Malaysiakini.com（http://www.malaysiakini.com）
The real 'Malay' dilemma, 9 December 2008
by KJ John
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad was absolutely right during the Riz Khan interview on Al-Jazeera recently. He said he is Malay and not an Indian, to a question about his origins.
After all, this concept of an ‘Indian’ is one of national identity and not an ethnic category. Therefore, neither Riz nor Mahathir is really an Indian.
Who then are they? What is their identity? Let us go to the Wikipedia to find out the truth about their racial or ethnic origins:
‘Born in Aden, South Yemen,to Pakistani parents, (Riz) moved with his family to London, England at the age of four. He attended Wood Green High School, graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Medical Physiology from the University of Wales, and then completed a postgraduate course in Radio Journalism at the University of Portsmouth.’ His full name is Rizwan Khan (added).
‘Mahathir was born on 10 July 1925, in Alor Star, the capital of the northern state of Kedah,[7] the youngest of nine children[8] of a schoolteacher and a housewife. His father, Mohamad Iskandar, was of half-Indian origin, being the son of a Malayalee Muslim (who migrated from Kerala) and a Malay mother, while Mahathir's own mother, Wan Tampawan, was Malay.’
Based on this, neither is of Indian nationality; and neither are the concepts, Indian or Malayan or Pakistani, ‘racial categories’. They are nationalistic socio-political definitions constructed under the British colonial system to divide and rule. In fact, they were socio-political contructs of the English language and culture, or of the British worldview, used to identify and categorise other people groups, especially those different from their own English Celtic heritage.
The Indian nation-state and that of Pakistan therefore came into existence formally only in 1949, when the British colonial authorities gave ‘independence’ to both the Indians and Pakistanis (then both West and East Pakistan, of which East is now Bangladesh). Similarly, the Federation of Malaya was birthed in 1957, 10 years later.
Therefore, my point here is that in ethnic-racial categories of sociology and anthopology, both Riz and Mahathir really are Continental Indians at best, or British and Malaysian citizens at worst, by using the same unit of analysis of nation-state identities. Both have their parentage origins in the southern portion of the Indian continent which always used to be called Greater Indian or the Indus Valley civilisation before the arrival of colonial and conquering powers.
Moreover, these primary and essential ways of classifying and understanding things and non-things are premised on the field and content of study called meta-physics. Therefore this concept of ‘category’ itself is never neutral in appreciation or understanding.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: What is there?
Consequently, today’s popular concept of race daily used by all and sundry is a ‘category’ to describe this thing of ethnicity and often used to differentiate people of such different ‘thingyness’.
In such metaphysical study of categories, Aristotle first tried to classify “reality itself;” whereas Immanuel Kant makes the shift to a rather conceptualist approach by drawing out and defining the categories that are a priori necessary for any possible cognition of objects. Therefore, premised on this metaphysical way of thinking conceptually, what would be the a priori conceptual category of ‘race’?
Since I am neither an anthropologist nor a sociologist and only an Organsational Theorist, I am more interested in groups and their raison d’etre than ethnicity per se. To me then, the a priori conceptual category to this socio-political concept of race must be a genetically defineable concept of ethnicity.
But, according to a Singapore genetics professor, such genetically defined origin-types are really based on the “type of clustering” and not based on the genetics premised on an a priori category. Therefore, Professor Andy Ho concluded his thesis entitled, ‘No Genes for your race or mine’ in the Straits Times (Oct 4, 2008) talking about Ahmad Ismail’s racial-origins theory for Malays and Chinese.
Constitutional categorisation
All this brings us to, in my mind and heart, what I call ‘the real Malay dilemma’, which frames and forms the identity crisis of the so-called ‘Malay race’. Since such a ‘race’ does not ethnically exist; the identity crisis for Malays becomes figuring out whether they are Malay first, or Malaysian first, or Malayan first.
The constitution defines a Malay merely using a cultural and religious category. As an ethnic original people group, the Malays are very much of a Polynesian-Malay-Indonesian racial category but in nationalistic terms, only in Malaya, the definition is based on the constitutional categorisation.
Technically therefore, one could also find an Indonesian Malay who is a Christian or an animist, Buddhist or Hindu. Therefore also, although one can argue that the Muslim Melanau of Sarawak are ‘Malays’ technically under our constitution, or likewise that the Muslim Iban are Malays; the people themselves might not agree with such an externally imposed definition.
Therefore, we need to clearly understand and appreciate that the real Malay race concept is only a constitutional definition and not an ethnicity-based definition.
It is therefore a socio-poltical-nationalistic concept and not technically a racial or ethnic category.
I made the same argument in a recent paper tabled at the Perdana Leadership Foundation Discourse Series on Bangsa Malaysia. Here again, another panelist, Prof Shamsul Amri (left) did clarify that the concept of ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ is really another maverick concept. When Mahathir first used this concept he delivered the Vision 2020 speech in English. It originally referred to developing a Malaysian nation. It was only later translated as ‘Bansga Malaysia’. There are therefore some serious implications of all of this to us as modern day Malaysians.
Now, in Bahasa Melayu the word bangsa is almost always a racial and ethnic definition as the phrase bahasa jiwa bangsa means to a traditional Malay. But, to me - a non-Malay, trained and educated in Bahasa Kebangsaan or Bahasa Malaysia for whom the root sources are Bahasa Melayu and Sanskrit - it will always mean the identity of the nation-state and never just that of the Malay race and culture, of which I feel little or no ethnic ownership.
I could therefore be culturally almost all Malay but technically can never be a Malay because of my Christian faith. That is why I have always argued that Lina Joy was denied her constitutional rights of citizenship when the Federal Court refused to officially recgnise her conversion to Christianity.
Our Malayness must therefore transcend our Melayu-ness or what I have called ‘a small-minded Tanah Melayu nationalism’ and transform Malaysia into a constitutional monarchy and democracy, where the first five letters of Malaysia would always define the primacy of the Malay culture and the faith which the Malay Rulers are enshrined to protect and preserve. And they have recently sworn that they would, too.
That must become the only true and real Malay precedence definition and not any other form of forced or compulsory assimilation of Melayu-ness. The current insecurity of the Malay race is precisely that: an identity crisis of not knowing whether they are Melayu first or Malaysian first. To me, it has therefore nothing to do with their religion or culture or even language; all these have been accepted by all other non-Malays as theirs and there is never a contention to make or re-label these as something else.
The real Malay dilemma is about what the real Malay is; given that this is only a constitutional definition which has really no specific ethnic source identity.
After all, maybe, there will never be such a race or ethnic identity without going to the roots of all such sources. May God bless us as we seek to define our real identities.
（End）
