He said political parties would be the most important vehicles in attempts to bring about a shift towards race-free politics. Because of this, he added, a non-racial political climate would be hard to realise as long as there remained parties that were based on racial or narrow dogmatic interests.
“Any alliance between any racial party and a party which is very dogmatic would instead move the political scene backwards into an even more extreme form of racial politics,” he said.
The Parit Buntar MP was responding to an opinion article written by Pakatan Harapan Chief Secretary Saifuddin Abdullah for Sinar Harian.
Saifuddin said the country would see a Bumiputera-Muslim dominant configuration if Umno and PAS were to collaborate and that this would be even more racially extreme than a Bumiputera dominant construct.
Mujahid agreed, saying the country would become more polarised if the alliance was successfully forged.
“Umno’s and PAS’s rhetoric has always been about race and religion,” he said. “They have been harping on this in order to scare Malay voters into supporting them and to create more hatred towards the non-Malays.
“This is the last thing Malaysia needs at the present time.”
Saifuddin wrote that racism would become more intense when coupled with religious sentiment. He said Umno and PAS would try to convince Malays and Muslims that they were under siege by anti-Islam forces and tell them to defend their religion.
A university professor, Tajuddin Rasdi of UCSI, also gave his comments on the issue. Speaking to FMT, he said the use of religion to heighten racial tension for political mileage was neither new nor limited to the Malaysian political scene.
“You can look at Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore Story,” he said in reference to the memoirs of the late Singapore strongman. “Lee often accused certain leaders of using religion to fire up racial tension,” he said.
Tajuddin disagreed with Saifuddin’s contention that the root cause of racial tension in Malaysia was the political agenda of certain political parties.
Instead, he blamed the religious education system as manifested in the curricula of schools and universities as well as in religious sermons. He said these had created a “Muslims against the rest of the world” idea among “middle ground Muslims”.
Even if there was no political agenda to split the nation into Muslims on one side and non-Muslims on the other, he added, there would still be tension as long as no one was seriously looking at the problem in religious education.
“That is the most dangerous of all accidental educational by-products,” he said.
“Even if politicians are trying to do good things but they don’t understand certain fundamental aspects of education, these religious racial tensions will be perpetuated.”
Tajuddin said he believed it was not the intention of religious teachers and preachers to propagate Islamic extremism. The problem, he said, was that they were also the products of the same flawed education system.