difference between now and then is that the Chinese used to distant themselves from DAP, therefore leading the Malays to assume that not every Chinese is a DAP. Now that favorable presumption had ceased.
It would truly unfair to blame UTUSAN alone for the controversy. Like I said it would be stupid for The Christian Federation of Malaysia to believe that merely denying the report would suffice to hide what most Malays had known since long time ago. This is not a new issue for the majority of white collars Malays. This issue had been circulating in the internet and from mouth to mouth even prior to UTUSAN’s report. A lot of people had heard the rumors of Dato Azhar Mansor’s conversion to Christianity in 1999 and even though we had yet been told about Police’s investigation into this issue, the fact that the same year Lina Joy started entering our picture really didn’t help to slow it down.Whereas UTUSAN is probably the first real counter offensive launched by the Malays, it is not.. I repeat.. is not the first domino.
I couldn’t be sure how to put my finger on the first domino. But UTUSAN’s domino fall this year in May, whereas DAP had been harping on LINA JOY’s case since 2007. They commented on it in newspaper, blogged on it and even organized a public forum on it. Their stand on LINA JOY is clearly supporting Muslims’s conversion into Christianity. The DAP is also the one which capitalize on the 2009’s “ALLAH-in-the-bible” issue up to the point where they relied on it heavily during their offensive in Sarawak recent election.
Similarly, it was DAP who mastermind the political chaos is Perak when they openly challenged the legality of the Sultan of Perak's action. It was DAP's involvement in Perak that lead to Malay's presumption that DAP intended to dethrone the Malays Monarch if given the opportunity to rule the Malays.
So my message for The Christian Federation of Malaysia, if they want to silence the issue, they better start by putting themselves in far distance from DAP. Otherwise there's no way to stop the Malays from gearing up in response to fear of losing this country as an Islamic Country. It's bad enough that the Malays are starting assuming that every Chinese in this country as DAP supporters. We wouldn't want such dangerous presumption to be extended to all Christians regardless of race.And to DAP, since you are the one who played up the issue in the first place, what do you expect? That the Malays simply lie and be steamrolled to die?
If these things spiraled out of control (bak kata orang Sabah: “palis palis jauh lah bala.. simpang malaikat empat puluh empat.. fuh fuh fuh fuh tiup kiri kanan depan belakang”), then all I can think is the real culprit to be blame is the one who first breached the social contract which is none other that DAP. And who caused DAP to rise?
Anwar Ibrahim of course..
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