In the span of just two weeks, Malaysia’s great experiment with a more-than-usual democratic government was dissolved by its King, the oldest prime minister in the world was summarily replaced and his mismatched coalition of long-time opposition parties, Pakatan Harapan (PH), shredded. Their replacements were a prime minister representing a…

One of the most pernicious aspects of racism in Malaysia is that most people agree it doesn’t exist. Put differently, they might begin to say, “Disagreements (between different ethnicities) happen, but they aren’t that bad.” There’s almost a herd resistance to not stating the obvious, part of it a direct…

In mid-2015, news broke out that 1MDB, a massive, state-owned sovereign wealth fund set up and chaired by Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Mr. …

Earlier this month, I read that fifteen families held capital assets worth about 76% of Malaysia’s GDP (The separation of ownership and control in East Asian Corporations, Claessens/Djankov/Lang, Journal of Financial Economics 58). It piqued my interest because it doesn’t take an expert view of our history to realise how…

Currently, the buzz in Malaysia is implementing hudud (punishments claimed by God), the holy grail of the Sharia. But, as Sadakat Kadri asks in his lovely exploration of Sharia history, Heaven on Earth, “Whose Sharia?” We have the Sharia of the Sunni heartland, as practised by the guardians of Mecca…

Or how calling conservatives moderate does not make them so — I am currently reading Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. She puts into words a nagging feeling I've had for most of my adult life, a scary one, that real moderates and secularists in Muslim-majority countries have already lost. Specifically, the fight in my country is lost. The…

Part 2: How citizenship as a privilege shapes fundamentalist nationalism — Terence Ong, 2006 In Part 1 of this essay series, I talked about the seafaring history of pre-Colonial Malay kingdoms and the multicultural influences that shaped them. One of the prevailing themes I spoke about was the issue of sovereignty and privilege. The Malaysia we know today comprises thirteen states…

Part 1: Pirate princes, scattered kingdoms and lost majesty — Gunawan Kartapranata, 2010 All Malaysians begin life at the bottom of the food chain. Whether we wind up with a silver spoon in our mouths or far from an urban centre, all of us enter the administration’s tracking system at birth. By way of our birth certificates and our initial…

When I was fourteen, I had a Physical Education teacher who decreed that all the Muslim girls had to wear a headscarf during his class. I don’t know what his rationale was to this day. Was he afraid the rigorous physical activity, for which we dressed in ankle-length sweatpants and…