It is hard for most Malaysians, both of the ethno-linguistic majority and minorities to see Bahasa Melayu/Malaysia ever being undermined by the Malaysian state.
The entrenched 1946 mindset trains most ethnic minorities to believe the state will only victimise the minority languages and most ethnic majority to believe undermining of Bahasa Melayu/Malaysia can only be done by market and society, never the state.
Hence, the undermining of the Malay language by the Malay-dominated state becomes an oxymoron. But it’s a fact, just that most people are blind.
The struggle of Malay linguistic nationalism
The struggle to uplift and glorify the Malay language as the predominant if not sole common language of all Malaysians has two grounds.
The first is Malayan/Malaysian civic nationalism. Based on the prevalent monocultural nation-state model, it is widely believed that a nation-state can only hold itself together if its citizens speak some common language and since mastering more than language is not easy, they should just speak one common language.
Its discourse can be found everywhere in official narratives so I shall not go into the details.
The second is Malay ethno-nationalism. Privileging a language is effectively privileging its speakers.
Making a language the sole official language, for example, increases the employability of the language’s speakers in the public sector at least and disadvantages speakers of all other languages.
Given the backwardness of the Malays – of course, with the exception of the Anglicised and Anglophile aristocratic-administrative elites – in the colonial era, uplifting the official status and value of the Malay language after independence would help to tremendously uplift the Malays economically.
Politically, if the non-Malays can be linguistically assimilated as the Minangkabau, Bugis, Javanese, Suluk and Bajau were, the this would reduce the former’s ability to organise and mobilise themselves to resist or challenge Malay dominance.
In the much longer run, this may even pave way for religious conversion, creating the Malay nation-state desired by many Malay nationalists at least since 1946.
The post-1969 momentum and dynamism
If the cause of Malay linguistic nationalism did not move fast in the early years of Malaya, then the post-1969 developments provided the momentum it longed for.
By 1970, Malay became the medium for all subjects except English in the former English-medium schools. By 1983, from primary up to pre-university, all public schools except the Chinese- and Tamil-medium ones used Malay as the medium of instruction. In that year too, English started to be phased out by Malay in universities.
The advance of the Malay language at the obvious expense of English and to a lesser extent, Chinese and Tamil hence explains the minorities’ perception that the state cannot be hostile to the Malay language.
But the post-1969 momentum also created its own dynamism. For many members of the ethnic minorities, the struggle of Malay linguistic nationalism was essentially one of ethno-nationalism.
From this perspective, the Malay language was promoted to subjugate the non-Malays rather than to bring about national integration and inclusion.
Instead of becoming like Thai Chinese who advance in society without any glass ceiling after assimilation, they fear becoming like Indonesian Chinese under Suharto who became national bogeymen and scapegoats despite assimilation.
Any ground for their fear and distrust? Tip-top Malay proficiency would not open all doors for non-Malays unlike an excellent command of English would in the colonial days.
Hence, while the Malay language is rigorously promoted by the state, it is often resisted and belittled by the non-Malays in market and society, beyond the reach of the state. This explains why many Malays believe that the undermining of Malay language can only be caused by market or society.
Some like to blame it on the existence of Chinese- and Tamil-medium schools. However, from my personal observation, putting down the Malay language is probably as common if not more among English-speaking Chinese as among the Chinese-speaking Chinese.
For many non-Malays who cannot or dare not to hit back at the discriminatory state, disparaging the Malay language – alongside Islam and the Malays – becomes a Scottian everyday resistance act.
Hence, ironically, the national language that is meant to unite the nation in practice has divided her more. This perhaps explains why few seems to notice let alone care about the undoing of the National Language project.
The quiet denationalisation of the Malay language
Notwithstanding the prevalence of English in the private sector and middle-upper class, and of Chinese and Tamil in the minority communities, Malay is still the most national language of all.
Not only most understood across all Malaysians, Malay is most widely spoken in cross-ethnic interaction in villages and small towns, East Coast of West Malaysia and East Malaysia. In that sense, Malay linguistic nationalism has not failed entirely.
When the Allah ban was tried in the court, the judges and lawyers transformed themselves into theologians and linguists, arguing over the origin and significance of a single word: Allah.
The elephant that everyone in the court room refused to see or pretended to not see was that th schism of the Malay language in making.
When the non-Muslims have to say “Tuhan”, “Profet” and “Bible” in Malay for what the Muslims call “Allah”, “Nabi” and “Injil”, we effectively have a Muslim variant of Bahasa Melayu and a non-Muslim variant of Bahasa Melayu.
Instead of a single national language for all, Jakim and the state-level Islamic authorities are quietly taking over the role of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka to create a Muslim-exclusive, religiously-cleansed (halal, if you will) version of the National language for the Muslims.
But by doing so, the Malay language is simply dethroned as the national language to go back to square one, a communal language for the Malay-Muslims.
The catch is that unlike 50 years ago, now many Malay-Muslims don’t just speak Malay. They speak English, Arab, or even Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and whatnot.
Hence, if the argument for the Allah’s ban is to protect the Muslims from religious confusion, then the actual target of such “religious protectionism” is only the monolingual Malay-speaking Muslims.
To religiously purify or cleanse the Malay language, Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” can be halal in English but must be haram in Indonesian.
Similarly, Irshad Manji’s “Allah, Liberty and Love” can be halal but Irshad Manji’s “Allah, Kebebasan dan Cinta” has to be haram.
Invalidating the ban of “Allah, Kebebasan dan Cinta”, High Court judge Datuk Zaleha Yusof asked, "as the authority only decided to ban the book when it was translated into the national language, does it mean that only Malay-speaking readers would be confused while the English-speaking readers would not?“
The answer is pretty obvious. The old National Language Policy which aimed to strengthen and spread the Malay language has been thrown out of window.
The new unnamed policy does not assume Muslims who speak only Malay to be intellectually inferior. It aims to make them so.
This is a dramatic turn in the politics of nation-building. As a regime maintenance strategy, expansion of Malay literacy is now replaced by confinement of Muslims by Malay literacy.
The ideology of Malay/Muslim supremacy will now fight for its survival through, no longer assimilation of the non-Malays, but the creation of a Malay-speaking, Muslim-centric ethnic-partisan core, who would read Utusan, join Isma and Perkasa, and vote Umno.
As long as this ethnic-partisan core is large enough, the whole nation can be held at ransom, not just Allah.
From the standpoint of multiculturalism, this end of assimilation is a catastrophe, not a triumph. A deeper religious divide defined by language is being created through religious cleansing of the national language.
Some Muslims are celebrating the victory, some non-Muslims are crying over the loss, over the right to call God "Allah". But does anyone see that Bahasa Malaysia is slowly bleeding to death?
That ignorance is epically tragic. – July 30, 2014.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.
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