Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Cap Naga

    Hmm, funny words, only two of them, must be a recipe, right?  It’s not.  I (TP) have come across this term a couple times over the past couple of months when reading about the reformasi (reform) movement in Malaysia after the sacking of then-Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim.  Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, ended up heading the National JUSTice Party (KeADILan) after Anwar was arrested and jailed for sodomy and corruption.

    So what about this term.  It’s funny because it’s one of those terms that you think that you are misunderstanding when you first read or hear it.  It translates as "dragon brand" or "dragon stamp".  Now, when you’re in this part of the world you learn pretty quickly that "dragon" is a codeword for Chinese.  So I was sure that I was misunderstanding when I encountered this term being used to describe Wan Azizah.  As the elections right after Anwar’s sacking approached, a number of Malay politicians remarked that Wan Azizah was not a suitable leader for Malays because she is cap naga.  What could they be talking about?

    Well, it turns out that Wan Azizah has some Chinese ancestry.  OK, but that’s weird: in Malaysia, by law, the definition of a Malay is someone who follows Malay customs and is a Muslim.  Wan Azizah certainly falls into that category, and there is precisely no legal provision for genetic requirements for Malayness.  Once I met a guy, Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee, who was certainly Malay but very openly was proud that he had very little Malay ancestry (here’s a picture).  No one disputes that he’s a Malay.  In fact, this accusation against Wan Azizah is quite shocking; JM and I have never heard or read about anyone seriously disputing whether or not anyone was a Malay based on appearance or ancestry.  In fact, the newspapers here occasionally run stories of saudara baru (literally, "new siblings"), usually Chinese Malaysians who have converted to Islam and "become Malay".  This accusation against Wan Azizah is the lowest of the low blows that we can think of in Malaysian politics (and anyway, check out her picture).

    I looked up cap naga on Google, and the only hits I found were articles about these accusations against Wan Azizah and products by a company named Cap Naga that sells Chinese herbal concoctions in Malaysia and Indonesia.  This suggests that either the term was created for Wan Azizah, or (more likely) that it’s a term that you rarely hear out in the open.

    At any rate, this is a nice additional commentary on politics and ethnicity in Malaysia.  Everybody knows that everyone is supposed to fall neatly into one of the ethnic categories that the government perpetuates, and everybody also knows that these categories are sort of fake, but everyone has to act as if these categories have objective bases in reality.  And the government can try to marginalize you by taking away your ethnic affiliation.

  • MUI vs. JIL

    The big news in Indonesia these days–so far not reported in the West, as far as we can tell–is the issuance of a set of fatwas by the Council of Indonesian Islamic Religious Teachers, or MUI (Majlis Ulama Indonesia).  The big doozy is this one, the translation of which we quote from the Jakarta Post: "Religious teachings influenced by pluralism, liberalism and secularism are against Islam. The fatwa states that Muslims must consider their religion to be the true one religion, and to consider other faiths as wrong." Despite its name, the MUI does not actually represent all or even most Islamic religious teachers in Indonesia, rather it is a conservative group well known for its intolerance.  It started out as a government body under Soeharto’s New Order, and was relatively moderate, but has since gotten out of hand.

    Indonesia is a plural place, so this fatwa has caused a bit of an uproar.  Every government that has ever ruled Indonesia (that’s not too many, but still) has mandated that ethnic and religious pluralism is a fact of life in Indonesia that the government will protect.  Although governments have times oppressed certain ethnic communities (most often the Chinese), governments have always been tolerant of minority religions (except for Confucianism and animism, and even this was more like just pretending that they don’t exist or don’t count as religions).  Condemning Islamic religious teachings influenced by pluralism as anti-Islam throws down a big challenge to most Indonesians about their relationship to their religion.  These teachings have a long history in Indonesia.  Is Islam in Indonesia going to move towards the Middle East?

    Happily (so far), the public reaction to the MUI ruling suggests otherwise.  Muslim scholars and Muslim public intellectuals have sharply criticized the MUI’s fatwas in the past couple of days, calling them "heretical" and "anti-Islam" themselves.  Others have attacked the fact that the MUI could have issued a fatwa that says that violence against other religious communities is forbidden, but did not–the reference is on an attack by some fundamentalists on the compound owned by a deviationist Islamic sect (Ahmadiya) in West Java last month.  Some of these public intellectuals include former President of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid, current VP Jusuf Kalla, and other well-known Islamist thinkers, including our acquaintance Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, whom we know from the Freedom Institute, and who runs the influential Liberal Islam Network, or JIL (Jaringan Islam Liberal). They have been joined by leaders of interfaith groups, a surprisingly strong element in Indonesia’s crowded post-Soeharto civil society.  A number of groups have called for the government to ban MUI, or at least stop giving it financial support.

    Want to know more?  Unfortunately, the Jakarta Post’s online edition has a dynamic link-changing thingy that makes directly linking to articles a bad idea, but you can browse around and find related articles.  You can also check out Ulil’s writings at the JIL website, which expouses an attractive version of religious Islam that is strong in Indonesia and getting stronger with Ulil’s popular commentary.  You’ll see Ulil’s picture too; he was always smiling like that.